Jasmine Sun: Close Enough to See Clearly

**Jasmine Sun** (0:00)
Long-form writing is a much more measured, a much more good faith, a much more even-handed and nuanced version of myself than the version of me in conversation or Twitter or anything else. I think I choose long-form writing because it makes me better. I was trying to pitch Tracy Allaway from Odd Lots on doing a Chinese peptides episode, but not me. I was trying to pitch her on doing one with somebody else.

**Jackson Dahl** (0:21)
Somebody's gotta, will the devs do something?

**Jasmine Sun** (0:23)
Yes, will the devs do something? I was like, Tracy, this is hilarious. It's about supply chains, it's about US-China stuff. It's about biohacking, it's about tech bros. It is a perfect story. I had sort of convinced myself in the process that it actually was an interesting story. I like reporting on memes, but not reporting on memes in the stupid way, but the deep way. And so with Chinese peptides or the permanent underclass or whatever, the fact that there is a meme that is rising in the zeitgeist, to me, tells me that there's something simmering below and I want to find out what that is. I really don't want to make myself dumber. Claude or no Claude, AI or no AI. I write because I think it makes me smarter. I think it makes me kinder. I don't know how to give any advice besides be real with yourself. You just gotta know if you are doing the work. I'm ready for my AlphaGo moment on the writing. It's gonna happen. To me, the point of writing is to communicate the life behind the work. When you marvel, like Alyssa Lowe and her ice skating performance, it's not just the fact that she's a good skater, but it's the life behind the work. We're compelled by Alyssa Lowe because we hear about her dad, we hear about her quitting, we hear about her coming back and learning to love it for herself.

**Jackson Dahl** (1:19)
And you see it on her face.

**Jasmine Sun** (1:21)
You see it on her face.

**Jackson Dahl** (1:21)
Looking down at her.

**Jasmine Sun** (1:22)
It's the expressiveness. It is a technically perfect performance and the liveliness shines through. Unitry robot, Alyssa Liu, would just never be as compelling.

**Jackson Dahl** (1:31)
Welcome to Dialectic, episode 49 with Jasmine Sun. Jasmine is a writer, journalist, and acts as a bit of a translator between Silicon Valley where so much is changing so quickly and the rest of the world. She writes primarily about the technology industry, AI and how everything is changing out here, and tries to do so both to the San Francisco audience as well as to the broader audience. She writes for her personal Substack and is a contributing writer for the Atlantic magazine. She just wrote a flagship piece for the New York Times on the permanent underclass, has written about Chinese peptides, AI in China and much more. She worked on product among many other things at Substack for several years before becoming a full-time writer herself. I hope you enjoy the episode. Before we get into things, I would like to thank Notion, Dialectics, Presenting Partner. As I discussed with Jasmine, we're heading towards a world where more and more of what we do at least on computers is automatable. What I like about Notion's approach and its principles behind its design and philosophy for the product is that there is ultimately going to be lots we want to automate, and there is going to be work we don't want to automate. Notion is a tool that is about you and your collaborators doing great work together and being able to be in sync across all of the things that you guys are creating, tracking, working on and so on. Notion has accomplished a rare feat of being a pre-AI era company that has rebuilt itself in the ground up for the era of AI and agents. This includes Notion AI, custom agents and now workers, which are a part of Notion's new developer platform. You can create workers that will run in the cloud 24-7 while you and your team focus on the work that counts, the work that you don't want to automate. Notion's developer platform is now extensible with any other piece of software you're using. And so Notion has become a place where you can run your entire business, AI and otherwise, from a central hub. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.
All right, Jasmine Sun, thank you for joining me.

**Jasmine Sun** (3:27)
Thanks for having me.

**Jackson Dahl** (3:28)
I'm very excited for this one. I feel like you're also kind of having like a little bit of a moment. You've been on all over the place.