All right, hey friends! So what I’m going to be doing is I have a speech that I’m giving in a couple of weeks. Today’s date is Feb 8th and I’m going to be giving it on the 25th of Feb in New York. It’s going to be 15 minutes long and it’s supposed to cover my big thesis. I’m going to just improvise my way through it, maybe a couple of times. So, maybe I’m just going to record it right now. I should… I um… I’m just going to use this [phone]. Okay, so where do I start?

When I was a kid, I was a lonely kid. I was a bookish nerd. I would read a lot of books and I loved books. When I discovered the internet, I felt that the internet was like a library, just like the libraries that I loved. And I could participate in it directly.

And so, I’ve always wanted to participate in communities. I used to play in a band when I was a teenager, and I fell in love with my local music scene. It was also frustrating in some ways, because of the in-fighting, or like you know, just people squabbling over things like which band gets to go first or last at some particular gig. And I was always frustrated by that, because I felt that our real challenge as a scene was to try and grow the scene, get more people interested in music, get more people showing up to gigs. That’s what I cared about.

Eventually, I had to serve national service in Singapore, which is when you’re ~18 or above, you have to serve in either the military, the police, or civil defense. And so, my band broke up, which is a very common outcome for Singaporean bands. I still love music and I still want to do some music at some point, but the more interesting thing, I think, is that when I was on the music forums, I just cared a lot about trying to, you know, assemble some kind of goodwill, right? Like community spirit. Right?

“I felt versions of that on every forum that I’ve been on. So, even before that, I used to be on gaming forums and I would try to just have good conversations with people and have community spirit. Right? I just wanted…the internet, forums, blogs, and everything that I participated in, I wanted it to feel good. I wanted it to be nourishing, supportive, a great place to be. It’s like a Ben Horowitz blog post about a good place to work. And that is a more corporate-ish environment, we’re talking about people who have to pay bills and people who have to do their jobs. But it’s a similar idea. You know, how there are good places to work and there are bad places to work, and the difference between the two is that in a good place to work, you can trust your managers and your colleagues that everyone is kind of focused on whatever the goal is. And you know, whether you get promoted or not should be a function of whether or not you’re contributing to the organization, whether you are achieving the goals that you’re being set out to do, and you’re not kind of infighting about people’s feelings. That’s not to say that you should disregard people’s feelings, and like be an but, it shouldn’t be petty politicking about some managers getting on some manager’s good side or whatnot. Although I recognize that that is to some degree inescapable.

I used to also blog about local politics. It started out blogging just to hang out with my friends and to just write about my thoughts and feelings. And some of my blog posts about local politics in like 2007-2008 those years…”

My posts went “micro viral” at a time when social media was still in its infancy and Facebook didn’t have a share button yet. People would share blog posts on Facebook, which I believe is how it all blew up. During that era, writing content that was Facebook-share friendly was popular, and this was also the BuzzFeed era. Writing about politics went viral and got a lot of attention, but I was frustrated with the quality of the attention. I felt that my audience wasn’t becoming smarter or more thoughtful. I’ve always sought smart, thoughtful audiences, and I’ve always wanted a better quality of conversation.

Eventually, I abandoned my local politics blogging. This was around the time that I got married, bought a house, and got a job, so I was no longer free to write about whatever I wanted. I was working in content marketing for a software company, and even here, I looked for people who seemed to care about what they were saying. There are people who see a job as just a job and will say whatever needs to be said, even if they don’t believe it. However, I’ve always felt that if I’m going to put my name on something, it matters to me.

I want to be able to look at everything I’ve ever written and be able to point at it with pride and say, “I put effort into that. It mattered to me that what I said was truthful and I’m proud to sign my name on the thing.”

Where are we now? I’ve always been blogging. I’ve always been very optimistic, idealistic, curious, ambitious. There are several videos and essays that shaped my perspective. One of them was watching Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture, a professor at CMU who was talking about how to live your childhood dreams and how to conduct yourself as a person. It’s very virtuous, without being fake or virtue signaling. He really meant what he was saying and he was trying to demonstrate. At the end of the lecture, he talks about how it’s not really for the audience, but for his kids because he didn’t live much longer after that. He had cancer and I was very moved by the idea that we should aspire to be good people and do good works. There’s almost a religious quality to this, but it’s secular. You could use religious language, but the idea of community spiritedness, what is a community, what is community spirit and what is it about some context or environment that feels good and makes people want to hang out and be a part of it.

And it’s you know, people conducting themselves in an ethical way, and uh, even talking about words using words like ethics, and virtue, and morality, or whatever, they all just kind of feel kind of a little bit cringe. I think because you know that a lot of people who talk about these things might not really mean what they say. And the only real way to judge whether or not someone really means what they say is to examine their actions over a long period of time. So, in some ways, this can only be done at the scale of decades. Right, because every year some new people show up, say a bunch of stuff, and then they leave for whatever reason. And not every quitter is unserious, but every unserious person eventually quits.

And uh, you know, I don’t think we should be unkind to the people who quit. All along any journey of any kind, there are a lot of good reasons why someone might quit or give up. You know, their personal life, health, family, whatever. But what I’m passionate about is figuring out how to make good communities that last the decades. Right. And it’s interesting, I tweeted a while ago about how someone gave up, someone asked for advice. I said, “Don’t quit.” And he quit after like six years, and someone else replied, “Well, you know, six years is a hell of a lot more than most people will give.” And I’m like, “Fair enough.” And yet, what I’m looking for is people who work for decades. You know, I wrote a blog post called “Are You Serious?” and in it, I talk about people who have worked for decades and how inspiring they are, and how you know you want to, for me, I don’t know if it’s the same for everybody else, but for me, when I encounter people who have done meaningful work with their life.

I think about authors as well. I think about Ray Bradbury and Bertrand Russell and the things that these men said at the end of their lives in their 80s, 70s, 80s, 90s. They’re like, “You’re looking back, you see that love was the answer to everything.” When you see that, you know, some amount of public service, some amount of trying to reduce suffering, some amount of trying to take care of other people, being a good mentor, supporting, you know, what society flourishes when Elders water trees that they know they will never live to enjoy the shade of. Right? Like, How do we cultivate that Spirit? That’s what I care about.

And my thesis, I guess, is… I don’t really… and this is not like a final thesis, you know, it’s what I’ve been working on for years and years, but I… I might change my mind about the specifics in the future, but how I think about it is, it seems to me that there are some people who are already kind of naturally inclined to do this sort of work. 

So now I’m gonna let me switch talking about my first book. When I first wrote my first book, it’s titled “Friendly Ambitious Nerd.” I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. I knew I wanted to write a book. I always knew that I wanted to write as much as possible, and I would be writing. You know, these… a lot of people would see my writing, which is all over the place, this robot, whatever I felt like writing, people would see my writing and say, “Hey, Visa, your writing is really great. When are you going to write a book?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. Uh, I will when I can, when it feels right.” So what I did was, I would ask people…

Why do you share my writing when you share my writing with other people? What do you say? How do you introduce people to me? And people often say things like, “Oh, you know, Visa is very encouraging, very kind, very friendly, very pro-social, very community-minded.” Or they would say, “He’s very prolific. He dreams very big things about very big picture stuff, but also very small, day-to-day, daily life stuff.” And so that’s that full-stack ambition: being prolific, you know, doing a lot of stuff, and then there’s the curiosity, asking lots of questions, you know, following one’s nose, being interested in taste and aesthetics.

And so when I, when I kind of assemble all the things that all the people said, I found that the phrases “friendly,” “ambitious,” and “curious nerd” all kind of arose and I mixed it around, came up with “Friendly Ambition,” published it, and a lot of people liked it. So, like I think 2,000 plus almost 3,000 copies. And it’s not even a very good book. It’s really just a collection of essays and threats. And some people, one of my favorite descriptions of it, somebody said, “It’s like Marcus Aurelius’s meditations for Twitter addicts.” I love that. I think it’s a better description than anything I have been able to come up with for myself.

Since writing that book, I have been looking to history for other examples of friendly ambitiousness, and you know, it’s it’s I put those three words together but as a concept or as a way of being, I don’t think that’s new. I think you can find friendly ambitious nerds throughout history.

So I could point at a bunch of people. I can point at Max Planck, who used to host house parties where people like Einstein and other friends would show up. They would play violin and they would do physics together, or they would just discuss stuff. And you know, like the relationships that were formed there, they would collaborate and change our humanity’s understanding of physics altogether. There’s so many examples, like Stein right in the 1920s Paris. She used to host weekly salons at her house parties and people like Picasso and I think Hemingway and a bunch of those people would show up. And there was a scene that was created right. Andy Warhol had this thing called The Factory in New York and again, it’s like he would provide this context for people to show up and be introduced to each other and potentially do great work. And so when you examine history, you know I think if you don’t examine history, it’s tempting to think that human progress is kind of slow and steady, but when you examine it, you find that it’s not the case. You find that a lot of progress happens in very small clusters of time and space. It happens in Paris, in Athens during the Age of Pericles, in Florence during the age of Da Vinci, and in London during the age of Shakespeare. It’s just so fascinating. The founding fathers of the US, the founding fathers of Singapore, they’re all these narrow contexts in which a lot of people do great things all at once. During the Gupta Golden Age of India, they invented zero. In Baghdad, they figured out chemistry and astronomy and made progress on those fronts.

“I believe if you examine it, you can see that great productivity and great output happens when you have a cluster of people who show up in the same place at the same time and challenge each other and unblock each other. Really, the thing is, people – I think most people – are regulated, self-regulated, peer regulated, in a kind of homeostasis, to do great, ambitious things is to be deviant. And to be deviant is not a very natural thing to do. It’s not comfortable. People need a kind of supportive context to do deviant things, and you know you want it to be positive deviance, not negative deviance. There’s some trickiness there, but I guess my thesis is that you can encourage positive deviance in the world by creating supportive contexts for that deviant behavior and deviant people.

You practice good reply game, you know, good improv skills, conversational skills, to build relationships with people, create shared understanding, and introduce them to each other. Ask lots of questions, be curious, and be willing. You know, curiosity is something that everyone says is good, like, we pay lip service to it, but when you actually examine it, you find that most people have some lines they don’t really cross. And to be fair, yeah, some lines maybe shouldn’t be crossed. It depends on the social context. Curiosity can be dangerous, right? And a nerd, who I define as someone whose behavior is directed by their curiosity, can create advances in science. And every advance in science also creates new tools, and every powerful tool is also simultaneously a weapon. So people are understandably suspicious of that.

I think Peter Thiel recently has been or, like, for a long time has been kind of arguing that there has been a global cultural suppression of curiosity and technological innovation and advancement, probably because people are afraid to try big, bold, audacious, scary things. And it seems like people usually try these things in like wartime, right? And then the progress in technology that happens during wartime, like radar and all lasers and all those things, they then end up having all these knock-on effects that are positive. Like Sony was founded by wartime researchers, right? And the transistor.

Anyway, I’ve reached my time limit, so I don’t know if I did a good enough job of saying all the things that I’ve said. I think in my next attempt, I will try by starting by talking about scenes first, rather than starting with my life story, because I don’t think my life story is that interesting. Um, yeah, I think I might start by talking about David Banks’s essay, the problem of Genius. But I’m just gonna pit stop, record, and publish on this, and see how I feel on rewatch. If you guys have any thoughts, let me know. I might do another video like this tomorrow, exactly the same length, just trying to ramble my way out, improvise my way out to piecing together a talk. Done.”