Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google)

23:49Once we know how it exists, we can figure out how to make it do great things and how we as members of the system can tweak and nudge it. So I just want to flag that before I dive into this. You know, I have this slime mold deck, which has gotten the ton of traction over the years. And part of the reason for that is because it feels like, people tell me it feels like getting a big, like they think they're crazy. And it feels like giving the big hug, saying you were not crazy. Here's why this thing shows up. And once you acknowledge it, it feels like a bummer to acknowledge it. But once you do, now there's all kinds of options that pop up.

24:18Oh, given that this thing is way more offensive than it looks, I can now do this and set that one's 10 times cheaper. Of these two options, this one is way cheaper, way more likely to succeed. So once you see these forces, you see them work really. So K -Fave is, I think, a lens that's useful to understand how organizations actually work. K -Fave is a word that comes, I believe is a carnivore that is used and applied to professional wrestling. And it means a thing that everybody knows is fake and yet everybody acts like Israel. And I think it's one of the defining forces within an organization, any organization.

24:47So K -Fave in the small is optimism, enthusiasm. When someone says, we're going to do this thing. you say, yeah, we're going to do that. Even if I think it's going to work. If you say, I know this thing is going to work. Everyone loses hope and it definitely doesn't work. So having a little bit of this is extremely valuable. It's the lubricant that allows organizations to believe they can do something and to attempt to do it. The problem that you get is, as organizations get larger, imagine you or five levels down or something and you have this project you're working on and you're trying to give a status update to your rolled up to leadership.

25:21And it's currently a yellow. And your manager asks it. And you know, it's not going to be presented to leadership and enrolled up until next week. Yes, yellow, but I've got my arms around the problem. I know I'm not a fix it. I'm going to go talk to Sarah. I think they are a solution. By the time it's reported up, the chain is going to be green. So if I make it yellow, there's a non -trivial chance that someone's going to swoop down and say, well, what's going on? And we have a review and it will be way harder to fix. So I'm just going to a little white light. It's green. This is a totally reasonable thing to do.

25:48And to self -defense, the thing to do is It's probably the right thing for the organization too. The problem is, this happens up multiple layers and it compounds. So then your layer above you does the same, it does the same, and it levels up. You can be many orders of magnitude off of the ground truth. And so the K -fave, the thing that everyone pretends to believe is true, is obviously incorrect. And the dangerous part about this is it can lead you to make very bad decisions. And if you as someone who sees this can see that wait a second, the official strategy is definitely not going to work.

26:17You're like, I got to tell somebody. We're doing work between the bad directions, not going to work. And you go and say, it's actually not going to work for these reasons. And what someone will say to you, this happens, by the way, I'm not substituting any particular organization that's happened literally in all organizations to some degree, is the senior person will say, Alex, I agree with you. It's not perfect. But if you hit the ground truth, if you share that and everybody, the whole thing will shadow and we can't do anything. And so, how we fix it. Like don't say the ground truth, just help them not get in fix it.

26:51Like that's a good point. Okay, so you help working on it. And then you realize, you know, a month later, we just like it's getting worse. We're doing things that's not good for the company. It's not fitting user value. It's not good for the employees. They're burning out. It's just not good for anybody. And it's getting worse. And so if you think you're going to go and hit the ground truth button, before you do, you'll be flying tackle to the ground by somebody and stabbed in the dark because you will destroy everything. And so it becomes correct to hold onto this idea. If you acknowledge the K -Tab is false, then you are in danger, again knocked out of the game.

27:22And so how do you do good things despite the fact that you're pulled into different directions? And this is increasingly in the limit. It can be good to a point where the easiest way is if I let go of this idea, if I do, if I hold on this idea, we might create significant value for the company. If I let go of this idea, I die. So the easiest way to maintain this split brain thing is to just turn this part off and just earnestly believe the K -Fape This has been organizations become zombies and anyone individually you talk to behind the scenes We'll agree I think it's not possibly work that turns out that these things work this way and yet the entire organization numbers on and This is a kind of death state for large organizations.

27:59It happens all over the place And then any number of different conditions and this is one of the reasons it shows up and I think acknowledging that is an important ways to help navigate and still make good grounded things happen. Like, how can you allow disconfirming evidence to show up that doesn't kill you that helps make you stronger? If it all has to come in one massive moment that could ruin everything, then you weren't going to hear it. And then it will build up and build up and build up and build up into a super critical state that could shadow. Yeah. I was just listening to a couple podcasts and a thread that came up in the number of them is some of the most successful leaders.

28:34their instruction to their reports is as soon as there's bad news, I need to know as soon as possible. Do not shield me. I just want to know all the bad news as soon as possible. Feels like that's one solution to what you're describing. Like, disconfirming evidence hurts. And so you won't, you won't realize it. It hurts to that any given moment. It's a distraction. We're just trying to get this thing done. And so it comes from a good place to not get it. But if you're busy, that's what you need to take a step back. We take a step back. You're a little bit calmer. You can absorb this confirming evidence.

29:01It doesn't feel like an existential threat It's really easy to get surrounded if you are very powerful You will find all the confirming evidence you need and if it doesn't exist it will be created for you without your knowledge And so this is one of the the reasons that large companies are radically different than smaller companies and one of the traps You can get into of not realizing this dynamic is happening And you can you can make very bad decisions if you don't understand that is inherently without it You feel they all will have some bad actors. You don't know. If people don't play this game, this game is emergent.

29:32It shows up even though everybody hates it and if you don't play the game, you are knocked out of the game. The underlying dynamic that must be true in any organization on a fundamental basis is you can't make your boss talk dumb. Because if you do, they're the person who will go to science or all his person is not performing or whatever. And that one little asymmetry, one little fact, in most cases, it's still that matter. that one little asymmetry is what leads to the systemic compounding thing where you get these really weird dysfunctional emerging things that everybody hates nobody wants and yet nobody is in the position to change per se.

30:05I love your caveat at the beginning that continues to resonate in my head as you say this like you're not cynical about the sucks. It's more here is what I'm observing we need to think about ways to get around this. Yeah, because I mean that I think So much pain and misery is caused by us being not acknowledging these fundamental, inescapable things. I can almost, it's almost impossible. Like entropy is one of those things. Entropy emerges because there's more ways to go away from point than towards a point. It's fundamentally like must be true. In really any universe you can possibly imagine.

30:35And so if you're going to fight entropy, like you're going to lose at a certain point. So like if you are aware of these things, you can find subsets of ideas that do work despite these challenges. And that's some of the stuff that tactics I advise are often things that look playful. They look un -serious. They look like, oh, you're saying you don't know the answer. No, I'm admitting I don't know the answer. And I'm saying it doesn't matter if I don't know the answer because this thing, this very small seed I am planting is so cheap that yes, I can't tell you for sure this will work. But I could tell you there is a chance that will work and the downside of this is basically the opportunity cost of planting the seed in this one moment.

31:10And the person who's planting it enjoys planting it so that opportunity costs really isn't that much because they get energy from doing it. So who cares? Plan a bunch of these suckers. You know, if one of these grows into an oak tree, that's great. Don't try to analyze beforehand, which seed is going to turn into oak tree. If it's super simple to plant the seeds, then plant the seeds. And if it starts growing, then keep watering it. That's it. That's the thing. And people sometimes will see this as like, I've been called in Nileist before because they said, well, you're saying that you don't know the answer to the thing.

31:36And it's like, no, I'm saying I would have to know the answer to the thing. If on a systemic basis, I let these ideas, and then you respond to the ones who are working that are viable doesn't really matter if you didn't know ahead of time which ones were going to work. This is a great segue to talking about this core idea that again informs a lot of the way you think which is this idea of building versus gardening, the magic of acorns. Talk about this general idea and then I want to follow some threads. So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like I have a plan, I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen.

32:11and this is a way you can create tons of value. Part of the problem though is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. And so what I look for instead are things that can be garden, things that can grow on their own and that you can sort of direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy too or curate over. And it is a totally different mindset for it. So it's like a lead by gardening kind of vibe. I don't try to pick the things in the system. I try to work with what I've actually got and I try to lean in on the ones that turn, I think are going in the direction that I believe is valuable based on constantly seeking disconfirming evidence.

32:44And if you do this properly, it looks like magic. It looks like a thing, it looks like getting lucky because what you're doing is you're farming for miracles. And so on a systemic basis, I can't tell you which of these things will work. But I can tell you there's a very high likelihood that one of these will work in a way that is interesting and transformative. And so if you're looking and finding these seeds that have the compounding potential, like if they work, they start working at an accelerating rate, then like, you don't have to not have time. So like, this is just, to me, this is, I've been told that this is completely against all the advice that people get, you know, building products nowadays.

33:20And, but I think it's a very powerful approach that works in a lot of different contexts. Is there an example that you can give from either from something you worked on or something someone worked on that came or trimis because I think people hearing this might be like, But I had shipped, I got a ship stuff, I got to hit some goals. I don't have time to sit around and garden and plant seeds. I got to actually build. If there's an ecosystem approach, if there's something that if it works, they'll sort of be self -accelerating. So, okay, what you're going to do is say, we aren't entirely sure what's going to work.

33:50But if a developer writes a thing and someone uses it, it'll track more developer -effect users. And then this would row on its own. Then it's cheap to do the little example of the thing. It's cheap to build the little open source, like tinkery little thing and just put it there. And if nobody uses it, it's fine. It was fun to build it, it took you three hours, it's fine. If someone does use it, then you just invest an incremental bit of unit each time that you find a signal that somebody is finding it useful and then you stop if you ever cease getting that information. So like I would use this anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect and many things have network effects of some kind of compounding loop.

34:23Compounding loops are not rare. They are, they are, look, there's like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked we're working on an accelerating rate. Lots and lots and lots of things intrinsically have this shape. Anything with a network effect, anything with the power goes up with a number of users, but it shows up in all kinds of problems that we don't normally apply it to. Along the same lines, you also advise people to think more emergence oriented versus top down. It's kind of what you're just saying, but I think that's another really interesting way of thinking about this same idea.

34:58Create opportunities to your emergence, bottom up versus top down control. You just chat about that. 100%. I think the emergence is one of the most powerful forces if you know how to marshal it and you know how to work with it. And the only thing that's hard about it, in my opinion, is you're going to look like you aren't very serious. You're going to look like a weirdo. You're going to look like a cook. And one of the downside, if you're working on something and you're doing the normal top down approach for you, make the plan, you execute the plan, even if the plan turns out to not be useful, you bring yourself thing and nothing interesting happens, no one can say you didn't work hard.

35:29But if you try doing this kind of designing for emergence and something amazing happens even once it happens Will go I was luck. I didn't I where was the miraculous moment where you the heroic moment where you made that happen So therefore you had nothing to do with it and this was the biggest unlock in my career actually was when I stopped My gut said was promoted to director at Google. I was like cool I never want to be promoted inside of a large organization ever again and The freedom to now do the highest impact work even if I can't make it legible to the organization was so powerful and I was able to like 10x my impact with the organization because they have to worry about making it measurable specifically in a way that would show individual heroic effort.

36:08And I think that's the hardest part. You have to have like typically what I would advise for PM's my approach at Google was 70 % of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and create value. Maybe it's boring linear value but some kind of value you're trying to minimize the chance that any other person in a company will say Why does that team do anyway? If someone says about your team, your team is on the verge of death. So you try to minimize the chance that anybody wants to say that or thinks that it's appropriate to say that. But clearly, an unindiculously adding value.

36:41You're not saying this is the best team in the entire world, but clearly they're doing something useful. They're executing well, they're working hard, and of course, a team should exist. I don't know, I don't think about it. Of course they should. But now, once you do this, you have like 30 % of your extra time that you can plant all these seeds. You can find interesting little things where maybe a junior PM on the team has an idea you think is kind of silly, but they're really into it. And the reason is, the thing, it could work out great actually. If you tweak it like this, there is a potential, like I guess, I can see how that could work.

37:07If that PM is gonna work on that anyway, they wanna do it anyway. So they say, no, no, no, no, we don't have time for that to be a little bit more productive over here. I say, go for it. I hear my concern, I do this part might not work, but this part is really cool right here. And then if it works, if it doesn't work, then they've stretched their agency. They've executed, they've exercised their agency. They've learned, they've gotten stronger, they've gotten, they've grown. It has the upside of it turns out to actually work. And worst -case scenario, you know, the opportunity got to do anything that helped them grow and they learned and they like.

37:36So like, I don't know, don't try to force it. Don't try to stop it. That's a really good example of actually how to go about doing that on your team. The way I've always thought about this is the visual I share with people is like, you want to create cover fire for your team? Where your team's just hitting goals, moving metrics, and then while with that cover fire, you're kind of building the Doomsday bomb inside protected. Where no one's going to come and stop you. Yeah, yeah. Because one of the hardest parts about an acorn when you plant it is making sure a squirrel doesn't dig that flicker up.

38:04Yeah. Like there's so many things that can destroy it. And just keeping it allowing it some space and allowing it some time is the most important thing. And it's challenging to do, but that's why it's important as a leader to have enough credibility in the organization that people can see that you are doing useful work to to give you a space to protect, to give your team the space to do this truly great work. Like, if you wanna get your team to do good work, there's a million different paths to do that. If you wanna get your team to do great work, there's no shortcut other than to have an extremely high trust environment where people lean into their superpowers in a way that adds up to something greater than some of its parts.

38:39That takes time, takes effort, it's very different to make legible up at the rest of the organization, but that is where great things come from. It reminds me of something Ed Katmull shared in creativity, ink, this idea of the ugly baby, that every new idea is an ugly baby. And nobody wants this ugly baby. Everyone's just like, get this out of here, because every new idea is bad initially. Yeah, it sucks. They're just like this ugly thing that barely works, or kind of like, but this is why what I try to do is, I try to see the greatness, the seeds of greatness, and everything. Everyone and everything around me, I look for, I try to find and steal, man, what is the most compelling part of this?

39:16And let me lean into that. And so one of the things I try to do when I meet with people I mentioned them, I try with it within the first session or two, whenever I can sort of get a hypothesis of this, I think your superpower is, and I describe to them what I think I can see them being truly exceptional at. And sometimes I get it wrong, especially if I try to do it earlier, but when people feel very seen and they feel acknowledged for that, they now are willing, they're going to stretch farther and they're going to respond to nudging feedback even better because they know that you're not trying to tell them be different.

39:44You're trying to tell them be more and you can and now the nudges will feel less like a stop energy and more like it Someone who gets me and can help me grow even more and you can get some amazing things out of people when you just treat them with the respect I take from a assume that everyone I talk to everyone I talk to is You know is it interesting as seeds of greatness in them even if they don't recognize this is really where they are Someone described to me actually this morning in one of my little dirt clubs. I run about about the help to facilitate about treat everybody like the Buddha.

40:15I think it's messing with stuff, but like this notion of like, imagine everyone you talk to is the Buddha, you know, Buddhist mindset. And how do you see and find that those seeds of greatness and treat everyone with respect and prinsically as an end of the other themselves? This is one of those things that you do to be like a compassionate human. It's also, I believe, a way to maximize the amount of value direct and indirect value that's created. So it's like one of those win, win, win, win, wins. Where it's the right thing to do as a person and a member of society, and it's also the thing that can create a lot of business value and create real value in the world.

40:49This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests, to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar, Coda is my go -to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help you get more done. And Coda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OCRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas.

41:25You can also access hundreds of pressure tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision making frameworks. See for yourself by companies like DoorDash, Figma, and Qualtrics. Run on Coda. Take advantage of this special, limited time offer just for start -ups. Head over to coda .io slash Lenny. And sign up to get 6 free months of the team plan. That's coda .io slash Lenny to sign up and get 6 months of the team plan. Coda .io slash Lenny. Coming back to a phrase that you used earlier, slime molds. I want to spend a little time here. So, interestingly enough, the first time I heard about you and what got me interested in your stuff is I did a newsletter post with the company perplexity about how they build product.

42:13And as they were describing how they organized their team, the co -founders described they organized like slime mold and healing to your deck about slime molds. And I was like, what the heck is this? Can you just briefly describe what you mean when you talk about slime molds and how slime molds are related to the way companies are organized and how they should think of the organization. Yeah, so the main thesis of the slime mold deck is that the core dynamic that makes organizations hard to navigate as they get larger, even if you assume everybody is actively good at what they do, actively collaborative and actively hardworking, is this emergent force of coordination of finding the subset of projects to work on.

42:50It would never be super busy, that everyone agrees and commits to actually work on together. And finding this coordination cost is in, you know, grows kind of with the square of the number of people who are working on that thing. And so what companies typically try to do is fight this or ignore that it exists. If you're going to fight it, the one way to look at this is, think about a company like a vehicle. When the company is very small, you can drive it, you can steer it like a sports car. As a founder, you're allowed to steer. Everyone acknowledges you are allowed to steer. They're never going to be wise.

43:18They're staring at that way. So you, a founder can help navigate a organization around an obstacle, the organization cannot see or comprehend itself. The problem is, as you steer, as you grow into the size, your organization goes from a sports car and you grow into the size of a big rig. If you drop a big rig like a sports car, you're going to be a danger to yourself and others on the road and you're going to grind the engine. And so you've got to drive the car that you actually have. So I see a lot of things happen in large organizations. If you're just trying to ignore this fact. And when you drive, by the way, a car, your vehicle, like a big rig, when it is a big rig, people go, oh, it means go slow.

43:53No, no, no. It means pivot less. It means have a little bit more, like, you know, be more intentional about the times that you adjust the steering, invest more in program management, invest more in processes, give a little bit more slack in the planning process to absorb any kind of unsurprising things that you can still all reach the product launch at the same time. The other option you can do is you can split your thing up into a series, a swarm of sports individual sports cards. And the downside of this, do you get the autonomy and strengths of the bottom up? The downside is other people will look at it and go, well that team clearly didn't talk.

44:26You'll say, yep. You have to decide how bad that is for you. Apple has chosen the former. Is it very important to them to have the illusion of perfect coherence in their products? It worked very well for them to execute it. Obviously. And if you also pick the exact opposite thing, it would be awesome. There's like 15 different ways of doing everything to clearly talk to each other. but it allows the overall swarm of the AWS products suite to be very powerful and anti -fragile or whatever you want to say. And so slime molds, I think, is like acknowledging that organizations are, especially ones that focus on autonomy and agency of their individual employees, which is a lot of tech companies, they are more like slime molds than we realize.

45:04And if you fight that fact, you're going to have a bad time. And if you embrace it, and you can start realizing slime molds, yeah, it's gonna come amazing. They can find solutions or problems. You didn't even know you were searching for it. Alex, if the best matter for us, I don't know how you do this, but they're so evocative and correct. I can tell you the process I do if you release that. I think by talking I'm an external processor. I literally can't think if I'm not talking. Make sure I have as many interesting meetings as I can. That's where I discover what I think by talking to people. The test is, if I say a frame, something that the person goes, oh, they're like, they go, ah -ha, that's a win.

45:45That's a mark that's a good one. You're just randomly casting it, I find one. And then if a different person, also the similar response, if a person in sales and a person in engineering both find the same idea, interesting, it's a very good sign that lots of people will find it interesting. How diverse in terms of background skill sets, you know, perspectives are the people who resonate with the thing you're saying. The intuition of this is, if you find in a social network, you want to see what's to go viral. If something is shared and it's shared within a certain people who are at the beginning are all highly densely interconnected in the social graph, then the implied ceiling is relatively small.

46:22You only know it works with that audience. But if you're people that are very different sub graphs and very little overlap, they both find it interesting. That implies a much larger max audience. So you're looking for ideas that resonate with the diversity of people. And then once you find them, each time you get a signal like that, you'll notice a little more time in it. You think a little bit more about framing it. The next time you I haven't done this during this chat, but in most conversations, you will see me as I'm talking, writing down stuff, but oh, that was the best formulation of that one so far.

46:49And so you keep on coming back to it, you keep on tightening it and seeing how, watching how it's responding and referring with different people. So you're like, where did you get these from? I was like, I got like thousands and thousands and thousands of little examples or metaphors or whatever. That's sick. One of the benefits of metaphorical thinking is you connect nine of the 10 dots and you will allow you invite the listener to engage with the argument to connect that last dot. This allows you by the way it's a very controversial thing because if you say if you can't put all the 10 dots and it's like oh that's the official strategy then you are instantly you know a dangerous thing whereas if you leave one dot I connect it you'll go connect that I go oh my god I think I'm gonna place the opposite like oh my god what like yes that's why I picked that so but to It kind of acts this because now it's less obvious to people that it's correct.

47:35You have to make the metaphor evocative and interesting. One of the reasons a slime mold deck got so much traction is partially because slime is gross, it's bad, and yet it's talking about why slime is good. And so that has this kind of instantly subversive thing. I only know this after the fact of trying to figure out why did that deck get so much attention for all the things that were written. It also is all emojis basically, which is not how you often read a deck. It was very beautifully made. I love that you've been talking about the way you think and come up with ideas is by talking to people and having conversations.

48:09We also talked about how you write in this bits and bubs approach. I asked someone that you worked with at Stripe what to ask you. She said to ask you about strategy salons, which feels like a good avenue for this sort of thing. Can you talk about what these are and how you set these up? So these are also called nerd clubs. These are my secret weapon. I have a blog post. I started writing it for my second kid. It was born and then he was born three weeks early and I just lost the plot. Now it's like a 40 page draft of a thing that will probably never finish. But I've used this tactic. I discovered it many years ago as I strengthened some of the techniques I've used in open source community organizing.

48:47And the situation was I was just doing a new team at Google. I've been there for many years. And there was like at the time, 12 different groups work in different aspects of this overall problem domain. And it has a Google fashion. They add up to significantly less than the some other parts. As in not like, oh, we'll see which one works. But like these two things directly under my each other, if you execute both of these strategies, neither can work. And I knew that if you try to do pairwise executive reviews on this very complex ambiguous open ended problem, you would get really expensive pageantry they would obscure more than it clarified.

49:17So I did with a creative secret group that I call naval gaysers with the original one and I wanted people when they hear about it, I want people to go like, I have something like a club for nerds. Yeah, do you want in? And so this means that only people who intrinsically want to be in it for its own sake come in. So you get only a kind of positive, you know, yes and kind of energy. So then within these groups, you say you said the norm is very explicitly and say this is a collaborative debate environment. It says only yes say I did somebody says a thing in this group that is optional and secret and completely off the side of anything that matters.

49:48If they say something that you think is an actively dumb idea, you are free to not engage. Just leave it. That's fine. Right? Because that thing's going to happen. We're deciding anything interesting or important here. And if you want to engage and you don't like it, a productive way of doing that is saying, oh, it's so interesting. I would never would have thought to apply that lens. I typically to apply this lens to that kind of problem. I wonder if that applies here. And by saying I wonder, you make about you not them. And so that person can choose if that's an interesting thing to build on or not.

50:14This sounds by the way very non -rigorous. Feel like, ah, how can you possibly get rigorous thinking with the S &? It turns out there's limited amounts of time. And so people will choose to build on the things they find most interesting. This is things, interesting things are surprising and potentially valuable. And so if lots of different people in the group are building on the same idea, that's a good sign that is something very interesting going on. And the third thing you do is you dribble in new perspectives. So every, you know, one to three a week, you put in lots of new perspectives of all at once, the norms can all scramble.

50:42If you have five people who have a very particular kind of personality can mess up the norms. And so you're trying to minimize the chance you add a jerk. It takes one person to poop a party and go, what are they even doing here? Like, you want to minimize the chance that happens. But second or third, barely and more importantly, you want to have people with as different a perspective as possible added into the group. And so this is what Ken Stanley might call, for example, novelty search. You're novel to searching through the different perspectives in the overall thing. When you do this properly, you get something magical.

51:12You get a group that people find intrinsically valuable for its own sake and just enjoy participating in and finding meaning in that also, so castically spins off, game changing insights for the surrounding context. Because you're searching through these ideas in a low stakes environment where the ideas that lots of people build on, they go, oh, you should write that down. This is like an idea lab. What Tim ever went on to do lab. And this creates amazingly interesting insights. You just can't force it to do anything. It has to be a bottom up and emergent, which means if you try to steer it towards the outcome, it won't go.

51:44And so, but if you do these, they are amazingly places to riff into share ideas and half -formed ideas. And this is anywhere I go, I terraform the culture around me and create these. Because I need it as a place to have, to experiment and try out different half -formed ideas and build on them and be inspired by other people. and that is one of my secrets, that I've been doing now for probably 10 years ago as when the first one started. And there's now, I can count like eight or nine I've started over the year. Some of them have emerged, some of them have still at Google. And I think it's like, they're just wonderful environments that they create a lot of value.

52:21And I love it's a perfect example of your approach of emergent properties, letting things emerge versus a top down. Here's what we're doing, and here's what we're talking about here. If someone wanted to set this up within their company or within friends, any advice, what are some kind of constraints and ways of setting it up for success? The communities are all about momentum. You want to have a space too small, a time too short. Like if you have a big cavernous space, a lot of people in it, no one's talking, I guess it's the place where we don't talk for whatever reason. So what you're doing is you want the smallest seed of people that you know are going to be actively engaged.

52:52Maybe there's four of you that already talk over lunch, whatever topic, it's always really interesting and generative. Who will get that group together into a thing? And then incrementally They add people who you think are going to like that already as it currently exists. And then you need to feed it. So you want to make sure that it never dies. And the community that has only one person talking is, the community with no people talking is definitely dead. A community with one person talking is already dead. You don't realize it yet. And so you're trying to maximize the chance that there is an interesting conversation even when you as the kind of facilitator are not there.

53:23This takes some active policing by the way. Like a garden has a gardener. There's somebody pruning back and saying, hey, just so you know, I think it came a little but strong to Sarah's idea and maybe next time add, I wonder to the front of that statement or whatever. The other thing that you do is when people reach out to you and think, hey, let's take out of this thing and you go, that's a really interesting idea. You should share that in the group and then they do. And then you engage in the group and say, that was really interesting, you know, a little emoji response. And people who didn't watch the interaction assume that Sarah just decided proactively to stick her neck out and share that and that it worked.

53:53And so this becomes a self -sustaining norm in the community. And it's not a secret. You're not like, if you're someone to ask, but yeah, I told Sarah to share that. The people watching don't realize that. And so it becomes a place that people do take risks and feel comfortable sharing. Now the other thing you do is once a week or so, you want to make sure that you never propose something in the group that people go, you always want to do a thing people, yeah. So what you do is you see that you're talking to other people, you say, you know, I wonder, what you do, like a live conversation, it was so often, right?

54:21Like the chats were so fun, but like, then it goes, yeah, so would you comment if I did? Oh yeah, well, okay, great. So now I say, hey, a few of us are talking, we're just going to an experiment. We're going to have an hour -long conversation over lunch on Wednesday. Anyone on the group is free to come. And then what you do is you make sure it always has quorum because if it doesn't have quorum, then the thing that, you know, it looks like the community's dead. And then what you do is you send phomo stuff afterwards. So you say, here are my notes from the thing, or thanks, you know, Sarah, Jeff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

54:48For an amazing conversation, I thought the insight about blah, blah, blah was so ridiculous and amazing. So you want people who were in the group that didn't come to feel like they missed out and to come to the next one. And so you're constantly creating these kinds of vibes to do it. You can't do it if you don't have somebody with a lot of energy. I'm typically the kind of like, see Crystal for a lot of the groups I'm in to start them off because I have like a lot of energy. And I like, you know, I like anything that people have to say that I think is open -minded or interesting. I like building on and yes, ending.

55:20And that kind of gives a sort of foundation that can go. But like look for the people who already roughly want it. Don't forget to give it a minute. Don't forget to give it somebody who doesn't want it. They will not feel good. I love this playbook for starting to build a little bit of community within a company. Have you written about this by the way? And if not, you should write a whole post about this. I have, it's a long essay in a... It's just not... You can see it in bits and bobs. Like if you asked, if you gave the bits and bobs to Claude and said, please write a thing about nerd clubs in essay and the style, it would do it.

55:49Because there's a lot of the pieces are in there. It's just not far too out. I see writing something down right now, which tells me you just articulated something in the new way that you want to say. Yeah, that's right. So you mentioned this idea of constraints of time, and it reminds me of something that you share in one of your bits and bobs around productivity. You say that if you have two hours to do a five minute task, the effort to do that is impossible. And instead, you should flip that. Can you talk about this insight and how to be a little more productive? Yeah, I think a lot of the trick to productivity is to play yourself like a fiddle and figure you're out, how you work and what gives you energy, and set up your day, just structure it that way.

56:24So like, I find, every time you start a task, there's an activation energy, especially if you don't really wanna do. And then when you complete it, there's a little burst of energy. So if you do this properly, you can get small things that are extremely easy to knock out in like 10 seconds of effort. And then you do one that takes 30 seconds of effort and then you do one that takes, you know, longer a bit of effort. But if you get it too much space, it's too, it's harder to do. So like, you almost want to find, okay, let's, I got 10 minutes. I got to do this thing where I figure out how to add the deal.

56:53Do this thing in gusto. They've been putting, you know, I feel like, 10mage shouldn't be enough time to do it. Instructure it so like, okay, right now is the only time I have to do this right to do it. And, you know, another trick is, I use this like a, one of my original media messages actually, one of the original public ones is about sometimes rules, always rules are better than sometimes rules for self control. And so if you're gonna die it, like, I'm gonna eat, I'm going to skip lunch every day. Like, holy, you're going to fall fat on that at some point. I could meal a day with a big executive review.

57:27I really make sure I'm well fed before I go into this review or something. And now you've broken the streak and now it's over. Whereas if you say a thing you know you can do, I will not have a dessert unless it is, it would be socially awkward for me to not eat it. For example, in a small environment where somebody made a homemade dessert and all of a dessert eating it, I'm gonna, so a very clear black and white rule that you can hold on forever. So like, for example, since the pandemic started, I've done a Peloton workout every single day since the pandemic started. And once I had to start going back to the office, if I had to compute into the office, I would sometimes do a meditation to protect the box for that.

58:02But if I'm not commuting, I've done a full program. I'm not like, deathly sick, I've done a full workout since then. And the idea each day of like, is today the day of all the hundreds of days in a streak That is the worst or the hardest for me to do this thing is this the day. Yeah, of course It's not I will do it and so that keeps you in this sort of streak That makes it harder and harder to get out of it and it's some ways you kind of of of course you can tort yourself in Unproductive way like at a certain point Maybe you should stop that streak, but But I think those kinds of structuring help you get the things done you need you want to get done It's like the signfold the trick of productivity where you just cross, you just keep track of how many days in or you've done something essentially.

58:45Yeah, exactly. And I think people don't give those kind of tactics enough credit because there's lots of little social tricks to yourself and others. This is when you have other people who are depending on you for something and we'll know that you didn't do the thing, there were so much better. So like just little tricks like this help you get be wildly more productive. I actually want to go back a little bit. I'm curious what you wrote down when we were chatting earlier that you thought was a good articulation. if you're able to share, if it's interesting. I wrote down, and the reason I wrote down is I've never, and the value, I collect everything even once I think or like maybe onto something.

59:16So I wrote down a community with zero people speaking is dead and a community with one person speaking is, that doesn't yet realize it's dead. That's what I wrote down. So fun. I love this practice that you have. By the way, the reason I can do it, I can type insanely quickly. And undergrad, I wrote my thesis on the emergent power dynamics of Wikipedia's user community. and I did 150 hours of interviews with Rant with different editors in Wikipedia, and I transcribed them myself. And so I got really, really, really good at like, I can just pipe an idea straight into my fingertips and still listen to other stuff.

59:51So like, that's another super power is I just constantly, I'm able to capture it very, very quickly. I've written notes that are at least good enough for me to clean up, you know, with the next day or two into something that's more stable. Is there a way you built this other than, It was just you did it and you had to do it and you just like figured out I just realized later that like I could take really good. Okay. Really fast I could just pipe it straight through to my fingers and it worked and I don't know I don't know if I hadn't written my thesis would I have discovered that I don't know I feel like everything you do is like on super speed like the way you think the way you write I get stuff done.

1:00:29There's a lot of when I just realized when when you're feeling productive, you're unstoppable. And so just how can you be in your fullest state as much as possible? And there's things that absolutely completely grind me to a halt. And I just make sure I invest my time in situations that don't have that characteristic. And but like, so when I work on something that I believe could work and have a big impact, I just I can't stop. Like, you know, sometimes I'll wake up at four in the morning, it's a little early riser. I don't just have like this thing or I think, you know, the meeting starts, you know, at seven and I think there's I see this really cool here.

1:01:02And I let myself lead into those kinds of, when I have the moment, I also find that like often, if I have an idea and I just have, it seems to write it down. If I can write down 30 minutes and get a very rough of it in one place, now it's easy to clean it up later. But like that first act of creation, I do it whenever the muse hits, because it's 10 million times, if it's like, oh, write that idea down later, you keep on delaying it, delaying it, now it's a month later, and I'm like, what was the idea? How did that work again? It's gone. And so I just try to capture the interesting insights. It's like a butterfly collector.

1:01:33Like the butterflies are going by it. I collect them and put them in my collection. That is it quickly as possible. Our garden as one might describe it. Yeah. This touches on a quote I wanted to talk to you about. It's I think you described it as your life philosophy. Do things that give you energy that you are proud of? Yep. Talk talk about that. So to me, it's the combination of when you're doing something you believe in and that gives you energy, you are 10 times more productive And you also the effort that you are doing is its own reward and so you are Indivatable on that on that topic and go for much longer So finding the subset of things that align with that you give you energy then just it's kind of like infinite energy It's just it's like they get opportunity cost because it energizes you more than the sort of opportunity cost at the time to like go and spend to other things and two there are ways to There are ways to give yourself energy, like for example, playing a YouTube video game or is there any kind of mind -blowing substance that might give you that kind of like, oh, that's good of me energy.

1:02:33Those are not things that, like, that's, I'm not saying do those, I'm saying, what are the things that you'll look back and say, I'm glad I did that, I'm proud that I did that. And if you take the perspective of a 10 years on looking back on each decision and thing that you're doing, and imagine seeing this decision played in front of a thousand people who's opinion you care about, your family, your friends, your role models, would Would you be proud is a good sign of life that you're taking your problem up perspective? When you're busy and in the moment it's so easy to say, I just got to do this one thing that's probably not great to get this thing done.

1:03:01And once I do it, you know, it's going to suck, but when I do it, it'll be fine. And like, you find yourself doing it again and again and again and again. And before you know it, you've like lost who you want to be and you're now a kind of a husk of yourself. And so I think those two pieces, being into where you find energy, where you specifically find energy, you're super power, the thing that you intrinsically enjoy doing, and just make sure it's something that you're actively proud of, you know, in that outpatient show, you don't take a bunch of shortcuts. So along those same lines, I think a lot of people have heard a version of this quote, which is, do things that give you energy.

1:03:36So one, I love the additional piece of it is, and that you're proud of. Two, you have a, another quote that I love that makes you think deeply about stuff, which is the secrets of life is things you've heard a million times already, you just weren't ready to hear them. They talk about that insight. So this I call kind of the homework card fallacy, which is you discover at great effort some deep insight that resonates with you and makes you see the world differently and you want to share it. Insights are naturally viral. You want to share them and you go tell some it's like guys, guys, the point of life is the friends we made along the way And people go, that's from a homework card, man.

1:04:14And because, and to you, it is, you now possess the knowledge, the emotional intelligence to understand why that phrase has been shared so many times before you, you heard it when you weren't ready. And now it becomes a trite duh. Everyone says that. I can't possibly do the meaningful statement. The reason people clip on saying it is because it's meaningful, you know? And so I think that having that space of recognizing it, that when you have these epiphanies that come from different leaps and sort of vertical development or the ability to, when you stare into the abyss and make it through the other side, you realize and learn a bunch of amazing things that you want to pass on to others and it's just really hard to get them to find it.

1:04:53I find that that's one of the reasons I try to write things that are, or share ideas that are kind of like little seeds that you can shoot into someone's brain, even if the soil's not ready for it's kind of racking or craggy. And Ragi at some point in the future, if there's a little, you know, something goes through there and opens up a crack that's sitting there to grow into an idea. One of the things that makes me the happiest is when someone had mentored years and the years in the past, they go, they search me out years later and say, Alex, I just want to let you know, you probably don't remember talking to me, but that Tuesday at the, you know, building the no name cafe or whatever on Google campus, you said something.

1:05:28I think I frustrated to hear in the moment. I didn't understand it. And I just want to tell you, thank you, because I finally understand what you would try to tell me. And I realized that that influenced me in the decisions. That to me is one of those meaningful things I can hear. And so I just find that like, you can't force it before people are ready to hear certain topics, you know? Man, I must feel so good to hear those sorts of closing the loop on something long ago. The point you make about cliches that you've heard a million times actually finally feeling right and like profound. I had this very very experience.

1:06:03I did a psychedelic trip with some friends a while ago and at the end of it has just like, man, love is all you need. Love is all you need. Like I felt that so deeply through the experience and I was telling people they're like, shut up. It's like, oh do you just do psychedelics? Yeah. It's funny. I have a lot of folks in my broader space who obviously have used psychedelics. I never personally have myself. And but I find it's there's various ways like the transcendent mindset is this feeling of being part of something much much Much larger than yourself and kind of losing your ego in this thing There's different ways of doing it something we'll find it in hiking and being out in the wilderness alone Some people find it being at a concert and thousands of people perfectly in sync to this thing Some people find it in religious spirit some people find it, you know using psychedelics and others to help get there But a lot of it is it's that same just being willing to be in awe There's so many times that people feel that feeling of awe or wonder or curiosity is treated as a not very serious or childlike thing And I just don't get that because it is the that is how you are open to disconfirming evidence It's how you see beyond the current limits of what you like your you know your ego It gets hurt when you get this confirming evidence You don't want to hear it and so you'll construct the world around yourself to not get that disconfirming evidence But this confirming evidence is what makes systems strong.

1:07:21It's what makes you strong. And so how do you put yourself in a situation to get that kind of information and really receive it? And part of it is just coming in terms of the fact of like, you know, earlier my career was called Me Cookie. I'm very sorry. I'm like, okay, fine. Yeah, I'm Cookie. Look, whatever. I'm totally at peace with the idea that like some people track me as Cookie and not particularly serious. I think you will watch the work that I do and the kind of indirect impact it has, realizes I'm doing something that is working, even if they don't fully understand how it works. To start to close our conversation, I wanna throw out one more seed that might land with someone in the right time.

1:07:59You have this concept of the adjacent possible, which I think is a really powerful concept. And it's basically argues that a lot of people jump to big bold ideas and instead, the better approach is think about what's a constraint you have and lean into the constraints and use that as a guide. You just talk about this and how this might inform how people think about product and strategy. Sure, yeah. So the frame is the adjacent possible, which is I believe comes from design thinking. It's, I've found it from the liars in my life for the ones who were just be doing it. And adjacent possible is the set of actions that you do that you can do with the right in front of you that if you do them, they would work, almost certainly work.

1:08:35And the tech industry in particular, we kind of default assume that like the adjacent possible is like this and you go, and like flying leap to something. And in reality, the adjacent possible is quite small. It's like very within the within's arms reach. And people kind of say, oh, that's your B and I list, you're limiting your potential, like, you know, you're saying don't do big things. But when you recognize that your adjacent possible is relatively small, you realize that you actually have full agency to pick within the subset that is within your reach. And your actions matter because you take an action and now the world reconfigures and now you get a next set of action actions.

1:09:09And it's based partially on the action you just took. And so if you slice this thing up and you have a coherent worldview and you're a principle approach You can arc to wildly different outcomes than looks like they were possible while at each point each individual action is safe and reasonable And so you can combine both of these things. I think so many times we try to like jump and we jumped to the end state of the thing and Actually, you don't need to make that decision Like if you can slice up your decisions into smaller and smaller decisions And like this next step definitely makes sense So we'll almost certainly pay for itself or the very least won't be too expensive and then it might allow these other things They happen and you take it and those other things don't happen.

1:09:44Okay. Don't take another step on that path That's fine. Go in other directions for a while if it does then take another step and another and another and another and this allows you to get rid of a lot of the risk And still be exposed to all the upside and so the risk comes from trying to jump too far ahead in an unknown unknown environment So is the general advice if someone's working on trying to figure out the roadmap trying to think about what products to build is the advice don't be scared to go a little incremental versus what people are always pushed to figure. If you believe you need both.

1:10:14So if you only do incremental, you will follow the shortest like the steepest gradient in front of you. So you excel our size. I used to want to do this and it was exactly that and you will end up random walking through the thing. So you need coherence about where you're going and the way you get that is by creating a kind of north star for yourself. It should be in three to five years in the future. It should be very low resolution. It should describe a thing that every single person who reads it was any kind of knowledge that might be useful or relevant, agrees that it is plausible. If this happens, I would not say, oh, miracle happened, it's that I could see how that could work.

1:10:44And lawyers say I could see that could work. And someone who's worked on this 30 years ago, and a similar product at Microsoft, I can see how that could work. And that if you got to the end point, everyone would hide five. Because if it's going to be a thing, I guess that could work. I'd be like, oh, yeah, neat. That's not worth it. You want to know a North Shore? I'd be like, yeah. You know, like, great. Wow, we kick off, we change the way it does. entire industry works or whatever. And now this is your North Star. The North Star should update, but it's because it's far off in the distance. It will update.

1:11:10It will slide up kind of that's a sky a little bit. It won't be you won't be kind of jerking around. You'll be kind of like arcing slightly differently. And then what you do is you look to your adjacent possible and you look for the thing that has the steve is gradient that pulls you towards your North Star. So you just want to go in that direction and you want to go in this direction. This one is second most in demand from what you think, but it's pulling you the direction that you believe will pull you there. Go in that one. And then the keep on repeating. That's it. But you need both because if you don't do if you only do incremental then you'll end up random walking into a corner And if you only do the long term you end up dreaming big and designing castles in the sky that are impossible It's actually going to pass to give you a metaphor from an experience I had I did this silent meditation retreat once and the big part of Buddhism is to not like clinging to a specific outcome and not Have a plan in mind and be sad if it doesn't work out and so I asked them just like how do you be six?

1:11:58How do you achieve success and and want to be successful while not doing that. And their metaphor is point your card in a specific direction that you want to go. Like just push your point your card in that direction, essentially in your example of North Star and just start walking, don't figure out. This is exactly the path I'm gonna take to get this end destination. And you know, after the fact, you'll say, oh, you know, I curved a little bit or I had this little jog in there. And you'll say, ah, it wouldn't been more efficient. But we're so focused on efficiency of like not wasting effort that we end up doing nothing at all or doing very dangerous things that don't So like I'm sure that I have a path that's slightly inefficient because we're navigating unknowns and we couldn't know no Like I can't think the number of times I find people say I need to know for this strategy, you know in That someone was you know trying to get me to look at and then say Is this number in Five years is it gonna be 93 or 95 and it's like I don't know and it doesn't matter Either it's going to be that order of magnitude.

1:12:56It doesn't matter. We don't have to do that analysis. If we believe that the order of magnitude is of that thing, it actually spent all the time to get the illusion of precision, which at great expense. And then people say, oh, I'm data -driven. I want to really run the analysis to ground. There's tons of stuff you can't know ahead of time. So if you're getting a false precision at the beginning, that's a comfort blanket. That's just helping you feel like there isn't uncertainty. There's uncertainty everywhere all the time. You know, and trying to ignore it by trying to pin it down with like fake numbers that you just made up for yourself at great expense Is a really bad idea like and that's why if if the ideas are strong enough like things have a compounding return Don't give you oh well either get 93 or 95.

1:13:36It's like well either get zero or we'll get a thousand You know great. It doesn't really matter which if it's a thousand a thousand one who cares? It's singing or is it meant to larger than the alternative and so it is better. That's really freeing I noticed again you were writing something again curious which wrote down that you thought was insightful I actually this time it was not writing that something down I was checking a thing I thought you might say that was gonna reference was Tim urban happiness is Reality minus expectations. I was good that backwards. Have you heard this frame? Let's get into it Yeah, we're not gonna bet this.

1:14:08This is great happiness is reality minus expectations And this is Tim urban was from way, but why and I think it's a very simple the still distillation of it of like if you set your expectations super high and it comes in and it's amazing But it's off below it and it's in that negative. So like the easiest thing reality is hard to change It's not impossible. It's hard to change your expectations are super easy. So just change your expectations You know hold it lightly and don't say oh my gosh. This is gonna be you know My kids birthday. She's gonna remember it's gonna be a best birthday I've ever had and we're all gets me perfect because then when it doesn't go perfect It starts rating that day You get all worked up.

1:14:45She's like, no, I want to make, I want to spend this day in a way that I can look back on and remember fondly. And that will include, yeah, change, remember, like one other piece of advice someone gave me that I really like is try to feel the emotion about the story that will make you feel in 10 years. So if it's funny in 10 years, we're going to see the humor in it now. And this one in particular was a friend, their newborn would, every time you change your diaper would poop. That was only the end of it. And they did it. It would often be a projector. And so it was like a trapped like you changed the diaper.

1:15:17Yeah And like what are you gonna do in that situation? It like and then they're just like just it's gonna be a funny story In a few years. So like let's see the humor now even though god I really wish that you know that's right In poop I remember and I think that that kind of that kind of perspective is really people sometimes hear this as oh you're saying Don't dream big don't set high expectations Don't expect more and be okay with mediocrity. That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying hold those expectations lightly, allow them to change, be willing to be convinced by different things, and seek something great, seek something that you can be truly proud of, and that feel very authentic to yourself if you achieve.

1:15:57Alex, I feel like I could talk to you for hours. I can't believe it's already been almost an hour and a half. So just to wrap things up, is there anything else that you thought would be fun to share or maybe a piece of wisdom you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round. I think we covered it. I think we covered a lot of that. We could go on for hours and hours and hours and hours. I could just do a random, I got featured in the company where I can pull up a random idea and like, let's not do that. Okay, amazing. Well, Alex with that we reached our very exciting lightning round.

1:16:27Are you ready? I am ready. First question. What are two or three books you recommended most other people? Origin of Wealth by Eric Binharker, which is great. It's about a sort of complexity economics. Why the traditional economic model doesn't work. Also, why it takes an evolutionary lens on what kinds of business plans work and how companies execute them that I found my entree into a lot of systems thinking. And I thought it was just absolutely brilliant. And the other one is the dilemma that I was thinking in systems, which is short, easy to read, very approachable. In fact, if any of the people think of it as not serious enough, it's too easy to read.

1:17:01It's one of those books that when you read at the beginning you'll say this sounds right and then later a year later if you read it again you'll go oh my god that was so like I didn't I wasn't ready for that yet but like I that is it totally the way so she's one of the people who talks about dancing the systems let go and dance with the system is one of her lines and I think it's just a phenomenal. Next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you're really enjoyed? For me I was even at this it's the Green Knight which I watched it's I think a few years old it's about the Arthurian legend it's a challenging movie in fact when I watched it I I was like, I dislike this.

1:17:33I do not find this interesting. And then I couldn't stop thinking about it. And it helped me, I think one of the reasons I like to write in parable is that parable is open -ended. It encourages and requires the listener to engage into the idea and play with it and see how it affects them and how they affected. And so for me, the green night, again, when I was, I'm not excited to watch it again, but I found it to be the most impactful movie I've seen in the last couple of years in terms of amount of thinking that I kind of cause what to do afterwards. Wow, that's a lot. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

1:18:10To me, I think the example for me is WebSim. It's the one that I like playing around with a lot. And I've said it before I use a lot of 29 today. I mean, I find that it's almost impossible for me to imagine doing work. I mean, of course, now I gotta use Strawberry and see how that feels. But yeah. When use case of WebSim that I found really fun, that I used to do with Dylan, if you do Gmail, if you give it Gmail .com slash someone's name, it just comes up with what their email likes like. And you give it for famous people like for, you know, Patrick call us in your head and it's like, wow, that's really good.

1:18:45The elements are really good. One of the things we play around with is having a thing that generates fake data of arbitrary schemas and it just gave it a short back, it had a right or short backstory of a person and then have it generate data that fits in this fictional user version's world. And like, it's just amazing, the kinds of stuff, like the coherence it has with like a, yeah, it's weird and it's very specific to that story, but like, oh, I'm just so, they're like these little holograms, right, of all this information of the humanities, like interesting sort of informational pattern is the little thing.

1:19:16And all kinds of, it's like a mirror that different things reflect back out of it at you. And it's just, it's shocking sometimes to see humanity like reflected back at you. It's like a zip file of all human knowledge. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. And it's because it's trained on all the things we've written. Yeah. All right, two more questions. You have a favorite life motto that you often come back to finding useful and worker in life. I guess I've said to it. This is cheating. But I said to the, you know, do things that give you energy that you're proud of. And the happiness is reality in my expectations.

1:19:50I think are really simple clarifying words to look like. All right, final question. You can go in one or two directions. One is what's something that you are gonna add to this week's bits and bobs that you're thinking about right now that we haven't talked about? Or just go to your compendium and pick a random thing and see what comes up and share. Okay, so this is the, I'll just read this out. Great. We've forgotten this is written a year ago. We've forgotten a world without aggregators. Non -arrogator ecosystems make it so participants don't have to fear empowering their overlord. Like, where you have to worry about the other.

1:20:28Each bit of action you're doing the aggregator is getting it more and more harmful. My space was the Wild West. Facebook made it so you can't change the CSS, which was better for users. Contelling some freedom. Aggrators make sense in the late stage of an era, but at the beginning they curtailed too much exploration. That's just my random reflections. I don't even remember what conversation that came from originally. but of the power of, I'm just so obsessed with the idea that we are in the late stage of this current technical paradigm that we're in. And so many things, we feel like we've given them all out and nothing can be different.

1:20:58And I kind of don't love this outcome that we're in. Like the idea of like, you know, you just want to quit framing. To me, if you ask somebody on the street to tell you what the canonical piece of software is, the answer they'll give you is something like Instagram, which is to say an app, which I think is a shame because an app is monolithic. It's one size fits all. It's not composable. It doesn't mean anything interact with anything else in the product ecosystem. It's also only allowed to insist if some of the largest companies of the world say it makes, which is insane to me. To me software is alchemy.

1:21:27It's the ability to extend human agency beyond ourselves to create something that can then combine with what others have created in unexpected and unforeseen ways to create the common -trial possibility of human agency. And somehow, in the past decade, we've become convinced that all of this potential should be squeezed into about a dozen little boxes on your phone. And now with the power of AI, everyone just is default assuming that what's going to happen is we're all going to be locked inside of the box with a super god AI Clippy. The only thing that people disagree about is which clip is it going to be whose clip is it going to be?

1:21:57That to me is bunker. I don't want that rule. I want a world where we use this magical duct tape to escape the box to allow software and humans using it to lean into their agency. And I think So, I think, aggregators are amazing in an environment where you have a safe environment to have all kinds of interesting stuff that can't be fully open ended because the aggregate can't allow it to escape the possibility of that ecosystem. And so, for me, one of these big side of the elements being in this weapon technology is, I think that it allows us to get out of this monolithic sense of like whatever we're all just beholden to a decreasing number, very powerful organizations, and lead into everybody what are you being able to be creative and collaborative and exercise their agency in a pro social way?

1:22:40So, wow. Well, you blew our mind as a final element of this conversation, Alex. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Working folks, finding online, where do they find stuff you're working on? If they want to read more and follow the stuff you're thinking about, and then how can listeners be useful to you? Comeroskey .com is where, it's my husband gives me so much shit for, it looks like it was designed in the early 2000s, which it was. I link to all the different posts there if you click there's a Google group But now where you can subscribe to my updates whenever I post in the bits and bobs or any medium article That's a good way of taking touch as a port publish stuff and then the way that could be useful to me is I have office hours on my site That or open to anybody to join in I am continually there worked off in the few weeks in advance But if you find something that resonated with you or that didn't or you think is interesting or oh here's a parallel I don't know if you've thought of before just reach out to me and I love love love talking to people Interesting people especially who have life experiences and backgrounds are different from mine But one point a magician showed up my office hours and described and said hey, just have to keep talking about your bits and bobs That's actually cold reading.

1:23:49That's what psychics use and you know So I find always crazy connections. I'd never occurred to you before and so people just reaching out and sharing ideas and I love Alex you're awesome Um, this conversation was exactly what I was hoping it'd be. Uh, my brain is buzzing as I expected. Thank you so much for being here. I'm excited folks to listen to this and to learn from you. Thank you so much for having me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:24:28You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast dot com. See you in the next episode