The big sort (E)

0:00Just past my house, near the Sawmill River, I passed about a dozen dinosaurs, lying in the sun, relaxing, as they often do on a fall day. Of course, they weren't the kind of dinosaur you just pictured. They were birds. Konnichiwa! It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:29Yes, of course, birds are dinosaurs. If we carve up all the animals on the face of the earth, and all the animals that there used to be, the way Linnaeus did, we discover that the lineage of birds goes straight back to the dinosaurs. But we don't call them dinosaurs anymore. The reason is simple. Because if I say I saw a dinosaur lying by the side of the road, you're going to visualize an Allosaurus, a Brontosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus rex.

1:07Because in our minds, that's what a dinosaur looks like. So the question for today is, why do we even bother dividing things into categories? Well, Linnaeus did it for a reason. And the reason was this. If we could accurately divide the world into categories, taxonomy as it's called, and the categories are taxons, maybe we could understand how the universe worked. Maybe we would get some insight into how we got here. From that early beginning, we've developed a mania for sorting things. We sort them for a whole bunch of reasons. Go to the library, and there is the Dewey Decimal System until you get to fiction, and then it's alphabetical.

1:59A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The question, of course, is, is the alphabet in that order because of the song? The fact that the alphabet has an order, the fact that we alphabetize things, that's pretty new and super important because one of the other uses of a big sort of a taxonomy is to make it easy to find things. So the ruler and the pens go in the junk drawer in your kitchen, but the eggs, the eggs go in the egg holder in the fridge, except if you're in Europe, in which case the eggs go on the counter. And when you're staying in an Airbnb, it takes a few minutes, an uncomfortable few minutes, because nothing is in the right place.

2:48Our ability to know where to find things causes us to sort them, because it's easier to sort them when we're putting them away than it is to constantly remember the where and why of where something might be. Another reason that we will sort things is so that we can rank them. Amazon learned this early on. there used to be just one bestseller list for Amazon Books. It was the bestseller list. This book sold more than this book sold more than this book. But they discovered that authors were eager to promote themselves if they had a shot at being a bestseller. So now, yes, you can be a bestseller in just about any category you can name.

3:38New books on crocheting, there's a category for that. And if you write a new book about crocheting, good luck to you. I hope you come out at number one. About 25 years ago, I had a fascinating correspondence with the editor of the New York Times Book Review. At the time, they had been listing each category of book on their bestseller list with 10 listed winners, 10 bestsellers. So they had fiction, they had nonfiction, and for each one they had paperback and they had hardcover. But then what they did was they carved out a section called advice, how-to, and miscellaneous. That's my section. I don't know if I do advice or how-to, but I guess I do miscellaneous.

4:25And then what they did was they made all the other lists 15 books long, and they made my list five books long. It turns out the advice how-to in miscellaneous nonfiction category sells a lot of books. And by making it only five books long, the Times made it really hard to get on that list. So I wrote them a letter. And I said, dear editor, why did you do this? And she wrote back a personal letter, which I was very impressed by. And it said, we did this because we don't want people to read those books. That has really stuck with me. Because if you control the taxonomy and you control the rankings, you're also going to control how people think about where each thing fits and what's important or not.

5:14If you're a breeder of a Tamaskan, which is a Finnish dog that looks a lot like a wolf, and you're hoping to be able to show your dog at the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden, run by the American Kennel Club, you're out of luck. Any conversation of taxonomy wouldn't be complete without talking about dog breeds, because after all, there is no such thing. All dogs are on a spectrum, and show dogs merely fit within accepted boundaries of parts of that spectrum. And so what's going on at the Westminster Dog Show is a celebration of these artificial taxons. One other thing about it, something I have never understood, why is it considered a sport?

6:06Why do they cover the Westminster Dog Show in the sports section of the newspaper? Yet another example of putting something into a category. The other reason we want to rank things, of course, is not just so that we can be ranked number one, but so that we can pick the thing that is ranked number one, because it makes us feel better. It makes us feel better to know that we have a hit. and these rankings also, when they're subjective, make the winner feel really good. There's a concept called an EGOT. That's somebody who wins an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. Of course, Mel Brooks is an EGOT winner.

6:49The thing is, the open secret about the EGOT is that the easiest one to win is the E part because every year they give more than 1 ,000 Emmy Awards. If you show up on TV and you don't win an Emmy, you might not be doing something right. How did that happen? It happened because the taxonomy of TV got ever more complicated. There are sports Emmy Awards. There's daytime Emmy Awards. There's the Emmy Awards for Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland. Add it up. And sooner or later, if you stick with it and pick a category that's not too competitive, you too might win an Emmy. This led to some problems for the Grammy people.

7:38From 1986 to 2009, they awarded a Grammy for the best polka music. Of course, you know the immortal Jimmy Slur.

7:54Jimmy won a Grammy 18 out of 24 of those years. Good for him. That's a lot of polka talent in one person. But after a while, the Grammy people realized that maybe they should retire one of their categories. Okay, so to find things, to rank things, why else do we need a taxonomy? The next thing is to predict behavior. What we do is we learn how a category, a taxon, works. And we use that as a shortcut to predict how the next thing in that category will behave. So we would be stunned if a lion or a tiger or a bear started flying. Because things in those taxons don't fly. But if a bird, a bird we've never seen before, starts to fly, now we're not surprised at all because birds are supposed to fly.

8:56We categorize the world and then we make assumptions about how the world is going to work. And one way we get into trouble is when we try to make a taxonomy of human beings. When we try to say, oh, this person is going to act like this because they're in that category. So falsely categorizing and falsely predicting how something in a category will act leads to unfairness, to confusion, and to lost opportunities. The fourth reason we might want to sort things into a taxonomy is to understand how the universe works. When they decided that Pluto wasn't a planet, this was a big problem. It was a big problem because most of us haven't spent much time at all thinking about astronomy.

9:51And so, when they changed the rules of astronomy, the taxonomy of astronomy, we have to reconsider it. Well, if Pluto isn't a planet, what is a planet? And if Pluto isn't a planet, is Rover a dog? Is Pluto a dog? What is Pluto anyway? And Dino, is he a dinosaur? What happens when we start to mess with what deserves to be in what category? It makes us uncomfortable because categories mean we don't have to pay attention anymore. Once we know that the spoon goes in the spoon slot in the silverware drawer, we can forget about the spoon. But when we have an item, a new item in our house, a tape dispenser, and there's never been a spot for that before because the tape dispenser doesn't fit in the junk drawer, we have to leave it out.

10:41And every time we pass it, we're sitting there saying, what category do I want to put this in? The universe isn't working when that's occurring. And of course, there are different kinds of universes. If you go to an art museum, you don't expect the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures to be in the same room as a David Hockney painting. Of course not. It makes it too difficult for you to think about how art fits together, how the universe of art makes sense, if we eliminate the chronology that art has traditionally been judged by, chronology and materials. It lets us form taxons. But then, just about 30 years ago, they started messing with it because they divided contemporary from modern art.

11:30What? That doesn't make sense. Contemporary and modern art should be the same thing. But of course, they're not the same thing. They're not the same thing because modern art was a reaction against thousands of years of traditional art. It was the work of a few artists who stood up and said, now that there are cameras, we don't have to work to paint things to make them look like a photograph was taken. And that lasted for 50 or more years. But then the joke was over. Okay, we get it. You're not painting like you have a camera anymore. Is that the end? Is art over? And what Marcel Duchamp and others did was they pioneered contemporary art, which said, we are not reacting against traditional portraiture.

12:18We are reacting against art itself. That what we're going to try to do is represent ideas, not just the way that they are painted. This caused people a lot of consternation. And so curators, the curators who built taxonomy, needed to figure out how to divide those things so they could inform us. Because the purpose of the big sort, one of them, is to inform us about how the world works. Okay, a couple more. To find holes and opportunities. So quite famously, they talk about Miami Vice, the TV show. I can hear it coming in the air tonight. Oh, Lord. How much time we got? That was pitched with just two words.

13:12One was an acronym, two words. MTV Cops. What does MTV Cops mean? Well, MTV is a taxon. MTV is a category. MTV is music videos. And cops? Cops is a genre, a category, a police procedural. What happens if I mix them? So once I understand the grid, once I understand how the world is laid out, then I can find the holes and I can blend categories to find new things that are between categories. So what's a flying car? A flying car is in between cars and planes. It doesn't exist yet because the physics aren't in its favor, but the point is that there might be a way to have it exist. And when we think about business model generation, we can do the same thing.

14:04Some businesses are based on an auction. Some businesses are based on using heavy, expensive assets. Some businesses are based on the relationship between the buyer and the seller. Other businesses involve no relationship between the buyer and the seller. Once I can carve up the universe into categories, I have a chance to understand how the universe works. I have a chance to rank things in that universe. I have a chance to predict the behavior of things in one category or another. That's what stock market analysts do all the time. The P-E ratio of a stock is based largely on what industry it's in, which is based on what category it's in.

14:47This is why Jack Welch got famous. Jack Welch was the long-serving head of General Electric, and he may or may not have been a really good manager. But here's what he was great at. he convinced the stock market that General Electric was an industrial company, but he made money like a bank. And since he had the P-E ratio of an industrial company, but the profits of a bank, GE stock soared and soared and soared because all Jack Welch did was move one thing from one category, one taxon, to another. A conversation about taxonomy wouldn't be complete without talking about David Weinberger, miscellaneous, Google, and the folksonomy.

15:34Here's what happened. Google, unlike Yahoo, didn't need a librarian to figure out what goes where. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, not at first. It was a directory. And there were actually teams of people, hundreds in a back room, who were sorting with a taxonomy every website they could find, sorting them and ranking them, a logical way for a librarian to help you find the things and where they belonged in the universe. What Google came along and said is, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to do that. We're going to look at the words associated with people who are linking to every website on the web.

16:19So if someone is using the word plumbing supplies to talk about this website, and you type in plumbing supplies, well then, we're going to guess that's what you're looking for. This idea of tagging by the masses is called a folksonomy. It's a folksonomy because as more and more people tag more and more stuff, the number of categories grows organically. It's not a top-down process where a librarian decided that the Dewey decimal number is 700.14. Instead, the crowd is deciding what belongs in what pile. And as Google started down this race, what we saw was more and more miscellaneous just getting thrown in the pile.

17:05Because if you can tag everything, it doesn't matter where you put the tape dispenser. All you gotta do is type tape dispenser and you will find it. Suddenly, there aren't 100 categories or 1 ,000 categories. there's an infinite number of categories, which means sorting by category is no longer useful. It means that ranking by category is no longer useful. Everyone is a bestseller of one, because every category just has one in it, the one that is unique. And being a bestseller on Amazon in a category like new books about crocheting obviously isn't worth that much because the categories get smaller and smaller.

17:50But it doesn't matter. Because even though we can't rank the way we used to be able to rank, what we can do in this long-tail universe is find exactly what we're looking for. So I don't know if there's such a thing as left-handed crocheting. But if there is, now I'm going to be able to find it. Because the ever-growing folksonomy of people labeling stuff means that if I need it, I can find it. and those dinosaurs near my house, well, I can give them a tag that in addition to being Canada geese, they're also dinosaurs. And I left out the last one, but I want to address it now, which is that one reason we continue with taxonomy is to divide us.

18:38That people who seek to divide us label us. That people who are uncomfortable with miscellaneous scientists need to know who someone is before they encounter them, to find out what team they are on. And too often, as the media hypes up our political system, what we do is we judge others by the worst among them, and we judge our own team by the best among us, which is a completely unfair comparison. And what we end up doing as we seek to divide ourselves, we spend more and more time on the validity, in quotation marks, or the DNA verification of the person we're seeking to judge, the us versus them, and not nearly enough time on the folksonomy, the open long tail idea that everyone is actually in their own category.

19:36And so if putting someone in a category isn't helpful, then if all you care about is whether an animal flies, It doesn't matter if it's a flying squirrel or a sparrow. It still flies. And so the behavior that we see, the outputs that we see, make it way more important than whether Pluto is a planet or not. So yes, now we live in a world where everything is miscellaneous, where it pays for us to understand traditional categories so that we can find the whole, so we can blend, so we can invent MTV cups so we can find untapped opportunities. But no, we don't have trouble finding things anymore. This, this is a podcast.

20:23Me, sometimes I'm an author. Those are categories. But right now, you, you are an individual, an individual with choices, an individual who can choose to see the world one way or the other in any given moment. And the better we get at tagging things, the better we get at figuring out where we want to go, the more easily we'll be able to contribute to the culture we want to build. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in a minute with answers to your questions from last time.

21:10My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, sir. This is Rex. Hey, sir. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. We got some great questions this week. Before we get to them, I want to encourage you, if you're listening to this in early February, to visit akimbo.com. Not the usual akimbo.link. akimbo.com where we will tell you a little bit about a new workshop we're launching this week called The Business of Food. It's run by my colleague and hero Will Rosenzweig and you can read all the details at akimbo.com. Hi Seth, this is Rafi from North Carolina.

21:53I'm a plastic surgeon so I spent a lot of my time talking to people about their self-image and beauty and talking about what defines beauty. It's fascinating for me to think about how an ancient sculpture and its pure unpainted marble that in our current culture may be an undeniable representation of human aesthetics could be entirely different in its appearance from how its creator intended it. I agree entirely that we need more empathy and understanding what the regular kind was when it was created. My question though is, is that what we should be doing? Is it more important that we experience art as it was initially intended or as our culture currently sees it?

22:32Isn't it just all about how it makes us feel? Something I have learned in my line of work is that a person's self-perception of their own beauty and how that reflects on their self-confidence is far more important than the cultural norms of beauty that determine how other people see them. Thank you, Seth. Thanks, Doc, for this question. It's complicated at a bunch of levels, so we'll start with this. Art can certainly be consumed merely as what makes me feel good. But what has happened in the last hundred years of many forms of art or theater is that the idea behind it, that concept, is just as important as the execution.

23:15So a Marcel Duchamp ready-made hanging there, or understanding the algorithm that Saul LeWitt asked the curator to execute. These change our perception of what we are seeing. They change the way we understand it. And so the source does matter. Now, you can choose to view it purely as an aesthetic exercise without any narrative whatsoever. But plenty of people are engaging with art, with the story that it comes with, and that story is something we wrestle with, which leads to the second half of your question. I don't believe there are internal narratives about beauty that exist in a vacuum. I think that people who lived in the time of Rubens had a different body image than people who live now.

24:10I think that people who live in Miami have a different body image than people who live in Copenhagen. And I'm rounding, of course, everyone is on a spectrum. But what we know is this. We look in the mirror, but we also look at other people. We look in the mirror, but we also look at television or the internet. And so I think we cannot discount the fact that the culture around us feeds and fuels our narrative of whether or not we think we fit in or we stand out, whether we think we're tall enough, whether we think we're good enough. Personal aesthetics are always relative. When Gulliver ended up in the land of the Lilliputians, they said he was a giant.

25:01They didn't say, we're not tall enough. When he ended up in the land where people were half horse, they didn't say, oh, I hate the fact that I'm half a horse. They said, there's something wrong with this guy. The current dominant narrative is force-fed to us on a daily basis. That narrative is what fuels so much of what drives people to cosmetic surgery in the first place. Hey Seth, it's Jason Kugler from San Diego, California. I have a question for you. You highly recommend blogging daily. You say it will change you for the better. You also talk about putting your work out there for people to see.

25:46to not hide it because of what they may think. And also, you remind us that there's no such thing as writer's block. If you can't write things that are great, just keep writing and it'll naturally get better. So here's my question. If I commit to a daily blog and I commit to putting it out there for anyone and everyone to see, should I still post on days when the content isn't as good as I'd want it to be? Should I just not care what people think? I'm glad my riffs about the daily writing habit are resonating with you, so let me try to be as specific as I can. Your work will never be good enough.

26:24Your work is unlikely to ever feel good enough. But we do the work anyway. We go to the gym even though we can't run a four-minute mile. We decide to write an essay or a book or a blog post even though we are not Stephen King. That's okay. The goal here is not to be perfect. The goal is not even to be the best in the world. The goal is to express ourselves, to be interesting, to land an idea in someone else's consciousness so that they can go ahead and also make things better. So yes, you have to ship every single day. You can't say, what the heck, and ship junk. But you have to ship every single day.

27:12because that will put the resistance on notice and the resistance will push you to make better work the first time as opposed to spending all its time stalling and looking for excuses. Hi, Seth. This is Joey Wright from Lynchburg, Virginia. And I was wondering if you're the type of person who figured out the idea or the one who saw the other person figure out the idea, just like the crows. and if the latter, who did you gather some of your ideas from? One thing that I've appreciated about all of your work is the amount of goodwill you put into it. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's all about doing hard work, and I was kind of interested in where that, I guess, moral compass came from in you.

28:11Really love the work. Thank you for sharing all of your ideas with us. There are no original ravens. There are no wholly original thinkers. It is impossible to bring a wholly original thought to the world and have the world do anything at all with it. the best we can hope for is juxtapositions, combinations. Take this and that. When we put them together, oh, we have something new. So when email was young, I said, what would happen if we combined email, something I didn't invent, with game shows, something I didn't invent? What would happen if we figured out how to earn the permission of people we were engaging with?

29:05That was something I invented, but it wasn't a wholly original idea. My guess is that the ravens and the blue tits and the other creatures that figure out new ways of engaging with the modern world, They bump into something, and after they've bumped into it, they change it just a little bit. And if it works, they do it more. Then there are other ravens who are much better at seeing what's working and copying it. I would like to think that I'm a combiner, not a copier, but I am well aware that on a good day, 90 to 99 % of the work I'm doing is about copying what someone did before me, and then maybe, just maybe, twisting it a little bit to make it even more useful.

29:55That brings us to the second half of your super generous question. And here's the thing. There are a few people, the Milton Friedmans and the Ayn Rands of the world, Robert Ringer looking out for number one, who have somehow persuaded people in our culture that the short-term hustle, the selfish shortcut, But the this is for me, not for you mindset is what we're supposed to do. It's not. And every day, cops and crossing guards put their lives on the line. Every day, people go to work at a hospital and do grueling, emotional labor for not enough respect and not enough pay. Everywhere we look, people are paying it forward, making the culture around them better.

30:42So my posture of doing this, it's not original. In fact, it's pretty common. And it's the only way I can see to be able to be the contribution that I seek to be. So yes, Zig Ziglar came before. You can get everything in the life you want if you'll just help enough other people get what they want, he used to say. I'd like to just leave out half of that. How about you can go ahead and make the culture better if you can help other people get to where they are going, period. It's a privilege. It's something that we get to do. It's not a shortcut for a way to get more. So I try to highlight the people who have come before me as often as I can, but I should do it more because mostly what people who are trying to make change do is they take things that are working from the world and slightly repurpose them to make things better.

31:41Hi Seth, this is Nishtha from India. Firstly, thanks a lot for the incredible work you are putting out. This is Marketing. The book is really awesome. My question is, do we as budding entrepreneurs, as people who are trying to make their mark in the world step by step, do we really have to market on Instagram because it is too addictive? Your question faded out at the end, but I'm going to run it here anyway, Nishita. And here's the deal. Marketing is not advertising. Marketing is not interrupting people. And marketing is not keeping track of how many likes you have on a social media platform.

32:21So no, you don't have to use Instagram. Instagram is often a symptom of something working. It is not a tactic that causes it to work. So just as there were great brands that were built without running TV ads, and just as there are people who have something to say, who are not saying it in a tweet, you need to figure out who is your audience? How do they want to see you? How do they want to consume your work? How can you go to where they are and engage with them in a way that fuels your work and theirs instead of agreeing to be a pawn in the Twitter, Facebook axis of social media where you are doing what the company wants, not what's good for you and the people you seek to help.

33:12So there you go. A bunch of questions this week. Thank you for listening. We love to hear from you, please visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K. Click the appropriate button and share your question. I'll do my best to answer it. We'll see you next time.