The short list (E)

0:00Argon is one of the noble gases. It's an element on the periodic table. So, here's the question. What is the atomic number of argon? Hey, it's Kevin Beach, and this is a special archived episode of Akemba.

0:22The thing is, the atomic number of argon is not an interesting question. it's something you could easily look up. Someone already knows the answer. When I wrote Stop Stealing Dreams several years ago, in it I put that there are two things we ought to teach kids to do in school. One is to lead, and the second is to solve interesting problems. And I've been surprised through the years at how many people have asked, How do we find interesting problems for our kids to solve? I've heard you speak on a number of occasions about finding interesting problems to solve with your kids, and I love this idea.

1:10I try to do this as much as I can, but to be honest, it can be rather difficult to come up with new things. I realize that solve interesting problems has three challenges. solve, interesting, and problems. So I wanted to talk for a few minutes about what it means to find and work on an interesting problem. Let's begin with solve. If you come from the educational industrial complex with multiple choice tests, with SAT scores, with most of all the right answer, with the idea that the teacher has something in mind and you're supposed to guess what it is, then the word solve is a bit confusing because it implies that there is a solution, an answer.

2:01But interesting problems are almost never solved. And that's because there isn't one answer, that there might be the best available answer in this moment. but tomorrow there might be a better one. And so maybe challenge kids with interesting problems is more accurate than solving them. The third word, problems, is also a bit of a challenge because what does it mean to have a problem? And is a problem a good thing or a bad thing? If you've got a perfect problem, you know, the one that just resists everything you do to solve it, that's because it's probably not a problem at all. It's probably a set of mutually incompatible constraints that give you no obvious way forward, and that the only way to move forward is to ease some of those constraints to make the problem less perfect, which is where we get to interesting.

3:12An interesting problem is worth the effort we put into it. Knowing the atomic number of argon, in addition to being not much of anything other than data acquisition, isn't particularly interesting, because the only reason you're tracking it down is because it's on the test. So I've been thinking hard about where interesting problems come from and how we might recognize them. One thing to begin with is this. There are always going to be wrong answers to interesting problems. Obviously wrong, obviously deficient that don't meet the constraints that are bested by something that we are aware of already.

4:01But it also means that we need to be able to fail as we seek to solve one of these problems. That effort needs to be put into it, and we have to be okay with the fact that after we put in the effort, we might not be rewarded with a win. It's a problem to be addressed, to challenge us, and it's interesting. It's a puzzle, and it's worth our effort. One thing that makes these problems work is that they have multiple axes. If the problem is shoot a baseball as fast as you possibly can, then we have a linear set of solutions. Either this method of shooting the baseball is faster or slower than that one.

4:53Multiple axes, though, get to the heart of what it is to be in the real world. Consider the interesting problem of design a new kind of jet airplane. Well, one of the axes is it's got to be safe. Another one is it needs to be fuel efficient. Another one is it needs to fit into the largest possible number of airports. Another one is it needs to be cheap to buy. Another one is it needs to be cheap to maintain. Another one is it needs to be efficient to fly. It must load fast. It must unload fast. You can go down a list of 20 or 30 axes that we might want to optimize on. And I am confident in telling you, there is not one airplane design that wins on all of them.

5:45There are trade-offs. And it's the trade-offs that make the problem interesting. The next one goes right next to the idea of multiple axes, and it's multiple users. Different people want different things. So that master of the universe with unlimited money who's desperate for prestige and status, he might want a private jet, one he can stand upright in without having to duck his head when he gets in. not because it meets most of the standards of an airplane, but because it meets his standard. So part of solving this interesting problem is figuring out who it's for in the first place. One of the other things that goes on with interesting problems in our culture is that the solution might demand novelty.

6:39So the first time Bob Dylan sang Tangled Up in Blue,

6:53He satisfied people who wanted to hear a new Bob Dylan song. He's not allowed to sing that song again the same way and solve the problem that those people have brought to the table. So many problems, including the ones we can bring our kids, are based around novelty. What have you done for me lately? The next idea is adjustable constraints. That there are constraints in any problem. If there are no constraints, then there is no problem. But some problems have adjustable ones. We can give up some of this to get some of that. If we seek to make a car for less than$50 ,000, we might decide to spend part of our budget on a high-tech new body paint.

7:48But if we do that, we won't have as much money left to buy the tires. Consider what happened in television about 10 or 15 years ago. Now, they'd been making television for a really long time. A television show for network TV was a pretty interesting problem. There was no last best TV show, that there were many axes, there were multiple users, there were different constraints. The assignment of come up with a clever idea for a 30-minute sitcom is a really interesting problem.

8:35But about a decade ago, the problem got more complicated, and that's because of Pay TV. Pay TV said, we're going to change some of the constraints. Now you can make many, many episodes that people will watch over and over again. Now you can run them without worrying about censors. Now you can run them without commercials. And so then Mad Men and The Sopranos showed up and, quote, reinvented, unquote, television. They did this by solving a new problem. They did it by solving a problem for HBO and the other networks in a way that would permit them to solve their interesting problem of how do we get people to stop watching network TV and pay to watch us instead.

9:34And one of my favorite examples is the garbage can. The garbage can in New York City. New York City has tens of thousands of garbage cans. Their budget for a garbage can is about$175. dollars. The maximum weight for a garbage can, 32 pounds. That's because a full garbage can is really heavy. It has to be lifted at least once a day, sometimes more. There are a long list of the things that a New York City garbage can has to achieve if it wants to be a successful New York City garbage can. And so last year, the Department of Sanitation ran a design competition. You can see the details on the show notes at akimbo.link.

10:23This challenge leads to the key question, where are the trade-offs? We can have this, but we can't have that. We can make it lighter, but that will make it less durable. We can make it prettier, but it will be harder to lift. Should we make it in two pieces so one part stays where it is and the other part gets lifted out when we're emptying it? Our budget could go over$175, but only if we could show that the garbage can would last even longer? How are we going to deal with things like recycling, particularly when the rules of that keep changing? How do we keep rats out of the garbage can? An endless list.

11:00It's obvious that the garbage can has not been solved forever. The garbage can will never be solved forever. There are multiple users, multiple constraints. There are different ways of measuring what success looks like. So when we sit down with our kids and we try to help them understand what it is to solve interesting problems, first we begin with this. You're not going to get in trouble for getting it wrong because no one knows what right means. That we've got to get past the idea that you're going to get an A on this. And instead of pushing you to go find the right answer, we need to push you to ask the right questions, to understand trade-offs, to look deeply into uncertainty.

11:49And instead of running away from it, trying to come up with a way to guarantee it will not return, figure out how to embrace it and put resilience into what we build. It's easy to imagine that only designers, maybe engineers and architects, have to deal with interesting problems. But of course, it's not true. Running for president is an interesting problem. Winning a new kind of lawsuit is an interesting problem. Understanding how to get along at work when the rules at work keep changing, that's an interesting problem. Alas, each of us has been brainwashed for 5 or 10 or 20 years to look for the right answer instead of figuring out what's interesting.

12:37Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

12:56Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. I love hearing from you. I hope you will visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. Also, you'll find show notes on this and every episode. Hi Seth, my name is Thea. Thank you so much for all the work you do and your generosity. So my question is around the episode around podcasting. And given that the average podcast download is only 125 and that the average author won't be making J.K. Rowling kinds of money, your thesis seemed to be that we should be creating content, you know, writing podcasting for the sake of enjoyment.

13:50And that runs counter, I think, to a lot of cultures, or at least subcultures, that we should be pursuing influence and we should be pursuing wealth and dream big, right? Pursue your passion. All of that stuff. Thank you, Thea, for the kind words. It gives me a chance to clarify two things that are easily misunderstood, two forks in the road. One fork in the road is, can somebody who creates, a singer, a writer, a playwright, make money simply by being heard? And for 10 ,000 years, the answer was no. That for 10 ,000 years, you couldn't make a living as a poet. Then, in the 1900s, things began to change.

14:42And the reason they began to change is there was scarcity and gatekeepers. They go hand in hand. So Don Rickles got picked to be on The Tonight Show. That makes Don Rickles famous. And now, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Warmth himself, Don Rickles.

15:10Nice to see you in a red shirt right in the front. That's class. I never entertained a Mountie.

15:1940 million Americans. I gotta get a dummy Mountie right here in the front. Hello, dummy. And he waved to me. I said, hello, dummy. He went, he knows me. I'm a Mountie. Being famous makes him a living. That J.K. Rowling, it took her many tries, got picked in the U.S. by Scholastic. That got her bookstore distribution. That distribution sold a lot of books. That got her a royalty check. When the market opened, and it opened wide, when the gatekeepers began to leave the building, A whole bunch of people, people who were creative, who had something to say, looked at the fact that no one could stop them from self-publishing a book or self-publishing a video or self-publishing a song and thought that the second half of the equation would hold.

16:10But it doesn't. As soon as scarcity goes away, as soon as it's easy to have a podcast, then having a podcast is worth less. if your goal is to get paid for the digital content you are creating. Because digital content, with two exceptions, has many, many substitutes. If there are many substitutes, then it's hard to charge for it. The two exceptions are, is it timely? For example, a Bloomberg machine costs thousands of dollars a month because you can get information 15 minutes faster than you can on the internet. And second, is there a community? Am I paying to connect to other people who wouldn't be around me if I didn't pay the toll?

17:01So, A, I'm saying that if your goal is simply to create content that is digital, it is probably a good idea to view that as a hobby, as an opportunity to share what you've got. And if you end up hitting the jackpot, fantastic, but it's a lottery. The second half of it, though, is that attention is precious. If the 125 people or the 175 people or the 700 people who are listening to your podcast are all chief marketing officers of Fortune 1000 companies, that attention is worth a lot. And what I've been saying for 20 years since I wrote Permission Marketing is that attention is undervalued, that marketers suck it up and spit it out like it's worth nothing.

17:54It's worth more than nothing. It's worth a lot. that if you can find the 1 ,000 true fans and they can find you, that if you can figure out how to be heard and trusted by people, you get a bigger prize. And that prize you get is to be heard and to change the conversation. So maybe you get paid to be a professional speaker. Maybe people sign up to be clients of your chemical consulting firm. Maybe you make an impact on the discussions that are going on in London or Washington. This attention doesn't scale, and that's fine. That the opportunity is to find the smallest viable audience, not the largest possible one, not compromise for them because you got to pick them.

18:42And so without compromise, create a narrative for them that they want to hear. Can you do this for a living? Yes, you can. This is the fundamental transformation that the internet has brought to business. This is what you can do for a living. You can also do it as a hobby. That's great too. But I think it's important to belie the mythology that says just because you have skill or perhaps talent, you are entitled to get paid well to share that digitally. Generally, that's not true. And I think that's just fine because all of this contribution that's getting made to the culture by people who want to be seen and understood and trusted, it weaves together an intellectual framework for so many of us.

19:34And finally, a correction. Last week in my rant about privacy, I mentioned Walmart, when I should have talked about Target being the company that figured out a woman was pregnant before she even knew it. I posted the correction on my show notes and then heard from a reader who pointed out that it was an urban legend. I checked with Charles Duhigg, who wrote the original article in the New York Times. It's not an urban legend. The story was confirmed by several Target executives. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.