welcome to not boring world
not boring goes paid
Welcome to the 847 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since 2025! Join 256,316 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
And today, for the first time ever, you can pay while you’re there to get even more not boring.
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Tuesday! Happy New Year! And HAPPY not boring world LAUNCH DAY.
I’ve been looking forward to today for a long time, so without further ado…
Let’s get to it.
welcome to not boring world
Today, we’re launching not boring world: the paid section of not boring, where the world’s smartest founders, researchers, investors, creatives, and general geniuses, the ones I couldn’t hire as a full-time writer for a million bucks, write their best ideas.
Here’s the master plan.
Geniuses bring their genius ideas, I help write them. Call it a Cossay or a Joint or something. Whatever we call it, make it as easy to for busy practitioners to share their insights in the essay format those insights deserve as it is for them to spill them on a podcast.
We get all the geniuses in one place, and then we grow from there. This world is biological; your guess re: how it evolves is as good as mine. But it will, and I want you to be a part of it.
We are making a few bets. That ideas are meant to be written. That people who are out there doing things earn ideas you can’t find in LLMs. That the most biased narrator, the one betting his or her livelihood on his or her idea, is the most reliable narrator. That when it’s easier than ever to get mediocre outputs on-demand, the best thing you can feed your brain is high-quality inputs from high-quality people.
That the future can be full of both means and meaning, and that we can create the home for this good future online. A place that’s smart and weird and, hopefully a little magical.
I mean, it’s a newsletter, so we’ll see. But that’s what I’m going for.
Something that I keep writing about because I think it’s really important and becoming even more important is differentiation: doing the thing that only you can uniquely do.
not boring world is that, for me.
It is a bet on the written word when everyone is going all-in on video.
It combines two of my favorite things in the world: talking to smart people and writing.
And it works way better now than it would have when I started not boring.
Over the past six (6!) years of writing this newsletter, I’ve gotten the chance to know and work with some really smart people, people way smarter than me, who are out in the field building stuff and researching stuff and creating stuff. These people are betting their prime years on certain ideas that no one else understands (or believes) yet.
They are more motivated than anyone else could possibly be to understand every facet of the bet they’re making: the history, the technical details, the economics, where it could all go wrong, and what could happen if it goes right.
Meaning, the best person to learn about what’s happening in robotics from is the founder of a robotics company. Even better, from multiple founders of multiple robotics companies, each making a slightly different bet on the winning approach.
Unfortunately, because these people are busy building, and because they’re not necessarily writers (those who can’t do, write, or something), their very best, most core ideas don’t get to see the light of day.
I love to bring them out when I write Deep Dives, but I only write a few Deep Dives a year, often after years of knowing a founder and his or her company. I am only one person and I have only ten fingers. I am a bottleneck.
Most founders resort to a much lighter-weight way to get their ideas out in the world: podcasts.
I love podcasts. I listen to them all the time. I’ve made a couple of them.
Having said that… I think podcasts are a pretty terrible medium for ideas.
They’re great for getting to know people. They’re great for stories. They’re certainly great for putting on wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.
But quick: name the best idea you’ve heard on a podcast recently.
Aggregation Theory was written. Commoditize Your Complements was written (twice). The Bitter Lesson was written. Attention is All You Need was written, too. I, Pencil. Meditations on Moloch. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 1,000 True Fans. Do Things That Don’t Scale. The next big thing will start out looking like a toy. Why Software Is Eating The World. All written.
It has been said that reading is dead, that video won. And for most people, that’s probably true. Video is easy, and video is fun. But I can’t think of a single canonical idea born on a podcast or video, not one.
Ideas are meant to be written.
They are meant to be put to paper, cross-examined, torn apart, rearranged, supplemented with data, edited, packaged, placed next to shitty hand-drawn illustrations. They are meant to be quoted and shared and built upon.
So not boring world is doubling down on the written word.
One goal is to make it as easy for genius frontier practitioners to produce an essay as it currently is for them to go on a podcast and yap. To start, that will mean co-writing essays with them.
We have solid precedent. My two most popular essays of all time, The Electric Slide and Excel Never Dies, were co-written with founders! Sam D’Amico and Ben Rollert, respectively. I just realized this last night, long after deciding to do this. Literally the two most popular essays in not boring history.
The trade is simple: they’re smarter than me, I’m (usually) a better writer than them.
As Ben put it: “I have good ideas but somehow fail to bring them anywhere.”
My job is to bring them out. It’s what I love to do, truffle pig new ideas and shave them all over your inbox.
Hardware is a Fruit, which I co-wrote with Daylight’s Anjan Katta, was a more recent trial balloon. Anjan had a core idea against which he’s been building a company for years. He texted me a small version, then sent me a voice note with a longer version, and a couple of days later, we had an essay that he probably never would have written about an idea that I never would have had on my own.
I have a lot more in the hopper. All are ideas I never could have come up with myself, even using our new thinking machines. Which leads me to the second thesis behind not boring world…
We will write down ideas you can’t find in an LLM.
My co-authors are figuring out new knowledge in real time, and we’re going to share it fresh, before we’re even sure it’s right, while the hypothesis it still being tested.
Early last year, I wrote Long Questions/Short Answers, and I argued that finding the right questions will become extremely important as LLMs make it easier to get to answers.
not boring world is something similar. Like: Long Inputs / Short Outputs.
MSCHF’s Gabe Whaley went on Jackson Dahl’s Dialectic podcast last year and talked about employing a full-time person whose job it is to bring in fresh inputs and educate the rest of the team on them. That’s just about the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.
I want not boring world to feel kind of like that. A home for really good, well thought-out inputs, inputs that are so fresh, so frontier, that they’re not in the LLMs yet. Inputs that exist only as ideas trapped in geniuses’ heads. I intend to help get out as craftfully as I can.
To start, that will be through co-written essays with smart founders, researchers, creatives, industry insiders, etc… but I think this starts getting most fun as that network of collaborators grows and continues to contribute.
So Anjan wrote that essay on hardware, now he can share his inputs. The papers he’s reading. Tidbits from conversations he had. But more: art, too, and music, even meditations.
And it’s not just Anjan. Each contributor will enter the center of not boring world and be able to share their inputs, independently or in conversation with each other. They’ll debate each other. Maybe they’ll collaborate. All of a sudden, not boring world becomes this fascinating little network. At its best, it will help you learn things you can’t learn anywhere else. And it’ll help you see the raw inputs and thought processes behind these ideas, so you can form your own thoughts.
This is because our thesis is that you should come up with your own outputs — that’s your job — fed by great inputs — that’s ours.
If I just tell you to “buy Google” or whatever, there is exactly zero alpha in that. It’s much better for you to combine some new inputs from the frontier, your own experience, and inputs that you find yourself to come to your own conclusions.
As the Genie tells Aladdin, bee yourself.
The coolest part about my job has been stuffing my head with inputs directly from really smart people doing things, letting it all swish around, coming up with my own outputs, and through that process, as if by magic, developing my intuition. I want to share that magic with you.
But inputs can be messy, which is where not boring world comes in. I’ll curate the very best people I can find and present their ideas as coherently as possible, to balance the raw inputs with legibility.
Two things will help us do this.
The first is Editorial Infrastructure. I’m going to be hiring out a team to build a machine that helps the very best ideas and inputs shine and spread. Editors, illustrators, researchers.
This team is not built out yet. By subscribing to not boring world today, in the very beginning, you’re helping the start of what I hope becomes a unique and world-class modern media organization that grows with the people actually making the news.
There is a fun secret behind all of this: I couldn’t pay any practitioner worth hearing from any amount of money to get them to come work for not boring full-time. If they were so easily bought, they wouldn’t be generating the types of ideas worth listening to.
But they’re certainly willing to spend a few hours (or less) to 1) get their favorite ideas in essay shape and 2) get those ideas in front of smart, curious people (who are potential employees, investors, customers, and partners). This is the Liquid Super Team at a higher level than I initially intended.
The risk here is that the message gets diluted. What is not boring world if it’s tech and architecture and book reviews and group meditations and …?
The answer to that question is the second thing that will help us build this universe: a coherent worldview.
not boring world publishes on behalf of the good future.
That means technology, but not only technology. The closest I’ve come to expressing this worldview is in Means & Meaning. not boring world covers both.
Means are obvious: how technologists give humans ever-greater means – including cutting edge research and the strategy it takes to scale enough to have a real impact.
Meaning is harder: what is worth paying attention to? How can we contribute? What are we doing here? How do we bring about Modern Magnificenza?
If we are zipping around the world on supersonic planes depressed and arguing about politics or whatever, we have failed.
Come join our world and make sure that doesn’t happen.
The truth is, I don’t know exactly where we’ll end up. I do know that this is as energized as I’ve been about not boring since the beginning. I have the most fun when we’re experimenting with new things, even and especially when they feel different, and this feels like something that doesn’t exist, but should, and that we’re in the best place to make it happen.
Turning on paid subscriptions was actually the plan from the very earliest days of not boring. Once I hit like 5,000 subscribers, I’d turn on a paywall, convert like 10%, and be off to the races. But on the way to 5,000 subscribers, then 10,000, then 100,000, then 255,000, I realized that I really liked it when those words I’d put so much effort into writing got into as many peoples’ brains as possible. So I kept the newsletter free, partnered with sponsors, and grew.
The thing is, I still like when the essays I pour my very best ideas into get to fly free, so those will remain free, along with the Weekly Dose. Everything you get from not boring today, you will still get for free.
not boring world is different and more.
Over the next few months, we’ll be dropping co-written essays every other week to paid members of not boring world. The roster is already full of some of the smartest and most creative people I know. No one I’ve asked has said no yet.
As I build out the team, and as co-writers become contributors, frequency will increase. We’ll figure out how to do that without overwhelming you. We’ll also open up a chat in the Substack app to discuss it all together. This isn’t going to be a one-sided thing. You’ll get to be a part of what I’m building. Book clubs? Possibly. Daily rituals? I hope so, eventually.
This is the maximalist version of what a newsletter can be. Newsletter as world container. Newsletter as jumping off point. Curation and creation combined. Our place to experiment with new formats. The last subscription you’ll ever need (jk please support my fellow substackers).
It’s a bet on the written word, that great new ideas are trapped in human heads, and that it’s possible to build a future that increases both means and meaning.
Welcome to not boring world: a newsletter, yeah, for now.
Big thanks to Hanne Winarsky for helping me prepare to launch.
That’s all for today. We will be back in your inbox a BUNCH this week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
This is a very easy “take my money” scenario. Can’t wait!
Thanks, Packy! You've inspired me to write more.