any large organization has to operate to some degree like a machine you got this thing kind of on your back it's not really fitting can you just cut that off dude that's my wings people feel like they always have to be busy there's no things that can't proceed without my heroic right there at the moment effort your team and the system will learn and
get stronger by doing it itself a lot of my tech friends have the hero mentality they have we're going to do we're going to work 27 hour days it's very easy if you're looking short term to look only at the direct obvious action that you're having but the Ripple effects I think are significantly more important there's no magical moment the magic is the whole
so you'll miss it if you aren't paying attention the mundane will cover every square inch you give it you have to make the time for that well hello everyone it's Jim o shasy with yet another infinite luks today I have one of the most fascinating people that I have met in the last couple of years as my guest Alex karosi who has worked as a product manager as a director of corporate
development at little companies you probably never heard of them Google stripe you know I had to look them both up to be honest with you Alex welcome thank you for having me um so I love your stuff let's just St let's start there thank you I went through it all and had some great conversations with you and I think that you and I find each other uh very
sympatico on on many things and the way we look at things and I kind of wanted to start with uh the the Builder vers The Gardener now I have a couple of questions first did you by any chance read Andrew marvell's the mower against the gardens no I have not that is I think it's a wonderful and it opens up with the line luxurious man to bring his vice
in use did after him seduce and he's and he's and he's weaving together uh you'll probably be able to guess who wins in the end yeah yeah I I but but rather than me go on and on why don't you for our listeners and viewers frame frame the idea uh because I I think it's a great idea and uh honestly we could talk the rest of the podcast just about that one we're not
going to because there's some other great ones too but if you wouldn't mind starting with that um because I think it's a a really great metaphor cool thanks yeah it's a piece I wrote I think last week and it's uh strategy Parable is the way I put it where you know I just s of at some point I used to write more sort of dry strategy pieces and now it's like whoops all Parable just I'm
just gonna have speak for itself and the idea is the these two archetypes of the Builder and the gardener and this is a theme I come back to again and again again again again from different angles and in the parable you know the Builder and the garden are both trun to build big big beautiful things and the Builder looks for the biggest rocks they can
find they can move with their own power to put into a carefully crafted thing and they're getting stronger and they're being more clever and they've got sweat on their brow and the gardener is just looking at their feet kind of you know sifting through dirt and just looking like they're playing and the Builder kind of you know uh calls over hensively
and says you got to lift some bigger stuff what are you doing with all those Pebbles and then of course at a certain point the build builds over what The Gardener has created is U not as big as what the Builder has made but it's it is beautiful and uh so the the Builder thinks I got to work even harder like is this guy cheating what's happening and
he keeps on looking over trying to catch the gardener building this thing and each time he looks over it's bigger and bigger and before he knows it's of course spread out his dominates thing he's built and he thinks I will I give your magic uh and of course the reality it's a tree and the what the gardener says is um the difference is it's not a
secret it's not magic it's actually something anybody could see if they just simply had the patience to watch and is that some things are alive Pebbles rocks have no agency they cannot grow on their own they require an external Force to build them into something beautiful and big but acorns uh some Pebbles are actually acorns they had the potential to be alive and if you tend them
correctly and if you put them in the right conditions they can grow under their own power into much larger things and they can do it on their own but it's better if you help support them specifically and you create the conditions to make sure you know the squirrels don't dig them up and they have the right amount of shade at the beginning and protection and you don't
know which ones are going to work some of them won't work um but if you plant enough of these over time uh they will some subset of them will grow into something massive and beautiful and at every Point critically I've had people sometimes tell me oh we don't have time for that that's not urgent he's like yes but it's extremely important and you
know the the best time to PL tree is 20 years ago the second best time is now if you know you're going to be around in 20 years um then like the the afternoon it takes you to plant that tree um and then leave it there with the option value of it turning into this big massive thing and so I just want to in that that Parable just sort of underline that
gardeners often don't look serious they look like they aren't you know they're looking at these little things that can't possibly matter but it's because they see the potential of these things that they're spending time on it and I think my overall I I push back I think to some degree on some of the received wisdom of individual heroics going for individual built objects is the only way of
creating massive amounts of value and good in the world and so that's I wrote it up in a it's short for me actually it's one of the shorter pieces have written in a while which is notable um but yeah that's what was I was thinking in my head when I wrote that up and as I was reading it I I couldn't help but think of Jersey kazinski being there and
he has chony Gardner I you know I have not I've not Vis watched that movie but it's on my list to watch so now I will definitely to do it so let me uh give you a hint and read the book instead uh the M the movie is fun but you won't you you won't come to the movie the same way if you haven't read the book The the book is pretty profound he's got a a a great line from Chance
The Gardener gets transformed into Chanty Gardener when a very wealthy woman hits her him with her car after he's been thrown out of the place that he lived and worked as a gardener uh forever and he's he's a bit of a dunce and uh a a a dunce in the um in the DST way of uh like what what he utters tends to be deeply deeply profound yeah and and and it's an interesting book because
one of the things he says is a gardener isn't that the perfect description of what a real businessman is and and the idea of to plant a garden is essentially to believe in tomorrow and you said something when you when you were when you were talking that I wanted to like take a minor tiny issue with like I don't think that you have to even think
you're going to be around in 20 years to plant a tree now I think that like the way I look at life and I got this I stole this from one of my first big clients who I foolishly he was in his late 70s when he hired me and uh he's gone now uh but so I had brought to him very conservative portfolios and I went out to his lovely house he was a prospector and um so I started showing
him these very conservative portfolios and he got this big smile on his face beautiful weathered face from being out in the elements all the time and he goes why are you bringing me all this boring stuff and I'm like well uh because uh you know we got uh we're just taking your age into consideration and then he sat back in his chair and he pointed to
the table next to him which was filled with photographs of his grandchildren and great grandchildren and he goes Jim my time Horizon is infinite and it so struck me that I I stole that immediately from him yeah and and so I I try to think in terms of uh an infinite time Horizon but more on Builder vers The Gardener I mean we could also kind of make this a look at ecosystems
couldn't we like oh yeah when we when we use the metaphor of a garden we also immediately sort of think ecosystems and some ecosystems are healthy some aren't talk a little bit because I you have an interesting take on heroism which is which is something that a lot of my tech friends still very much believe it in other words they have the hero mentality
they have we're going to do we're gonna work 27 hour days we're gonna add extra hours and and and you have some really insightful things to say about that yeah I think the I think ecosystems and I view I'm a systems guy so I think of I try to look at up most problems from A System's lens of the how is the what is the hole that is greater than the Su of
its parts the thing that will last and be more important and larger and the in indirect effects of everything I it's very easy if you're looking short term to look only at the direct obvious action that you're having but the Ripple effects I think are significantly more important to add more value or more moral importance over the Long Haul and those take time to percolate and diffuse
through the system so you can't you literally cannot see the effects of it unless you take a broader view over time or you know what your gut will be that that it will cover and I think when you're in a really fast moving environment which of course in the tech industry we pride ourselves moving very quickly um you don't have the time to watch for the implications I had
somebody at one point that I'm caring this a bit but somebody uh who has tried to Mentor me I had a number of amazing mentors obviously over the years who's trying to forcibly Mentor me which by the way is not a thing mentorship has to be consensual no and they said something to me that was I'm cturing a bit was basically you know Alex you'd be a VP by
now if you stopped thinking through the implications of your actions and it's like oh my that sounds terrible what what so awful yeah and and so I think you know the I love your point around um children and part is something much larger than yourself that you want to the Ripple effects of the actions you take you want to be proud of I try to
leave each moment of my day imagining if someone were to show me a video of this in 10 years or 20 years this decision right now no matter how small it might be like imagine you're going to another meeting and you Chuck a rapper towards the trash can and it misses do you stop and do you put that in the trash can or do you keep going like that kind of decision even um
imagine showing a video of this 10 years from now to a bunch of people whose opinion I deeply care about people in my life my friends my family you know people role models and I try to live my life to minimize the chance I'll be actively embarrassed but ideally actively proud of the decisions I made uh that they were the right decision the
right long-term broadminded decisions and I I think ecosystems when you uh you know as a manager one of my rules of thumb is the first two weeks I try to run my team in a way that the first two weeks when I'm gone people almost shouldn't notice there's no processes that are blocked on me there's no things that can't proceed without my heroic right there at the moment effort the
next two weeks I want them to start noticing oh when's Ally's getting back I'd really love to ask him the question about which of these two options and those kind of explore this idea with him of right the long-term effects are and the next set of two weeks you know fourth fifth and sixth weeks people'll be like okay when again back I need some help like to to figure out how to
navigate this because I think you want a system that's almost going on its own own and arcing and converging to a good spot on its own because then you can take your effort instead of having to apply your effort to motive Force to push it forward you can instead apply it as nudging force and you can do it um sort of reactively where it needs it so
if the thing is converging to a good enough outcome on a good enough time Horizon you can leave it actually in fact um your team and the system will learn and get stronger by doing it itself it might not be exactly the way you would have done it but that's okay because this other people will do it in a way develop their own Empower themselves and develop their own ability
to do that and again the difference in how they will do it is strength it is good because it means that if everyone was just acting as an automaton version of you or trying to do their best uh version of you then you would have an extremely um uh weak you know brittle system and it turns out there was a blind spot that you know I had in that
context then the whole system would be would be undermined and so diversity of perspectives and skill sets and things is strength creates a more resilient system I could sorry I'm going off in a million different directions but um no that's what I love about you because there's so many threads that we can pull on I the first one that I uh uh find
interesting is I often think of uh fear of embarrassment as being a really inhibiting force uh because like some of some of my ultimately greatest uh parts of my life and career came after you know deeply embarrassing myself by doing something really stupid and as I dig down on that with people I often find I ask the question a million different ways and and I often find that
that is at the core of a lot of what keeps people from jumping outside the box right I think that's right and I think I mean this not so much in a embarrassed as like you'd feel like it's that you know that you aren't living up to your potential are you being authentic to what is true for you so and not it's not so much embarrassing are like someone will think poorly of me
it's like no I would think poorly of myself because I would think that I hadn't worked uh made decisions with authenticity to myself or what I believe was the right thing to do it's it's not so much like I think one of the things that enables people is when they realize hey you're not perfect and you never will be but actually you're pretty good
and you can become even better by being curious and open-minded and uh growth orientation and be okay to fail and make mistakes to learn and so to me it's a it's also much like this illusion of perfection or something like this no no it's just that like are you living in a way authentic to who you want to be uh and that's to me the the most important
part of the frame as opposed to a some people are going to think you're a cook or you're a dummy or you're are going to have are going to impose some ideas about how you should be doing a certain thing and what you want to do is just live in a way that you feel proud like no here's why I made that decision and here's why I'm glad I made that decision
at the time I believed these things were the casee and so I made AUD judgment call that this was the right you know thing and I understand how some people disagree with me but at the time given the information I had I thought that was the best course of action with the most likely to create the most net good you know in the systems and spaces around me
and um but like being so many people I think are driven by this insecurity of of like people will know I'm dumb or will know I don't know what I'm doing and there's something so liberating and saying yeah I have no idea what I'm doing I don't think any of us do really we're just doing the best we can and we're trying to learn from it and take actions that over time we get smarter
and we understand we develop our intuition about what kinds of Ripple effects will likely come out of a certain thing you know on a very fundamental level in looking at even deep learning systems or any form in information Theory or evolutionary biology you just can't learn if you don't try and fail there's this book I have not read this book but I've heard
other people uh describe it uh it's by economan and uh sunstein and other people who I deeply respect about um I think it's called oh what's it called Thinking Fast slow Thinking Fast SL it's um it's recent and it's noise noise is the title and it's it has this this this metaphor of a Target and you have a bunch of archers who are shooting at the Target and
anybody who's not shooting at the Target is noise bad gotta get rid of it like this is not a good thing and um I think that metaphor is flawed I think the metaphor is actually much more akin to imagine a Target that is moving in an unknown and random BL and you don't know when you shoot an arrow you don't know until it hits the bullseye that you hit
it it lights up it's in the dark and it lights up green if you hit it for a second and under that condition you can see this metaphor is incorrect and that you actually do want spread in noise because if the B eye is likely to move at any given time step if everyone's shooting where it used to be now it now you see no light you got to spread out and find it again and then everyone can
follow and not the things so you actually want noise because that means that if the the target uh moves into some direction um as they're shooting you'll now know which way to shoot next to because you'll already have have some coverage of the thing so on a fundamental basis you actually want to have an amount of noise or variance in your system that is directly
proportional to the expected rate of movement of the target per unit time and so noise is good you need noise you need it VAR variants to be able to find the the hills as they move and shift um to climb I love that because uh it's really consistent with a thesis that I have uh that there is gold in data exhaust uh or noise right there is there are meaningful patterns and this is one
of the reasons why I'm so excited about AI because as humans even a good collection of humans are going to find it hard to look at an array of a 100 million things and and figure out oh that actually is a very meaningful right and and in in in the past it was all gotten rid of is Just Pure Noise and big mistake because there there it's a bit like I I wrote a series
of letters to my kids that I would give them each of my children on their 21st or around their 21st birthday and the second one I wrote I I'd written draft on it because I write them all by hand and and then and then I thought as I was writing the letter I thought no this is going to be the one I published for you because it's in the unpolished version
that you're probably going to see much more what like I'm trying to get across to you at any rate and and I completely agree uh with your clarification of the embarrassment thing I think the the best way if you're gonna be comparative with anyone compare yourself to your former self don't don't don't don't don't try to compare yourself to this person over
here or because it that's just in my way of looking at the world not a not a uh good use of time yeah it's like how do you make sure that you the former self you just want trying to be growing and learning and improving and becoming a better and better version of you and this is one of those ideas I tell people you know when you're in any large
organization to some degree is it has to operate to some degree like a machine and you have to start treating all the inputs and all the pieces uh like a measurable thing with clear metrics and fully legible and and the Machine to some degree will tell you you know hey we have a G right here a cog a space for a cog and you're right there and you got
this thing kind of on your back it's not really fitting can you just cut that off so we can jam your right here into the machine and it's like dude that's my wings you know like you how do you how do you become the best version of you and I think people sometimes look for that meaning in their job and don't get me wrong I think your job is of course an incredibly important part of the
meaning creation of you and the one of the C lists of things that cause you to grow and do important amazing things but like that's where the machine's never going to tell you to spread your wings you know like you got to tell you that you know I completely agree and you know it's like one of the problems I always had with Frederick Taylor's time motion
studies and scientific management was it sucked the soul out of free markets and and it tried to turn and it didn't try it turned human beings into essentially robots right no no no you must be here at this specific time you must turn this widget and that's it that's what you're going to do and you know maybe for the time when we were just having the
Industrial Revolution and those things did matter but it poisoned our mindset I think because it his studies and tailism infected so much of at least the United States it infected large organizations it infected the government in infected the military and you know I I know it's apocryphal but uh the austri Hungarian Empire used to have this thing this is
so The Story Goes uh that was the order of Maria Teresa who was one of their great uh leaders and and what I loved about it was it was given to the officer who directly violated and contravened direct orders from his superiors and they was only get it was only given to those who did that and succeeded those who did that and failed were executed I mean talk about talk about
something like Whoa am I Really Gonna really gonna do this but like this also bleeds into the idea of markets are driven markets are are not invented exelia right I think that if you if you I'd recommended some books to you by Howard Bloom and he's got a great one called the global brain in which he basically says essentially markets are living things
right and and he goes on to say you know for the most part they're driven by emotion they are not driven they are not driven by you know I think his his words for it are you know cash is mass attention you know I look at it as money is an information uh technology right yeah um but but what do you think in in terms of like looking at the natural
world we see so many like it's basically a collection of complex adaptive systems and and if you understand that you're going to think very very differently about things like You're you're you're going to be at at least as far as I think about it you're going to be far more likely to think you know what let's just plant some seeds over here let's plant some seats over here and then see
what happens what do you think yeah this this is 100% agreed and I think this is why I use I think sometimes people think I'm I'm writing more in metaphor and by the way you might see me taking notes because as I'm writing as you're saying interesting things down things to put into my little but um the uh I sometimes people say oh you talk you talk so
metaphorically in some cases yes I am speaking very specifically in a metaphor that I help clarifies and draws a parallel that helps make an idea intuitive for people that otherwise would be hard to get into their heads but in some cases they say oh you talk about these things being living things and what an interesting metaphor like no
I think they're literally alive like I think that they are in in some meaningful sense they are the summation uh the the compounding effects of these interl decisions by different agents within that system and you can apply this complex adaptive systems lens to basically anything as you zoom on down and you when you do you see that the same basic Dynamics show up everywhere
and they show up again and again and again and again and when people push against some of them like you know effectively one of the things that complex at the systems of the fundamental level this uh implies is you will get boundaries that have to show up and conceptually it's because signals are broadcast typically and they might be broadcast in a channel that has been
like a wire that has been made very narrow so it goes to a specific place but within that wire within that boundary you just me a boundary by making a wire um it is all over the place and so one of the reason this has to happen is because otherwise everything would be a cacophony at all times and nothing could be heard over the background noise and so boundaries
preclude certain Communications from happening at certain times to allow there to be a different otherwise everything reduces to the centroid of the cacophony of the background noise of the system and so by having boundaries you allow there to be a different centroid that's different from the thing outside the boundary which now gives you a radiant which over which there's an
action potential of something some interesting information can flow if you don't you kind of get this this buzzing confusion where nothing can possibly happen and people will say all the time they'll say wow if only we could get the right information to the right person at the exactly the right time in the organization that would be perfect and
it's like on a fundamental basis you cannot it is not possible and I you I you know I'm have smart enough to do the to proof myself but I can point you in a few people who have and like it is a fundamental physical impossibility however you can say what are some of the things that will make it significantly more likely that the right information will flow to the right person at the
right time stochastically and there are 100% you can do there's a number of tactics and techniques that will make it significantly more likely and one of the ways you do this is by having um sort of uh networks overlaid that are very different from the or structure so um in places that have like a 20% time people often think about it uh oh it's a it's a
fluffy thing that's only possible in a Zer environment or if you've got a you know huge money machine I would argue that 20% time is is a useful thing in many many contexts for any pro product Market fit kind of company and there's two things I think it does really well one there's a class of um things that you can do in an organization that are easier to do they have very little
downside risk the only downside risk is opportunity cost that are easier to do than to explain to people why you should do them and again for a class of things that have very the only downside is opportunity cost like a very clearly either neutral to positive impact um and so someone up to you there why are you affecting why are you spending so much
time tweaking the the performance of this internal developer tool and you can say 20% time go away you know and you have to explain to them like well actually everybody right now it's between it takes 20 seconds to run it's just long enough that people contact switch to something else and if I can get it down to five seconds and people actually stay there the likelihood that
the the overall Loop of that will be way faster and I think it's going to be important you to explain you just say 20% time the second thing that in practice I think it allows you to do is it allows the creations of what I would call knitting clubs of people people who just in the company say oh we all like knitting let's talk about knitting and
from the perspective of the company the usefulness of a knitting club specifically it's not that interesting however the presence of things like knitting clubs is extremely useful and the reason is it's extremely high trust um random low uh you know what would be called weak ties in the in the network of people within the organization it's orthogonal to underly official structure
it's high trust and its weak ties weak far-flung ties and this structure fundamentally makes it significantly more likely the right information will flow to the right place at the right time and if you were to chart the right information flowing at the right time at any given time any individual instance of it you'd say that was kind of just
luck that was just a miracle that information happened to float to the right time place at the right time but it's not because in a structural basis you're making it more likely these people are be talking in a low stakes environment say oh kind of sounds like that thing Sarah was talking to me a couple weeks ago have you talked to her
about that and so like this is another thing by the way that people get confused all the time I say well that was luck that was a lucky break and uh sure okay but there are things you can do that structurally increase your luck surface area on a fundamental level and uh structurally stastically the likelihood of the of great outcome you know miraculous outcomes happening is
significantly higher and I I I another person um actually the same person who's giving that that mentorship advice at one point again caricaturing what they told me um was something along the lines of Alex you know 70% of your time you spend and you're just a canonically strong product manager a roll btle you want all the other product managers to
follow 30% of your time you do a bunch of cookie and then you constantly get Super Lucky with just completely out of the blue random happen stance miracles for your product have you considered that if you spend 100% of your time on the role model stuff you get promoted faster and I said have you considered where the Miracles come from like well I get that you don't see how
the kooky stuff creates the the luck surface area but I'm doing something very intentional here and I'm gardening some of these opportunities um to create these kind of structures and again I as somebody I can track as the kind of the soromon the heroic bold product manager I know how to play this role and it's a tall white suender male you know I who
was extroverted it's very easy for me to play this role and so it's easy for me to to stick my neck out and an example this early in my career I made a um I made a strong decision that I said I'm gonna work from home on Fridays I'm not gonna take any meetings and people gave me so much for it they'd say oh you're going to work from home on
Fridays great and it's like okay first of all we can let up my teams and my products output compared to yours any day of the week I'm happy to do that second of all I'm in meetings 8 to 6 or whatever Monday through Thursday running between meetings quickly you know pling emails and scheduling stuff and just responding on comments the one time I
take time to step back and synthesize and think to my to carefully read documents or think to myself what's the thing I've said multiple times this week that been R the document would have saved me tons of time or what's the thing that might um you know that's the time you do it in the time the 20% of time you take a step back to look and uh and so when I tell people this that all
the game changing ideas I've ever had came out of that time they go ah that must be so nice I just I just don't have the time for that it's like the mundane will cover every square inch you give it you have to make the time for that you know like that everybody always especially a high you know tight Bay kind of hardworking person will constantly be busy of course you will of
course you will and so the question is what are you going to make the time to do and uh and so it's the it's this important but not urgent that requires a boldness a certain boldness to create space for that because people will think that you're being a cooky weirdo and you're like you know picking your feet up and to some degree if they watch you
you are you're sitting there you're thinking to yourself maybe go on a walk you know um but they don't see the M the the value creation because it seems so indirect um so again I could not be more in your camp on all of the things youve just said the the I I have this this like it really triggers me the idea of busyness right like like people feel
like they always have to be busy I think that that's the worst the worst instruction you might give to somebody who's on your team somebody who you've invested in like no what you want is the ability to have sometime programmed in your Friday where you take no meetings right because really we you talk a lot about pattern recognition and you and I have discussed
it in the past and you know I kind of look at myself as I'm hunting for her patterns which are are the most Elemental foundational patterns that exist and and they're they're like Primitives in AI models right uh but they are so important and you can learn so much from them and and this idea that I one of the problems that I have and I think you probably agree uh with Nuance
is people are so into labels and and we forget I mean you know wienstein I think uh what said when you label me you negate me I might be getting the the uh philosopher wrong but the challenge that I find with label thinking is naturally it turns off thinking we we we think that we've labeled something right good or bad and we put all of the things that
we associate with that thing in that label bucket and then we stop thinking about it and we don't understand at all unless we really really try to understand we don't understand that that is really subtracting loads from our ability to see new things like I believe that it's important to like look at something that you've always seen you've always known you know this book or
whatever and look at it for as if you're seeing it for the very first time and what do you notice it's like we have a a story we have a publishing arm called infinite books and we have a science fiction story um that we're publishing later this year and one of the it's a collection of stories a bit like the fit science um that the overall make a really great
story but one of the things he's got in there that I really love is that um all of all of the AI is trained on and there's another author who I actually um had in on the podcast as well who has the same theme but the Consciousness is trained on children's brains uh and Eric hoell who was a is a neuroscientist who I've also had on the podcast I asked say like so describe
kids on up to the age of five and I think he said something along the lines of constantly tripping yeah yeah yeah yeah they're they're trip they're tripping balls right and and when you think about that that's because you are you are not labeling you are not bucketing you are not being praying at the alter of busyness and and and like I personally
believe we're going in into an era where all the old models are collapsing and new models are going to take their place and you better be thinking about this stuff or it to your own detriment right like the the the the Playbook that got people ahead in their gray flannel suits just doesn't work anymore yeah and this is where you know the the I used to
believe earlier in my life that like efficiency was always good you know the noise reduction was good and efficiency comes directly in tension with resilience and resilience be making it less likely that you're in the right place or you have stable footing or some footing when the world shifts on its axis and when you when you create structures around you you create labels
you create processes you create code you create whatever um it's great makes you more efficient at doing that task but it also it's like a rot and the deeper and more energy that goes through it the deeper the rot gets and it gets more efficient but also gets incredibly hard to escape the rut and to discover you know if the conditions change and so it
becomes a liability this is one of the reasons you get this classic S curve and basically everything is you at the beginning everyone's Banning out and exploring everything and then you start seeing which patterns work and more and more energy goes into those then you start hitting the the ceiling the ASM toote of that underlying Paradigm or
that underlying approach and people will say these these can run in like multi year uh Cycles I would argue that we're unambiguously nearing the end of a 30-year cycle in technology that was kicked off with the web browser I think um back 30 years ago and a bunch of the stuff that's going to feel like in the same way that fashion goes and for whatever reason roughly
30-year time Horizons it's definitely something around the maturity cycles of of indiv in cycles of individual humans is the reason we see 30 years I think but um I don't know exactly why but it must be related some way it's going to be like oh that sounds like the thing that like back in the the hippes we're talking about back in the early 90s it's
like yep it does uh we're in the factory farming era of whatever of of this thing and you think oh of course the only way this could possibly done is a vertical sass that is funded this way and uh we're in a community gardening we're about to be in a community gardening phase again I think because uh as you have technologies that change the underlying fundamental assumptions of
the cost of production of certain things whole new opportunity spaces open up and uh at the beginning the more that you hold on to well of course it's done this way this is the way we've done it we we used to do it in the bad old days we didn't know how to do it and then we realize vertical sass who where it's at and that's what we do now it's like okay
but I'm trying to talk about something that's bigger than this that maybe what if vertical SAS is actually a specific optimization at a particular phase of a of a broader Tech Paradigm and that beginner thinking that kind of cooky out there playful um I think is extremely important at the beginning phases of new paradigms uh at the beginning phases of
S curves the hill finding phase and uh that's why I I find you know I constantly kind of undercut the notion of the capital S capital P serious person you know serious business person with their numbers and their metrics because that's the default that we hold up as a of course this is the thing that everyone should aspire to be and the serious business person never admits
uncertainty but right it's like a it's like a you have this thing where people implicitly believe sometimes that acknowledging uncertainty is weakness which to me is barkers it's exactly the opposite it's like I acknowledge I do not know the answer to this and here's why I bet that of these five this is the action I will take because you know if
it as any one of these four things it will work out in this uh you know uh this will will be a good idea and the fifth if the fifth option then it'll be amazingly good idea so like this is a one that's likely to be at least good enough if not actively great you know so you can make these decisions by acknowledging that you don't know that you have no idea uh exactly how this
will play out and uh I think I agree with you that it's uh we're in a late stage of something it's very clear to me that we some of the internal inconsistencies of the way that this technical Paradigm Works um are getting increasingly weird and increasingly strained and then you're throwing AI into the whole thing and it's like whoa this gets really funky really fast if
you take AI which I think it was like magical duct tape you know and people are in this late stage factory farming phase and he gleaming tractors and farm equipment and they're saying well I'm trying to use this magical duct tape but I can't make a whole new appendage for the detector on it so it must not be useful it's like f it's magical duct tape what are you
talking about like yes it can't be used for that but like now it allows you you and anybody else in the earth to jury rig anything that's got to change something right that's the idea that this is B it's not useful I'm going to Chuck it what like um it's the other thing that you talk this earlier about llms llms are wild to me in that the
amount of compression of them they're like this holographic you know tetang has this Frame which I I take issue with in some of the ways he framed it with the Chach BT is a fuzzy jpeg of the internet I think it gives a few Impressions I don't I don't think are necessarily helpful or correct but I do think this notion of loss compression finding patterns to a degree that is so
amazing that it can make these many highly predictive patterns for a thing that feels so open-ended and so complex there's something very powerful in that technique and I I don't think it's necessarily by the way the Transformer architecture I think transform AR is amazing but I think this is something that happens inevitably with enough scale uh and compute and data and this
kind of Auto regressive loop back capability and so to me llms are not a party trick they're not a thing a flash in the pan very fundamental it's like going from procaryotes to ukar it's like this is a thing that's going to like you know be a very different world that we live in that enables all kinds of new things it's going to feel different some
of the things that we knew that we thought were Solid Ground are going to turn out to shift under our feet and it's going to be a little bit scary but I personally believe that um this is going to be an amazing period of um for Humanity to thrive to help Empower people to be creative to lean into their own creative ability in a collaborative way that can create meaning and value
across the society um so I'm extremely optimistic about this new era that we're going into but I agree it's going to require uh a stance that people may have written off as being from the past or not serious or or what have you I to um share your optimism and and think the period we're going into is going to be like I I I I literally run out of
superlatives thinking about what what it could be I I you you mentioned earlier that you know people are like what do you mean you're not 100% certain you know I blame Plato and Aristotle right because essentially that that gave birth to deterministic yes no binary thought processes it is either is or isn't one or zero zero to 100 black and white and that isn't the
way the world works we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world and often and often you know hilarity or tragedy ensu if if people could understand that we lived breathe eat probability everything is like one giant Quantum wave and and this idea that we can be absolutely certain I view as a sign of absolute Madness if you think only the
madman is 100% certain in my opinion there are all sorts of different ways that you can be more right right just as there are a lot of ways you can be more wrong but it it it is a continual it is not you know other than maybe death and taxes right those are the two things I'm fairly certain about yeah I'm pretty sure I I love this this framing of the
um you know that the idea being absolutely certain like that's only an absolute mad you know mad man could believe that and I think uh people often when they hear about some of these approaches and techniques I people called me a dialist before they said well you're saying that nothing everything's unknowable and therefore nothing matters like what how did you
get that no I'm saying I'm acknowledging the uncertainty but of course the role that we take and the actions that we take have massive Ripple effects we have power to do world the things that change the world all of us some of us are in different positions that have different you know more strong levers available to us but like the actions and things that
do of course they matter it's not saying this is some Pro posttruth thing I'm saying there's uncertainty this is where I I talked about this metaphor with you I think in the past it's in the Sor radat essay but you know you start off and you're you're climbing this mountain and it's really Steep and it's really hard You Keep On Slipping back down and
then you get a toe hold and you pull yourself up and someone sitting there your manager someone claps good job and you go yeah okay cool and you get stronger and you get better and you climb faster and better you have more people cheering you on say wow that guy is great he's you know climbing this m and you're getting more and more medals and you're feeling great you're like I
got this I'm not just some random person being slashed around in the world I have control by asset I'm authoring my own self and then you get to the top of the mountain and in front of you you see a like a a cliff and a just a a ravine you can't see the bottom of and you think well I can't jump off this Cliff because that would be giving up that would be
nism I I can't go back down the hill I just spent my entire career climbing to the top of this hill and then you see in front of you a cooworker worker or someone else in your life you always thought was a little bit kooky and they're just hanging out in the clouds they just looking like like dancing you know and and they're like hey coming over man it's great and you yell to them
are you high because like what what so like that can't possibly be right and then of course as more people come up the mountain it gets more busy and and at some point you get jostled and you get knocked off the side of the mountain some crisis or something and you stumble off and your eyes close and you think this is it I'm falling I'm falling to my
Doom I'm Giving Up This is Everything over and you you have this like little moment in your head and you go you know what just doesn't feel so bad it feels kind of like flying and then you open your eyes after a minute or so realizing you haven't hit the ground and you realize wait a second I'm standing on you know fluffy ground kind of I'm floating a bit but I'm on solid
something and you see that this this Chasm was a a hologram it was an illusion and you're on the other side and now in front of you you see this vast an amazing Garden you see your coworker who you know was dancing and see all doing all these interesting things and doing all this magic things you think what an amazing place where I can get amazing things done I can do all
kinds of things by just letting go of the idea being certained I I can create all kinds of amazing things I'm proud of the value and goodness I can create in the world and you uh go back and see the people at the top of that that glyph just miserable and you y back and say come on over it's great and they yell back to you are you high and that's the
story of humanity that's the whole tragedy and uh it's so funny to me to try to like I found that by the way it's very hard to get people to make this transition um there's a lot of you could might describe this as like a self-authoring to self-transcending mindset transition that's the way it's framed various adult development theory thinkers frame it
this way and I found that it's very you want to go and Shake people and like wake them up and say hello hi yes you should be do this self transcending mindset and you'll feel more empowered than ever before and More Alive and connected and meaningful than ever before um but people track it as nihilism before you they get over to it and I found that there's no real good
way of doing it I found that what you can do is plant a few seeds you know uh in people's heads little quotes or ideas or things that maybe don't make sense to them but then when they have that crisis it's always a crisis it's something that causes them to feel unsteady on what they thought was Solid Ground now maybe there's a crack in their in the rock of
their head of that part of their brain and that seed takes takes root and starts blooming you don't know when that will be that might be in 20 years that might be in 5 years might be never it maybe tomorrow who knows um and I find that spreading those seeds is a useful way of of probabilistically helping people through that transition onto the other side of this thing that that
people resist because they said that can't possibly be right that can't be like I've I've thought the entire time that what makes me different is that I'm really good about being control and being certain and not making excuses and that can't possibly be right because that person appears to be you know you know being completely uncertain and not
and they are wishy wasy and I'm a strong thinker because I'm willing to call it like I see it and it's black or it's white and that's it and uh there's this it's like the thing that you will help you move forward is precisely the thing that feels like moving backwards and that's the illusion that's the challenge of getting people to see through that
totally uh cousin Zaki said uh the the cracks are where the light gets to come through uh the author of uh Zoro the Greek and and many other really great books I I actually wrote a piece about uh kind of the and again here's a label that I don't think works but you know the spiritual side of things and I actually in that piece it's actually a thread on Twitter in that thread I I
confront exactly this and I call it the bridge of nihilism and and and and the the challenge is most people get to the beginning of the bridge of nihilism and then it's like I can't go any further and my I maintain that all of the fun stuff is on the other side of the bridge of nihilism yeah and that and that you literally have to walk across it and so
many people are terrified to do that and yet that's where all the magic is uh I think Terrence McKinna said something about uh along the lines of you know nature loves courage and sometimes when you leap into the abyss one finds that it's actually filled with wonderful cotton that and and that it's it's that that metaphor of the leap right right and and
we see it everywhere and you were talking earlier about compression I really believe that we have maxims like we have because they have been compressed compressed compressed all across human time right and and and that's why they have withstood the test of time that's why they because because they're been compressed they're used like I call this the Hallmark card
fallacy you discover a deep truth and someone says well sounds like something for a Hallmark card it's like yes and the reason it's on a homark card is because it's really resiliently true actually and then later when they discover it they go I I realized the real you know meaning is the journey and the friends along the way it's like yes like I think call and it's like I was
telling you that before and I I find you know the um I don't know if you ever read Robert Wright's book nonzero from the 90s um yeah and really interesting book you can also tell by the way you're reading like this feels different you can say oh this is clearly written before September 11th you can you know you look at the date of it he's obviously a very smart and great guy and
one of the things that stands out in that book that I remembered is you know Chieftain back in the era of Chieftain uh you would have people who had these egregiously over-the-top ways of punishing their enemies were the ones everyone heard about and one of the reasons for that not to excuse that you know that violence one of the reasons is
the stories that are viral that stick in people's heads for whatever reason get transmitted and so if they did this they probably even do it on purpose but the ones that did do this barbaric thing that year he made the son eat the father's foot or what whatever crazy terrible thing sticks in people's brains and gets transmitted and and so that's
one you hear about and power to some degree is the belief others have in your power and so the more the story is told the more that it has a self that empowering thing and so therefore those are the stories get pulled those are the ones that get the resources and the I'm about to excuse this again I'm to describe it and I think there's a similar thing where maxims that have a
have the night they're compressed and interesting they have an interesting frame or an interesting metaphor or whatever are ones that are naturally viral one of the things I I do in various contexts is I create communities of people I call them Secret Gardens or or nerd clubs and I collect interesting diverse uh thinkers people with different viewpoints or open and curious
thinkers that want to be in this group and then if you do this and you collect people who want to be there I call it a nerd club that way people go I say yeah I've got the study group and they go that sounds like a club for nerds it's like yeah do you want it and you get a positive pressure differential right so the people who don't want to be there
self like that people who do want to be there despite the fact that it looks like a nerd Club um are self- selecting into it so you get a bunch of people who intrinsically want to be there then what you do is you have in these groups you have a yes and energy you say uh this is optional nothing important is decided here if someone says a thing you
disagree with you are free to not engage that's fine you don't have to there's no point to this um but if you do engage either add to it say something interesting yes and or if you disagree and you want to engage say something like oh that's interesting huh in the past I up to these kinds of problems I've applied this lens I wonder if that applies here or or maybe I'm worth
applying it and by saying I wonder you get about you not them so instead of saying to them well how of this spit into the frame I'm on about right now they're like well man I have no idea I'm just thinking out loud so you want people to share ideas um and the third thing you do is you trickle in a diversity of perspectives so you're looking at each week to add in one to
three people into the group otherwise you get very stale and Echo chamber very very quickly and even with very open Curious mindsets then uh you're for each person you add in you want to minimize the chance that they ruin the vibe it takes one person to poop a party so you want if you have one person that goes what are we even doing here like it's
over the whole thing is ruined so you're minimizing that chance but secondarily and more importantly you're trying to maximize how different that person is from the people that are currently in the group so if you got a bunch of sales people in the group and an engineer wants in yeah add them in you got a bunch of senior people and a junior person wants in yeah add them and you
have you know just different life perspectives and experience and different ways looking at the world now you have a group of people and people assume these groups would be um less rigorous thinker well you just said there's no you can't use the word no and it doesn't have any importance and what you create with these things somewhat surprisingly
is a machine for creating meaning for its own sake an infinite game that people enjoy for its own sake that also regularly spins out game-changing insights for the surrounding context and the reason it does this is because people can choose to build on the threads they find interesting and so you get a bunch of diversity different perspectives someone puts something out
there if people choose to build on it they're voting that they find it interesting something interesting to say something provocative or surprising or six in their brain and if you find that idea lots of different people in the group all who are very different all find interesting and novel or important that's a very good sign that actually is
interesting in novel and there's a there's a paper of Phil mener and his lab um I was he presented at Sai at one point and I'm just gonna again carat the paper to the point you know to the point of It kind of ridiculousness but this Insight of if you want to see what idea will go viral in the given context look at the early reshares of who's sharing
it and look at how different those people are if they're all in the same click in the network then the the implied ceiling is relatively small if they're very different uh not in the same sub networks of people then the implied ceiling is very high and so if you have lots of different people who go oh yeah can I share that very good sign you're on to something meaningful and
differentiated and gamechanging and uh I I find that people kind of think of this stuff again as like a fluffy little thing on the side it's like no this is actually a powerful strategy for creating value in the world value and good and meaning and business value too actually you know so exactly I and you know that my challenge with you is that
like even just one little thing you're talking about I find so many threads that I want to want want to pull on but what what you were talking about what makes a meme uh viral and and not I couldn't help it in the way the the horrible ways that would execute people I couldn't help but they gave of The Princess Bride and the dread pirate Roberts right it's all it's all his reputation
it's a different person all the time and this is but this is what I by the way this is why I think taking seriously fiction and narrative that resonates with the society is incredibly important because I I take notes constantly as you see me do multiple times during this call and I when I'm watching movies with my kids or whatever I'm constantly
taking notes and reflect and saying what is the deeper truth that this is in that is implied in this thing why does this character is this character so scary because or why is this idea so resonant and so why I mve to Tears In This Moment of this kids movie or whatever and unpacking that you can find these patterns like oh my God you another fun thing I don't know if you ever done you
know tvtropes.org you seen this so I had an internship many many sumers ago where it was a weird to do a governmental job and uh they gave me a task that I somehow did in like a week and they're like I we can't give you any more work so just pretend to be busy for eight weeks or something which I what so I just read TV trops all all the time and
you realize before long it's like oh my God every single work of fiction is an assemblage of these tropes they might not do it intenal like you've mentioned a number of different um thinkers already in this conversation who I have never heard of before but I'm like I clearly resonate with and uh so there's always tropes that not weren necessarily inspired directly from each other it
wasn't like someone went to TV Tropes and hit picked five and together and made a thing but there's reasons that we've discovered it's a pattern language in the Christopher Alexander sense right it is an emergently discovered pattern language that you can cons assemble a lot of meaningful narratives out of uh that stick in people's brains and that
and that cause them to change their behaviors like if you have the best idea in the whole world and nobody ever hears it or everybody hears it never does anything different because of it doesn't really matter what you're trying to do is affect something that will lead to people making different decisions being more willing to do things they might have thought of as weakness that are
actually about compassion and strength and you know the boldness to love the things around you even when it's hard or even when you know the machine tells you that not to um and so I think that that uh if you look around you there's richness everywhere you know yeah totally and the I I love the Riff on the idea that there there are certain things
that are just mimetically they just work better and and I I always say that you know St Paul who used to be Saul was actually I just I was just reading that in the that um I was reading actually the book you recommended on the down here yeah so so literally was the world's first and most successful memer he memed Christianity into existence yeah and and and one of the reasons why
he did so well was because he was the first to say if you recall that period in history right everyone had their own local Gods right your your little village had its own series of gods then the bigger Town had gods that were over those gods and so on like a Russian nestled dolls right and and so and so uh uh say PA comes along he's like oh no
there's there's one God but by the way here's the good thing doesn't matter what color you are doesn't matter what sex you are doesn't matter what tribe you come from you are all welcome here and just like boom he Meed that religion into uh being and and using the term meme not as the cute thing you see on social media but but the idea of an idea that gets
transferred from Human mind to human mind and one of the other things to look for that often is it's like your idea of if if all of the same group are sending out the message it's not it's going to have a low ceiling but if very disperate groups are sending it out it's going to have a very high ceiling the the same is true of looking at the original Meme and
did the original author if you can ascertain who that is did the original author lose control of the meme if they lost control of the meme they might be bummed out but that's a powerful me yeah yeah right one go ahead you were I I was going to say the Kevin Kelly uh he and I were discussing a few weeks ago uh obviously he's had a huge influence on on my thinking and uh
indirectly actually but yeah he's one of those people who's in the background of a lot of things I really like and we were talking about this The Secret Garden this nerd Club pattern and I was describing as a senius and he said you know a senius is this idea his and S brand talked about like a a genius but as a scene as a as an or collected that is much more powerful and interesting
and capable than any of the inputs into it and we're just using if if these Secret Gardens are SC are Aus or not and he said well Aus is one has to escape its creator it has to become greater than its original Catalyst and I think that's a similar idea for a successful meme it's that it's it's alive if it can escape its original Creator maybe yeah
and and you you know when you look at the idea of complex adaptive systems again right one of the things that just continues to to present itself is the and you and I have talked about this in the past this idea of the Matthew effect uh you know from from from the Bible you know where the parable of the talents right the master master leaves and gives
the three servants one gets a thousand the other gets 5,000 the third one who he thought was the most capable gets 10,000 and then he returns after like years and years of being away and the first servant says you know I I took the thousand and in invested that and and I now can give you 5,000 and and the master is this is Splendid this is amazing give him another 5,000 talents
and let him go for it and then the second one uh well I I invested it but I was a little nervous so I had five and but here's 10 and the master's like okay okay give him 10 let him invest now the guy he thought was the best who he gave 10,000 talents to prostrates himself in front of the m and says master I feared your wrath so much I knew you to be a
wrathful and vengeful man that I buried the talents so that I could at least give them back to you and the master loses his and he calls his servants and he's like take this horrible human and cast him into the darkness to whail and grind his teeth right and and so they to he that hath more will be given to he that hath not what little he hath
shall be stripped away from him sounds brutal but it's the way all complex adaptive systems work our immune system works that way yeah like essentially when when Co came along like our immune system is like what the hell is this I don't know so like one marches over there and it's like oh let's try this at figuring it out and doesn't and so he all human cells have Hill switches
apotosis so they have suicide switches and they push the button and they disappear and another one appears in its place and then what happens is the the cells that are seeming to make progress guess what happens the other soils swarm towards them so what it really happens is a Senus what happens is the Senus draws the swarm of cells and this works
all across nature yeah the same basic p and and because it's it's so powerful and it's a uh and by the way I think people sometimes hear descriptive terms of composite active systems they say well it's you know hierarchy is a naturally occurring thing it's it is a description of a thing phenomena that happens in M substrates now the outcome
of it you can argue well yes but there's real people in the outcome of this and therefore we should tweak or use the system you know the system to create these other outcomes so it's possible to separate out the like this is how it works and why it works or why we see this thing and also not say well you know it works this way therefore it is good like this is a separate from that
but this notion of um like imagine I was sitting the other day I was on the pelaton and we have it in the right in the little sun room that looks out in the garden and there was a a a apple tree that by husband planted a couple years ago that's just starting to grow an apple so it was a few months ago I forget and I had this like how does the Apple Tree know to go to the Apple there
how does that know that that's the place the right place to do it and I don't know this is that how it works at all I'm just kind of imagining how such a system could work and imagining what if you have all these different possible budding sites you know there's maybe hundred on the tree and each one and the tree kind of has like this Collective
like some chemical that's getting to a point of like enough sugar or whatever and the Heats you know the days are long enough and it says okay and so the little budding sites are like oh should I do this am I gonna is this the right place and the one that gets there first and it says yeah now you can imagine that other one's going it kind of the other numbers go down and so it's like
all these different places budding G to the point and then one for whatever reason is slightly better it's closer to the thing or whatever and it kind of go and out of the tree goes okay cool that's what we're doing it and and like the and it can grow there and maybe once the the sugar Lev get high enough like another one to suit size of the bud and
it can give these outcomes that look extraordinarily coherent but are emerg from it's like well where's the brain where's the part where it decided to grow the apple right there well there isn't one it was a collective process here's another um similar thing that a few of us were talking about a month or two ago is this interesting phenomena in llms where each token is generated
independently conceptually um from the one before it so you know you ask a thing hey can you give me a a um a summary of this text and bold the important words so the llm produces on the the third you know token it produces it produces a asterisk which is the um the markdown formatting for the next word is going to be important how do it know like what the
next word is like how does it know the next word is and and so so in some ways it's it's this kind of wild like how could it Poss this coherent thing but now imagine a world where uh five good friends are all playing a party game we're all going to collaborate and we're each going to draw a panel of a cartoon together and we're going to not
communicate at all when the first one of us going to draw the first panel and hand it to the next person and so the first person draws um a bunch of guns pointing to the right and then the next person goes okay I guess there's something scary here uh maybe a dragon and the second person gets it and says okay let's see someone's attacking the dragon and what is it why would the
dragon be hitting its ground maybe there's gold that's protecting and so each person is play laying down a coherent part of the story and someone sees at the end goes oh there's a coher how do you guys plan this well we didn't plan it we're doing a um a it's just we all were cooperating in a way that uh allowed ourselves to participate in a
way in good faith together uh without having the strong defect urge in that thing uh to screw up the whole thing or whatever and uh that creates an outcome that is extremely coherent and looked entirely like it was planned but it wasn't planned in any meaningful s it was an emergent phenomena That Grew entirely based on good faith collaboration yeah indeed and and that's
the other aspect of complex adaptive systems that people seem to have uh just difficulty wrapping their heads around and it's probably because of our earlier very hierarchical both business but also religion Society was based on these hierarchies and you know the the top of the hierarchy would prefer them never to be changing and so top like you guys like
just not ever change this good okay we out right like this yeah and then and then wait wait a minute but why are you there um because God told me God God that guy told me yeah this guy right here I got picked by God oh okay which which God did you get picked by that the god no I'm the one that froms all the other ones actually well you know what's really
funny about that is in uh Babylonia right in Sumeria they had designs right they wanted to be the the they wanted to be the head city state and the problem that they had was they had a very puny God like their God was not like among the uh he was certainly not uh to mix metaphors he was certainly not up there on Mount Olympus so what did they do they gave him a better story so
basically they came up with this story oh no no no no no Our God was the god who created heaven and earth and he did that by battling the most fearsome monster of all time and ripping it in app and throwing half of it up here and half down here he gave us the sky and the Earth and like everyone was like oh yeah wow that's a very cool like what oh
you whip the are aart wow wow okay well you guys must all right what do you what direct us My Le I love that notion of like yeah you tell the best story you get the power right like the the person um ex exactly and what's so funny about it is if you go back and go back and go back that's what's happening what's happening is I love this piece about Babylonia and how
they gain dominance in Samaria it was some better storytelling now granted they had some they had some unique uh things at ad making them Advantage like they had done the their priests got tired of counting the barley corn right can you imagine like so the way that the gods were assus was the farmer whoever would bring the barley corn and make his offering but
then the poor priest had a sit and count one two three and so they invented briting writing in the clay tablets the Sumerian clay tablets the original for the romantics out there sorry I'm going to bum you out writing started to do to keep track of inventory yep I love that you know it's kind it's because it's immediately useful like you're accumulating a thing like exactly
we've talked about in the past about these primary versus secondary use cases like the primary use case is a thing where it does the thing it's supposed to do and it's obviously better at the thing and the expected value as a user but the expected value is greater than the expected cost the expected is important because it's based on your
priors about how similar products have worked or what your friends experience was or whatever if it's above if the expected value is greater than the expected cost for that user there's a gradient of adoption that could plausibly cause them to go oh yeah this is better this is better than trying to keep track of my head like just doing a little tally system and someone comes up
with you know the extra little you know mutation on top of it makes a little bit better go this is better it can kind of accumulate over time and people will copy the ones that appear to be the most useful and kind of vote on the ones that appear to be uh most useful and those will get transmitted into the future the other ones will fade away entropy will
kind of tear them apart and they'll fade away and they won't they won't be transmitted to the Future and you get these um uh so then you have a secondary use case so now I got writing someone goes wait a second we can write what if it were like a thing that was just kind of like you know trying to like uh put the moves on this and tell this romantic
thing to this person recing or whatever and like I'm gonna write a little story to like show them what a badass poet I am or whatever like and so you now have these things are adjacent because you're going to take for granted the fact that this thing was created for other gun you can EXA it you know to uh I think that's how you's saying it's that you adapted
into a context in which it was not intended to be used but now is plausible to use and that primary it shifts to a secondary use case that was not good enough like no one would have invented writing just for poetry but it is a maybe um but like now that you created it for this other thing go wait a second now we got the S around here of course
I'll use it for this kind of the adjacent possible right yeah and this other essay about itative adjacent possible and this notion of people the adjacent possible is a set of actions that are within your grasp that you can do and will likely work based on where you are situated system in the system and based on what your capabilities are and the kind you sit in and um I think
in a lot of Industries people assume that their adjacent possible is massive we can do anything you know we do a flying leap for this thing and I would point out most people's adjacent posses are actually pretty small like the things you can do and have a very very high likelihood of them working are relatively small um and once you Embrace that fact you realize wa it's not like I
do it once than done you do it once and now even knew it is impossible you know have like a a good like solid spot to reach for the next one and if you do this and you are intuitive about where what kinds of adjacent possible you have and what you can reach you can Arc to wildly different and better outcomes that people would have said were insane
to do a flying leap to and anybody who tried to just do a flying leap 2 would have you know completely not worked and I think once you Embrace that limitation and sometimes by the way people sometimes people assume their jent possible were smaller than they actually are in the tech industry people they are wildly large they actually are I think
um but by doing this you then see clever little moves again and to bring it back to that Builder versus Gardener you know the Builder keeps on looking over from when's the magical point when the gardener is creating all this value where's the point where it dumps and I can see it's like no it's a continuous smoothly growing thing there's no magical moment the moment is the whole
like the magic is the whole um and uh so you'll miss it if you aren't paying attention and if you assume the magic must happen discontinuously leads us right into uh your piece on uh suron and ragas I loved that piece um and why why don't you uh take our listeners and viewers through it because you're going to do a better job than me yeah that the
idea and it's kind of a fanciful metaphor and by the way I actually based it I I've only ever seen the movies so I based it on a very perfunctory understanding of the movies from 10 years ago so I'm sure I got some ask cat um some of the like is it okay to use soron in this way could you say that s is actually not that the G actually before the Lord The Ring movie started
is based on like a chat gbt retelling of the Lord ringy but the frame is you know people say well magic isn't real in the physical world it's just a fanciful thing and yeah sure fine magic isn't real in the physical world however magic is absolutely real in the social world and in fact it's quite common in the social world because power comes from
the belief that other people have in others people's ability and uh and then of course the actions and decisions we make in the social World directly impact the physical world so in a very real way magic affects the physical world and I sketch out is two different archetypes fundamentally different archetypes that work for different like game theoretic
reasons uh to describe and create uh true magic in the social world and the first is the Saron archetype and again I want to emphasize San the things a little bit unfortunate about this metaphor is that it's the Saron we know him as the evil go turns guy who turns evil in The Lord of R movies I want to emphasize before that point the guy who
was just industrious and powerful wizard and um the way that this magic works is it's somebody who believes in the great man theory of history that the history is principally driven forward by Great Men uh you know rising to the occasion one two they believe that they themselves are a great man and three they have initial success that leads others watching to go huh maybe that
guy's a great man and if you have these three things it is possible not easy but possible to create a self- accelerating Loop where more and more people believe that is that person is powerful and then kind of take actions that make them actually more powerful not get bet against them and the core animating logic of this is a complete and total absence of self-doubt because if you
were to see self the self-doubt if you were to cross that nless bridge then the whole thing falls apart um and this is a very familiar archetype and there's tons of tons of titans of Industry that you can point to Steve drops to use one concrete example is this R1 without question so another archetype that is way less commonly seen since quieter is
the radagast and the radagast looks cooky and weird and playful and not serious and the way their magic works is entirely different and their magic works from seeing the potential in everything and everyone around them seeing the seeds of greatness everywhere around them and of course to use the Builder and Gardener the sorons or the builders and the the ratags are the are the
gardeners and the radagast can create enormous amounts of indirect value they can create cuses they can inspire people to fulfill to see their own greatness their potential for greatness in their particular and Inspire them to help grow into that greatness and support each other to creating something that is much bigger than the sum of its parts
significantly more important and valuable and useful and meaningful than any of the individual components and I think in society we we know about all the s we don't talk about the radas as often and to use another Steve Steve wnc you call radagast say um and I think the two types of magic are actually really powerful together like you want them uh it's oh we should all be
radagast like okay I I would definitely uh connect with the idea of being a radagast so sure I have a I would got some skin in the game there but um it's you need both of these types of magic interplaying and working together in the world to create value I think cuz if you didn't have anyone who had no self-doubt on a particular thing well they would
never take that risk and yeah most of them won't succeed but one of them might turns out that actually everyone was wrong about that thing and that that will be successful it will create a new a new thing so you need both in society um and I think fundamentally that you typically find people develop the San Magic first and later if they when they
go through a crisis might discover the radagast Magic in themselves and that same metaphor I talked about earlier about climbing the cliff and seeing your friend who's high in the clouds I think is a story about the transition from a Saran mindset to the ability to exercise a radagast mindset and I think you know you want say this person's a radagast that person is a soron no all of us
could act as a builder or a gardener a soron or radagast in different contexts the question about nurturing those different mindsets and applying them or using them allowing them to bloom in the right contexts so what I love about that and I love about all the things that you write and talk about is it's not either or it's both MH and and so many people
have such a difficult time with that understanding it's not Sparta or Athens it's Sparta and Athens it isn't uh you know uh athenia and bakus it's it's both of them and and people just seem to me they they really love dichotomies you know and and are you a wizard or a warrior well you know in certain circumstances I'm a wizard in other circumstances I'm a warrior and
and and the ability as you do to to understand that it isn't either or it's both and both are essential and you you you know like my friend Tom Morgan is always talking about the left brain versus the right brain great by the way I was just with him last night yeah oh really nice right um so he's I always keep trying to say to him Tom like no no
no it's not that the right right brain or the left brain is better or worse than it's that we are overemphasizing a certain way of thinking and we need to we need to make it more holistic and and that that's what I love about you and and your work is you know it simple things like you know anything that becomes a measurement gets gained just like if if we're going to decide uh
widgets number of widgets produced is our our measurement game Game Central right and and so you'll have uh I always love the metaphor of the guy who sees the guy who's drunk staggering around underneath a lamp post and he's like the guy walks over him and he goes what are you doing and he's like my like he goes where did you L him somewhere somewhere way Island Street
there go well why are you looking here then he goes H the lights better here by that is my favorite performance of that of that frame I've ever seen was Academy Award for something in that performance of that but right I think that I think that that just that it's a funny thing and it gets the point across but people don't really understand a lot of people that's
how their thought process is working and a lot of the structures and machines around you are pushing you to think that way because and at least to appear to think that way and that's one of the reasons that like my friend Demitri glazov a very good friend we used to run the blink rendering engine together for and home for number of years and he's
phenomenal he's got this very adult developmental Theory he's got a great deck on this and uh it's like the there's a lot of scaffolding and support for people to get to the self-authoring mindset where you kind of like lean into your particular you know marketable skill and but there's not a lot of infrastructure and Scaffolding and support in society modern society for
that shift to the self transcending mindset and in fact a lot of the machines that you were in will hold you back from it because you if you find like for a while at at one point in my career my entire value like entire ego was tied to this idea of getting gold stars from the machine and at one point I said to somebody yeah I just want really want the machine to love me and
someone said Alex the machine is incapable of loving you what are you talking about why would you want like seek love from people you know like the uh like that's where you find it and I know I find that people um get held back by it because it's like oh no you have a number serious people like this is another thing people like oh rigorous
thinking we need rigorous thinking okay sure yeah right um and so therefore we need a bunch of words with a bunch of footnotes and a bunch of numbers it's like yeah but you you made those numbers up they go yeah but we need to have Precision it's like yeah but that's that's not precise it's actually it's like both Precision it's actually quite dangerous like I'm saying I don't know
and actually even if you know one of the the um here's an example I think maybe we talked about this before but as on a team and again I'm charactering a real situation to some degree but there is a a backend team was brilliant and they're working on this state that was a research project and they were um trying to decide how many degrees a field of
view in an a reality experience could people uh would users tolerate of being off and still have the illusion work and I like wait first of all it's highly context dependent of like if you're showing something that's like supposedly you know Beyond the Horizon or whatever I'm sure it's way more degrees than if it's you know supposed to be immediately
in front of you and whatever but secondarily what's the amount like so ask the people on the team what's the highest that anybody thinks that answer might reasonably be so it's like okay seven okay what's the lowest that anybody on the team thinks it might posibly be they go three they said what would you do differently now and for the next six weeks if it were three versus
seven and say nothing nothing different it's like cool said you don't know the answer to that question it doesn't you know like it doesn't matter well we shouldn't Kick the Can down the road well actually if the road has SLE slipt away from you you absolutely should kick the can down the road like attempting to you know convince yourself you've answered this question and then now i'
I've been the uncertainty I know know the answer to this question is actually more dangerous because it's going to be extremely expensive it's going to give you this um illusion of clarity that's actually not correct and will lead you to make you know Reckless unnecessarily Reckless decisions because you think it's it's clear it's actually not you
know it's the bug in human OS the the desire for the illusion of certainty yeah and and and The More We crave it the the worse the outcomes I believe because like you you know when's the last time you saw somebody wandering around you know proclaiming godamn it the sun is gonna come up tomorrow the sun's coming up tomorrow I and you know aing soapbox hear me now the sun is
coming up tomorrow nobody does that because like most people believe that I have found in my experience that those who Proclaim loudly and continually their beliefs it's because they're not so sure and what they're looking for is converts what they're looking for is well if everybody believes it it must be right well actually that's not true at
all as a matter of fact it's often the reverse of that and but the this craving of certainty this craving of control like has has led to more cock-ups more fuckups more burning down of just useful things than almost any other of the features that we have and and this and this desire to always be right is like it itself is so wrong it's not even wrong yeah exactly it's like
the wrong question to even be thinking like it's like the there is no correct answer to that frame like someone was saying in some Contex the last few weeks of like well how important is X feature it's like I can't answer that question because it's a question of tradeoff compared to what you know like you like that's there's not even there isn't the
answer to that question because it's not like it's some absolute thing that's you know stands outside of time and space it's like no it's in a situated context of like what are the things what's the decision that's in front of us and so you get these frames where they sound reasonable and uh and and it's like I can't I have to attack the fra that
frame there's no answer to the question as framed you know exactly exactly and that's why frame is so important right it's like the the the the question that you ask is often more important than the answer the way you frame the question determines whether the discussion or the debate or the collab is going to be useful or not and and framing it that way it's just
like oh well uh okay that's the exactly wrong question yeah and then you and then and then you get into you know the the the the digging in it's like I always joke you often see on Twitter right like what hill would you die on and I always say I subscribe to the General George Patton uh idea that the other poor dumb that bastard can die on his
Hill yeah I he's gonna yeah bye but bye bye and people I they laugh right but when you analyze that that statement you understand the wisdom in it right and like of course you know why are you dying on Hills what if you're wrong yeah there's this I think people also get this this um I think intuitively sometimes get it correctly but like this notion of absorbing barriers like death
is a very different thing than making a mistake and people see mistakes as death and once you see the mistake is not death of like I can recover from this now once you have one foot inside the system one foot outside the system you see everyone Act is acting like oh making a mistake in this cont would be like death you maybe you get fired from this world if I got fir from this
role what would happen well I go get a job somewhere else you know and like you know it would be a little bit uncertain for for a bit in there but like you know survive and that allows you to take bold actions that people oh my God like you're you're about to die in that situation no it's not actually will death it's a mistake be a mistake if it
doesn't work in this context it might not work I don't know but if it does it works great so like um once you realize once you don't fear death in that context you can do miraculous things that appear to others be totally miraculous you know it's like that in the Matrix when the the kid's bending the spoon like how you do that well he
there is no spoon he's off here sit in and the code you know hacking or whenever tweaking it is making the spoon go like this because he realizes the spoon's AR real man so like once you understand the the perspective as one foot in the system embedded it understanding it the intuition of it be able to make actions and one foot outside the system the a to look at it
from the balcony to see outside of it and see it's a system in a larger system allowed you to do magic and it's magic that people inside the system would be like it's like um someone in flatland and someone in 3D doing this thing like how' you do that like well it's 3D man it's a thir Dimension I know like exactly it reminds me of the quote uh
yeah about Chess uh in life unlike chess life goes on after check checkm all right I know you've gotta go Alex I could talk to you all day uh for we did this for days like we definitely could but if if you know the show you know the the final question we are going to wave the law we're going to make you the emperor of the world there are some rules you can't kill anyone and you
can't put anyone in a re-education cab but what we are G to give you what we are going to give you Alex is a magical microphone and you can speak two things into the magical microphone and you are going to incept the entire 8 billion and change population of the world from whatever their next morning is they're going to wake up and they're going to
say I've just had two of the best ideas in the world and unlike all those other times I'm gonna actually act on them what two things are you going to incept in the world's population I got the first one I think the first one for me is compassion is strength and um which I think is the frame kind of is surprising to people but I think aach strength is one I wish that people would uh
internalize and you know and then I guess the need for certainty is what's holding you back I I love both of them Alex this has been a pure joy for me thank you very much for coming on and I hope to be able to do this many many more time yes yes anytime you want I would this is um I've gotten like four pages of notes of stuff I want to threads I want to pull on and
books I want to read things I want to look up so thank and and then just quickly where can people find you on online kos.com I got a bunch of stuff linked there my cards compendium is linked from there I got a bunch of medium essays uh and a bunch of my open source GitHub stuff is on there awesome Alex thank you so much for being on the job thanks for having me