My first book took six days to write and 51 years to collect.
Today I’m pleased to announce that I’ve published my first book.
It’s called The Hunting Party: Why uncertainty is making Hunters important again. It’s 50,398 words long and, depending on how you count it, took either six days or 51 years to write.
The book now has its own home at thehuntingparty.net.
Six days, 51 years
A reasonably well-researched 50,000-word work of non-fiction would normally be measured in months or years, not days. Mine came together absurdly quickly because I wasn’t starting with a blank page.
I’ve spent most of my life asking why people behave the way they do, and roughly the last ten years writing about fragments of the answer. Some of those pieces became part of the spine of the book, alongside decades of building companies, managing people, making games, relationships, cancer, insomnia and a frankly ridiculous amount of time talking to strangers.
So the six-day claim is true, but slightly misleading. The six days were when enough of the material finally came together.
The underlying question has been there for much longer: why are they doing this?
Plato in my pocket
AI is the reason I could assemble it at that speed.
I’m dyslexic and I think out loud, so dictation lets me work at something much closer to the speed I actually think. ChatGPT gave me somewhere to put the thought before the next one displaced it, but more importantly it gave me a way to interrogate the ideas, find contradictions, attack my own arguments and keep enough pieces on the table at once to see what they were doing. I’ve written before about the process.
I started thinking of it as Plato in my pocket, preserving the thinking while I talked. Then I taught Plato to ask questions back, which turned out to be considerably more useful.
A strange collection of influences
The intellectual family tree is predictably odd: Socrates, initially encountered through Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Sherlock Holmes, Adam Curtis and, through him, Vladislav Surkov, Sebastian Bach, games and systems design, lean methodology, and hundreds of people I’ve worked with, loved, argued with and occasionally been completely fucking baffled by.
Most of them probably had no idea they were contributing to a book.
What it became
The Hunting Party starts with three establishments a few metres apart and a young bloke behind a bar who appeared to be doing almost nothing.
From there it ranges across human difference, Hunters and Farmers, scarcity and abundance, organisations, relationships, power, stories, manipulation, AI and uncertainty. Somewhere in the process, ideas I had previously treated as separate started resolving into the same larger question: what if we are often judging people without paying enough attention to the environment they are adapted to?
That leads to one of the ideas at the heart of the book. There probably isn’t a best human brain. Different people are useful for different problems, and sometimes the useful unit isn’t the individual at all, it’s the tribe.
Nearly forty years ago my English teacher Mr Mitchell told me I could say more in half a page than other students managed in three, but he couldn’t mark half a page properly.
I appear to have finally solved the quantity problem.
