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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/45a3ea23de6919f3

So much of the 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.
And 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. What I look for instead are things that can be gardened, things that can grow on their own and that you can sort of direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or or curate over. And is a totally different mindset for it. If you do this properly, it looks like magic.
I've been told that this is
Completed all the advice.
that people get building products nowadays, but I think it's a very powerful approach that works in a lot of different contexts.
Today my guest is Alex Komarowski.
Alex is one of the most original
most articulate and first principle thinkers on the future of product and tech that I've ever come across.
This conversation will get your brain buzzing in all kinds of ways.
Alex spent 13 years at Google, where he worked on search, double click, he led Chrome's open web platform team for eight years, led augmented reality within Google Maps, and developed a new toolkit to line company wide strategy from the bottom up.
After a stint at stripe as head of corporate strategy,
He's currently founding a startup that aims to reimagine the web for the AI era.
In our wide ranging conversation, we cover how LLMs and Gen AI will impact how we build product in the coming years, what skills will matter most as AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, what companies can learn from Sly Mulk, organizational cfabe,
The adjacent possible
Strategy salons
why you should be thinking more like a gardener than a builder, plus a bunch of productivity tips, life advice, and so much more. This was such a fun episode and I am sure this is gonna get your mind thinking in completely new ways.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that I bring you Alex Kamarowski.

Alex, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
I love the way your brain works. My brain immediately starts buzzing anytime I start reading some of your stuff.
And one of the more interesting things that you write and do and a really interesting habit you have is
You actually have this doc that you keep called Bits and Bobs.
That uh I love.
And we're gonna be touching on a lot of the things that you share in this doc, Bits and Bobs, and we'll link to it.
First of all, can you just explain?
Was dark.
Bits and bobs. What's it about?
Yeah, so it's it's I think it's like six hundred pages now. It's just one Google Doc.
Every so often, almost every day, someone will accidentally add a suggestion to like add a space or something because
It takes so long to load.
that while they're waiting they'll tap on the screen and then it'll turn into like taps on adding a comment or something.
And it's
I
I take a lot of notes. Uh people I tell people when I'm in meetings with them of like
If you see me on my phone.
Or typing.
That means I think you said something very interesting and I'm writing it down.
Um it's not that I'm just that I'm disengaged. I just I I try to like collect all these ideas.
And then once a week I go through, I take a few hours and I just reflect to myself.
and try to find patterns and unpack and find meaning in things.
And I write those down and I started uh you know
some time in the past, sharing those publicly.
And uh
It's now become a thing I I literally can't stop doing. Like I just find
Someone was like, Oh, if you get war exposure for this, if you broke these up into tweets that you sent out, once you know
You know, throughout the day it's like
Dude, I didn't for me. I'm like happy to let other people see and s like peek into my weird mental process if they want.
This is a hundred percent about uh my own self reflection.
Um and it's not designed
I don't want anyone to like
feel compelled to read it or like in fact it's designed a little bit to be I allow myself to be a little bit illegible.
They want people to have to work a little bit with it.
And to it's not gonna lay it out on a platter, it's gonna jump between different things. I'll use terminology sometimes.
It is
What are you talking about?
And I do that specifically I don't want anyone to read like Oh sucks. Was it worth my time. It's like cool, like
It's a
two six hundred page Google Doc of like by just unspooled insights. Like, you know.
It's it's okay for you to not want to dive into that.
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I started it many years ago, the same conceptual thing.
Taking a bunch of notes. I have a thing called the compendium.
Which is an open source
tool. Um if you look at it currently, it looks like I haven't touched it in years.
That's actually incorrect.
Uh I built this about five years ago. I use it every day.
And so I have I think see I currently have seventeen thousand two hundred and forty eight
Unpublished working notes.
And so what I do during the week is I'm taking notes very quickly in meetings.
And every day or two I go through and I process them and put them in as working notes in the compendium.
And this is where I correct misspellings, I add just a little bit more context so that it will make sense to me if I were to read it.
In a year.
And also I built a feature into it that uses embeddings to find similar cards. So I find similar ideas from the past.
And then what I do on Friday afternoons is I sit down and I go through all the notes I added that week.
I just click and check the ones that still resonate with me. They still seem interesting in some way.
And then I put them I have a little export thing, I put into Google Doc and while the kids are napping on the weekends, I just kind of
Go through them and try to
Distill them a little bit more um
uh in a more long term format.
Um and then on Monday mornings I publish them.
And uh again it's a a deep
For me it's like I I can't imagine not doing this.
It is the
the place where I find most of my most interesting insights is by reflecting on interesting conversations for me.
As we get into the conversation, people get see how deeply you think about stuff.
part of the reason you're able to think so deeply about stuff is you have this practice where you take time to reflect.
And share and crystallize. There's so much power in just
forcing yourself to write it out, I imagine, versus just like A hundred percent. I mean I find that like
when you're when you're busy, you're constantly just go, go, go, go. There's no time to like do any deep thinking. Deep thinking takes time and space, and you gotta create that space. Like
Yeah, the mundane pointless bullshit.
Well cut take every square inch you give it.
So you gotta make that space.
To sit back and reflect.
I'm juriate in these ideas.
And when you do, you're often like, Oh my god, oh wow, that's a
That's one I'll keep.
And uh
I've told people like back at the very beginning of my career
I used to work from home on Fridays.
People gave me so much shit for this.
And they'd say, Oh, you're working from home on Friday. It's like first of all, I will line up my like output
Any day of the week.
Yeah, I'm I'm very proud of the impact I've had.
Second of all.
Monday through Thursday I'm in meetings from eight to six or whatever. I'm just running between I'm singing, you know, pinging people and scheduling things and

Plinging action items.
And the one day I don't take meetings is on Friday.
And that's the day.
I read documents carefully that people had sent me.
Or reflect and I think to myself.
What is the thing that if I had done it
at the before the week started would have saved me tons of time and effort that week.
So for example, maybe in ten different one on ones with people on the team
I had to explain to them.
a strategic thing that we were doing or a change that we were making and the it the idea and the way I framed it worked for everybody.
Well, you know that that should probably be a document.
Right. If the same idea work for ten different people.
And now in the future, there's probably ten other people that need to hear it. And now I'll write that document in thirty minutes.
And now I have it as a a memorialized thing that other people can read on their own time.
Without having to involve me.
And you also find these interesting ideas sometimes
Where you look at this problem that you're banging your head against and you go, Oh, we have like
Yeah.
They would have a wildly different
Dynamic.
And you can only find those when you take a step back.
And I find that people I I told someone
Um, I've mentored someone or I've mentored hundreds of PMs over the years and I told someone that at one point and they go oh
I wish I had the time.
It's like
You gotta make the time.
All of us are busy and will always be busy.
And so this to me is not something I do to just for the enjoyment of all. I do deeply enjoy it, or you know, intrinsically.
It's something I do because I think it makes me more productive and effective.
I'm very tempted to go down a whole direction of just how you structure time and your productivity.
calendar and all the stuff, but I'm not gonna do that. That could be another episode. I do one for that for hours.
What I wanna do instead is pick on some of the bits and bobs that you've been focusing on and noodling on.
That I think are gonna be really helpful.
to listeners in how they think about product and the future of AI and all these things that I think are emerging.
And the first one is actually that. I wanna
Get your
Thoughts.
On
How AI and LMs
are likely to impact product development.
A lot of listeners to this podcast are PMs, engineers.
Founders, people building software.
I know you're spending a lot of time thinking about AI and product development, a lot of your
Bits and bobs have been just like here's what's happening. Holy shit, this is how things are gonna be.
Let me just ask you this.
How do you anticipate LMs and Gen AI?
are gonna change how products are built in the next three to five years.
I think it they change a lot. I think LMs are truly a disruptive technology.
In fact, I would argue that what we're seeing in the industry
is us trying to use mature playbooks from the end stage of the last tech era?
And one that doesn't really fit yet.
To me, LM's
Or magical duct tape.
They are formed principally by the distilled intuition of all of society.
Into a thing.
That operates between a c in a cost structure between
A human?
And Pleno Computing.
Yeah, so much of how the industry is built.
Free supposes.
The idea that software is expensive to write and cheap to run.
And LMs undermine both of these.
So it makes it LMs allow writing shitty software to be significantly cheaper. That's really good software, but like, you know, good enough.
in certain context and also it means that there's certain s software now
That
isn't plain old computing that can be run cheaply, it's relatively expensive, marginal cost.
And so
If you're gonna do a consumer startup, it can't be based on advertising. It's just too expensive. Advertising cannot clear the inference cost, even with it.
uh with inference costs declining.
So I think
The way that to me a disruptive technology changes
Tons of stuff.
All these assumptions you didn't even realize you were making because you didn't realize it could be any different.
Like imagine if you were locked in a room for
For your entire career.
No windows.
You have all these experiences, you're getting all this know how you're getting this kind of sense of how things work, what will happen.
And then imagine that room tilts on it on its axis by five degrees.
Everything looks roughly the same.
And yet now the dynamics of force of gravity is pulling in a different direction than it was before.
You didn't even think about the force of gravity before'cause it was so omnipresent. It never changed.
That it's just a a blank in your head.
And now everything has changed effectively for for your perspective, and all kinds of intuition is now wrong.
I put this thing on the table, it's gonna stay there. And then it slides off and falls into the wall. You know, all kinds of weird stuff will happen.
I think
LM to me feel like that.
I got I can't tell the number of people who are um
And at some point like a year or two, someone
Uh it came to be like
I just built a prototype.
Product.
That wouldn't take.
Three months.
And they're like, Yeah, but we're going to start like
How differentiated do you think that is? Like everybody can do that now, you know? Like it changes the basis of competition.
I think today I see a lot of
Folks using
Ellen's
And LMs are like a squishy computer.
We're used to computers doing exactly what we told them to do, which is not necessarily what we meant.
Um and only some people have learned the skill of
Programming part, like the arcane.
Magical incantations make computers do exactly what you meant.
Now LLMs can do all kinds of stuff and they don't do exactly what you told them and but they do typically do kind of roughly what you meant.
I see all these places where people will build products and they'll say eighty percent of the time, ninety percent percent of time, it's great.
Five percent of the time it punches the user in the face.
And like Oh, we're gonna reduce the number of times it punches them in the face. It's like
Even if you get it down to like ninety nine percent of the time, it's fine. If it punches in the face, that's not a viable product.
And so how do you design your products assuming
that this thing will be squishy and not fully accurate and fully.
People use these things a lot as like oracles.
I'm gonna have it, I'm gonna formulate the answer and it's gonna be a fully fledged answer. And of course, strawberry has been really standing a chance to play with it.
Um they are getting better at some of these kinds of behaviors at great expense.
But in a lot of cases I instead would rather say
How can you take uh LMs for granted?
How can you assume that you now have this magical duct tape?
Don't assume it's gonna solve all your problems. Don't assume it's gonna do it, you know, autonomously
uh be able to give high quality results of every case.
But what can you now build?
Now that you have magical duct tape.
You're a product manager for most of your career. Now you're a founder.
I'm curious what your advice would be to
product managers and people building products in terms of what skills they should lean into, what you think is gonna be matter most.
You know, there's like hard skills, there's soft skills, there's
getting more technical, there's getting more product business
It just
What do you think people should
work on more and becomes more valuable and what do you think becomes less valuable from a product?
builder perspective.
I think in this early stage, we're in the community gardening phase, not the factory farming phase of this technology.
And so I think what people need most is curiosity and play.
You should be playing with these things and trying out different things and seeing what weird things are possible now.
One of my favorite things to be honest right now using uh uh AI is websites.
Whipsim.
is so weird. What a weird idea. Like who
Why?
And then you play with it and you realize, oh, this is a thing that could only exist in a world where LROs exist.
And I think these kinds of
I d
interesting, weird, provocative, generative things.
will be where a lot of the uh interesting patterns are found.
Because right now we're so used to like
You know, if the playbook
If the cost structures have changed, the kinds of things are now possible, the playbook is wrong and we should throw it out, or at least ignore it.
Some degree.
So like
It will feel like we are
uh navigating through a whole new
industry.
That it has in the past.
You know, any time that an industry gets really, really, really, really, really good at like um you know, vertical SAS.
We know how to execute the crap out of that, right? Like we know exactly what to do. It doesn't require that much, it requires
dumption and execution velocity and you know, and and all this.
But like
Vertical SAS, I think, is not
The right model.
Of how you would attack attack a problem.
that it is sort of an AI native cell problem.
Um and I think that those are where all the interesting things will be. And again, I think
A lot of the tactics that we're trying out at the beginning, they won't work.
Well turn out that like they they you know, they only work ninety five percent of the time and five percent of time they punch you in the face or something.
And that means that you have to be more adaptable and you have to assume
that like a scrappy uh thing will be more important.
One of the ways I put this is
Okay.
We've
uh seen a vast reduction in the cost of distribution of information.
And now we're seeing a reduction in the cost.
of information production.
And most of it is slot.
And so in this cacophony
How do you stand out? You stand out by having good taste.
I think taste is the most important thing. You have a perspective.
that is different from the background noise, different from the average, and that people find compelling.
How do you find your own taste and how do you lean into that taste?
is I think much more important than just generically executing in the way that everybody else could do.
There's so many threads I wanna follow here, but maybe on just this last one, when we say taste.
What do you mean by that? What should people think when they're like, Okay, I gotta work on my taste.
Taste with when we're looking at this is
Uh differentiate from what the L M would have written if given the same prompt.
How different how distinctive is what you have to say.
And uh I think so much in large industry, in large organizations is about
Fitting in to the role.
How can you be a better and more efficient cog in that particular kind of machine?
And I think in this new world, what you want to do is how can I become the best version of myself?
How can I lean into the things that I have an interesting perspective on that make me different?
Those are the kinds of things.
If you do if you lean into something and you're doing something sort of out there and nobody resonates with it,
And like
Doesn't count.
That good taste is something that is individual
And also compelling.
Uh, to others. And so find what things you say that resonate with other people and lean into that.
I love that. Back to the Web Sim example, uh
We're gonna link to this, but definitely play with Web Sim.
I was interviewing Dylan Field at
Figma config and this was his ask them like
What's the number one thing you think people are gonna get more excited about in the future that you're playing with now? Cause he's really good at identifying things that are
Uh gonna be bigger in the future and
Oh we
And that was his choice.
And it's like very hard to understand exactly what it is if you just go there.
But basically it's like you type a URL and it invents what that website is.
Using just AI.
L O Ms.
That's insane. I mean, as in, and and you can get it to do, you realize as you play with it more, you can get it to do all kinds of specific things, and you can sort of steer it.
Based on the way it uses the context of the last few pages, it creates a coherent world.
It's coherent with
The things that you have recently seen.
And so you can steer it directly in
Um you can watch you know, fascinating people will uh cover all kinds of wacky little techniques to get to generate like
Share the game for your kid that's of a specific type like you can do all kinds of stuff.
And I'm not saying this surely websim.
Website to me is
In a disruptive thing, things that look alien and weird and yet are compelling, those are what we should be paying more attention to.
As opposed to
Yeah, take an existing playbook and like slap some AI on it.
You know?
I love that.
Another point that I saw you make about AI and the way it's different from other things we've done is
Most of the tools that we adopt in the workplace are collaborative.
where it helps your team be better, helps you collaborate better, and AI is the opposite. It makes you individually
Better. Can you talk about that insight?
A hundred percent. Like the I think

the question right now, um, of like, okay, everyone's talking about AI and yet nobody is doing like there's no interesting breakout success obvious other than open AI and Tropic, obviously.
So is it just all is there any value being created?
I think it's entirely possible and Ethan Mollch, um
uh who's a good friend who has an amazing blog, was absolutely worth reading.
Um
Has pointed
Uh this is things that make individuals better in a in a way they might not want to tell their ban manager about.
You know, like I can now do my job like twice as fast.
Um and if the organization sees that, they might go, What is that? We should pay you half as much. But like what if we got if we can get rid of some extra people or something?
And so
If this stuff is magical duct tape.
It's very hard to make scaled
repeatable large scale
Things out of it.
It's very easy to jerk the shit out of anything.
And so
You'll see it being used in the small in a way that's almost entirely below
the level of awareness of the seeing like the organiz you know, seeing like the state, seeing like the organization. The organization almost won't see it or see sense it.
And yet it could be adding significant value.
Or doing you know, just being used quite heavily.
And I think this is one of the things that makes it um if everything is happening in the the long tail of usage
then you could conclude, oh, it's not being used for anything in industry.
But it's being used all over the place. I mean I I talk to Claude twenty times a day.
uh you know, I just have long conversations with it. I have tons of projects load loaded up with all kinds of context on different topics.
And uh I literally could not do the job I do now without having a conversation partner like Claude.
Let me follow that thread real quick,'cause a lot of people are like, Okay, people keep telling me I need to play with AI, you gotta talk use chat GPT.
Sometimes it's hard to see exactly what they can do with it.
Can you give one example of how you found it really helpful or how you use
Claude or another tool in your day to day. I use the think through problems.
And so like when I'm trying to name a concept or get a handle on a few different ways of looking at something.
Just saying, here's what's in my brain about this topic right now, here's some relevant context. I
I have a number of projects that just stuff as much of the bits and bobs into the context as I can.
Which is very helpful.
And uh and then just say uh you know, I just play with the give me ten examples of that thing, or then critique these ones, or it kinda feels like this one's the best one to me. What what works about this? Why is this one the best? Or I wanna work at an angle now that has something about, you know, Helen is and Baum's concept and contextual integrity. How I
Like
Layer that in. It's just
Think of it as having
A extremely well read but slightly naive
Friend.
who is willing to will never make you feel dumb and is willing to engage you in any particular topic you want to go down.
So like you know, when you talk to an expert, like a lawyer or a or a doctor or something
You know that that time is extremely valuable. You've a very small slice of time.
And so there's tons of questions you'll even bother to ask.
I don't want I'm not gonna spend a thousand dollars to answer that question. Whereas if you can have that conversation, now this is not saying you know, use it for legal advice, but can they let you to explore through a problem domain and then later check it with with experts and say, I believe
This is a coherent
outcome or thing that should happen and then go, Oh yeah, that works.
So I use L to help me um
Uh it's like getting a um it's like an electric bike.
for idea spaces kind of, you can just cover so much more ground so much more quickly.
And then
I love that metaphor'cause it builds on Steve Jobs' that computers are a bicycle for the mind and that's really
Uh beautiful way of thinking about it, that LMs are like the
Bi electric bicycle for the mine.
I don't think that's my that's someone else's the um I've I don't know where it came from. I but part of my job is a collector of ideas. And so
I try to put myself in the most inf interesting information streams with interesting people that I've found.
to have taste of have a perspective on something. Maybe I disagree with it, but they definitely have a coherent
Idea.
And then I just kind of allowed myself to like, Oh, that's a really good idea and let me
build on that or let me like these I I didn't know where this that particular one came
Yeah.
Ninety five percent sure that's somebody else.

I wanna get to this idea of gardening versus building that is central to a lot of the way you think about it, but before we get there
I wanna touch on another bit and bob that I love that you
Come back to occasionally.
Which is this idea of organizational K Fabe.
Yeah.
Talk about what this idea of K Fabe is on its own and then how this applies to organizations in your experience.
So one thing I should I should flag before I dive into this stuff.
Sometimes when people hear me talk about how organizations work and systems
They think I'm being cynical.
And I I wanna be very clear. I'm
hyper optimistic and I also believe that um the important like one of the moral precepts is how do you maximize the agency of real humans.
as ends and of themselves.
And so sometimes when I get excited about this, people go, Wow, that is so cynical. So no, just try to describe the system as it actually exists, once 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 the the I had this slime wall deck.
Which has gotten a ton of you know 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 are not crazy, here's why this thing shows up. And once you acknowledge it, it feels like a bummer to acknowledge it. Once you do.
Now there's all kinds of options that that pop up. Oh.
Given that this thing is way more expensive than it looks, I can now do this instead that one's
Ten times cheaper. These two options, this one is way cheaper, way more likely to succeed.
So once you see these forces, you see them more clearly. So K Fave is I think a lens that's useful to understand how organizations actually work.
Have is a word that comes I believe is a carny word.
that is used and applied to professional wrestling and it means
A thing that everybody knows is fake and yet everybody acts like is real.
And
I think it's
the one of the defining forces within an organization.
Uh any organization.
So
Uh.
K fabe in the small is optimism. Enthusiasm. When someone says, We're gonna do this thing, you say, Yeah, we're gonna do that. Even if I think that's it's like over.
If you say I don't think this thing is gonna work.
Everyone loses c 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
Um imagine you were, you know, five level levels down or something and
You have this um
this project you're working on and you're trying to give a status update to be rolled up.
The leadership.
And it's currently a yellow.
And your manager asks it and you know it's not gonna be presented to leadership and and rolled up until next week.
Yes, yellow, but I've got my arms around the problem. I know how to fix it. I'm gonna go talk to Sarah. I think we have a solution.
By the time this is reported off the chain, it's gonna be green.
So if I make it yellow, there's a non trivial chance that someone's gonna swoop down and say, Well, what's going on? and we have a have a review and it will be way harder to fix.
So I'm just gonna little white line.
It's great.
This is a totally reasonable thing to do. It's a self defensive thing to do. 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 in the same in the same.
And levels up, you can be many orders of magnitude off of the ground truth.
And so the K fabe, the thing that everyone pretends to believe is true.
is obviously incorrect.
And the dangerous part about this is uh it can lead you to make very bad decisions.
And if you as a someone who sees this
can see that wait a second, the official strategy is definitely not gonna work.
Yeah, I can't
I gotta tell somebody.
I yeah, we're doing work that's going in the bad direction, it's not gonna work.
And you go and say

It's actually not gonna work for these reasons.
And what someone will say to you, and this happens, by the way, this is I'm not subtle in any particular organization, this happens 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 button, if you share that
And everybody the whole thing will shatter.
We can't do anything.
And so
Help me fix it.
Like, don't don't say the grand truth, just help nudge it and fix it. Like that's a good point. Okay. So you help working on it, and then you realize, you know, a month later, wait a second, it's getting worse.
We're doing things that's not good for the company. It's not creating 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 gonna go and hit the ground truth button, before you do
You will be flying tackled to the ground by somebody and stabbed in the dark.
Because you will destroy everything.
And so it becomes um
Correct?
Two
Uh hold on to this idea if if you acknowledge the K tape is false
Then you were in danger of getting knocked out of the game.
And so how do you do good things despite the fact that you're pulled in two different directions?
And uh this increasingly in the limit
It can be got to a point where the easiest way is if I
If I let go of this idea
Uh, if they do if I hold on to 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 earnest believe the K Fape.
This is when organizations become zombies.
And anyone individually you talk to behind the scenes will agree. This thing could not possibly work. That turns out that these things work this way, and yet the entire organization lumbers on.
And this is a kind of death state for large organizations.
It happened all over the place in any any number of of different conditions.
And this is one of the reasons it shows up. And uh I think acknowledging that is an important way 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 aren't gonna hear it.
And then it will build up and build up and build up and build up into a super critical state that could shatter.
The uh I was just listening to a couple podcasts and a thread that came up in a number of them is some of the most successful leaders.
Their uh 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 um
You won't
Uh, you won't realize it'cause it hurts at any given moment that it's a distraction. I'm tr we're just trying to get this thing done.
And so it's it comes from a good place to not get it, but if you're busy, that's one of the reasons you need to take a step back. We take a step back, you're a little bit calmer.
You can absorb this as confirming evidence. It 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 the reasons that large companies are radically different.
Than smaller companies.
And one of the traps that you can get into
of of not realizing that this dynamic is happening.
Uh and you can you can make very bad decisions if you don't understand.
that is inherently without it. People say, Oh, we'll have some bad actors.
No.
If people don't play this game, this game is emergent.
It 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 look dumb.
Because if you do
They're the person who who decides all this person's not.

And that one little asymmetry, that one little fact. In most cases it's does not matter.
That one little asymmetry is what leads to the systemic compounding thing where you get these really weird dysfunctional emergent things that everybody hates.
Nobody wants
And yet nobody is in a position to to change, per se.
I love your caveat at the beginning that continues to resonate in my head as you say this, like you're not s cynical about
This sucks. It's more here's what I'm observing.
We need a
Think about ways to get around this.
Yeah.
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 a point than towards a point is fundamentally like must be true.
in really any universe you can possibly imagine.
And so if you're gonna fight entropy, like you're gonna lose at a certain point.
If 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, the tactics I advise are often things that look playful. They look s uh unserious.
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.
Yes, I can't tell you for sure this will work.
But I could tell you there is a chance that it will work.
And the downside of this is basically the opportunity cost of planting the seed in this one moment.
Uh and the person who's planting it enjoys planting it. So that opportunity cost really isn't that much'cause they get energy from doing it. So like
Who cares?
Plant 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 gonna turn into an 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 will sometimes will see this as like, I've been called a mailist before because they said, Well you're saying that that you don't know the answer to the thing and it's like no, I'm saying
I don't have to know the answer to the thing. If on a systemic basis I
But these ideas.
And then he responds the ones that are working that are viable.
Doesn't really matter if you didn't know ahead of time which ones were gonna work.
It's a great segue to talking about this core idea.
that I again informs a lot of the way you think, which is this idea of building versus gardening.
uh the magic of acorns.
Talk about this general idea and then I wanna
Follow some threads.
So much of the 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.
And 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 gardened.
Things that can grow on their own and that you can sort of direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or or curate over.
And is 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 uh 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.
And if you do this properly.
It looks like magic.
It looks like a thing, um it looks like getting lucky.
Um'cause what you're doing is you're you're farm 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 you know interesting and transformative.
And so if you're looking and finding these seeds that have the compounding potential of like if they work, they would start working at an accelerating rate.
Then like
You don't have to know how to tell. It's like this is just it's to me this is uh
I've been told that this is
Completely against all the advice.
That people get
Um
Yeah, building products nowadays.
And uh
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.
Kimmer Trimus, because I think people hearing this might be like, but I had ship, I gotta ship stuff, I gotta hit some goals. I don't have time to sit around and garden and plant seeds, I gotta like actually build.
If if there's an ecosystem approach, if there's something that if it works
they'll be it'll sort of be self accelerating. So okay, we're gonna do the same. We aren't entirely sure it's gonna work.
But if a developer writes a thing and somebody uses it, it'll attract more developers, track more users, and then this would grow on its own.
Um then and it's cheap to do the little example of the thing. It's cheap to like build the little open source, like tinkery little thing and just put it there.
If nobody uses it, it's fun. It was fun to build. 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's finding it useful and then you stop.

Anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect
And many things had network effects have some kind of compounding loop.
Conviding loops are not rare.
They are
They're they are look they're like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for.
and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked would work at an accelerating rate.
Lots and lots and lots of things intrinsically have this shape.
Anything with a network effect, anything with a um you know
Where the power goes up with the number of users or
Uh 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 uh emergence oriented.
versus top down it
kinda what you were just saying, but I think that's another really interesting way of thinking about the same idea.
create opportunities for emergence bottom up versus top down control. Can you just chat chat about that?
Hundred percent. 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 that's hard about it, uh in my opinion, is
You're gonna look like you aren't very serious.
You're gonna look like a weirdo. You're gonna look like a cook.
You know?
And uh one of the downside if you know.
If you're working on something and you're doing the normal top down approach where you make the plan, you execute the plan, even if the plan turns out to not be useful, you produce a thing and nothing interesting happens.
No one can say you didn't work hard.
But if you try doing this kind of designing for emergence and something amazing happens, even once it happens, people go, Ah, that 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
I got to I 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
ten X my impact for the organization because I didn't have to worry about making it
measurable specifically in a way that would show individual heroic effort.
And I think that's the hardest part. I mean, you have to have like typically what I would advise for for PMs if I approach at Google was
Seventy percent
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 a boring linear value, but some kind of value. You're trying to minimize the chance.
that any other person in a company will say
What does that team
Two
Anyway.
This if someone says this about your team, your team is on the verge of death.
So you're trying to minimize the chance that anybody wants to say that or thinks that it's appropriate to say that by clearly and unambiguously adding value. You'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 like, of course that team should exist. I don't know. Think about it. Of course they should.
But now and once you do this, you have like thirty percent of your extra time
But 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 kinda silly.
But they're really into it.
And there is a 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.
If that PM is gonna work on that anyway, they wanna do it anyway.
Instead of saying No, we don't have time for that, be a little bit more productive over here say
go for it. I here's my concerns. I we're I would imagine 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 um
Exercise their agency.
They've learned, they've gotten stronger, they've gotten um they've grown.
It has the upside if it turns out to actually work.
Uh and worst case scenario, you know they
the opportunity guys are doing their thing that helped them grow and they learn and they like.
So 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 a great cover fire for your team?
Where your team's just hitting goals, moving metrics.
And then while with that cover fire, you're kinda building the doomsday bomb inside.
Protected where no one's gonna come and stop you. Yeah, yeah.
'Cause I think one of the hardest parts about an acorn when you plant it
Is
Making sure a squirrel doesn't dig that flicker up. Yeah. Like it there's so many things that can destroy it. And just keeping it
Allowing it some space and allowing it some time.
uh is is the most important thing and it's challenging to do, but that's why it's important as a as a leader.
To have enough credibility in the organization that people can see that you are doing useful work.
To give you the space.
to protect you know to give your team the space to do this truly great work.
Like if you want to get your team to do good work
There's a million different paths to do that. If you want to get your team to do great work,
There's no shortcut other than to have an extremely high trust
environment where people lean into
The superpowers.
in a way that adds up to something greater than some of its parts. That takes time.
Takes effort, it's very difficult to make legible up.
To the rest of the organization, but think that is where great things come from.
It reminds me of something Ed Catmill shared in Creativity Inc., 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. They're just like this ugly thing that like barely works or kind of like
But if this is why I my what I try to do is I try to see the greatness, the seeds of greatness in everything. Everyone and everything around me, I look for
I try to find in Steel Man, what is the most compelling part of this? And let me lean into that.
And so one of the things I try to do when I meet with people when I mention them, I try with it within the first
session or two, whatever I can sort of get a hypothesis and say, I think your superpower is
And I describe to them what I think I can see them being truly exceptional at.
And you know, 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 gonna stretch farther and they're gonna respond to nudging feedback even better because they know that you're not trying to tell them be different.
Before I tell them be more.
And you can and now the nudges will feel less like a stop energy and more like a 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 I take from uh
Assume that everyone I talk to, everyone I talk to
Is uh
Yeah, is it interesting.
has seeds of greatness in them, even if they don't recognize necessarily where they are.
Someone described to me actually this morning in one of my little uh dirt clubs I run about um
Uh facilitate.
about treat everybody like the Buddha I think is I'm I'm m messing this up, but like this notion of like
Imagine everyone you talk to is the Buddha.
Yeah, Buddhist
uh mindset.
And
How do you see and find that those seeds of greatness uh and treat everyone with res respect intrinsically as an end and of themselves?
This is one of those things that you do to like 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
Uh just 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
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Coming back to a phrase that you used earlier.
Uh Sly Molds.
I wanna spend a little time here, so interestingly enough.
Uh, the first time I heard about you and what got me interested in your stuff is
I did a uh newsletter post with the company Perplexity about how they build product.
And as they were describing how they organized their team
the the co founders described they organized like slime old
And he linked 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 that in how slime are related to the way companies are organized and how they should think of organization?
Yeah, so the the main thesis of the of the Symbol deck is that
Uh.
The core dynamic that makes organizations hard to navigate as they get larger
even if you assume everybody's actively good at what they do, actively collaborative and actively hardworking.
is this emergent force of coordination of finding the like subset of projects to work on when everyone's super busy.
that everyone agrees and commits to and actually works 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 gonna find it the one way looking at this is
Think of a company like a vehicle.
When the company is very small
You can drive it, you can steer it like a like a sports car.
As a founder
You
You're allowed to see. Everyone acknowledges you're allowed to see. They're going to why is he staring at that, but you so you a founder can help navigate
A an 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 drive a big wig like a sports car
You're gonna be a danger to yourself and others on the road and you're gonna grind the engine.
And so you gotta drive the car that you actually have. So I but I see a lot of
Things happen in large organizations. People are just
Trying to
Ignore this fact.
And uh you know, when you drive by the way, a car uh your vehicle like a big rig, when it is a big rig, it'll go, Oh, I mean it's go slow. 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, inv invest more in processes.
Give a little bit more slack.
in the planning process to absorb any kind of uns surprising things that you can still all
reached the like 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 cars, individual sports cars. And the downside of this, you get the autonomy and uh you know and and strength of the bottom up.
Downside is other people externally will look at it and go, Well, that team and that team clearly didn't talk. And you'll say, Yep.
Yep, like 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?
Their products. It worked very well for them. The executed
Marversly.
AWS has picked the exact opposite thing. A W is like, Yeah, sure, there's like fifteen different ways of doing everything they clearly don't.
They'll see they'll talk to each other, but it allows the overall swarm
Of the AWS product suite.
to be very powerful and anti fragile or whatever you want to say.
And so uh slime molds, I think
Is like uh ignore acknowledging that
organizations are, especially ones that
Focus on autonomy and agency of their individual employees.
Where's a lot of tech companies.
They are more like symbols than we realize.
And if you fight that fact, you're gonna have a bad time.
And if you embrace it, then you can start realizing kind of amazing.
They can find pro solutions to problems you didn't even know you were searching for.
Yeah.
So
Uh Alex, you have the best metaphors. I don't know how you do this, but they're so evocative and and correct.
I I can tell you the the process I do if you're keeping it.
So
I think by talking I'm an external processor, I literally can't think
If I'm not talking. And so I I've
But make sure I have as many interesting meetings as I can.
And
That's where I discover what I think by talking to people.
And the test is if I say a frame
Something that the person goes.
Or like right or like they go aha.
That's a a win. That's a s m mark that's a good one. You're just randomly casting it out and find one.
And then if a different person
also has a similar response. If you have if a person in sales and a person in engineering
Both find the same idea interesting.
That'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 wanna see what's gonna go viral
If something is shared and it's shared within a uh pe uh some of the people who were at the beginning are all highly densely interconnected.
In the social graph.
then the implied ceiling is relatively small. You only know it works with that audience.
But if you had people that are in very different subgraphs.
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.
Yeah, each time you get something like that, you invest a little more time in it and you think a little bit more about framing it. The next time
You I haven't done it this during this chat, but
In most conversations you will see me as I'm talking, writing down stuff, but ooh, that was the best formulation of that one so far.
And so you keep on coming back to it and you keep on tightening it and seeing how
watching how it's responding and referring with different people.
So like where'd you get these from? It's like I don't know, I got like thousands and thousands and thousands of little examples or metaphors or whatever.
That sick.
One of the b benefits of metaphorical thinking is
You connect nine of the ten dots.
And you allow you you invite the the
listener to engage with the argument to connect that last dot.
This allows you, by the way, to say very controversial things.
Because if you say if you connect all the ten dots and it's like oh that's then still official strategy, then you are instantly, you know.
Uh a dangerous thing.
Whereas if you want that and connect the people can go, connect to that and go.
Oh my god.
I think it applies to us. Like, Oh my God, what? Like yes, of course that's why I picked that.
So but to counteract this because now it's less
Obvious to people that's correct.
You have to make the metaphor
Evocative and interesting.

Traction.
It's 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 inner instantly subversive thing. I only know this after the fact of trying to figure out why did that deck get so much
Attention for Yeah.
Of all the things I've written.
It also has all emojis, basically, which is not uh how you often read a deck.
Uh it was very beautifully made.
I l I love that you've to been talking about the way you think and come up with ideas is by talking to people, having conversations.
We also talked about how you right in this bits and bobs.
Approach.
I asked someone that you worked with at
Stripe what to ask you.
And 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 I also um call now like nerd clubs.
And these are my secret weapon.
And I have a blog post I was started writing right before my second kid was born, and I and then he was born three weeks early and I just lost the plot and now it's like a you know.
forty page draft of the thing that will probably never finish, but
I use this tactic. I discovered it many years ago as as I strengthened some of the techniques I'd use in open source community organizing.
And you know the the the
situation was I was just joining a new team at Google.
I've never been there for many years.
And there was like at the time twelve different groups working different aspects of this overall problem domain.
And if that's a good fashion, they add up to significantly less than some of their parts.
As in not like oh we'll see which one works, but like these two things directly undermine each other. If you execute both of these strategies, neither can work.
And I knew that if you try to do uh pairwise executive reviews on this very complex, ambiguous, open ended problem.
you would get really expensive pageantry that would obscure more than it clarified.
So what I did was I created a secret group.
I called Nabel Gazers with the original one. And it and one of the people when they hear about it
I want people that they go like
That sounds like a club for nerds.
Like, 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, uh Yan kinda energy.

You uh you say you set the norms very explicitly and say this is a collaborative debate environment.
It says only yes and if somebody says a thing in this group that is optional and secret and completely off the side of anything that matters.
If they say something that you think is an actively dumb idea, you are free to not engage. Just leave it. That's fine.
'Cause that thing's gonna happen. Not that 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 would apply this lens to that kind of problem. I wonder if that applies here.
And by saying I wonder, you make it about you, not them.
And so that person can choose if that's an interesting thing to build on or not.
This sounds, by the way, very non rigorous. How can you possibly get rigorous thinking that the SN.
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 with lots of different people in the group
are building on the same idea, that's a good sign there is something very interesting going on.
The third thing you do is you dribble in new perspectives. So every you know, one to three a week
If you put in lots of new perspectives all at once, the norms can all scramble. If you have one
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. Go, what are we even doing here?
Like
And like you want to minimize the chance that happens.
But second or more importantly, you want to have as uh people with as different a perspective as possible.
add into the group.
And so what you're d this is what uh Ken Stanley might call, for example, novelty search.
Your novelty searching through the different perspectives in the overall um thing.
When you do this properly
You get something magical.
You get a group that people find intrinsically valuable for its own sake and just enjoy participating in and find meaning in.
That also sarcastically 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.
And this is like an ideal app.
What Timber McConnell Ideal Lab.
And uh
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.
And so uh but if you do these
They are amazing places to riff and to share ideas and have formed ideas.
And this is
Anywhere I go, I terraform the uh culture around me and create these.
Because I need it.
as a place to have uh to experiment and try out different half formed ideas and build on them and be inspired by other people.
And uh and that is one of my secrets.
And based with sort of strategy secrets they've been doing now for
Probably ten years ago is when the first one started.
And there's now I'd I can count like eight or nine of I've started over the year. Some of them emerged, many of them are still at Google.
And I think it's like
They're just wonderers.
Environments that I think creative.
And I love it's an e uh a perfect example of your approach of emergent
Properties, letting things emerge versus a top down. Here's what we're doing, 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?
Communities are all about momentum.
You wanna have a
A space too small, a time too short.
Like if you have a big cavernous space with a lot of people in it and no one's talking, people go, I guess this is 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. So maybe there's four of you that already talk over lunch.
You have whatever topic and it's always really interesting and generative.
Cool, get that group together and do a thing.
And then
Incrementally add people.
Who you think are gonna 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 uh a community with no people talking is definitely dead.
A community with one person talking is already dead, you don't realize it yet.
And uh so you're trying to maximize the chance that there's an interesting conversation even when you as the kind of facilitator are not there.
This takes some active policing by the way. Active like a garden has a gardener. There's somebody pruning back and saying
Just so you know, I think that came out a little bit strong to Ciro's idea and like maybe next time add I wonder to the front of that statement, or whatever.
The other thing that you do is when people um reach out to you and ping you and they go
Here's the one this 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 get 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.
And so this becomes a self sustaining
um norm in the community.
And it's not a secret. It's not like a you're not like if someone asked me, Yeah, I told Sarah to share that. But people watching don't realize that. And so it becomes a place that people do take risks and feel comfortable sharing.
Uh, the other thing you do is once a uh once a week or so
You need that you want to make sure that you never propose something in the group.
That people go.
You always want to do a thing that goes, Yeah.
So what you do is you see that you're talking to other people, you say, You know
I wonder we should have like a live conversation every so often, right? Like the chats were so fun, but like yeah, so would you come if I did one? Oh yeah, I would. Okay, great. So now I say, Hey, a few of us were talking, we're just gonna do an experiment. We're gonna have an hour long conversation over lunch.
On Wednesday?
Um anyone in the group is free to come.
And then what you do is you make sure it is always has quorum.
If it doesn't have quorum, then the thing, you know
It looks like the Canadian's dead.
And then what you do is you d send FOMO stuff afterwards.
So you say, Here's my notes from the thing or things.
you know, Sarah, Jeff, blah, blah, blah, for an amazing conversation. I I thought the insight about blah blah blah was so ridiculously amazing. So you want people who were in the group but 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 like
vibes to to uh
Uh you you can't do it if you don't have somebody
with a lot of energy. I'm typically the kind of like
seed seed crystal for a lot of the groups I'm in.
Um 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.
And that kinda gives a the sort of foundation that can grow. But like look for the people who already roughly want it. Don't try to convince if
Don't forget somebody who doesn't want it to want it. They will not build room.
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 I have it's a it's a long essay and it um it has 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 and uh essay and the style, it would do it.'Cause a lot of the pieces are in there. It's just
I see writing something down right now, which tells me you just articulated something in any way that you want to say.
So you mentioned this idea of constraints of time and it reminds me of something that you shared 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 on 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 out how you work and what gives you energy.
And set up your day to structure it that way. So like
I find
Every time you you start a task.
There's the activation energy, especially times you don't really want to do. And then when you complete it, there's a poop, there's a little burst of energy.
So if you do this properly and get small things that are extremely easy to knock out in like ten seconds of effort.
And then you do one that takes thirty seconds of effort, and then you do one that takes
you know, a longer bit of effort. But if you give it too much space, it's too is harder to do. So like you almost want to find
Okay, let's I got ten minutes.
I gotta do this thing where I figure out how to
Add the um do this thing in gusto, they've been putting off like Timage should be enough time to do it.
And structure it's like, Okay, right now is the only time I have to do this right uh to do it.
And
Yeah, another trick is um
I use as like a I have a one of my original m medium essays, actually, the one of the original public ones is about sometimes rules
Uh always rules are better than sometimes rules for self control.
And so if you're gonna diet, you're like I'm gonna eat
I only g I'm never gonna eat uh I'm gonna skip lunch every day.
Like
Holy, you're gonna
You have a false thought on that at some point. Like a meal it'll be a a day with a big executive review, like I really need to 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 uh have a dessert.
Uh unless it is uh
It would be socially awkward for me to would not eat it. For example, in a small environment where somebody made homemade dessert.
And all of us are eating it. I'm gonna like
So very clear black and white rule.
That you can hold on forever.
So like for example, since the pandemic started
I have done a Peloton workout.
Every single day.
Um since the pandemic started.
Wow. And now once I had to start going back to the office, um, if I had to compute into the office, I would sometimes do a you know a meditation to sort of check the box for that. But if I'm not
commuting, I've done a full pop and 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 the 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 street.
Uh that
Makes it harder and harder to get out of it.
And it's some ways you kinda
You can tort yourself in
unproductive way. Like at a certain point.
Uh maybe you should stop that streak, but
Um
But I think those kinds of structuring help
You get the things done you need to you want to get done, yeah.
It's like the Seinfeld uh
Trick of productivity where you just cross you just keep track of how many days in or you've done something, essentially. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I I think people people don't give those kinds of tactics enough credit because there's lots of little social tricks
To yourself and others.
This is uh when you have other people who are depending on you for something and will know that you didn't do the thing, that works so much better.
So like just little tricks like this that help you get
And be wildly more productive.
Actually wanna go back a little bit. Uh I'm curious what you wrote down when we were chatting earlier that you thought was a good
uh articulation if you're able to share, if it's interesting.
I wrote down and the reason I wrote down is I never and the belly I collect everything, even ones I think are like maybe onto something.
So I wrote down a community with zero people speaking is dead, and a community with one person speaking is uh doesn't yet realize it's dead.
It's very.
So fun.
I love this practice that you have.
I th by the way, the reason I can do it I can type.
Insanely quickly.
In uh in undergrad I wrote my thesis on the emergent power dynamics of Wikipedia's user community.
And I did
Um a hundred and fifty hours of interviews with rant with um different editors in Wikipedia.
I transcribe 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. So like
That's another superpower is I've just constantly
I'm able to capture it very
Very quickly.
I written notes that are at least good enough for me to clean up.
you know within the next day or two into something that's more stable.
Uh, is there a way you built this other than was it just you just did it and you had to do it and you just like figured out how to do fit. 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 it worked. And I I don't know
I don't know if
Could if I hadn't written my thesis, would I have discovered that? I don't know.
I feel like everything uh you do is like on
Super speed.
Like the way you think.
The way you write.
Get stuff done I
There's a lot of things that we're gonna do.
Productive.
You're unstoppable.
And so just f how can you be in your flow state as much as possible?
And there's things that absolutely completely grind me to a halt, and I just make sure I I invest my time in situations that don't have that characteristic.
And uh
But like
So when I work on something that I believe could work and have a big impact, I just I can't stop it, you know.
Sometimes I'll wake up at four in the morning because I'm typically an early riser and I'll just write this thing or I think you know, the meeting starts you know at seven and I I just I think there's an idea that's really cool here.
And 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 I just I'm itching to write it down, if I can write down thirty 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.
Uh because it's ten 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 What was that how does that work again? And it's gone.
And so I just try to capture
the interesting insights. It's like a butterfly collector. Like the butterflies are going by and try to collect them and put them in my collection.
Uh as quickly as possible. Or garden as one might describe it. Yeah.
It's
Uh this touches on a quote I wanted to talk to you about. It's uh I think you described it as your life philosophy.
Do things that give you energy that you are proud of.
Talk talk about that.
So to me it's it's the combination of when you're doing something you believe in and that gives you energy, you are ten times more productive and you also
The effort that you are doing is its own reward.
And so you are indefatigable 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 kinda like infinite energy. It's just
It's like negative opportunity cost.
'Cause it energizes you more.
Then the sort of opportunity costs the time to like go and spend other things.
And two
There are ways to um
Uh there are ways to give yourself energy.
Like for example
Playing an addictive video game or is any kind of mind altering substance that might give you that kind of like Ah this gives me energy.
Those are not
Things that like that's I'm not saying do those, I'm saying
What are the things that you 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 ten years on
Looking back on each decision and thing that you're doing, and imagine s seeing this decision play in front of a thousand people whose opinion you care about your family, your friends, your role models.
Would you be proud?
is a good sign of like that you're taking a broadened up perspective.
When you're busy and in the moment, it's so easy to say, I just gotta do this one thing that's probably not great to get this thing done. And once I do it,
You know, I it's gonna suck, but when once I do it, it'll be fine. And like then 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 kind of a husk of yourself. And so I think
Those two comp pieces.
Lean into where you find energy, where you specifically find energy, your superpower, the thing that you intrinsically enjoy doing.
And
Just make sure it's something that you're actively proud of.
Um
Yeah, and that helped make sure 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.
So one, I love the additional piece of it is
And that you're proud of.
Two, you have a s another quote that I love.
that uh makes you think deeply about stuff, which is the secret to life is
Things you've heard a million times already, you just weren't ready to hear them.
Talk about that insight.
So this is I call kind of the hallmark 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 wanna share them.
And he go tells them it's like guys, guys.
The point of life
Is the friends we made along the way.
And people go
That's from a Hallmark card, man.
And because the 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 re you heard it when you weren't ready, and now it becomes a trite
Duh, everyone said that that can't possibly be a meaningful statement.
The reason people keep on saying it is because it's meaningful. You know?
And and so I think that having that space of
recognizing it that when you have these epiphanies
Um that come from
uh different leaps in sort of vertical development or the ability to
You when you stare into the abyss and make it through the other side.
You realize and learn a bunch of amazing things that you it's you want to pass on to others, and it's just really hard to get them to find it.
I find that that's one of the reasons I try to write things that
Error.
Or share ideas that are kind of like little seeds.
They kinda shoot into someone's brain.
Even if the soil's not ready for it's kinda racky or crogy.

In the future
Uh if there's a little you know.
Something goes through there and opens up a a crack that's sitting there to grow into an idea.
One of the things that makes me the happiest is when someone I've mentored
Years in the years in the past they go they'll
Seach 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
putting you know, the no name cafe or whatever on Google campus. You said something I
frustrated to hear in the moment. I didn't understand it.
I just want to tell you.
Thank you.
Because I finally understand what you were trying to tell me and I realize that that influenced me in the decisions
That to me is one of the most meaningful things I can hear.
And
So like it uh I just find that like
Hm you can't force it before people were ready to hear
Certain topics, you know?
Man, that must feel so good to hear those sorts of people
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 I had this very m very experience. I did a
psychedelic trip with some friends a while ago and at the end of it I was just like
Man, love is all you need.
Love is all you need. Like I felt that so deeply through the experience and as telling people they're like, Shut up. It's like oh do you just do so good, Alex? Yeah. It's funny. I I have um I had a lot of folks in my broader
I never personally have myself.
And uh
But I find it's there's there 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.
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 experience. Some people find it
You know, using psychedelics and others to help get their
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 the feeling of awe or wonder or curiosity.
Is treated as a not very serious or childlike thing.
And
I just 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
Yeah.
Your ego
gets hurt when you get disconfirming evidence. You won't want to hear it. And so you'll construct the world around yourself to not get that disconfirming evidence. But disconfirming evidence is what makes systems strong. It's what makes you strong.
And so how do you put yourself in situation to get that kind of information and really receive it?
And uh I d and part of it is just coming in terms of the fact that like
Yeah, yeah
Earlier in my career, someone called me cookie, I'd be like
I'm like, but okay, fine. Yeah, I'm cookie. Whatever. I'm like I'm totally
At peace with the idea.
that like some people tract me as kooky and not particularly serious. I think people who watch
the work that I do and the kind of indirect impact it has.
uh realize that I'm doing something that is working, even 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.
You 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
But
uh 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 the frame is the adjacent possible, which is I believe comes from design thinking. It's um I've found it from z designers in my life were the ones who are just be to it.
And the adjacent possible is a set of actions that you do that you can do that are right in front of you that if you do them, they would work.
Almost certainly work.
And um in 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 within his arm's reach.
And people will kinda say, Oh, you're that's you're being nihilist, you're limiting your potential, like you know, you're saying don't do big things.
But when you recognize that your JSON 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.
And 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 are you know a principal approach.
You can arc to wildly different outcomes than look like they were possible.
Well at each point, each individual action is safe and reasonable.
And uh so you can combine both of these things.
I think so many times we try to like jump
And we jump 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. It will almost certainly pay for itself, or the very least won't be too expensive, and then it might
Allow these other things to happen and you take it. And if those other things don't happen, okay.
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 j like jump too far ahead in an unknown in that 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 do bigger.
If you only do incremental
You will follow the shortest, like the the steepest
gradient in front of you.
So UXR says a user wants to do this and it'll do exactly that and you will end up random walking through the thing. So you need coherence about where you're going.
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.
You should describe a thing that every single person who reads it to has any kind of knowledge that might be useful or relevant
Agrees that it is plausible.
If this happens, I would not say well a miracle happened, it's say I could see how that could work.
You know, and lawyers say I can see that could work. And someone who's worked on this thirty years ago at a similar product at Microsoft is, I can see how that could work.
And that if you got to the end point, everyone would high five.
'Cause if it's gonna be a thing that like I mean, I guess that could work at the end of like, Oh yeah, neat. Like
That's not worth it. You want to a Norse be like, Yeah.
Yeah. Great.
Like wow, we kick off, we change the way this entire industry works, or whatever.
And now this is your North Star. North Star should update, but it's because it's far off in the distance. It will update, it will slide up and kind of the sky a little bit.
Um 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 interjacent possible and you look for the thing that has the steepest 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 keep on repeating.
That's it.
But you need both.
'Cause 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.
Uh
It's actually manifest.
To give you a metaphor from an experience I had, I did this silent meditation retreat once and a big part of Buddhism is to not like
cling to a specific outcome and not
Have a plan in mind and be sad if it doesn't work out.
And so I asked him just like how do you be success how do you achieve success?
And want to be successful.
While not doing that and there
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 to this end destination. And and you'll know after the fact
You'll say, Oh, you know, I curved a little bit or I had this little jog then there
And you'll say, Ah, it would have 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, I'd much rather have a path that's slightly inefficient because we're navigating unknowns that we couldn't known up front.
I can't tell you the number of times I've find
People say.
I need to know.
For this strategy
You know, in
Uh that someone was, you know, try to get me to look at and then say
Uh is this number
In uh in five years, is it gonna be ninety three?
Or ninety five.
It's like
I don't know.
And it didn't matter.
Either it's gonna be if it's gonna be that order of attitude, it doesn't matter. And we don't have to do that analysis. I if we believe
That the order of magnitude is of that thing, it'd actually be
We had spent all the time to get the illusion of precision.
Uh at great expense.
And then it's the people say, Oh, I'm data driven. I want to really run the the analysis to ground. There's also stuff you can't know ahead of time.
So if you're getting a a false precision
At the beginner, 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, we'll either get ninety three or ninety five. It's like we'll either get zero or we'll get a thousand.
You know?
Great. It doesn't really matter which of if it's a thousand or a thousand one. Who cares? It's orders a match too larger.
And the alternative.
And so it is better.
That's really freeing.
Uh I noticed again you were writing something. I'm again curious what you wrote, you thought was insightful. I actually this time I was not writing something down, I was checking the thing I thought you might say that I was gonna reference was um Tim Urban's
Happiness is um the uh reality minus expectations. I always get that backwards.
But uh have you heard this frame that's get into it. Yeah. We're not gonna cut this. This is great.
Happiness is um reality minus expectations.
And this is Tim Urban, uh from Way But Why, and I think it's a very simple distilled 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, then it's a net 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, by by kids' birthday, she's gonna remember it's gonna be a best birthday of ever had, and we're all gonna be perfect. Cause then when it doesn't go perfect
It starts raining that day.
You get all worked up.
Just say no, I want to make
I wanna spend this day in a way that I can look back on and remember fondly. And that will include Yeah, it changed. Like one other piece of advice someone gave me that I really like is.
Try to feel the emotion about the story that'll make you feel in ten years.
So if it's funny in ten years, try to see the humor in it now.
And this one in particular was a friend their um their newborn
Uh.
Would every time you change your diaper would poop.
Uh that was only the other and when they did it, it would often be um projectile.
And so it was like a trap like you change paper.
Yeah.
And
And like what are you gonna do in that situation? Like
And then that they're just like
Just
It's gonna be a funny story in a few years, so like let's do the humor in it now, even though God, I really wish this year poopover.
And I I think that that kind of uh 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 uh that feel very authentic to yourself if you're cheap.
Alex, 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. And I again we could go on for hours and hours and hours and hours. I I could just do a random I got feature in the compendium where I can pull up a random
Um idea and like
Let's not do that. Okay, amazing. Well, Alex, with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
I am ready.
First question, what are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinharker, which is great. It's um about a uh sort of complexity economics, why the traditional economic model doesn't work.
And 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 the systems thinking and I thought it was just absolutely brilliant.
And the other one is the elementos thinking in systems.
Which is short.
Easy to read, very approachable. In fact, if anything people think of it is not serious enough'cause it's too easy to read.
Um, it's one of those books that when you read at the beginning you'll say, This sounds right.
And then later.
Years 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 with 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 really enjoyed?
For me, uh I was thinking about this, it's the green night.
Which I watched since I think a few years old. It's about the Arthurian legend.
It's a challenging movie. In fact, when I watched it, I was like, I dislike this. I do not find this interesting.
And then I couldn't stop thinking about it.
And uh
And it helped me I think one this is one of the reasons I like to write in parable.
Is a parable is open ended?
It encourages and requires the listener to engage in
into the idea and play with it and see how it affects them and how they affect it.
And so for me the Green Knight
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 uh couple of years in terms of amount of thinking that I
It kind of caused me to do afterwards.
Well, it says a lot.
Next question. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?
To me, I think the answer for me is WebSim. It's the one that I like playing around with a lot.
Um
And I've said it before, I use claw twenty times a day. I was I
I like uh I find that it's it's almost uh impossible for me to imagine doing work. I mean, of course, now I gotta use strawberry uh and see how that feels, but
Um
Yeah.
Uh one uh use case of web sim that I found really fun.
that I used with Dylan is if you do Gmail if you go like gmail dot com slash someone's name.
It just comes up with what their email
Like
And you can do it for famous people, like for, you know, Patrick Allison or whoever, and it's like, wow, that's really good.
The LMs are really good. One of the things we uh we played around with is having a thing that generates fake data of arbitrary schemas.
I just gave it a short back uh write a short backstory.
of a person and then have it generate data that fits in this fictional user
versus world.
And like it's just amazing the kinds of stuff, like the coherence it has with like uh
Yeah, it's weird and it's very specific to that story, but like
Alms are just so they are
They're like these little holograms.
Right, of all his information uh
Humanity is like interesting
Sort of
informational package is a little thing.
And uh all kinds of it's like a mirror.
Yeah.
Different things reflect back out of it at you and it just it's shocking sometimes.
To see humanity.
Like
Reflect 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, right?
Yeah.
All right, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to?
Find useful in work or in life.
I've I guess I've said two, this is cheating, but I said to the um you know, do things that give you energy that you're proud of.
And the happiness is reality minus expectations, I think, are really
Simple clarifying
And

Yeah, words flew by.
All right, final question.
Uh I you can go in one of 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.
Um okay, so this is this is the I'll just read this off.
Um great.
We've forgotten this is written uh a year ago.
Yeah.
We've forgotten a world without agators.
non arrogator ecosystems because the participants don't have to fear empowering their overlord.
Like where that you have to worry about the other
Each bit of action you're doing the aggregator is getting it more and more powerful.
My space was the Wild West.
Facebook made so you can't change the CSS, which was better for users, continuing some freedom.
aggregators make sense in a late stage of an era, but at the beginning they curtail too much exploration.
That's just by re like random reflections. I don't even remember what conversation that came from originally.
But
The power of
I 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 figured them all out and nothing can be any different.
And
I kinda don't love this outcome that we're in. Like the idea of like
Yeah, well I you just one quick
Framing.
To me if you if you ask somebody
to 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.
Yeah, it's one size fits all. It's noncomposable, doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the broader ecosystem. It's also only allowed to exist if
Some of the largest companies of the world say it may exist, which is insane to me.
To me, software is alchemy. It'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 commentatorial possibility of human agency.
And somehow
In the past decade we've come become convinced that all of this potential
Should we squeeze into about a dozen dinner little boxes on your phone?
And now with the power of AI.
Everyone just is default assuming that what's gonna happen is we're all gonna be locked inside of a box with a super god AI clippy.
The only thing that people disagree about is which clipping is it gonna be?
Whose clip is it gonna be?
That to me is bonker. I don't want that world at all. I th I want a world where we use this magical duct tape.
Two
Escape the box.
To allow software and humans using it.
to lean into their agency.
And I think
Arrogators are amazing in an environment where you have um a safe environment to have all kinds of interesting
Stuff but it can't be fully open ended.
Because the air gear can't allow it to escape the the possibility of that ecosystem.
So for me, one of the reasons I'd excited about LMs being a disruptive technology is
I think that it allows us to get out of this monolithic
sense of like, whatever, we're all just beholden to us.
Yeah.
very powerful organizations and lead into
Everybody being with it.
Be creative and collaborative.
and exercise their agency in a pro social way.
So
Wow.
Well, you blew our mind as a final uh
Uh
element of this conversation. Alex, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions.
Where can folks find you 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?
Kamarowski dot com is where if my my husband gives me so much shit for'cause it looks like it was designed in uh the early two thousands, which it was.
Um I link to all the different posts there. If you click
Um there's a Google group.
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
Take in touch uh as I po publish stuff.
And then the way the code can be useful to me is
I have office hours on my uh site.
That or open to anybody to join in.
I am continually they're they're booked off in a 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 talk. I love, love, love.
Talking to people
uh interesting people, especially who have life experiences and backgrounds are different from mine.
At one point a magician showed up in my office hours and described and said
Hey, this tactic you're talking about, your bits and bobs, that's actually cold reading. That's what psychics use.
And yeah, it's like I would find all these crazy connections that never occurred to me before.
And so people just reaching out and sharing ideas and uh
I love it.
Alex, you're awesome. This conversation was exactly what I was hoping it'd be.
Uh I my brain is buzzing as I expected.
Thank you.
So much for being here. I'm excited for folks to listen to this and to learn from you.
Thank you so much for having me.
Bye, everyone.
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