A Good Hook is a Key to a Better Future

Take a look at the image. This is the first time I’ve staged something for a newsletter, so I want to call out the different aspects of it. They are all meaningful to me and I’d love to share them with you.

On top, there’s a hook that I’m quite proud of. It was the most complicated of the three styles of hooks I made in a blacksmithing class I took.

It started off as a rod of metal that I was able to manipulate and bend to my will. Heat it up, make it malleable, hammer it, twist it, make it my own.

Do you have any idea how much power I felt when I was able to do that?

The blacksmith talked about how, when he was a kid, he was attracted to some glasswork and then accidentally shattered a piece someone had built. And that led him to desire something more permanent. Something metal. Something that would remain even if the house burnt down around it.

Talk about a human mark on the world. The future.

Underneath the hook is a book. But not just any book, White Mirror.

If you’ve followed me at all over the last two months, you know I’m obsessed. There’s a puzzle inside it and I keep playing with it, every moment I get. I keep going back to it. Talk about another kind of hook. The hook that keeps me coming back.

Do you see the pages coming out of it? I’ve started cutting the book up, putting the pages together in different orders. Sometimes I need a different perspective on things.

With software development, there’s exactly zero sense of anything being permanent anymore. It’s all about moving faster and faster, replacing it with the next better thing. The thing that engineers think is cool because they’ve been following the future as closely as possible. While also fearing for their own futures. Things are very uncertain right now for the builders.

But interestingly, not the blacksmiths. They seem quite set on their role in the world and have established networks and norms that keep things working. And when I went to the class, it was structured as a beginning class that had one ultimate goal: make more future blacksmiths.

The first part of the class was about setting up a blacksmith shop and the economics of running it. We covered the cost of tools needed to set up your first blacksmith shop (about $1000), how to find old blacksmith equipment via estate sales and t-shirt marketing (make sure to have your contact info on the back for people to read. they have no problem staring at the back of your shirt long enough to read it in a way that is uncomfortable if it is on your front)

Then we got into the most important thing the blacksmith needs to know how to create: the hook.

These are the lifeblood of the blacksmith because they can sell for about $3/hook, and they are fast to produce. The smith showed us how fast he can crank them out, giving him an effective rate of $100/hour when he had to fulfill an order of them.

Really wish I had something like that I could build with software, but that’s not how it quite works. The blacksmith has a level of job security because the work is hard and manual and takes time to learn and create. With software, that’s not necessarily true anymore. It used to be, and that made us engineers valuable. But with AI, which engineers are valuable now? Can you tell?

Most engineers can’t. Because our time was suddenly extremely hard to value. When two people can create something that is functionally the same on the outside, who did it better?

The answer: it depends on the goals of the system.

So what are your goals?

As I was figuring out my own life, I realized something: I was racing against companies like OpenAI and Anthropic who have teams of researchers, infinite money, and all sorts of historical baggage that is putting them in the position they’re currently in.

I…don’t. So why am I letting their goals dictate my behavior?

Of course, this opens up a new question that is incredibly hard to grapple with.

What do I WANT to do with my time?

I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on that over the past week, because I realized nobody else was going to tell me. Or rather, EVERYONE was going to tell me and that’s actually way worse.

So I simplified, and asked what I love doing. What comes effortlessly to me?

Writing, building, and teaching. And I designed a business model around that.

I set up a paywall on my daily newsletters, and a plan for a weekly free newsletter. This made writing every day mandatory for me. I gave myself a very specific job. That job is to make this free newsletter the best one possible. I can’t do that if I don’t value the time I spend writing.

I had to hook myself before I could hook an audience. I have no idea how long this message will take to reach anyone, if it does at all. I have to make sure they can use it when they find it. If they find it useful enough, they’ll pay me money to read all the other useful stuff I write about. Or to join the community of other people I’m pulling in. This isn’t just a paid newsletter, it’s a filter. It’s a filter for people who don’t believe the narratives around AI that are being flung around. A filter who believes the future belongs to humans. A filter for those fighting the time war for themselves and their loved ones.

I’ve been taking apart the book White Mirror figuratively, literally, and every layer in between because I want to be a great writer. And that book hooked into my brain like nothing I’ve read before. It gave me the permission I needed to be ambitious with my life, to value my time, and to learn to have fun with things again. The key to writing the right hook is in there somewhere.

And I might have found it. It pointed me to a specific podcast episode of My First Million.

They discussed a unit of measure that was actually a marketing tool: Horsepower. There had to be a way for humans to convert what the steam engine could do for them into an equation that they could solve. Horsepower was that term.

Shaan mentioned it on the podcast: how can we create a way for humans to understand the power of AI?

When I started planning out the free issue of the newsletter I was going to start writing every week, my initial plan was to focus on covering the events of the past week in AI world. And this week, I probably would have done really well if I led with Anthropic destroying prized irreplaceable books because of stupid fucking reasons and OpenAI having a “rogue agent” on the loose hacking into systems. But that gives them control over the narrative. I reject those as irresponsible humain engineering principles.

So let’s work on a different metric: how much Humanpower does a network give you? When you connect to it, how much can your life change? How much agency do you have over your future if you join it?

Right now, the main labs are focused on horsepower because horsepower gives them more money. They get people addicted to variable reward token-based systems that feed their learning system. That’s their hook.

I’m looking for a more old school hook. So here’s a deal: I’ll work on building systems that help you maximize your own Humanpower. You can sign up for a paid subscription on here if you’d like to join the movement to build a future for humans, not AIs. One where books are celebrated and loved, not destroyed. Soon, we’ll have a community of people, a network that provides the stability needed for humans to grow. And I’ll connect that network to some other networks of people working on doing the same thing.

The most important thing you can do to increase your Humanpower? Learn to sell.

And selling starts with the right hook.

So I built a little tool to help you analyze your hook. Put in your webpage, it will give you a little bit of analysis on who you are selling to and then you can pay $3 to workshop your hook if you think it’s worth it. That’s the beauty of the internet.

I have no idea if this is worth $3. Maybe it’s my $3 hook, where any time I need money I can push attention to it and it will pay out. Or maybe not. But we don’t know unless we measure.

So I’m testing my hook. Either it builds my network and increases my own Humanpower or it doesn’t.

But eventually one of these hooks will, because I’m getting better at them.

No runaway AI or rampant destruction of books required.