jasmi.news | @jasmine

Live video discussing Dario's "The Adolescence of Technology" and the Claude Constitution with Irene Zhang from ChinaTalk and Kai Williams from Understanding AI. Get full access to @jasmine’s substack at jasmi.news/subscribe

People are panicking about the literacy crisis, about waning attention spans and why technology is making everything worse. But some people — like writer, software designer, and literary critic Celine Nguyen — have managed to not only retain their engagement with art and culture and literature, but actually deepen it with the help of the internet and social media. Today we chat about:[00:00:00] Ju...

VOICEOVER: A short essay on how vice signaling is eating Silicon Valley. Get full access to @jasmine’s substack at jasmi.news/subscribe

These days I am quite stressed about the fate of “liberal democracy.” It’s not a concept I previously felt very attached to, mostly because I didn’t like the way the Dems talked about it. But now, we are in a far, far worse place. Masked ICE agents are grabbing people off the streets. Millions of kids will die due to mindless aid cuts and anti-vax policies. Free speech is in the worst place it’s b...

Today's podcast guest is Fred Turner, a Professor of Communication at Stanford and probably the best historian of Silicon Valley culture over the past 100 years. His book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism , is my favorite book on Silicon Valley's history, focusing on how hippies and hackers came together from the 60s to...

Sometimes, a piece of writing goes so viral that it becomes an event in and of itself. One of the most successful recent instances of this is AI 2027 : a detailed scenario outlining how AI might doom humanity within a few short years, as accelerating capabilities intertwine with US-China competition, recursive self-improvement, deceptive misalignment, and job loss. I’m skeptical about some of AI 2...

Today’s episode is for the media nerds out there. I’m talking to author/podcaster extraordinaire Kevin Roose : New York Times tech columnist , Hard Fork cohost, and the author of 3.25 excellent books on the subcultures of AI, Wall Street, and evangelical Christianity. I’ve known Kevin since I was a freshman in college, when Young Money single-handedly persuaded me not to become an investment banke...

I invited my friends Anson Yu and HudZah to chat today, as young people thriving amid these ~unprecedented times~. Our conversation is very much about agency : how it’s nurtured by family and by community; how it’s shaped by stories, books, and films; and how AI can instill it or take it away. Anson and HudZah are both graduating seniors at the University of Waterloo. Anson studied systems design...

I'm obsessed with web-highlighter / read-it-later app / research assistant Readwise, so I was honored when to be the first guest on Readwise’s podcast . It was a fun conversation, so I'm cross-publishing it here. Among other things, we discuss: * Why Substack built Notes & how the algorithm works * Growth & confidence tips for beginning writers * My research/revision stack (ft. Readwise, Claude, C...

Today's podcast features Audrey Tang. She's the current Cyber Ambassador of Taiwan, a principal author of the book Plurality , and a major inspiration for my approach to tech. Audrey is like no other politician you will ever encounter. She's a middle school dropout and an autodidact. She has worked on Siri at Apple and founded startups before joining the pro-democracy Sunflower Movement and then t...

Today’s podcast features the brilliant and singular Mills Baker . Formally, he’s the Head of Design at Substack, where we met, and also fallibilist, New Orleanian, and OG blogger extraordinaire. Among other things, we discuss: * Is the “literacy crisis” real? * The case for reading novels * Why humans are not just fleshy LLMs * Parenting for a post-AGI world * Why Mills didn’t become a full-time w...

Today’s show features my dear friend Tianyu Fang ! Tian is a writer and researcher focused on tech policy and US-China relations. He’s currently a Tech and Democracy fellow at New America , and is a cofounder of the iconic Chinese internet newsletter Chaoyang Trap. We discuss: * How Tian became a teenage China watcher * The death of the China journalist * Why Chinese founders don’t blog * Censorsh...

This episode is an accompaniment to my “ tech right (disambiguation) ” post from last week. My guest today is my good friend Arjun Ramani . We've known each other since freshman year of Stanford when we got into a late night dorm argument about critical theory in high school debate (which says a lot about our friendship). Arjun is currently a PhD candidate in economics at MIT. And for the last few...

Announcing my 2025 project: an anthropology of disruption. (Voiceover) Get full access to @jasmine’s substack at jasmi.news/subscribe

I remember being a freshman in college and finishing the book “ Young Money ” by Kevin Roose, which follows eight recent graduates’ journeys into the opulent yet cutthroat world of investment banking. I’d been curious about finance—widely advertised as a reliable career path for the directionless humanities major—until the book turned me off entirely. Memorably, what scared me most wasn’t the acco...