Interview with Paul Graham

I&#x27;m hoping we don&#x27;t continue to see yc turn into &#x27;the old guard&#x27;.<p>YC folks, startups &amp; the people yc startup school attracts that I&#x27;ve personally spoken to in the past few years are more imitator-types.<p>YC folks &amp; startups of 2009 were more authentic &amp; original types.<p>Though I suppose it&#x27;s tough to avoid this deterioration in culture following $-influx &amp; &#x27;success&#x27;, in any domain.

&gt; But a few years after it&#x27;s over, we&#x27;ll be acting as if it never happened. We&#x27;re good at that.<p>So melancholy, a lot of the responses seem to gravity around a general accidentalism. I feel that’s true for a lot of people who have had great success, never really understanding how each of the pieces fit together to make their success and thus never feeling like they’ve owned it.

For me, this interview was disappointingly short. I&#x27;d love to see Eric Weinstein or someone similar do a long form interview with PG.

&quot;There is one though that I regret rejecting because it was an idea I&#x27;d always wanted to fund. I&#x27;d been looking for this company for years, and finally it showed up&quot;.<p>Out of curiosity: any guesses what this company might be?

&gt; <i>But a few years after it&#x27;s over, we&#x27;ll be acting as if [COVID] never happened. We&#x27;re good at that.</i><p>I fear this prediction won&#x27;t come true.<p>There&#x27;s a great risk that &#x27;health theatre&#x27; will join security theatre as a durable if not permanent part of our existence. That years from now, we&#x27;ll be getting temperatures checked, schools will be shutting down for worse-than-usual influenzas, and so on.<p>I still can&#x27;t bring an ordinary-sized yogurt on a plane, and have to remove my belt and shoes. Something made our society irrationally risk-averse, and I glumly suspect that COVID won&#x27;t be the turning point in that trend.

this is hardly an interview

As a huge fan of pg (since my early 20s), it feels bad (but also good) to see him so disconnected these days. Most of his Tweets read like the musings of &quot;some rich dude&quot; in an ivory tower (which is quite literally where he lives), whereas back in the day YC and pg&#x27;s essays were very much &quot;where the rubber meets the road&quot; -- apologies for being a bit metaphorical.<p>Anyway, I think he&#x27;s enjoying his well-earned money, life, and wonderful family (which is great), but as far as practical real-life startup advice? Paul Graham isn&#x27;t that guy anymore.

Honestly I never found PG’s writing that insightful and ANSI Lisp was a bit of a pain to read<p>That doesn’t take away from any of his success, which has been immense (anybody who has made over a billion is obviously amazing and had the ultimate life) but he has become too much of a cult figure in comparison to others in that stratosphere

Once upon a time I saw pg as a guy that was leveling the playing field, and I think he succeeded because of that.<p>As another comment pointed out, concerning his writing about the wealth tax, I think he&#x27;s lost sight of the fact that&#x27;s there&#x27;s more wealth to be created that&#x27;s outside the scope of what the wealth advisors for the uber-wealthy are familiar with.

&gt; 2. What&#x27;s the future of what we now call journalism? Is it all Substack (a YC company)? Can we run the global-scale world with that model?<p>I&#x27;m new to HN and was interested to read PG&#x27;s answer, because I like the civility and on-pointedness of HN, which I think is a result of its rules of engagement. So, first I looked at Substack, which I hadn&#x27;t heard of before.<p>PG&#x27;s answer suggests he values journalism, but I was surprised that Substack doesn&#x27;t address the main problem of journalism, which is not a lack of &quot;individual domain experts&quot; - it&#x27;s a lack of a viable business model to support people who practice journalism.<p>Advertising is what used to pay for journalism when journalism was published on newsprint. Since advertising went to online, journalism has been decoupled from the business model. Now less than half the number of journalists are employed in USA and Australia than at the peak, less than 20 years ago.<p>Can anyone point me towards attempts to find a new business model to sustain journalism?