Whether you’ve read it or not, you’re undoubt­edly aware that Chris Ander­son, edi­tor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has writ­ten a new book: Free.

I haven’t read the book but can likely guess the premise—and given that the unabridged audio­book can be down­loaded online I’ll no doubt be giv­ing it a lis­ten at some point in the near future (Ander­son made Free avail­able online at no cost in var­i­ous for­mats for a lim­ited time).

Until that time, this inter­view about Free between Chris Ander­son and Hugh MacLeod (of Gap­ing Void) will sati­ate my desire.

I think there are two classes of peo­ple who are afraid or skep­ti­cal of Free: those who grew up before the web (ie, olds like me) and peo­ple whose indus­tries are threat­ened by the web (ie, media peo­ple like me). Many in my gen­er­a­tion or pro­fes­sion (mostly, I hope, those who haven’t read the book) assume that Free is some­thing of a Ponzi scheme. Mean­while, my kids are also appalled that I wrote a book called FREE, but not because it’s wrong/scary, but because it’s so freak­ing obvious.

Need­less to say, they’re both wrong. Free is nei­ther a mirage nor is it self-evident. Instead, it’s an essen­tial, but complicated, component of a 21st cen­tury busi­ness model—not the only price, but often the best one.

Some other choice quotes from the inter­view (best read in context):

These are excit­ing days, and if ever these was a time to be overex­tended this is it.

Eas­ier: exper­i­ment­ing. Harder: predicting.

Don’t wait to be given a job to do some­thing cool. Fol­low your pas­sions, cre­ate some­thing every day, take chances and try to be the best in the world at some­thing, no mat­ter how tiny and trivial. Nothing impresses me more than ini­tia­tive. And there has never been a bet­ter time to take it.

On a more pro­saic note, I think that lead­ing peo­ple is per­haps the most impor­tant skill these days.