Curating Goodreads Remotely (Uri Bram, CEO of The Browser)

[01:35] Paul: Today I'm talking with Uri Brown, who is the publisher of The Browser, also leading the work for the organization there. And working with the very well-known in the nerdy circles Robert Cottrell, putting out just awesome content. I've been a reader of The Browser for I think more than 10 years. I don't know exactly when it was founded, but I'm excited to talk to Uri about living as a nomad for 7 years, running The Browser as a remote company, nerding out about things, some articles and essays we'd love, and We'll see where it goes. Welcome to the podcast, Ari.

[02:25] Uri Bram: Amazing, thank you so much.

[02:28] Paul: So you've been a location-independent nomad for 7 years. How did you first start on that path?

[02:37] Uri Bram: Yeah, it's like most of my life, I started out by accident. Um, I, after I finished university, I didn't have a job and I went through that phase of feeling completely, um, inadequate because all my friends had gone to work at McKinsey. I think this might be a familiar, a familiar story. Um, And I wrote a book because I needed to say I was doing something rather than saying I, uh, just sit on my couch all day. Um, and this was just when Kindle was getting started, so I self-published a popular intro to statistics. Um, and it took off a little bit, like enough that, um, I was making enough money that at 22 I was like, this seems fine, I could go live in Thailand.

And, um, yeah, I kind of set off and started and then never stopped.

[03:19] Paul: Yeah, what did you learn about just internet economics and creating online that other people weren't really aware of at that time?

[03:27] Uri Bram: So I think I was wrong in my assessment of it at the time. I thought at the time I'd gotten super lucky. It wasn't very advanced coding and I wasn't really a coder, but I was someone who was willing to read up online and kind of go through this hassle in order to get a book onto Kindle. And I think I didn't realize how much that moat was the reason. I thought writing books on Kindle was a good idea, but it turns out just being one of the first people in some new area of technology that hasn't yet really been developed was a good idea. Um, so I think a few years later when I was kind of encouraging people to write Kindle books, I kind of regret that because I think actually I was making a mistake.

Like, by that time it maybe wasn't such a good idea to do it.

[04:06] Paul: It's interesting to follow some people that are successful online it becomes hard to understand who was like the original creators on those platforms. So you look at some people that are really successful on Instagram or YouTube, and the reality is they were like 1 of 10 people who were just posting stuff early on and blew up. And then people try to copy that success and they can't really do it because they're joining when 100,000 other people are doing it.

[04:38] Uri Bram: Apparently early on in Twitter, some random engineer at Twitter picked 6 people to be recommended follows because there wasn't enough activity on the platform yet. One of those people became the President of the United States. Let's just say there's a lot of path dependency in how— Wow. Being early enough.

[04:56] Paul: I did not know that.

[04:57] Uri Bram: Wow.

[04:59] Paul: So, talk to me a bit about where you went from there and how you ended up at the browser.

[05:06] Uri Bram: Yeah, so I spent a while as an author and wrote a couple more books. I did various odd things. I made a board game that I really enjoyed. That's one of my favorite projects, even though not the most practical one.

[05:23] Paul: Let's dive into that. I mean, if it's the most— see, I'm always intrigued by when people are like, this is the thing that fires me up. I want to hear more about that. Tell me about the board game.

[05:36] Uri Bram: Amazing.

[05:37] Paul: What, what was the pull that was like, I have to create this?

[05:41] Uri Bram: So, um, uh, the game is called Person Do Thing. Uh, I came up with it with a couple of friends when we were living in Thailand, uh, and talking about what the minimum number of words you would need to know in a language in order to communicate would be. Uh, so we created this game where, yeah, you have these 30 basic words. It's a bit like Taboo backwards, like you have this very restricted list of words you're allowed to use and you're trying to describe a concept by gluing together you know, these very basic words. And the thing I love about it, and the thing I love about game design, is that it seems like one of the purest exercises in whether you can come up with a very simple set of rules and create really interesting emergent behavior. Um, and also in, in trying to guide people at a distance.

If you create a game, you have to put something in a box, and then you're trying to create some kind of behavior among a group of strangers who might pick up this box, read the instructions, and then hopefully have fun thanks to something that you created. Both of those just strike me as these incredibly pure exercises that are just fascinating and weird, and you get to see how much little tweaks in the rules affect outcomes. I think it's super applicable to the rest of life, but only in board games do you really get that at its essence.

[06:53] Paul: Were there any things from creating that that emerged that you didn't expect? Like ahas in your own creative journey?

[07:02] Uri Bram: Yeah, so I think I realized how much it's about theory of mind. So I think a lot of games like Taboo, it's really obvious to you while you're speaking what the answer is, and you're so frustrated. Why don't these people get it? It's really obvious. And to them it's completely non-obvious. And I think I had an aha moment around that, around how hard it is to understand what other people are thinking and how hard it is to communicate what's in your head to someone else.

[07:23] Paul: Yeah, I love that.

[07:24] Uri Bram: I—

[07:24] Paul: the reason I asked that is because so many people set out creating things expecting some sort of goal or metric, but it's always the things you don't expect that emerge that actually keep that creative journey going. So it sounds like a common thread in your journey has always been writing. What has writing meant for you?

[07:44] Uri Bram: Yeah, so I tend to think that there's two types of writers. There's people who love writing in and of itself, who just love playing with words. And I do also really love words. I think words are cool. I think we could get agreement that words are cool. But for me, it's more just like there's ideas that I wanted to express.

There's thoughts that I wanted to share. And writing happened to be a really convenient medium to share them. But, you know, I feel like I could have ended up doing videos, um, or podcasts or whatever the future might hold. Um, it was never the form so much that attracted me as just, this is this incredibly, um, convenient, accessible way to share ideas between minds. Are you, are you on one side of that or the other or both?

[08:23] Paul: No, I, I'm, I love the joy of finding out what I actually think. Writing is probably my favorite way to do that. I've been playing around a lot with videos and YouTube lately, but I find that creating videos is much more just technical, whereas writing is almost entirely just grappling with this idea you think is in your head, and then you put it on the page and you're like, either I don't actually think that, or that's totally unfounded and I need to go deeper. And I love that pull and then that gap of not really knowing where you're going or how to say it. Um, yeah, and I mean, writing has really emerged for me as the thing that is the thing worth doing over and over and over again, probably for the rest of my life. You're in a world of, uh, words and writing and working with someone like Robert Cottrell at the browser.

How did you end up working there?

[09:32] Uri Bram: Yeah, so I was a huge browser fan, not as early as you actually. You outrank me, precede me, I don't know what the word is. But I discovered the browser when I was in university and I just thought it was the most incredible thing in the world. It was the first thing I ever paid for a subscription for. I was definitely one of those people who never thought to even pay for news or music or whatever. And I was so excited about it that I wrote a really embarrassing, in retrospect, fanboy Facebook post where I was just trying to tell everyone I knew that they should subscribe to the browser.

And a friend of my brother's knew someone who knew Robert and, yeah, was like, oh, Robert would love to hear this. I'll send him your post. Yeah, so one thing led to another. I did some, like, marketing for the browser early on, and then Yeah, sort of here I am now, now running the company.

[10:23] Paul: I was really excited to get your email reaching out. I'm probably just as big of a fanboy of the browser. I started this group on Facebook in 2008 called Media Feast. I started it because I noticed that there is just an explosion of really good content, and it seemed most people were not paying attention to that. Or it was, it was still somewhat hard to find. So I created this group of basically you have to share a long-form post and then share a detailed description of like why it matters.

So I was basically trying to create the browser for myself, and then the browser emerged, and I would start every day just going to my browser, clicking the browser, and then saving a few articles to Instapaper and I can't even really qualitatively measure what the impact it's probably been in my life. I've discovered so many deep ideas and it's really helped me just think in a much more nuanced way about the world. So that's my own little anecdote. You can pass that along to your team.

[11:40] Uri Bram: Oh, that's so nice to hear. Robert will be so happy to hear that. He is the sweetest eccentric person and he is so happy when he Yeah, I think he doesn't realize how many people, you know, feel this way about it.

[11:50] Paul: Yeah, it's, and I started this, I'm my own like reads newsletter, which I ran for like 2 years and then I kind of got pulled towards something else. But yeah, talk to me about finding good things to read. There's so much good content on the web now, but it also seems like It's actually harder to find it now than it was 10 years ago because a lot of the news organizations have figured out this direct path to people is also a way to kind of hack people's brains and emotions and things like that. So talk to me about maybe how that shifted in the last 5 years and how the browser thinks about its role.

[12:36] Uri Bram: I feel that there is a lot of good content, but not that much great content and even less extraordinary content. And so I think a lot of our job is, I think, I think Various people have tried to start selection, curation, recommendation newsletters, and a lot of them pick 5 interesting enough pieces, like pieces that are fine, but you don't read them and think, wow, like my life is different because I read that. I never would've thought of that. We've definitely noticed the same shift you have over the last few years. Robert just reads all day. I mean, he reads 8, 10, 12 hours a day.

And I think partly that's the answer is just spend all your time reading and you'll be able to come across more things that are really extraordinary. Um, yeah, I think he also just seems to have like a really special knack for having really good taste, figuring out, you know, what things would interest everyone. What's— um, I think he's also just like an unusually, I guess, sort of ego-free person, if I can say that. Like, I think a lot of people read and they partly funnel it through, um, what does this say about me, what does it say about the groups that I'm in. But Robert, as far as I can tell— obviously, like, you know, no one is truly completely this— but as far as I can tell, he just reads things and it is this interesting, like with no relation to himself.

[13:49] Paul: How do you and your team think about like new versus older content? Because I think one of the realizations through the browser was that there are these easily readable, amazing things that were written 100 years ago or 50 years ago, and they're starting to surface because people are publishing back catalogs and stuff. So how do you guys think about that balance of new versus old?

[14:16] Uri Bram: Absolutely. So this is our, our only rules for what we publish are basically, is it interesting? Do we think it's good? And do we think it will be as interesting 10 years from now as it is today? Um, so yeah, we sort of noticed the same thing you noticed, that there's amazing stuff that was written a long time ago, and then also there's things that are in the news that are good or interesting because they're current but won't be interesting even 2 years from now, or even 6 months from now, whatever it might be. Um, Yeah, so I think, I think there's a really important role in the world for reading things that will— writing like of lasting value, things that will still be interesting well into the future.

And that's like an important model. I'm not saying people shouldn't read the news, but I think people should make space in their life for that kind of timeless writing. I think there's some really— something really important there.

[15:03] Paul: I mean, I think that's one of the biggest ahas for me is reading history is you just notice the same patterns 100 years ago, right? Or 300 years ago. It's the same human emotions. It's the same circumstances, but a different environment. One of my favorite essays is In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell. And, uh, it's written almost 100 years ago, but it's all like the same question is still with us.

And you can just picture him being like, what are you doing? You haven't solved it.

[15:43] Uri Bram: Bertrand Russell is deeply, deeply upsetting. No one person should be allowed to be that good at that many things.

[15:50] Paul: Yeah.

[15:50] Uri Bram: I mean, he's just like, yeah. Yeah.

[15:53] Paul: His writing just channels so much delight and joy, um, and still being like sharp and insightful at the same time.

[16:01] Uri Bram: Yeah, and like the History of Western Philosophy is extraordinary. Like if that was— if someone was like, I'm a popular philosophy writer, I just wrote History of Western Philosophy, I would say incredible, what a life's work. And then to also do like mathematics and actual original philosophy, I do not understand this person. Like how is he real? Um, I'm such a Bertrand Russell fanboy. Someone once called me a Bertie bro.

I really enjoyed that. That's good.

[16:27] Paul: What are some of the older pieces of writing that you keep coming back to? Do you have a few pieces that you reread every year or two?

[16:40] Uri Bram: Yeah, I reread Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. This is something— I actually think this is quite an interesting thing overall. I am trying to— I think when you're religious, there are certain texts you read regularly. Most religions include some amount of, we read this every day, or we read this every week, or we read this once a year, or whatever it might be. And something that I think about sometimes is trying to create like a non-religious version of that. And so for a few years, once a year, I have read Reasons and Persons, uh, parts of Reasons and Persons.

I can't finish it in a day. Um, and yeah, this is just like this incredible text about like personal identity and what it means to be a person. And, you know, um, and something about coming back to it again and again I think, um, is really impactful. Um, I mean, in these sort of cliché stereotypical ways, like you see how you've changed from year to year. Like, you get something new from it each time. Do you have any favorites you never stop reading?

[17:37] Paul: I think one I keep coming back to is William DerSchowitz's Solitude and Leadership. It was a commencement essay in 2010 about just the sacredness of solitude and how that relates to leadership in contrast to what we kind of like pop leadership, how we think about about it and then how friendship and just introspection can be elements of that solitude. It, I think it's very aligning with like how I want to be. So it's kind of, it is kind of that religious spirit of kind of trying to like reorient and say, hey, this is something I find valuable to orient towards. How can I remind myself? Plus the writing is just, Incredible.

[18:33] Uri Bram: He's amazing.

[18:34] Paul: I—

[18:35] Uri Bram: he's— he just gives you that sense of someone who is embedded in this, like, elite university world and is just watching these generations of students, like, make the same mistakes and, like, prioritize the wrong things. And, like, he— his essays are just these incredible, like, um— I think screams makes them sound too aggressive, but you know what I mean? Like, these incredible, like, please, no, stop doing this. Like, you're— yeah, yeah, you're missing the point, you know?

[19:00] Paul: Well, and I think he resonates deeper because he quit that world.

[19:04] Uri Bram: Did he leave? Yeah.

[19:06] Paul: Well done. So he left very shortly after, like, publishing his Disadvantages of an Elite Education piece.

[19:17] Uri Bram: I didn't know that.

[19:19] Paul: But you see a lot of people say these things and then you look up and you're like, hmm, full-time job, tenured professor. Okay. All right. Good, good advice, but I'm not taking it serious. But he quit and is basically just writing now, which I think gives his stuff a lot more truth for me and resonance. So talk to me about how the browser operates.

You guys have a pretty small team. I think writing traditionally is something that I guess would be considered remote work. Before remote work was a buzzword anyway. What are some of the lessons and shifts you guys have gone under in the last 5 years?

[20:05] Uri Bram: Yeah, so, um, we're a very small team. Uh, for a long time it was 2 people. Uh, it was Robert editing and like someone on the management side. Um, in the last year we've brought on like a number of additional people and, you know, we're kind of like expanding slowly. Um, I think we— when you have two people with really clearly defined roles, so like Robert was always doing the editing and always did all the editing, and so me or my wonderful predecessor Duncan did like the management for a long time. And you know, like at various times with different setups, I, you know, I'm glossing here, but, um, I think it's kind of easier to be remote then.

And as we've grown, I think learning how hard it is to coordinate different people where there isn't this like really clean-cut, I do this, you do this We don't really need to communicate, you know, day to day on what we're up to, even if we like communicating day to day what we're up to. What have we learned from it? A friend of mine said once that you should only really hire people where you don't know what they do all day and you don't worry about it. And I really like that. I think the best, yeah, the best teams, the best things are when you just like Don't, you know, someone is doing their thing and you just trust that they're going to do wonderful things and you don't really think about it day to day. Um, yeah, that's a big lesson.

[21:27] Paul: Yeah, I think that's such a good lens to kind of break up this default mode, which I see many companies fall into, which is that, okay, we're a remote team or we've shifted to remote, now we need to recreate the office, which is like, okay, install Slack And now we need to have our coffee chat or like chats around the coffee machine scheduled as a meeting every day at 12. And it's like, wait a second, we've shifted to a new paradigm, a new world, new opportunities and possibilities, and you're, you're going to create a much worse version of just bumping into somebody at the coffee machine. I mean, have you picked up any of the like tactics from other remote companies in the past year? I mean, there's been a ton written about it.

[22:15] Uri Bram: Yeah, um, we've tried various things. So I basically— I really agree that when new technologies come in, it seems like always the first step is replicate the old setup in the new setup in this weird way. Apparently the first TV shows were just filming radio dramas. They just had two people at microphones doing a radio drama and they filmed them. And you think to yourself, why? That's worse than radio, like you've just gone backwards.

Yeah. Um, and yeah, I feel like we are in that stage for remote work, obviously. Uh, we've tried to implement other people's methodologies, but most of them were overfitted for us, like We are still a really small organization. I think there's always going to be this trade-off between formality and rigor and how much do you make sure that everything is legible. Is legibility the word here? There's some— gosh.

James C. Scott or someone wrote about this for states, how you go from like a tri— yeah. Do you know? Can you explain this properly? Because I'm half remembering it from— yeah.

[23:12] Paul: Seeing like a state. Yeah. He talks about legibility, which is that once you measure everything, everything becomes super ordered. And one of the examples he gives is trees in a forest. So they started tracking the outcome of how much wood or how much wood could you get from a tree. And so they started optimizing around that.

And then they backtracked all the way to the forest now look like this organized row of these perfectly planted trees, but then it actually destroyed the environment. Because they were just optimizing for statistics. So, yeah, super legible and easy to track on a spreadsheet, but not actually what we, what we want. And I think a lot of people in business do mix up, okay, we can track this and measure it with, is this actually getting us an environment or conditions we want?

[24:11] Uri Bram: I, I really feel that struggle right now because like there are all these benefits of legibility. Essentially, if you're a one-person business, you don't have to be legible at all. Everything happens inside your brain. You never have to write anything down. Nothing has to be replicable. You understand the moving parts in some, you know, amorphous nebulous way.

And as you grow, like, you do need to make some things legible. Like, you know, you do need to have procedures or some way to hand things over or know what different people are responsible for so that if someone is, you know, has to take time off, someone else will take over their work. Like all of these little things. But somehow doing that without doing the overly structured forest that 60 years later burns down completely is— yeah, I think that's a big challenge for us. But it's something that it feels that a lot of the people writing about this are just giving us instructions for how to become very legible, but at a really high cost to the organization. And I think potentially, as you said, some danger to the future of the organization.

[25:05] Paul: Yeah, I think the best I've seen is companies like Basecamp or Automatic. They communicate the why behind things instead of saying, here's the policy or procedure. It's here's the decision I made. That's not important, but here's the why behind it.

[25:21] Uri Bram: Yeah.

[25:22] Paul: Now use your judgment. Right. And then they obsessively iterate on that document of like the why or the values or how they made the decision. And I think this is something that's key that's very hard for most people that are trained in business is communicating the why instead of the what.

[25:41] Uri Bram: It's so tricky because as you get more experienced at things, you just get better judgment, better discretion. Like, you've seen more situations before. Um, and I think we sort of imagine that if we explain the theory of something, then everyone will be able to— you know, you say things should be done like this, and then your team will understand it, and then they'll do the right things in the right situations. But almost nothing worth doing is that that easily theorizable and that clear. So yeah, you basically have to keep getting into new situations and then trying to express, okay, here's what I would do in this situation. Here's why I would do it.

Next thing that comes up will be different, but hopefully eventually these tacit principles will become some kind of clear instruction. Hopefully eventually.

[26:24] Paul: I wanted to ask you about distribution for the browser. So the browser was a website for a while and then there was a paywall to access older reads, I think beyond like a day. You were on Substack for a while, I think one of the early launch partners with Substack, and now it looks like you're on Ghost. So talk to me how you've thought about distribution, why you joined Substack, and why you ended up moving to Ghost.

[26:52] Uri Bram: Yeah, so we rolled our own tech for a long time. My phenomenal predecessor Duncan is also a coder and did business and tech and did things that I couldn't do and would not be able to maintain on my own. Um, and I— we were definitely there. He'd integrated WordPress with Stripe with Mailchimp, and he may even have done something before Stripe came along to do his own payments. It was just like such a bundle. And yeah, just as a matter of principle, I thought, um, if someone is offering kind of these tools, the like commodity tech to do something like newsletters, um, you ought to use it.

Like, why spend your time on the tech if you're not focused on tech. I don't have any, like, deep insights there. Um, so Substack came along a few years ago. Uh, we, we weren't with them when they launched, but we joined shortly afterwards. At the time, we were— we doubled the number of paid subscribers overnight on the platform. Um, and we joined when they really didn't have very much, and it was all based on what we thought they were going to develop, what they were going to work towards.

Um, as they've grown, it just sort of became clear it wasn't a very good fit. Um, Substack doesn't offer any flexibility or any, um, sort of— for example, like, as a publisher, you can't edit your own menus on Substack. And, um, when I talked to their team about this, they were a bit like, well, we know how to make a menu better than you do. And I'm sure they're right. I mean, like, I have terrible taste and I'm a bad designer, but I should still get to put whatever I want in my menus, you know. This is just, um, it's just a matter of independence, I think.

[28:18] Paul: Um, yeah, so there's something really key there, I think, which is that we know how to make a better menu than you. And they may actually be right on a, like, optimize for revenue. But on a, like, this is who we are, we want to be this kind of person to the people we care most about, it's a different decision. So it sounds like you left. I love Ghost. Like, I just love John, the founder.

He— the way he thinks about building a company, like, I definitely want to have him on this podcast sometime, but he's just He's even more impressive. He like gave up all ownership of his company, put it in a trust, and it can like never be sold. And it's just like, wow, like that, that's so cool. Um, so did you talk with them before you switched to them?

[29:12] Uri Bram: Uh, yeah, yeah. So I, I actually had made a website on— so Ghost has been going for 7, 8 years now, I'm not sure exactly. And I made a website with them pretty early on. They started as a web thing. And I think it was January or February this year maybe that they started offering paid memberships. Um, so sort of as soon as I saw that, I was like, great, if Ghost is now doing this, you know, like, this is this like longtime company that is like clearly sustainable.

Like you said, they've kind of created this ridiculous model that makes it completely safe as a publisher. Like, you know, they're going to be there long into the future, and you know that, you know, and they kind of can't change the rules on you later on. Um, and so yeah, we just sort of got in touch with them and we you know, like, like what we saw, like what we heard. Um, and yeah, it's sort of a really— I, I think it's a better platform for us technically, and it's 10 times cheaper than Substack. So ultimately it was just like a very easy decision. There's no— it wasn't one of those big dilemmas.

[30:05] Paul: What have you learned working with, uh, Robert?

[30:08] Uri Bram: Robert— I've learned that Robert is the nicest person in the world, um, and just incredibly smart and thoughtful, and that there's no topic Like anything you bring up, he could just say, oh yeah, yeah, no, there's this interesting writer who talks about that. It's just like one of the most delightful humans. I think I've also learned the value of basically just knowing what you want and what your skills are. And a lot of people talk about this, but I think like you mentioned about William Deresiewicz, is that his name? The same idea, he didn't wanna run the business while doing the editing. And he brought me in and said, look, like you run the business, like do your thing, you're in charge in a way I think few people would have done with that degree of genuineness.

Um, so yeah, um, obviously I feel very flattered by that and I feel very lucky to be running this company that I love. Um, but also it just seems like a really, like, smart decision to me. It's like too many people would have tried to keep both, you know, feet in both camps. I don't know, I don't know what the metaphor there is, but, um, yeah, very inspiring, very inspiring human.

[31:11] Paul: Yeah, I just finished this book, The, uh, The Great Works of Your Life. Have you read this book?

[31:16] Uri Bram: I don't know this.

[31:18] Paul: It's about— it's by Stephen Cope, and he talks about the work of finding your dharma, which is like the work that brings you alive. And I think people confuse this often with the work that can be paid for. But his mindset is really like, how can you create the life conditions? And he gives all these interesting examples. To do the things you actually, like, need to do or are pulled to do. And if you started with, okay, what is employable, you probably wouldn't start with, okay, I want to read stuff 10 to 12 hours a day.

Do you know how he originally started this? Was it just an email to friends? Was it something he had done informally?

[32:07] Uri Bram: I guess he and his friends were talking about starting a publication in, I guess what must have been 2007, if I'm doing the math right. And they originally talked about doing something that I guess, they'd come from The Economist and they would think of doing The Economist but built for the internet age, which I think maybe would have turned out a bit like Vox, roughly. And then the financial crisis happened and their financial backer suddenly didn't have as much finance to back. So Robert had to come up with a business model that was, you know, something that someone could do sitting in their pajamas in their bedroom. And he thought, you know what, there's already so much writing.

He had, you know, like, I guess a year later than you, he had this insight There's so much writing already, maybe someone who just reads and curates and selects is actually a better model than creating one more publication anyway.

[32:52] Paul: The world's probably better off. I wanted to ask you though, tangentially, why don't you think there have really been competitors to compete directly with you?

[33:03] Uri Bram: I think partly— so we have the browser, which is for reading, and the listener, which is for podcasts, and that's edited by this wonderful journalist called Caroline Crampton. She was at the New Statesman for a long time and started a podcast long before podcasts were cool. Um, and yeah, both Robert and Caroline just have extraordinary taste. I genuinely— obviously I'm biased, and you know, like, you can take this what it's worth, but I, I think they both are just exceptional humans. Like, I think, um, it's like being a chef, you know? Like, I can cook dinner for my friends and they will be happy with it, but I could not open a restaurant.

Um, and I think similarly, like, many people can read things and find things that are interesting for a small group of people, or, you know, I think it just takes like a really exceptional person to have to find pieces that so many people will find interesting. And then secondly, at risk of giving away our model, I think, I think people misunderstand what we do a little bit. Like, I think some people think of us as curators, you know, that selecting the links is the difficult bit. But I actually think it's the summaries that make, that make the browser what it is. We have this paragraph that is like really carefully written, takes a really long time to get it right. That tries to just like catch the essence of the piece.

Um, and that both means that like you can read this one paragraph and have a much, much better idea of whether you want to read the article or not, but also that just reading the paragraph in itself is a delight. Like, I just love reading the browser newsletter. I love reading Robert's little praises. Um, even if I don't have time to read every article, you know, I just love reading his, his writing as well.

[34:35] Paul: Yeah, I I definitely resonate with that. It's, I think what you guys are selling or putting out there is like a way of seeing the world through a lens of delight and curiosity. Like it's really just a, wow, what an interesting world we live in. Check out these things. It's a nice balance to a lot of what you see out there in media.

[35:11] Uri Bram: Delight is one of my favorite words. There's a book by Ross Gay called The Book of Delights where he just spends a year noticing things that delight him, and that is just one of my all-time favorites. Just really, like, once you start paying attention to the world that way, I think it really changes you.

[35:26] Paul: I'll have to check that out. So the browser has expanded. You have The Listener now, which curates podcasts. I think I saw you have The Viewer. Yes. Is that right?

And that's video. There's really been an explosion in all sorts of content. Are you thinking of moving into different areas, other types of content, or is that really the focus, those three things right now?

[35:54] Uri Bram: What would the other, other types be? Tell me what we should be doing.

[35:58] Paul: I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, you could curate Twitter threads.

[36:06] Uri Bram: Yeah, we could curate TikToks. Yeah, we curate songs maybe. It's, um, I'm open to doing— I mean, there's two. So we started The Viewer with this thought that, oh, actually videos would also make sense. We found this amazing, uh, 17-year-old Abe Callard, uh, who just has grown up on YouTube and has exceptional taste in videos. Uh, so he does this weekly newsletter for us, The Viewer.

Um, I would— I've thought about expanding into other things, but there's— it would just have to be something where there was this really clear fit and a really amazing curator to do it. Um, I also sometimes wonder, like, could we do the browser for business, the browser for tech, maybe the browser for business and tech? But similarly, you just have to find the special person who has that skill, I think.

[36:49] Paul: What are like 2 or 3 essays written more than 5 years ago that you think everyone should read?

[36:58] Uri Bram: In Praise of Idleness, which you've already mentioned, and the entire book that it is in. I think that is a really strong—

[37:04] Paul: So I haven't read the whole book. What's the name of the whole book? I need to read that now.

[37:09] Uri Bram: So I don't know if it was originally in a book, but there is a book called In Praise of Idleness. I think Anthony Gottlieb, who is also incredible, is the editor collator there. So he selected Bertrand Russell essays and put them together. And yeah, like, it's the same experience over and over. Not every essay is incredible, but many of them you just think, was this written today? How is this not written today?

He's got like these essays on economics and how like the industrial class is actually opposed in interest to the financial like elite, and the fact that they're in a coalition is not just like some inevitability. There's just so much in that book that you think, wow, like, how, how is this person possible? Um, Susan Bryson. Is a professor who got sexually assaulted when she was in France and has written both an essay and a book about it that are just, I don't know, just like changed how I thought about trauma and resonated with a lot of experiences in my life in a way that, yeah, it's just like, I think everyone should read this.

[38:12] Paul: Do you know the name of that one?

[38:14] Uri Bram: The book is called Aftermath and the essay might also be called Aftermath. Her ability to both genuinely, like, emotionally experience things, but also comment on them from the outside, like, notice what is happening and talk about it in a— I don't know how to put this— like, a detached way without being detached from the experiences. I've seen very few people who are able to combine those. Patrick McKenzie's essay on salary negotiation is something I end up sending to people very often. I think, like, many people would benefit from reading that. Yeah, yeah, maybe.

I think I said 3 now, so maybe I'll, I'll cut myself off there.