Richard Jacobs: Hello. This is Richard Jacobs with the future Tech Podcasts. I have Matt Richtel, Pulitzer Prize-winning tech for the New York Times, which is pretty cool. I haven’t even got close to a Pulitzer Prize, so to talk to someone who has it, it’s a great thing. And we’re gonna be talking about the man who wouldn’t die. That’s a project that Matt is working on. So Matt, thanks for coming.
Matt Richtel: Thanks for having me on Richard.
Richard Jacobs: Yeah. So tell me, what does this the man that wouldn’t die? What inspired the project? What’s it about? You know, we’ll get into it that way.
Matt Richtel: That will you know I’ve been covering Silicon Valley for the New York Times for like 20 years and I’ve taken it very seriously. Like I was there when Netscape appeared in someone’s dreams and I was very assiduously dutifully covering it in 20 years I decided it’s time to start making fun of this place. The man who wouldn’t, the man who wouldn’t die is a comedic detective novel vet in Silicon Valley where one of the great granddaddies of Silicon Valley goes head over handlebars over Alice’s restaurant and dies and then tweets for the afterlife. I was murdered. And it turns out that the man who wouldn’t die is a scoff detective novel about all the madness of Silicon Valley.
Richard Jacobs: Well did you as a publisher fear retribution even though it’s a satirical novel?
Matt Richtel: Well I think they said listen Matt is a serious person, or we think he is he writes all these serious books, writes all these serious articles for the New York Times. Maybe we better signals to the world that this is something else altogether and there’s kind of a rich tradition of this actually as authors I have played around with the voice they use and I think in particular in this case they said, well listen, that was Matt on bended knee taking notes with whatever, you know, picking up Steve Jobs spittle and in a cup and reporting on its genetic sampling if he’s going to start making fun of this stuff, maybe we should try an alter ego, so that’s what happened.
Can I tell you one thing that really made my day? Well, this week the New York Post called it the best of the week and said it’s a hard-boiled hilarious detective novel and that’s perfect because usually, the New York Times reviews me in a serious way. It’s good for the New York Post to review me for the hilarious side. So it’s all coming together, Richard.
Yeah! Well, the headline, I don’t know, but I need a headline. Like, what headless book named founded on Sunday list. Give me a good New York post headlines.
Richard Jacobs: Well, there was the old one have a headless man found in a topless bar. I don’t know if that’s real or not, but that was like an old.
Well yeah, I can see why you did it under a pseudonym because then you know, as you continue to interview people and report on Silicon Valley, you don’t want them to say hey, am I just telling you this stuff for your next book where you’re gonna make fun of me or you know, can I be real with you and tell you everything? I can see why you’d want to do that.
Matt Richtel: I think I can see that. I also can see like I do feel like from my look, I live in San Francisco. I think many of us in Silicon Valley get that we are satirical in our own way. I mean one of the most frequently heard sentences I hear in silicon valley is yeah, we got high-class problems and sometimes from the concern we put into what our dogs are wearing, making sure that our kids wind up in the proper free play.
Pre k the environment, it can be at times an extremely self-serious place and so I actually don’t think most people are gonna mind this. I think they’re probably going to enjoy the fact that they can exhale a little bit.
Richard Jacobs: Well, people always like to pick on people that they think are better off than them. Worse off than them different. So yeah, I don’t think you’ll get a good reception to it. I don’t think it’d be a problem.
So did you have to do research to write the book or did you just revered, I mean, remembered what’s happened over the 20 years? Did you look at articles that you’ve written or because you’re living observing the lifestyle just came out of you? The book.
Matt Richtel: I mean, I’m so steeped in it and you know, like I’ll go to a warriors game with a buddy who’s an entrepreneur and will start coming up with, you know, business ideas and the line between a brilliant business idea and a satire is often very thin. There’s one of the entrepreneurs in the book comes up with, do I use it? The thing I wanted my Pulitzer for was distracted driving. No, sorry, I didn’t win it for distracted driving. I want it for writing about distracted driving. I don’t think you could win a Pulitzer for driving poorly. And one of the entrepreneurs in the book has come up with a drive smart app for the car. And the way it works is that, and the thing has gone crazy. Everybody loves it. In your car, on your screen, you play a video game that is you actually driving your car. But it’s much more fun to pay attention to the video game of you playing because you could score points. So it turns out everybody becomes a much better driver playing on their screen in their car rather than looking out the window. And that’s the kind of thing where you go, you’re like, you go like, that’s both idiotic, but it has a hint of truth to it. You know, and at one point, University Avenue after dark in the book turns into a place where every storefront is telling you how you can, it’s beckoning you to come inside so that your kids can learn to take the SAT and learn an instrument to improve their college admissions possibility. I promise you I came up with that idea long before anyone with using the backdoor alley to get into USC. So like, you know, it’s like, it’s just one degree off of the madness we generally face.
Richard Jacobs: That’s cool. So yeah, it sounds like a really good read. Interesting. I know you don’t want to give away the whole book, but you know, anyone or two particular anecdotes from it or maybe material that didn’t make it into the book that you thought it almost made it, but it would be really cool to talk about.
Matt Richtel: Well, one of the things that did make it into the book and that I am actually really interested in is I remember this guy tweets or apparently tweets from beyond the grave saying that he has been murdered. Well, I’m actually genuinely interested in, I like to have substance even in the midst of trying to use humor, but I’m genuinely interested in the idea about AI and our ability to reproduce ourselves. Like, could this guy actually, you know, there are hints that in the book that Steve Jobs still exist somewhere out there. There’s also hints that he’s working with Bano to change everyone’s ring tone. But that’s clearly obviously true. I’m really interested in this idea about AI and reproducing the human experience. And I will tell you, you know, I’ll tell you like of late, do you have you used Gmail, Richard?
Richard Jacobs: Yeah, that is.
Matt Richtel: So do you get the little notification at the bottom that says here are some possible responses.
Richard Jacobs: Thanks. That’d be awesome.
Matt Richtel: Yeah, look, okay, I get it. But I have to admit the capacity, the computational capacity to be assessing those because I go, I read them to see how accurate they are. And yes, they are to some extent they’re very boiler plate, but I’m impressed by the ability to mimic a human being. And I come back to the original Eliza test. Do you remember these tests for AI where they put a computer essentially behind a curtain and a human body?
Richard Jacobs: The touring test.
Matt Richtel: Thank you. Right. So can I talk a little bit about why that, why that there’s an interesting fact of that that is not often noted, that makes it so hard to distinguish a computer from a human? Can I just say something about that really quickly?
Richard Jacobs: Sure.
Matt Richtel: So on one level you think, well, the computers have gotten sophisticated, but there’s another way to look at it. And that is that human beings often are pretty rote. We draw from a series of stories, a series of cut and paste commentary that we tend to use over and over again. We actually don’t go outside the lines of our own narratives very often. And what’s kind of interesting is, as you think about Captain Don, that’s the guy with all the yachts who are tweeting or is he not tweeting from the afterlife? That you’ll have to read the book to find out. But it’s plausible to think that most of us aren’t that hard to mimic that it’s not that the computers are so sophisticated, it’s that most of us are less sophisticated than we imagined. I find that extremely interesting when you think about the touring test when you think about, everything up to say, self-driving cars, anything that seeks to understand how are human beings relate? What makes us curious and difficult is that there are occasional outliers that muck up the whole predictability, but they’re only fairly occasions. I mean, they might be grand if you play them out over the big scheme of math. But that’s just, I find that extremely fascinating. Richard had short, you and I aren’t that interesting. As interesting as our wives tell us we are.
Richard Jacobs: Yeah. Well, they tell you that that’s good too. But yeah, I guess to say the 80, 20 rule, you know, 80% of what people do and our is, can be systematized or in a recreate it. And then there’s that 5, 10, 15, 20%. That’s unique. Maybe less.
Matt Richtel: I think that’s exactly, and maybe 95, five. And I think that’s a really interesting facet of big data. Maybe we’re going to figure out if it’s more like 80, 20 or more, like 95, five. And I take a lot of really smart people with a lot of computing power beginning to figure that out. And so what makes, you know, a spoof of Silicon Valley kind of fun in this respect is that there’s enough substance that you, you know, it’s not, it lends itself to satire, but still can have substance underneath it.
Richard Jacobs: Yeah. You know what it’s talking about this, I would bet that you know, there’s like 20 master plots. There’s, I mean, like the stories you’ve written, how many stories do you think you’ve written over the past 20 years? What’re your guests?
Matt Richtel: Oh, you mean like for the New York Times? Yeah, I’ve tried to look it up. It’s definitely several thousand. But it’s where you’re going with it. That there’s, that they have major scenes over and over again.
Richard Jacobs: Right. You’re probably right. I don’t know, seven or 10 different types of stories and just guessing, pulling out numbers. But yeah, but they’re almost always the same.
Matt Richtel: There was an effort some time ago and I doubt, yeah, the reason I pause there, Richard, is there’s a way we can segue here into the question of universal income. But let me get there slowly because I just left ahead, but there was an effort some time ago and it may still go on where you didn’t even need a journalist for the sports pages. I think small newspapers tried this where the coaches would send in the scores and who scored what in a program would reconstruct a new story, you know, about team A beating team B in basketball with, you know, James Smith being the leading scorer and Tanya Jones having the most blocks or whatever it was. And there was an effort to do that because the thing was so rope, which is a word I realized I’ve used again, what does this have to do with universal income? Well, number one, it shows I’ve had too much caffeine and I’m making random segues. But the thing that it really, in a serious sense, well, Hey, I have not had too much caffeine, but look, one of the questions we face in society is everything gets automated. What will happen to workers? And so that was where my brain went there is that, you know, people are saying, look, if we really do automate so many jobs that people, we need to create a sufficient income to live. And if you want to be more Machiavellian about it, a consumer base, you can see why that idea has percolated around Silicon Valley.
Richard Jacobs: Hmm. Well, what’s your thought about the universal basic income? Good idea, bad idea, what are the pros and cons?
Matt Richtel: I think it’s a conversation worth having. I’m ill-equipped to decide on these policy issues because I am ever the journalist and I can always give you both sides, which drives my wife out of her mind. But I really, I think it’s a conversation worth having because I think that it is easy to lose sight of the fact in Silicon Valley how blessed we are to have the education, the choices that we are afforded. And that when you get into places where the automation is taking over jobs, livelihoods, family incomes, that those of us, well, I wouldn’t put myself necessarily in this group, but those of you who are making the world more efficient, you know, seem to be recognizing that there are massive side effects. I don’t think that’s lost on most people. There is a funny character in the book, this is the daughter of the guy who’s died, she’s gone to our hard-boiled detective for his health in, and his name is Fitch. She’s gone to him and says, my dad has tweeted from the afterlife that he’s been murdered. And of course, the detective’s like, give me a break. But she introduces herself and she says, she’s very charitable. She explained and she is going to communities around the country where the children, unfortunately, are not learning to be as efficient as possible. And her job is to go teach maximum efficiency to the children of America. That is what she sees her. She says, would you believe there are entire communities in America who are not trying to be as efficient as humanly possible? And our detective Pho gasps because he does not see it as a major issue.
Richard Jacobs: Yeah. Well, from your perspective, I mean, do people in Silicon Valley really live that differently from everyone else? Are they trying to automate everything in their lives? I mean like how are they different from everyone else if you have perspective on that?
Matt Richtel: Well, the way I think we, and I’ll put myself in this group are different than other people. First of all, I don’t think people are different from their core, I do think that the education that we’ve been afforded and the circumstances we have wound up in allow us a greater amount of choice then, And I don’t think this is lost on most people I live around.
I mean, I think there’s an understanding of how fortunate many people are in Silicon Valley. I am back actually spending this summer in my native Colorado.
We did a house swap and I have come across, as I often do when I come here, you know, a, just simply in some ways a different set of economic circumstances for many people that become choice limiters and that’s where I think the chief differences. Look if you’ve had a good exit from a company or you know, even a medium extra that the subtitle of the book is murder is just another extra strategy. If you’ve been fortunate, you are sitting on some ability to choose. It doesn’t mean living with your kids is necessarily easier. It doesn’t mean you know, your relationship is easier to manage. It doesn’t mean that you know, go down the list of medical issues isn’t as serious it is for someone else. But it does mean that you have more options. Again, I don’t think it’s lost on people in Silicon Valley, but I do think we’re allowed to poke fun at ourselves and I took a big stick to do that this time.
Richard Jacobs: Okay. Well, so the book, what’s the status? Is it available on Amazon?
Matt Richtel: The book is available all over the place. It’s called the man who wouldn’t die. And my pen name is AB jewel. Each initial is my kid’s middle name. And jewel is my wife’s middle name. So if you’re looking for it under Matt Richtel, It isn’t going to be there, the man who wouldn’t die by AB jewel and then my website has lots of info on it and that’s Matt richtel.com and hey, if you think you see yourself in the book, if you go, Hey, I’m that guy. I promise it wasn’t, it wasn’t after you exactly. It was after someone just like you.
Richard Jacobs: Are you going to have the characters in the book tweeting about their responses to the book? Especially the dead guy?
Matt Richtel: That’s brilliant you have intellectual property so in the right off Fanjul there are now in the book, there’s a drive through a law firm that I thought of a little bit like mofo where Morrison, where you can go and get both a drive-through patent and a latte and so the people who were at the booth are called Barista Rastas half lawyer. Absolutely. That’s cool. So you have just become my Mother Teresa and patented. I’m going to have to tweet that I’m starting today Richard.
Richard Jacobs: Okay! well, that’s cool that makes sense those are the easy ones. You just do the obvious stuff like telling upon as a joke. So I hope it helps you, that’s it.
Matt Richtel: No one sees it’s like dad jokes!
Exactly right! Yup, That’s my specialty. So you gotta keep it up. Well, excellent. Very good, I guess yeah just one or two more questions. So, John, you said that people in Silicon Valley or not really that different, they just have more choices, but are there any fundamental differences you see in the people in Silicon Valley? Like mentally their outlook, or are they just people that had more choices available to them?
Matt Richtel: Well, I do have to say the place breeds, entrepreneurial-ism and I do think that exists in a lot of places, but I will say that people in Silicon Valley feel to me and here I define it very broadly as the whole region, it seems to have drawn people who are entrepreneurial and every facet of their lives, like they’re entrepreneurial about how they approach their kids’ school. They’re entrepreneurial about how they approach their fitness or diet and by entrepreneurial I mean creative. They are kind of creative, creative with intent and I believe that is actually essential to the American spirit and so it is everywhere. I just believe that Silicon Valley has drawn that and when I say that, it’s going to sound to a lot of people, like a good thing. It’s to me it’s good. It’s not good or bad because that spirit comes with a lot of things and I just find that is really endemic of the place. I think it is a beautiful thing. I just think it can go overboard, like any kind of powerful personality trait but overboard again it doesn’t mean that it just means it can happen in excess.
Richard Jacobs: What about the technology itself? I mean, you’ve been around long enough to be with dotcom boom and bust and then crypto what’s going on right now? Do you have any insights you really see just take legal technology like the fashion, the boom in the bust or like what’s your perspective on it versus other people?
Matt Richtel: I look at right now, I don’t look at the boom and bust quite so much as boom and bust. I look at it like there are a lot of things being seeded. A fraction of those things will work and they will work on a huge level. So in that sense, I mean, you know, this is like its guppies that have the chance to turn into Wales and a lot of guppies are going to grotesque metaphor, but they’re going to die. They’re going to be swollen up pretty easily. And so my big-picture view of it is that it doesn’t exactly, boom and bust it. There’s millions and millions of small busts and some big that give rise to another set of, you know, ideas. I think what makes this so hard to predict is that is, is essentially goes back to Moore’s law.
Things are moving at such a pace that it’s hard to understand how they will come together in exponential capacities.
But I want to offer one if not chilling than at least a reality check that strikes me and that is I’m going to say it with a caveat. I am agnostic. I don’t know whether there’s good or not. I lacked the wisdom to know, and you may wonder why I’m saying that, but the reason I’m mentioning it is for all the strides we’re making inefficiency in technology, I am struck that happiness remains in tremendous flux and we have delivered on a platonic ideal in a lot of ways in this country and continue to deliver on it. In small part thanks to technology but I don’t think that has solved our existential challenge.
I think we still wrestle with court issues and we should not lose sight of that fact in silicon valley and I know many people have not but it’s just reality so that goes back to the man who wouldn’t die. You know, on some level for everything are captain of Silicon Valley Captain Dawn, who is tweeting from the afterlife. I’ve been murdered for everything he’s achieved. He doesn’t want to go either. He says debt jet, he says death is one of life’s greatest inefficiencies.
Richard Jacobs: Well that is true, Excellent on that. So yeah, while we were talking, I looked it up and confirmed. So yeah, kindle, audible, Amazon, A man wouldn’t die by AB jewel, the books out there. So yeah it sounds super fascinating. I haven’t read it yet because it’s literally just come out with them and I’m going to get into it and I appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking about it.
Matt Richtel: Much gratitude Richard, have a great day!
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Get The Latest Finding Genius Podcast News Delivered To Your Inbox