Tim FerrissCo-Founder of Blogger, Twitter, Medium, and Mozi — The Art of Pivoting, Strategic Quitting, and More
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
55 min read · 10,510 words- 0:00 – 0:47
Start
- EWEv Williams
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, I'd recommend this to 100 people. Love this book. It's by a guy named Ken Stanley, another guy, who are AI researchers. You know, we're taught from birth and from school and everywhere is like, set your goal, make a plan to get to the plan, persevere, go through that. And the premise of the book is that works if it's something that's been done a lot and that's formulaic. You can set a goal to run a marathon, and you can, you know, download a training regime, and you can go run the marathon. You can't do that to invent the computer or Twitter or create amazing art. You can't plot it, and to the extent you try to plot it, you shoot yourself in the foot because you cut off the possibilities that lay
- 0:47 – 2:46
Kevin Rose starts the party like it's 2004.
- EWEv Williams
before you.
- SPSpeaker
Hello, hello. [cheering] Good Lord. Wow. I can't see anything 'cause there's so many lights, but thank you for coming. [cheering] Uh, I'm Kevin Rose. Um, tonight is gonna be a really fun night. Lot of surprises, lot of fun. In 2004, when I was first out here, I would pull up my cellphone, and I would text a number which was 40404, which was for Twitter, and you would say, "I'm gonna be at this bar," or, "This is what I'm eating," [laughs] which is basically what you would say back then, and people would show up, and it was awesome. So it is really cool to have this kind of throwback, this time, this new reboot in many ways. And to kick it off, I have an old, old wooden friend, uh [laughs] as an Anchorman reference, Tim Ferriss, who is here. [cheering] Uh, we were reminiscing on the old times. Uh, he had more hair back then. I had less gray hair. And forever we were texting things, not using apps. So, uh, Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, and Tim Ferriss. [cheering] That guy. Yeah. Good to see you, man. Hey, guys. Hey, everybody.
- EWEv Williams
Hey, guys.
- SPSpeaker
Good evening. [cheering] Welcome to Austin, beautiful, beautiful, warm Austin. [laughing] You guys ready for a fun night? I have my party pants on. [cheering] And it's nostalgic to be here because the last time I was in this venue was probably 2007, I think, for a Diggnation event. May have been a little bit earlier. Stubs. Oh, it was Stubs. Excuse me, Mohawk. [laughs] That's my early onset dementia kicking in yet again. So we're gonna pretend that didn't happen,
- 2:46 – 4:18
Ev's first internet product.
- SPSpeaker
and we're gonna move on to discussing cutting-edge technology with Ev right here. And I know the question you all want to ask, which is, what is the past, present, and future of VHS? [laughs]
- EWEv Williams
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
And we're gonna begin with your history with VHS.
- EWEv Williams
Great. Thanks, Tim. Hey, everybody. I don't get asked about VHS, [laughs] VHS enough these days. In fact, I don't even know what it stands for. Video... I think what Tim is referring to is my very first internet product-
- SPSpeaker
That's right
- EWEv Williams
... um, which was a video cassette that was about how to use the internet.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
You watched it on your TV.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
The year was 1994, folks. It wasn't that odd for the time, but how are you gonna learn about computers on the computer when you don't have the internet? So, uh, I made a, a tape in my basement with my college buddies, and that was my very first internet product. It was two hours basically of me explaining how to FTP by terminal. I think I talked about the web for about three minutes. "You know, there's this new thing called the web." So we're talking Usenet, Gopher, that type of stuff.
- SPSpeaker
Did it sell well? Was it a bestseller?
- EWEv Williams
It w- [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
I think we broke even-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
... on a very low budget production.
- 4:18 – 6:25
How technology became social for Ev.
- SPSpeaker
So you're known for a lot of different things: Blogger, Twitter. You now have Mozi. And I wanted to ask you, because here we are in person. How nice is that? Remember COVID? [cheering] It's easy to take things like this for granted, and I wanted to talk about relationships because I imagine how you think about relationships, cultivating relationships, using technology to enhance relationships may have changed over time. Could you just walk us through perhaps that trajectory?
- EWEv Williams
Yeah, we have... We were talking earlier today actually about social media and social, how the word social has changed. Remember when social used to mean, like, getting together in real life-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
... getting to know people? And now the social is just this catch-all word that kind of just means the internet.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
And, um, that was I think an evolution that started in maybe Facebook days. Facebook was actually, and the newsfeed was I think a social media new format really because it was media from people you knew. We borrowed from some of that for Twitter. We also borrowed from blogs for Twitter. So, but Twitter we never saw as necessarily social. I wasn't very focused on social, personally.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
I think that's, the somewhat ironic thing is that I come from a very small town in, uh, in Nebraska on a farm, didn't know a lot of people. And maybe subconsciously I liked the internet 'cause I actually wanted to make friends. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
But I didn't know that at the time. So in all these technologies, I was really focused on information and ideas until fairly recently in my, like, this current stage of life. I'm- I don't want to say later stage of life [laughing]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughing] The golden years. Ev's golden years. [laughing]
- EWEv Williams
Um, I started thinking a lot more about relationships, and I personally had under-invested in relationships and over-invested, I think, in just, like, maybe business. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- EWEv Williams
So yeah, been thinking about that a lot
- 6:25 – 7:47
The simple idea behind Mozi.
- EWEv Williams
lately.
- TFTim Ferriss
How do you ... You seem to me to be a thoughtful ... You don't seem, you are a very thoughtful, I want to say systematic guy. How have you translated thinking about maybe countering the trend of under-investing in relationships? Have you done anything-
- EWEv Williams
Well, I started a company
- TFTim Ferriss
... collectively? You started a company [laughing]
- EWEv Williams
[laughing]
- TFTim Ferriss
Let's hear about it, because I'm, I'm sure there are people here who haven't.
- EWEv Williams
I started a company called Mozi, uh, within the last year, and Mozi is a app for finding out where your friends are and, and getting together, and it's ... We like to say it's actually social app, um, because it's really about getting together with, with friends by knowing where they are. So I'm in Austin. Who do I know in Austin? I know a bunch of people in Austin. I may have forgotten who I know in Austin, but Mozi tells me who's in Austin, tells me what they're doing, that type of thing. The way I look back on some of the early ideas about social and the internet is, of course, we connected with people. We've all made friends through the internet. We've built meaningful relationships or maintained relationships, but I think humans fundamentally, you know, we're wired to be deeply social, but that wiring was way before screens.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
And that, that wiring to be social didn't happen in public. And so Mozi is a very simple idea at, where we said, "Well, what would an actual social network look like?" And so that's what we're building.
- 7:47 – 14:49
Strategic quitting vs. sunk-cost perseverance.
- TFTim Ferriss
So I want to edge into a question about sort of initial product design and what your expectations might be just by rewinding the clock a little bit and talking about Odeo a little bit. So I've read about board meetings, and you'll have to tell a bit of the context related to Odeo, in which you're presenting usage metrics at the time. Wasn't growing, but it wasn't dead. Maybe it was semi-growing. And as a lot of people here read in the media, as they used to see on magazine covers, the stories of perseverance against all odds, it failed 100 times, but then we succeeded the 101st time, get a lot of airplay.
- EWEv Williams
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
But, uh, I think that's something that doesn't get as much attention is strategic stopping or strategic quitting.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right? Sometimes it doesn't make sense to keep beating your head against a wall.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
So could you take us back to Odeo and walk us through that experience?
- EWEv Williams
Yeah. So Odeo was a podcasting company that I co-founded in 2005, which, if you recall, was pre-iPhone. So, and not to correct Kevin, but Twitter was 2007 when it was, was here. So this was before Twitter, and, um, podcasting seemed cool. I don't know if you've heard about it, Tim, but, um-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughing]
- EWEv Williams
We're like, "Let's build a platform for podcasts." And we worked on it for maybe six months. We raised some money. Because I had previously sold the company to Google, I was fortunate enough to get some VC funding before we even had a product, which turns out isn't always fortunate. So we had high expectations from the get-go. This is in 2005. Apple released podcasts in iTunes that summer in 2005, which completely blew us away. It was totally unexpected. This is very, very early for podcasts, even though the name comes from the iPod. They basically obsoleted what we had been doing for six to nine months overnight, and then we, you know, we were like, "Oh, maybe we create a podcast creation tool." You know, we were trying to pivot and whatnot, and I think I just came to the conclusion at some point ... The way Biz Stone, um, tells the story is that I went and I wrote this big strategic doc about how to succeed in the podcasting business, and it was very convincing, and the, the, about the pivot we could do and should do, and I was like, "I don't want to do this." [laughs] Um, and so I went to the investors and said, "I don't think this company is, is, y- you know, on a great trajectory. Maybe we should just stop." But that was unusual because that was, this was kind of ... Pivoting now, of course, is taken for granted, that you don't, your idea isn't right the first time out. That was less assumed back then. And so I was embarrassed. I was like, "I said I was gonna start a podcasting company, and I raised this money. I have these employees. I have these investors, but I don't believe in it. I don't believe in this vision anymore," even though it's sort of ... You know, it wasn't dead, as you said.
- TFTim Ferriss
And was the reason you didn't believe in it based on the emergence of iTunes and what that represented, or was there more to it?
- EWEv Williams
I wasn't that into it personally. [laughs] I wasn't a podcaster, and I think that was another principle that I've learned over and over, is I think some people can build products for other people, and thank goodness they do, but I just build products for myself. And, um, I was like, "I don't, I don't know what ... I don't know the, what the product is here we need to build that I want." But I think to your question about strategic quitting, I think a ton of companies and a ton of people just get into these life situations where they just keep going, and that's certainly what I was taught. In fact, Blogger, uh, which is the company I sold to Google, I completely ran out of money, uh, after the dot-com bust, was ... I had to lay off all my employees, was barely able to pay my rent, and kept working on it, kept working on it, kept working on it, eventually sold it to Google, and very happily. And to me, that was like, yes, that is the triumph of perseverance, and that's why you should stick to things. And then, um, Odeo, thankfully we didn't, we did create ano- another company out of, out of that. But, um, but I think this idea of it's okay to quit is underappreciated, and the main reason, everyone knows about sunk cost fallacy. There's a great book, by the way, by Annie Duke called Quit, which I highly recommend. Um, and it's actually was part of the reason a couple years ago I, I stepped down from Medium, which was my last company I was running for a long time. I, I quit my job. The company's still going, but, but I was like, I realized that I was just working out of like, it was ego, it was pride, it was expectations of other people. And the book is really great if you, if you don't know it, because it just points out all the reasons beyond sunk cost fallacy that people do things way longer than it makes sense to do them. And the biggest thing is they underestimate opportunity costs. If you're working on one thing, and, and there's identity and ego and all those other things, but it's like you don't know what else there is until you clear that, your attention away from the thing that you've been struggling with. And so I think if, if, if you're in a situation where it's like, it feels like a slog, quitting is probably a good idea. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] So Annie Duke, for people who might not recognize the name, well-known poker player, also wrote Thinking in Bets, I believe. So let me ask you then, if you look back now, hindsight 2020, at Ev, who persevered with Blogger and then ended up selling it to Google at a very good time to get Google equity-
- EWEv Williams
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... did he just get lucky in that perseverance, or was there some type of scent trail that in retrospect you can say, "Well, it was actually the right thing to do at that time because"?
- EWEv Williams
I've struggled with this because I don't have a clean way to, to understand it, but I think one big difference is I believed in the vision of Blogger the whole time, and that was where Odeo was like, I don't know. It's like I would, I'm, keep coming to work and make it succeed. It was also, I was lucky because Blogger being my first real company and I was a little bit younger, I believed in the vision, but I also just was petrified of failing.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
I just couldn't accept that possibility for myself. I also didn't have a lot of other prospects. I'd never really had a job. I didn't have a degree.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
The dot com, you know, boom was, it was like, well, I don't know what the hell else I'm gonna do if I don't make this succeed, so I'm gonna stick with it. But it didn't really make sense.
- TFTim Ferriss
So that speaks to your prior comment about the opportunity cost.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right?
- EWEv Williams
Exact- actually, good point. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know what-
- TFTim Ferriss
Like your opportunity cost was not as high maybe at that point-
- EWEv Williams
Fair. Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... by pursuing something else.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- 14:49 – 18:38
How Odeo begat Twitter.
- TFTim Ferriss
So you mentioned something came out of Odeo. What came out of Odeo?
- EWEv Williams
A company called Twitter.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
I still call it that. I don't know about you guys.
- TFTim Ferriss
How, how-
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] How did that happen?
- EWEv Williams
Well, the investors, thankfully, the, my board, I went to board and said, "This is my honest assessment of Odeo," and they, as good investors do, said, "Well, we didn't believe, invest in podcasting. We invest in you. You have a great team. You got any other ideas?" And I thought, "Hmm, I, I must have other ideas." Um, so-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
... I always prided myself on having ideas, but I went back to the team and said, "I don't have any ideas. You guys got any ideas?" [laughing] And, uh, we ended up doing a hackathon where we basically for a couple of weeks-
- TFTim Ferriss
So an inter- internal hackathon?
- EWEv Williams
Internal hackathon, where we just said, "Hey, let's all break into teams-"
- TFTim Ferriss
How many employees did you have at the time?
- EWEv Williams
I think it was around twelve, twelve, fourteen, something like that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Okay. And what happened?
- EWEv Williams
And then, so people worked on a bunch of stuff. A lot of it was related because we were doing audio and, um, you know, recording in the browser with Flash and stuff like that. Again, pre-smartphone, so but we were dabbling with text messaging, and there was a couple of the engineers had, were familiar with how to send text messages en masse, which was l- little known at that time. There was no, um, real, uh, APIs for that. And so people were trying a lot of things along those lines. Maybe we send a, send an audio voice memo, maybe we record something in the browser, little kind of social things. Then there, one of the ideas was to... The way I remember it, first it was record a message actually via your phone, and then it got broadcast text to people, and then they could listen to it. And then that quickly involved with, evolved to, "What if we got rid of the audio?" [laughs] Maybe it was just, it was just text broadcast. And then, you know, having come from the blogging world, that we were familiar with RSS and, and subscribing, which turned into following, and yeah, it kind of evolved from there. That was, to mention names, that was, of course, Biz, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey's project and, um, it also was informed by Jack's previous work on couriers and status systems and whatnot.
- TFTim Ferriss
And at what point did you or anyone else for that matter realize that there was a there there? Like, oh, there might be something very interesting with this.
- EWEv Williams
We, we were pretty intrigued right away. I mean, we certainly didn't know the extent of it by any means, but it felt new and in, and interesting. And, um, we kept evolving it. It definitely wasn't right. I mean, I think, you know, no ideas come out fully baked, and so there was a lot we had to get right, like what is the, what is the graph? The very first version actually was highly informed by status messages, which were a thing in Facebook, but this is, this is pre-Facebook being available to outside of colleges, and we were too old to be on Facebook, so we didn't even know about status messages on Facebook.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
But it was kind of like that, and it was kind of like AIM messages. And the very first version, there wasn't a whole feed. It was just the latest person who had updated their status was on top and, and it went out via text message. And so, but we were like, "Hmm, interesting." And w- L- We pr- we felt it was interesting when we had maybe 10 people on it. 10 people worked at the company, and then we started getting our, you know, uh, partners on it, and we were intrigued, but... So this is 2006, and it really wasn't growing for months and months. And really, we hit an inflection point here in Austin in 2007.
- 18:38 – 20:08
Twitter's $11,000 SXSW 2007 inflection point.
- TFTim Ferriss
So [laughs] I have to just mention that that particular South By is very nostalgic for me because I launched The 4-Hour Workweek with an overflow presentation in 2007 af- [audience cheering]
- EWEv Williams
Nice
- TFTim Ferriss
... a- after haranguing the shit out of Hugh Forrest. Thank you for [laughs] letting me fill in for a cancellation.
- EWEv Williams
That's what I mean, improv.
- TFTim Ferriss
And then basically next to a cafeteria.
- EWEv Williams
It was just improv.
- TFTim Ferriss
My, my laptop failed, so I ended up having to improv the thing without my slides, and I remember the big screen TV in the, uh, ground level of the conference center-
- EWEv Williams
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... showing tweets-
- EWEv Williams
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... going through, and I was like, "Huh, look at that."
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
How's it-
- EWEv Williams
That was the, the idea we had. So it was starting to take off amongst the people we knew, and South By was always the conference where, like, the indie cool tech people came, and these were our people. And they, they were the ones, our early adopters of Twitter because they came from the blogging world, and they were our friends. And so we sensed that we could get critical mass here, and so we talked to Hugh and whoever from his team, and at first they were like, "Well, you could have a trade show floor," and we're like, "No, no, no. No one, no one goes to the trade show."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
"Can we buy a screen and put it in the hall where everybody's hanging out?" And that was, that was the move, and people saw that and were like, "Oh."
- TFTim Ferriss
That's amazing. I didn't realize that backstory.
- 20:08 – 21:42
Ev's hopes for Mozi's evolution.
- EWEv Williams
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
And this ties-
- EWEv Williams
Cost $11,000.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's a great investment. [laughs] $11,000. A little more expensive these days, I think, since you're competing against AT&T and God knows who else. But this ties into Mozi in part because I'm wondering how much your expectation is that you will design and deliver to spec, maybe like an Uber where the business model has changed relatively little over time, right? It's been very reliable.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's kind of stayed very similar with obviously bells and whistles and changes along the way. Or is your expectation maybe along the lines of a Twitter or Odeo in some sense morphing into a Twitter that Mozi is just a starting point and your expectation is it's probably going to end up being something very, very different a year or two from now?
- EWEv Williams
I'm sure it'll end up with so- in something very, very different. It's early for Mozi. The way w- the way we think about it, in our wildest dreams it is a ubiquitous social network in the way Facebook was at one time, but actually designed for enhancing people's social lives and relationships, which means it's not a media platform. It's not an advertising platform. It's not a performative platform.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- EWEv Williams
It's not a status building platform.
- TFTim Ferriss
Totally.
- EWEv Williams
It's, it's really about sharing information that's important to you with people you care about and enabling... It won't all be about IRL, but that's where we're focused on right now. But it's early. We haven't figured it out yet, and I think that's, that's part of the fun is find- figuring out where it goes.
- 21:42 – 26:08
Favorite books and information inputs.
- TFTim Ferriss
So you impressed me on a whole lot of levels. I've always found you to be a very deep thinker. You think a lot, and you choose your words carefully and ask a lot of good questions, and I'm always curious about the inputs, what you feed yourself in terms of information. And I've read that you're fond of a few books. This may have changed because this is from 2016, but Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. I don't know if you would still stand by those, but I'm curious, if so, why those books and if there are any others that you would add to that list.
- EWEv Williams
Where'd you get that list?
- TFTim Ferriss
That is New York Times.
- EWEv Williams
Uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
EvWilliamsFavoriteBooks.html. [laughs]
- EWEv Williams
[laughs] Yeah, I probably wouldn't pick those, um, now.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's been a while. [laughs]
- EWEv Williams
Um, well I'm not an executive anymore, so I, I mean-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
... that's not as useful. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is great, but I will mention one book very related to the conversation which is, have you read Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned?
- TFTim Ferriss
No. Great title though.
- EWEv Williams
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, I'd recommend this to 100 people. Love this book. It's... The, the subtitle is The Myth of the Objective.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
And the premise is, is by a guy named Ken Stanley and another guy, um, who were AI researchers, and the way it starts out is they... This is early AI research. Uh, like Ken went and worked at OpenAI later. They were building bots, and the example they talk about is trying to build a, a, a robot to go through a maze and, and how they've, you know, tried to program all kinds of smart algorithms into it and then they found that the most effective strategy was just try something new.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- EWEv Williams
And they go on from that and extrapolate this idea that if you are trying to do something that hasn't been done before, you know, we're taught from birth and from school and everywhere is like set your goal, make a plan to get to the plan, persevere, go through that. And the premise of the book is that works if it's something that's been done a lot and that's formulaic, and you can, you can set a goal to run a marathon and you can, you know, download a training regime and you can go run the marathon and probably 'cause... You can't do that to invent the computer or Twitter or like d- you know, create amazing art. You-- It's just you can't plot it, and to the extent you try to plot it, you shoot yourself in the foot because you cut off the possibilities that, that lay before you. And I read this book when I was running Medium, my last company, and it, it had a great effect on me because I felt this deep sense of relief. Because my entire business and startup career, I, I've been deeply driven to create things. I saw, like, companies and particularly products as a creative process. You know, it's like writing a book or painting a painting. It's like you have to figure it out as you go. You don't have it fully baked in your head from day one. But what I've seen happen a million times, this happened to me, is you have this intuition, you kinda h- know what it is, you start to develop it, and you're like, "Oh, it's this, not that. Let's try this, not that." And, and you feel your way into what's the best first version of it. If you're lucky and good enough that that first version, you know, meets with some success in the world, then, you know, in at least in the tech world, employees and investors and business people come in and it's like, "Okay, where are we going next? What's the plan? What's the roadmap? How are we gonna make the numbers go up?" And it just doesn't, it doesn't work to very far. It, it works, like, a little bit to get to that next stage, but it doesn't work to really innovate. It doesn't work. And so you have to be comfortable with the ambiguity of not knowing where you're gonna go. Anyway, this book is, is good [laughs] and it makes this point. It's very short. It also talks about evolution a lot and how, like, the most creative force in the world is clearly nature, and, like, it has no plan. It just tries shit. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, trial and error. [laughs]
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right. Taking notes. That's gonna be one
- 26:08 – 32:14
Raising a generation to co-exist with AI.
- TFTim Ferriss
of my next reads. You mentioned AI, and it is the topic du jour, but can't believe everything you read on the internet, but I believe that twenty-five percent of the latest Y Combinator class wrote ninety-five percent plus of their code using AI. And I'm curious, you have kids, what would you suggest your kids study in school?
- EWEv Williams
[laughs] Um, my kids are here, in fact. Um, I-- whatever they want. I mean-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- EWEv Williams
... it's [laughs] it depends on what, what the goal is. I mean, I think-
- TFTim Ferriss
I could, I can frame it a little more.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
I can strain it.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
I would say if people are wondering here how to, I don't wanna say AI-proof themselves because [laughs] good luck predicting where that's gonna go. But, uh, are there any fundamental skills or specific skills that you think will increase in value over time? For instance, I don't know if I had kids if I would suggest they take a legal path necessarily, since I already use AI in thirty seconds to draft most of my legal documents before I send it to human eyes. Do you have any thoughts?
- EWEv Williams
I haven't thought about this deeply, but what comes to mind is social human things. Two things. One is I do encourage them to read and write still, because I think that's how you figure things out. That's, like, the best way to think and have ideas and get clarity is to write, and you can't write if you don't read. So even if the AI can write for you, that's fine if it's a paper or, you know, a report or some analysis that where the product is very important, like this is the information and text that I need. But it robs you of, of the process of thinking. So I think problem-solving, creative ideation is useful no matter what you do ever. So I think those core skills and then, and then social skills. And one of the reasons I love the school they go to is actually they have a thing called SEL, which maybe you all had, but I sure as hell didn't have in rural Nebraska in the '70s, is social emotional learning, and that's just like, how do you connect with people? I mean, we know that's critical to any job no matter what you're doing, and I think that's probably, well, hopefully not gonna go away. Who knows? [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
I think we're-
- EWEv Williams
Who knows?
- TFTim Ferriss
... a lot of trouble if that gets-
- EWEv Williams
We don't know. We don't know
- TFTim Ferriss
... removed [laughs] from human life. You've done a lot of investing, and I'm curious what you would be long right now. Not necessarily a specific company, but it's like, okay, you know, I was thinking about this today and I was like, "What would I be long?" Like, it, it feels a little dirty to be like, "Yeah, I'm long vanity," because people are all presenting themselves online in these various ways. So how, how would you invest in a basket of vanity [laughs] without succumbing to it yourself? And it's like, oh, maybe, uh, who knows? Some type of dialysis. You know, people aren't taking great care of themselves. Maybe you're long dialysis. I'm not investing in these things, by the way. But just in terms of things that you, you might be long as you, as you project forward in your mind, could be one year, three years, five years. Is there anything that, that you think you would expect to grow?
- EWEv Williams
I don't spend a lot of my time investing, but what comes to mind, I, I have a venture firm called Obvious Ventures. We try to invest in things that are going to address big problems. So climate is something we've been doing for a long time, and I-- if you think generally, like now actually is kind of a weird time in, in, in climate investing, but it's gonna be a bigger and bigger problem. So if, if companies figure out how to address that issue, like that space, I think is a good investment. The other thing I would say much more specifically is psychedelics.
- TFTim Ferriss
What was that?
- EWEv Williams
Psychedelics.
- TFTim Ferriss
Psychedelics. [audience cheering] All right. [laughs] Some fans in the audience. I was checking these out to see if they were San Pedro cacti a moment ago. But okay, so let's take something like psychedelics, since I've, I've wandered into that ecosystem a bit myself over the last decade or so. How would you think about investing in that space?
- EWEv Williams
Uh, I don't know. Publicly.
- TFTim Ferriss
More, more quickly? Is that what someone said?
- EWEv Williams
Publicly. Publicly.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, publicly [laughs] . Got it. Well, where do, where do you think that ball is going? Any, any thoughts?
- EWEv Williams
I don't think I have a smart answer to that. You probably have another-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Well, I mean-
- EWEv Williams
This is why I don't invest. I, my partner would have a great answer to this. We've, we've done some psychedelics companies, but...
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, I, I will... People aren't gonna like this, but I mean, I think there are some grand experiments afoot, right? It-- there, there's no historic or indigenous example of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people consuming compounds that are effectively sort of neuropsychological nuclear power, right? That was typically reserved for a very, very, very small percentage of a given population. So I do think there's tremendous therapeutic applications, but it remains to be seen if it can be fit into the healthcare system that exists where you're limited to-
- EWEv Williams
It's also possible... When I say I'm long psychedelics, I'm long psychedelics for their ability to help people. Maybe they're not a great investment because they're not, um, hopefully they're not gonna get patented, although I know there's that, that is the worst-
- TFTim Ferriss
A couple of companies I've had some public fights with. Yeah.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah. So hopefully it doesn't fall into that, that business model and they can impact lots of people and remain, you know, generic.
- 32:14 – 35:04
Ev's billboard.
- TFTim Ferriss
have done. So let's, let's shift gears a bit, and I'll just ask a question I like to ask. If it goes nowhere, it goes nowhere. But all right. So metaphorically speaking, the billboard question, right? So if you were gonna put a message on a billboard, could say anything, could be an image, anything at all that you would want a lot of people to see and understand, what might you put on that?
- EWEv Williams
I love this question. I might overthink it-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
Um, and understand. So, so we can assume, though, they'll understand.
- TFTim Ferriss
The and understand I threw on there with a little creative flourish, it may complicate your thinking.
- EWEv Williams
[laughs] I'm g- I'm gonna build on that. In thinking about this, what comes to mind, first of all, is the category is something that will help people heal, you know, just be their whole and true selves, because I think that's where all our problems come from, is the lack of that. And as much as I care about climate, I think the, the key to solving climate is to heal ourselves, to heal culture, to heal the planet. And so I start with the, the self, and then my mind goes to, well, what's a big fundamental truth that we want everyone... Let's, let's pretend if they read it, they'll actually get it and, and know it. Then I think there's a little bit of tension between, like, the most fundamental truths and how actionable they are or how much they will actual... So if we said, "We are all one," which I believe, it's like, okay, we're all one. The universe is one big thing. We're all connected. What do I do with that?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- EWEv Williams
I mean, maybe if you really ponder that and meditate on that a long time, it'll actually, it will do you some good, but, but then if you move toward the s- the spectrum of, of usefulness, of what's a fundamental truth that's more useful, you might have, like, some Buddhist saying, like, all of our suffering comes from, you know, our, our thoughts or inability to accept reality, which is a little bit more useful, but maybe for the masses, not, still not very actionable. And then you could move to, like, feel your feelings [laughs] which I think would do a tremendous amount of good if people adopt, oh, feel your feelings. A little bit easier to imagine that. I think so much of our suffering, and I say this as someone who told their thirst- first therapist, "I don't understand the point of feelings." I was like-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
I was like, "They, they are just a nuisance and get in the way." And so it took me a long time to, to appreciate that and the avoidance that, that so many of us go through. And then one step further might be stop drinking alcohol for six months and see how you feel.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
Not tonight, though. It's fine. We're in a bar.
- TFTim Ferriss
Not tonight. Nice.
- EWEv Williams
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Starting tomorrow. Starting tomorrow.
- EWEv Williams
Consider it.
- 35:04 – 36:19
How Ev learned to manage his feelings.
- TFTim Ferriss
So following up just on the feeling your feelings, you said for a long time, and you said this to your first therapist, right? They're just a nuisance. I'd like to know how to [laughs] rid myself of these irritations. What changed? How did you end up going onto Team Feelings?
- EWEv Williams
It was a long, long process. I mean, the, the therapy helped. The psychedelics helped. Um, meditation, growth, learning, reading books, having friends, stopping drinking-
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm
- EWEv Williams
... actually, just for six months. [laughs] Um, I've gone through a lot. I've done a lot of work, particularly in the last couple of years, and, um, that's been just super, super important.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. Just a note on alcohol. Look, I'm gonna have some drinks to- tonight. I do enjoy drinking, but-
- EWEv Williams
[whistles]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] So, but just a, just a PSA for people, because ketamine is in the air. Ketamine's probably in a few people's pockets here. They're both dissociative anesthetics, so if you wanna feel your feelings, it's a good idea not to engage with those things excessively. And if you have a history of alcohol overuse, I would also stay away from any at-home ketamine. But,
- 36:19 – 39:08
Facing strangers as an introvert with the Hoffman Process.
- TFTim Ferriss
uh, in terms of books or types of therapy, did you find... If there are people in the audience who are like, "Yeah, you know what? Actually, that makes sense to me, but I've never been able to find a, a handhold to get started," is there any advice you might give?
- EWEv Williams
Probably the best thing I've ever done in that realm is Hoffman. Have you done Hoffman?
- TFTim Ferriss
Hoffman? I haven't done Hoffman, but quite a few of my friends have.
- EWEv Williams
So there's this thing called the Hoffman Process. It's 20 years of therapy in a week, in terms of the effect. I mean, I got much more out of it than I ever got in therapy. It's a week-long retreat. There's a few different places. The main one's in Petaluma, California. You hand over your phone, you go, um, and do some exercises with 36 strangers, um, and yourself for a week, and you come out a new person.
- TFTim Ferriss
I've spoken, well, not directly, I've more listened, but had a conversation on this podcast where the Hoffman Process came up [chuckles] and a lot of listeners have gone to the Hoffman Process, and I get letters literally every week from people who are thanking me for not really [chuckles] the proper credit, because there's someone else who brought it up, for the Hoffman Process. I'm very curious. You mentioned the strangers. Part of the reason I haven't gone is I'm like, "I don't want to air all of my dirty laundry in front of 20 strangers." [chuckles] I don't know these people.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I know you're also, I think it's fair to say, pretty introverted.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
I would say I am, even though I'm on stage, like safely doing-
- EWEv Williams
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... speaking into the darkness. Was that an issue at all for you? Or how did you get past that?
- EWEv Williams
It wasn't, it wasn't easy, but it's just in the context of it, it's, it just feels very safe. One of the fascinating things is it's strangers. You're, you are not allowed to say your last name or what you do in the real world when you get there. And so you connect with people, and I realized after a few days, I relied so much on people knowing who I was or what I did that it w- was this, this veil between me and oth- other humans. So you get to know people at such a deep level without really knowing any of the normal things that we would say you meet someone here, "Oh, what do you do? Where do you, you know, where do you live?" And that j- it just feels incredibly safe. But the process is, they've been doing it for 50-some years. It's very evolved. It's, it's very well done. You take any of it out of context, it sounds weird. Like I knew nothing going in, and about five people brought it up to me in random conversations over a week, and I was like, "Okay, this is a message. I'm gonna go sign up for this thing." Show up, had no idea, and then you just dive in and, and it's incredible.
- 39:08 – 42:04
Recently adopted habits that have galvanized positive change.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, from what I can tell, it's, it's somewhat like Fight Club, [chuckles] where it's like first rule of Fight Club is don't talk about Fight Club. You're not [chuckles] gonna find much detail on the Hoffman Process. This also ties into a question I was planning on asking anyway, which is, are there any habits or beliefs that have really positively impacted your life in the last handful of years? Could also be 10 years ago, but, uh, you've talked about doing a lot of work in the last handful of years. Any, any new habits, beliefs, tools, anything come to mind that have been really helpful?
- EWEv Williams
Yes, but I feel like they're the ones that everybody knows. [chuckles] It's just-
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, so the, I mean, sometimes the fundamentals are worth a review.
- EWEv Williams
I mean, it is exercise. Exercise and meditation I dabbled in for a long time, and then I got much more serious a couple years ago about both, and really, really dramatic life improvement.
- TFTim Ferriss
Why did you get more serious about them? You just wake up one day and you're like, "Today's a new day," or was there a breaking point? Was it-
- EWEv Williams
It was early, early COVID, I s- I was like, "What the fuck am I doing? I'm gonna turn 50, and I need to work a hell of a lot harder to, to be in shape than I was." So I just started doing it. I was at home. I had the time [chuckles] , so I did that. And then although that's, that's increased and, you know, 'cause you get the positive reward cycle and it feels great. Meditation I've always found super valuable, and I just last year, on New Year, on January 2nd, 2024, I had meditated the day before. I was like, "I could meditate every single day this year." And it was just that, that sort of psychological hook that you-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- EWEv Williams
... find motivating even though it's arbitrary. And I was like, "Yes, I'm gonna meditate every single day in 2024. That's a goal." And I don't normally set goals like that, but I f- I was like, "Okay, let's see what happens." And so one of my teachers says y- you can't boil water if you keep turning off the flame, and so the consistency of meditation I found, I underestimated what a dramatic difference that makes and how fast you can drop in if you do it every single day.
- TFTim Ferriss
What type of meditation did you decide on?
- EWEv Williams
Just mindfulness meditation, breath and, um, awareness, not, not TM, just-
- TFTim Ferriss
Just like an open monitoring, feel what you feel-
- EWEv Williams
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... see what you see.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Are you noting things or are you just observing?
- EWEv Williams
Sometimes noting. Sometimes noting. And I know you, you like to know about products. You know about this product, but the, I was using The Way.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yep.
- EWEv Williams
You probably talked about that before. The Way is a meditation app. I hadn't used a meditation app for years. I started using The Way. Uh, Kevin sent it to me, actually, around-
- TFTim Ferriss
It's, it's outstanding
- EWEv Williams
... when it was still in beta, and I started doing that around that time. The Way is fantastic.
- 42:04 – 45:02
The silver lining of being fired from Twitter.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, Henry Shukman, just an incredible guy. I mean, we'll [chuckles] hope to meet him in person someday. Uh, do you have a favorite failure or any favorite failures that come to mind? I mean, you've got, you've got a greatest hits list that's pretty outstanding. I'm just wondering if-
- EWEv Williams
I, I have a, I have a lot of failures. I mean-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, anything that has either taught you a lot or in some way set you up for successes later. That's two possible ways of approaching it.
- EWEv Williams
Well, we already talked about Odeo, which is kind of a failure. That led to Twitter, so that's obvious. But, um- I think the, a thing that it took me very long time to appreciate that felt like the biggest failure possible was getting fired from Twitter.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
Which I did. I co-founded the company. I was CEO for two years, and then I got fired to my great shock and dismay, and I was just devastated. Absolutely. And so now I look and it's like, wow, I'm probably way happier today than I would've been had I, uh, had I not. But it took me a while. It took me a long while to appreciate that.
- TFTim Ferriss
What was the silver lining on that in retrospect?
- EWEv Williams
Well, it kind of goes back to like all our unhappiness comes from thinking things shouldn't be how they are.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- EWEv Williams
Because I was very upset because of the injustice of it-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- EWEv Williams
... and, and like, and this, what I thought was just dumb. Now, in retrospect, and even at the time, I knew I was in over my head to a certain extent, and, um, [smacks lips] Dick, who became the CEO, was much better at certain aspects of the job. The way they did it, it... I wasn't even that attached to being the, the CEO long term. I was just like, "But maybe we should talk about it before you fire me." That seemed rude. Um, but-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
I mean, it was, it's my company. But, um, you, you could ha- be- because the, the silver li- lining, it was like, I didn't have to do the job anymore. That's one.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
I mean, I still owned a bunch of the company. I didn't have to do the job.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- EWEv Williams
I mean, that's, like, objectively, it wasn't that bad. But as an identity and ego hit, it was tremendous. I also, I thought, you know, the best thing for the company was for me to stay, and even not in the CEO role, and I tried to negotiate that, and that wasn't accepted, and so... But it was more like, "This is so wrong." And that's what, that's that anger. And then it was like, "Okay, what can I learn from this? What, what is..." Once I was out of that, you know, some deep reflection happened and, and I think a long-term path of personal growth.
- 45:02 – 47:00
Contemplating how the universe works with The One by Heinrich Päs.
- TFTim Ferriss
Are there any people who come to mind who you're tracking right now, or anyone you think people should pay more attention to? Innovators, technologists, thinkers, alive or dead.
- EWEv Williams
I'll mention another book.
- TFTim Ferriss
Perfect.
- EWEv Williams
What, what I've been geeking out on recently is just, um, how the universe works. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Small side project.
- EWEv Williams
You know. Um, which I used to, I used to read a lot of, like, physics books and quantum physics just for fun, and, and it had been a while, so, um, I started delving into that more recently.
- TFTim Ferriss
Just, just set a bubble bath, light a candle, read some quantum physics. [laughs]
- EWEv Williams
[laughs] Uh, there's a book I'm reading right now called The One by Heinrich Päs. I don't know anything-
- TFTim Ferriss
The One
- EWEv Williams
... about him. Yeah. The One is about, it's about how, it's monism, the idea that the universe is just one thing, and, and nature and us and this glass is all one thing, and that the separation is an illusion, how that fits with quantum physics, and, and the whole history of quantum physics and how this idea had come up, but rejected. It was sort of, it was very interesting to learn the implications of that, which we've heard about with m- multiverse and all these crazy ideas, were rejected by scientists who were materialists because it was like this... And it was interesting to learn the materialism in the science is basically a religion. It was like, and that's fascinating. So, yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] So how did you find this book?
- EWEv Williams
My partner, James Joaquin at Obvious.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
We like talk about how the universe works and then invest in startups.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Sounds like a great job. [laughs] All
- 47:00 – 50:29
How Ev stocks his reading list arsenal.
- TFTim Ferriss
right. How, now how do you, do you tend to find books, again, just riffing on how you choose your intake, right? There's finding the signal, and then there's tuning out the noise. I mean, I haven't had any social apps on my phone for years at this point because I just don't have the control to be like the heroin addict wandering into the heroin den. But then there's choosing the signal, and I think books are still, if you can do it with a slightly longer attention span or to cultivate that, a great way of finding these, like I said earlier, scent trails to follow. But you still have a problem because there are 100,000 plus books published in hardcover alone in the US every year. How do you choose your books, and do any other books come to mind?
- EWEv Williams
I wish I had a better way. I should ask you how, how, how many books do you read a month?
- TFTim Ferriss
[sighs] Probably four or five.
- EWEv Williams
Okay. You read a lot more than I do.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- EWEv Williams
Um, I may read two a month, but I think it's kind of haphazard, which is scary because you're gonna, like, select a very tiny portion-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- EWEv Williams
... of what's-
- TFTim Ferriss
Tim Urban style, right? It's like you got time-
- EWEv Williams
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... for however many books left in your life.
- EWEv Williams
Right. Right. Great book, by the way, Tim Urban's book. I have the... It, it's, it's pretty random. It's just, like, wandering. Like, I'll buy tons of books. I read mostly on my phone, but I'll buy physical books to remember that the book exists.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
And then, [laughs] so I'll have it laying around the house and be like, "Oh, I should, oh, this is interesting." Then I'll go, 'cause I'll just read it on my phone. But I feel like I should have a better way. I also watch a lot of YouTube, I have to admit.
- TFTim Ferriss
What do you watch on YouTube? It's gotta be better than what I watch. [laughs] I end up in some weird corners.
- EWEv Williams
I w- [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
I watch music content Like, not music, like how to make music, because, like, make music as a hobby as well and, and then, like, quantum physics stuff.
- TFTim Ferriss
Do you have a background in physics?
- EWEv Williams
No. I'm just, I'm, I'm probably... I'm, I don't even understand it. I don't wanna give the impression that I, I-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
... I'm an expert on any of this.
- TFTim Ferriss
No.
- EWEv Williams
It's just been, you know, I just follow my curiosity.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah. I used to just exclusively consume business and technology and startup stuff, 'cause I was so-- I mean, most of my adult life, I was CEO of a company and just waking up every day desperately trying to make that succeed. And so a lot of my new stuff, like music, is like, it's just fun.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm. Do you read any fiction?
- EWEv Williams
I'm trying to read more fiction. I tried reading that book that you recommended a little while back, the little one.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh.
- EWEv Williams
What was it?
- 50:29 – 53:02
Big thoughts on a Medium regret.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right. So if we look back at the products that you've built, if you were to build any of them again today, are there any features you would either remove or add that come to mind?
- EWEv Williams
Hmm. Certainly. I think a lot of cases, I was much too eager to add things, especially Medium. Medium, I definitely prematurely scaled. I just wanted to create a nice-
- TFTim Ferriss
Why do you, why do you say that, that it-
- EWEv Williams
Um
- TFTim Ferriss
... prematurely scaled?
- EWEv Williams
Premature- Because I hired too many people at first and had this, like, my, my tendency, I'm good at seeing, like, systems.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
And like, a product is, like, most of the things I build are systems. They're not just, you know, a product. And with Medium, I had lots of experience understanding the internet and publishing some plat- platform, and I was like, wanted to build everything new. That may or may not have been possible, but I tried to do it all at once, [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- EWEv Williams
Which was, I think, the, the mistake. And so that's why I say prematurely scaled, is just that it takes time to get everything right.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- EWEv Williams
And, um, you know, the company and the product, et cetera. And because when you're trying to do a whole bunch of things at once, it's, it's classic, classic failing mode to try to bite off more than you can chew. And I'd say eighty percent of the time, if I meet with a startup or founder, which I don't really do, um, anymore, if they ask me their advice is I do less. And so Medium, it was like that. It was like, build a great writing platform and, um, and then got im- impatient for growth.
- TFTim Ferriss
Was that due to outside pressure, or was that an internally generated pressure?
- EWEv Williams
It was internal, but it, it was self-imposed by me, but it was also... This is the part of prematurely scaling, is if you get beyond a handful of employees, it's, it's as much pressure from employees as it is from investors.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- EWEv Williams
You know? And if you have everyone around the table and everyone's seeing all, then, then you can kinda take your time more. But if you, like, people are having doubts a- and you have to sell internally all the time before you figured it all out, that's a dangerous place to be. So that's where we
- 53:02 – 56:02
Resisting the urge to bloat Mozi with superfluous features.
- EWEv Williams
were for a while.
- TFTim Ferriss
So when you say do less, right? I'm sure a lot of folks in this audience, I've been in a position where I'm trying to do more things than I should.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Taking a maybe shotgun approach to trying to impatiently get seven things done when I should probably put them in some type of logical sequence. So if you're trying to take a more rifle-like approach, and you could give the example with Medium or it could be with Mozy or otherwise, how do you choose the first few things to focus on? When you have this ocean of possibilities, looking back, we can use this as a starting point at, say, Medium, what would you have focused on in terms of feature set or otherwise?
- EWEv Williams
I'll use Mozy as, as an example of this-
- TFTim Ferriss
Great
- EWEv Williams
... right? 'Cause it's fresher in my mind. But where we've done a much better job. Mozy, I originally conceived of as a better contacts app, and the idea was, it's a very old idea, like the Plaxo idea.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- EWEv Williams
If you remember that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Sure. I do remember.
- EWEv Williams
I remember hearing about Plaxo, 2001 or something like that, and the idea of Plaxo, pre-smartphone, desktop, a, like a Rolodex on your, on your computer, but if I, if I have your business card in my Rolodex, you can update it on my Rolodex. I heard that idea, I'm like, "Duh." That's, like, one of the many things that the internet is gonna change is, like, the difference of being in a connected world versus a disconnected world is, is, and what utility and great stuff come from that. And then fast-forward 2023, we still don't have that, which is kind of crazy. Like, I have, I have this contacts app, and it's, like, lacking information. It's incomplete. It's outdated. And so I was like, "I'm gonna build a better contacts app." And then it led to the idea of, okay, if you- Managed to do that and got lots of people connected, then you would actually have this private social network. So then you could do all kinds of things. And one of the ideas we had was location sharing or, or like city-level location sharing, but we also had these ideas around customizing. If it's a digital business card, it was like, what if you could customize it, make it look really cool, and choose, choose your fonts and colors, and wouldn't that be just fun and kind of a throwback? And so we, we actually built that. We built this whole system for making these cool-looking cards that would show up, um, for your friends in your Mozi, and then we killed it all, thankfully. And then that was, that was painful because, you know, you've gone down a path with the team, they work really hard, and like, actually, you know what? This is complicating our vision because what we're hearing from people and what we're sensing is that's kind of noise compared to the utility. What I just wanna know is when my friend's in town, or I just wanna know, like when I'm going to a city, like where are my friends?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
And all the rest of this is noise, so we ripped
- 56:02 – 58:08
How Mozi balances privacy with utility.
- EWEv Williams
that out.
- TFTim Ferriss
How are you going to approach the invite process to show your contacts? 'Cause this, this seems to have been a challenge with some previous attempts of this work. If I look at my contacts, I've had... I mean, my contacts is this bloated monster full of people. A lot of them are sort of acquaintances I don't really wanna keep in touch with. There are probably a handful of frenemies where I'm like, "Definitely don't wanna see those people." Some crazies, don't wanna see them either-
- EWEv Williams
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... but they're still somewhere hidden in my contacts.
- EWEv Williams
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
So how do I just-
- EWEv Williams
What do you do?
- TFTim Ferriss
... have my, my real friends notified?
- EWEv Williams
Um, good question. Um. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
We are assuming, for starters, we made this false assumption, if you are in the phone book of someone else and they're in yours, that you're willing to share more than your phone number. You're, you're willing to share your private profile.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
And we're not sharing anything n- that's never public, but if you've given your phone number to them, then you can see what we build in Mozi profile, which is just... It's, it's not address.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
It's, it's like social handles. It's more or less what would show up on a social network profile.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
But some people are nervous about that, so ev- I mean, you can not sync your contacts and build it from scratch-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- EWEv Williams
... would, would be the answer. And then plans have a separate mode. So what-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- EWEv Williams
... people are most nervous about, and we wanna make very clear, is it's not gonna automatically tell, it's not gonna tell everybody in your address book where you are.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
And w- we, we don't even a- automatically update your location. We, you put it in plans, and then at the plan level, there's another level of privacy where you have to a- actually opt in to say, "This person can see my plans."
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- EWEv Williams
Does that make sense?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, it makes sense.
- EWEv Williams
We're trying to take a conservative approach to privacy, but balance that obviously with ease of use and, and growth and having enough nodes in the network, but we... We're not compromising on privacy, and we never wanna surprise someone that they're sharing information with that random ex or crazy person who happens to be in their phone book.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- 58:08 – 59:37
Parting thoughts.
- TFTim Ferriss
We're coming up on time pretty quickly. You guys excited for a fun night?
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- TFTim Ferriss
There's a lot, there's a lot coming. You mentioned, I think it was January 2024, "I could meditate every day this year." Do you have anything on the docket for 2025 that's like that? Do you make resolutions?
- EWEv Williams
No, that's the only one I'd, I'd made in, in years, actually.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- EWEv Williams
Other than the just general themes like dance more.
- TFTim Ferriss
Here we are tonight. [laughs] You guys are in luck.
- EWEv Williams
You guys ready?
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] All right. Well, we're gonna, we're gonna land the plane. Anything else you'd like to say, Ev? Any closing comments?
- EWEv Williams
Um-
- TFTim Ferriss
Thoughts for the audience?
- EWEv Williams
I would just say, Tim, thank you for having me. Um-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- EWEv Williams
... Tim and I have known each other for, like, 20 years.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, a long time.
- EWEv Williams
I've never been on a podcast.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's been super-
- EWEv Williams
That was fun. And, um, it's just a whole night of nostalgia because-
- TFTim Ferriss
It really is
- EWEv Williams
... we're back in Austin, and it's Diggnation, and it's, um, it's good times, so I hope you guys enjoy it.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. I will say, guys, it feels like the mojo's back to South By after COVID. It took a few years.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- TFTim Ferriss
And you have an amazing night in store, so we'll get more people out here in just a minute. I will be back out in maybe a half hour. I have a, a surprise and maybe even some gifts for everybody here.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- TFTim Ferriss
So stick around. And Ev, thank you. So much fun. Have a great night, everybody.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering] [clapping]
Episode duration: 59:42
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Transcript of episode VV1Y9GSFZNk
