I'm excited to share episode one of a new interview podcast: Dialectic.
I'll have conversations with the sharpest, most creative, and most original people I know or want to know. It will be wide-ranging, but cover the stuff I care about--ideas, ambition, tech, startups, business, art, culture, philosophy, taste, and what makes outlier people most themselves. I love to talk to people about the stuff that makes their eyes light up. One of my favorite ideas is Kevin Kelly's claim that life is about "becoming yourself": a journey of self-expression meeting reality that culminates not in being the best, but being the only.
I called the show Dialectic because it's fun to say and because if I've been told I'm good at anything, it's sparring with people about their ideas and pushing them to click one level deeper. My hope for this show is that it will feel like watching a great tennis rally. That's a tough balance to strike, especially in an interview, but as the show progresses I hope to push my guests in creative ways.
Episode one is with Jason Liu (Website, X, Github, Newsletter), a technologist, consultant, teacher, and friend. He spent the first part of his career as a machine learning engineer, mostly at Stitchfix, only to run into a wall: a hand injury that prevented him from being able to write any software for over a year. Fortunately, he's not so one-dimensional, and spent time reclaiming somatic experience in learning to free-dive, train Jiu-Jitsu, and return to the pottery practice he developed in art school, all while reckoning with big questions of ambition, purpose, and self-fulfillment. Since then, he's built a consulting practice helping modern AI companies better implement RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), avoid system design mistakes, hire elite talent, and build for an LLM-centric world. He maintains a large structured output library called Instructor with about 1m downloads per month, writes prolifically (which he does entirely via voice input with LLM editing, as we discuss), tweets semi-manically (he's grown to 30K followers on X with the simplest strategy I've ever heard anyone articulate—tweeting 30K times), and teaches courses on RAG and online consulting. Finally, my man can yap. He was a perfect first guest because he has no shortage of ideas but comes at nearly everything with a beginner's mindset.
If you've enjoyed my writing, I think you will enjoy this too. All feedback is welcome.
Episode 1 is available on Spotify, Apple, and other podcast platforms. The RSS feed is here.
thanks for having me!
was really fun listening to you guys talk about good vs great. as someone who listens to the Founders podcast in one ear and Ryan Holiday in the other, i feel it. lol. thx.