Pod Insights a16z Podcast Building for Tomorrow with Jason Feifer About this episode New year, new you! Right?
Well, as much as we’d all like to believe that we embrace the new… the reality is that we often resist change.
That’s why we’ve brought in someone who has studied how humans respond to and adapt to change – or sometimes how we fail to. That person is Jason Feifer – long-time editor in chief at Entrepreneur Magazine, host of two popular podcasts, and recent author of his book Build for Tomorrow.
Today, Jason shares 6 specific frameworks around the very natural human responses to change, which he’s developed through interviewing and studying some of the most influential people in the world – past and present. We also play a fun game at the end, where Jason comments on current technologies encountering pushback, and assesses where they might fit into his framework.
Topics Covered:
00:00 - Introduction
04:06 - Why adaptability matters
08:10 - Framework 1: We do not believe in our own adaptability
22:24 - Framework 2: We don’t know what new things are for
28:26 - Framework 3: Innovators don’t build a bridge
37:36 - Framework 4: We mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem
44:38 - Framework 5: We imbue innovations with personal anxieties
51:22 - Framework 6: We oversimplify problems
1:03:45 - Framework summary
1:04:55 - Game: Jason assesses current technologies!
Resources:
* Jason’s website: https://www.jasonfeifer.com/
* Jason on Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyfeifer
* Jason’s book Build for Tomorrow: https://www.jasonfeifer.com/book/
Stay Updated:
* Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z
* Find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z
* Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/
* Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
Transcript 13,882 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 People talked about the waltz in society Europe. The way that people talked about Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs a few years ago, right? Like, it was this incredibly scandalous, awful, destroying-the-youth kind of thing.
0:21 Steph Smith? Welcome back to the A16Z Podcast and welcome to 2023. It's hard to believe we're here, but if the last few years have been any indication, we are in for a lot of change. And that's why we brought in someone who literally studies change, and that is Jason Pfeifer. You might recognize Jason as the longtime editor-in-chief at Entrepreneur Magazine, the host of several popular podcasts, and the author of his recent book, "Build For Tomorrow." But in today's episode, Jason is sharing his six frameworks about how people understand and adapt to change, or how sometimes they fail to adapt to change. And he does this through studying and interviewing some of the world's most influential people, both past and present. So I'm going to give Jason the floor, but
1:04 Steph Smith? I did want to flag that at the very end, I think we play a very fun game, where I go through a bunch of current technologies that are facing some degree of pushback, and Jason shares how they might fit into his framework. So that includes things like remote work, AR and VR, biohacking, and lots more. So if that sounds fun, make sure you stick around to the end. I hope you enjoy this episode and have a great 2023.
1:29 Speaker 02 The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
1:57 Steph Smith? We have Jason Pfeiffer on the line. Jason, thank you for being here.
2:00 Speaker 00 Thank you for having me.
2:01 Steph Smith? For people listening, we had to go through a lot of roadblocks to get this recording on the books and then now actually recorded. So Jason, thank you for your patience. Why don't you just give everyone a super quick background on who Jason Pfeiffer is and what you've done over the many years you've been involved in technology?
2:19 Speaker 00 Sure. I have to say, by the way, I kind of love when things break. Like, this was not a bad experience for me because the thing is that when something breaks, it gives you an opportunity to fix it or to do something nice. And then people are kind of more grateful.
2:36 Steph Smith? Totally, which is what you did.
2:38 Speaker 00 I didn't fix it. You fixed it, but fixing it involved inviting me into your Riverside account and then me setting up this room and hitting record. So, you know, I have a weird amount of power in the A16Z world right now that will be
2:50 Steph Smith? Temporarily.
2:51 Speaker 00 drawn from me the second this is done. So, anyway, who is Jason Pfeiffer? I am the editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine and that means that I have the unbelievable pleasure of spending all my time talking with and learning from just the most innovative and smartest people in the world. I am also the author of a book called Build For Tomorrow, which came out of a lot of work that I've done, both with Entrepreneur and then also in this podcast that shares the same name, though originally started as Pessimist Archive. I know you guys at A16Z are pessimist archive fans and I used to be a part of that project and launched a podcast under there that I then evolved into my own thing. So, anyway, what am I? I'm a guy who gets to learn from incredibly innovative people and then turn around and
3:35 Speaker 00 teach innovative people how to be more adaptable because I think that that's the most important thing in success.
3:42 Steph Smith? That's amazing. And I want to get to your book that you recently wrote and published, Build for Tomorrow. So we will talk about that and talk about the many themes and lessons from it. But I want to hear from you, why do you think that skill is important? That skill of adaptability seems to be something that you've kind of geared your career around, now your recent book. Why is that important today? And why, of all the things that you could possibly focus on or write about, why have you chosen that?
4:09 Speaker 00 Well, so I chose it because when I became editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and to be clear, I didn't have a business background per se. I really have a media background. But when I started at Entrepreneur, I would go out and I'd be interviewed on podcasts, or I'd be speaking at events. And I got this question over and over again. The question was, what are the qualities of the most successful people or most successful entrepreneurs? And I kept thinking, it's like a weird coordinated attack that all these people are asking me the same question. And then I realized, you know, if you listen to the questions that people ask you, you discover that what they're really doing is telling you what they think your value is to them. And so I started to think, well, why are people asking me this specific question?
4:53 Speaker 00 And I realized the answer is because people see me as a pattern matcher. I get to talk to a lot of people and therefore my value is that I can see patterns across lots of different experiences. So I thought, well, if I am to seize the opportunity here and be really useful to people and match their expectations of me, I should have a good answer to this question. I spent years thinking about it and talking to very smart people. And what I came to was that the one thing that seems to define success is that people hang on through enough failures to get there. Because the journey of anybody in business, I mean, we're talking specifically to a tech audience, but it is certainly not just specific to tech.
5:38 Speaker 00 You are absolutely not going to have the right idea at the start. But by just putting something out into the world, you can start the iterative process of developing something that is something people really want and that solves real problems, hopefully in incredibly innovative ways. And that requires a level of personal adaptability. Because it's not just enough to
6:04 Speaker 00 Keep revising the product. You yourself have to be able to rethink who you are and what your company needs from you, and how to relate to the people you're trying to serve. And then to just overcome the emotional like battering that is things not working out. And I've spent years and years running various theories like this by just global game changing folks. And they all say, you know what? That sounds about right. And that made me feel confident to put it out in the world that adaptability is the most important thing.
6:41 Steph Smith? I love that you said that it happens on both the micro and macro scale. And we're talking, as you said, to a tech audience, but this applies everywhere in life, right? You wake up one day and you have certain plans and then it rains. You're like, oh, I guess I have to adapt. And it's funny because even in those micro examples, there is a huge spectrum in the way that people respond, right? Some people get very upset. Some people say, oh, well, this is an opportunity for me to stay in and work. And then if we extend that to the macro lens, which I'm very excited to talk to you about today, this has happened throughout history, right? You see this new technology arise and you're like, oh, man, that thing that I've worked on, that skill that I've developed for 10 years, no longer matters or soon will not matter. It's an opportunity to understand that you do have a choice in the way that you respond
7:24 Steph Smith? and that adaptability is something that impacts us at the daily level, the weekly, yearly, decade-long level. So I'm excited to talk through that. And you were one of the most prepared guests I've ever had. You sent me these six different, would you say they're frameworks or theories around how people maybe miss the opportunity to adapt or don't really recognize some of these larger themes that have happened throughout history? And why don't we just start there? What are these six different frameworks or theories that you've developed? And how would you kind of package them?
7:58 Speaker 00 So I appreciate that. Yeah, I sent you a very, very long document that I like pecked out at midnight in a hotel room. That comes out of me. Seeing how people convince other people to work with them. And the answer is often that they just, they come with a solution. If you go to somebody with a solution, how do they turn down good solutions? But don't ask for an opportunity, be the opportunity. So anyway, when we were first in touch, I was like, I'm just going to show you a whole lot of stuff and hope that you will read through it. So, look, I am fascinated by both how entrepreneurs solve problems today, but also about how change happened throughout history. The reason I really love the history stuff is because you know how the story ended.
8:40 Speaker 00 Whereas we don't know how the story ends now. Or anybody who's working on anything right now, you have truly no idea what's going to happen, despite your best efforts to control it. And yet, when you look backwards, you can see how decisions that were made
8:57 Speaker 00 played out. And I think that those are really instructive. If we can find the patterns across all of this, what we can see is where change and adoption of change goes right and goes wrong. And so I have throughout my work on all this many years, been just trying to make sense of all the data, right? I mean, how can I draw lines between why people threw rocks at early automobiles? And, you know, why people are uncomfortable with Lime scooters on the streets? And I think that we can learn a lot by trying to compare all these things. And so I came up with these six frameworks, which are really ways to understand
9:41 Speaker 00 why people are uncomfortable with or outright resist some kind of new innovation. And we could be talking about big, global, changing things like social media, but we could also be talking about individual innovations that you are just trying to introduce to a client base. So why are people uncomfortable with these things? And then what does it take to get them to? Embrace or understand this newness.
10:10 Steph Smith? Right. How do we get them to adapt? And something I liked from Pessimist Archive, which you've been a part of, is that it really is anything from the automobile to the mirror. Right? There are some of these things that people think are very, very commonplace today, but were faced with resistance when they were first introduced. And we'll go through the different reasons for those, but I think it's important to note that this isn't just like, yeah, social media or this big airplane. It could be the mirror. It could be the teddy bear. It could be jazz music. There are many things that people have faced with resistance that you would not expect today. And I think the lesson that will get you is that, you know, we see many parallels. So why don't we dive in? Why don't you introduce the first framework from the six?
10:55 Speaker 00 Number one is we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability. If you look back through time, and this even won't be unfamiliar to listeners of the A16Z podcast, because I know that Mark was talking about it not that long ago, which is that you find throughout time incredible concern that is repetitive about new things. So the number of things that have been claimed to be addictive, or it goes on forever, right? The things that people say about social media, you heard about the radio. But it also, you know, it gets kind of funny and time specific. The spinning wheel of the bicycle in the early days of the bicycle, people thought would make people go insane.
11:37 Speaker 00 Novels were believed to make women infertile, among many other things. But what I think you're seeing, and I'll tell you this one story that really captures it, that we generally believe that we exist in a kind of balance. And that that balance is very easily upset by new things.
11:57 Speaker 00 And so when something new comes along, we tend to process it as a loss. We see some new way of doing something and then we instantly identify the thing that we will no longer have access to, or that the thing that we're very comfortable with that maybe we won't be able to do in the same way. And then, because we cannot imagine what the gain will be, and maybe don't even believe that there will be gain, we start to extrapolate the loss. So we say, because I lost this thing, I will then lose this thing. 1877, Thomas Edison invents the phonograph, or he might not have called it the phonograph, but anyway, it was the very first record player. It was originally a cylinder, and then it became a flat record like we know today. And people's
12:39 Speaker 00 minds were blown. Just consider how, until that moment, the only way that you could listen to music is if a human being was playing an instrument in front of you. There was just, there was no other way to do it. And then suddenly, there was a machine, a machine that had captured sound and could play it back to you. People didn't believe it at first. They had to be shown that there weren't, like a live, there wasn't a live band hiding behind a wall somewhere. And then, once they did come to believe it, they were amazed and fascinated by it, and they wanted it in their homes. You know who really hated that? The answer is musicians. Musicians really hated that, because they saw themselves being replaced. And the leader of
13:24 Speaker 00 the resistance was a guy named John Philip Sousa. So John Philip Sousa, you may not know his name today, but you certainly do know his music, because he wrote all the military marches that we're still very familiar with. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So John Philip Sousa. He wrote this article, he was the champion, the champion against recorded music. He was leading the resistance for his fellow musicians. And he wrote this piece called "The Menace of Mechanical Music" in 1906, I think. You can go look it up. And it is this- String of arguments against recorded music, and my favorite of which goes like this. So he says that if you introduce recorded music to the home, or the phonograph or record player enters the home, it will replace all forms of live music. All live music now gone, because you know, why would anybody perform live when there's
14:09 Speaker 00 a machine that could do it for them? And then mothers will no longer sing to their children. Why would a mother sing to her children when a machine could do that? And then because children grow up to imitate their mothers, as John Philip Sousa says, the children will now grow up to imitate the machines and thus we will raise a generation of machine babies. Now, that of course didn't happen, but you can see the logic, you can see where he's going, that there's some kind of very specific balance here, that we are performing live in the home, which inspires mothers to sing to their children, which inspires children to grow up to imitate the mothers and therefore kind of find their humanity. And that one little change to that very important shame breaks everything. But of course, that's not what happens.
14:52 Speaker 00 What instead happens is that we find game in totally unexpected ways. You think about what happened with John Philip Sousa and recorded music, and as it turns out, recorded music enabled musicians to reach people that they couldn't physically reach. John Philip Sousa lived in a completely geographically based world, where the only way that he could, he could have people hear his music and make money off of that is if he traveled to them. But now he had the ability to scale.
15:23 Steph Smith? I like the analogy of something breaking, because that really does seem to be the emotion that arises when people visualize certain new technologies, where it's really like, there is a current world order and something about this is going to break, maybe all of it. Sometimes it gets that far. And it reminds me actually of the Douglas Adams quote that Mark, you mentioned Mark's interview. He- Brought up there, which is really this idea that when you're brought into the world, you think that everything is normal and ordinary and just a part of the way the world works. And you basically live that way until you're, I think that the quote says around you're around 15. And then between 15 and 35, everything's new and exciting and revolutionary. And actually probably something that you can build a career around and that you can be a part of.
16:06 Steph Smith? And then anything after 35 is just fundamentally against the natural order. And then that's where you see, you know, a parallel from the music example you gave. You see AI coming into play right now, a lot of dispute between artists and the people creating the AIs and the other people building technology on top. And so, yeah, I think one of the reasons it's so interesting to learn these stories from history is because you can apply them or you can see the parallels today. But I think that's a great example of just that idea of breaking society. Meanwhile, the society that we live in today broke the society from 100 years ago, which broke the society 100 years before that. There's no like true way that humans are supposed to live.
16:49 Speaker 00 That's right. We really are the products of change and we forget that. We're actually the argument for change because the things that we grew up with were the things that people had previously opposed. The belief in, in a kind of easily breakable humanity, I think, is also a belief in fixed opportunity. Economists have this theory that I love, which is called the lump of labor fallacy. Are you familiar with it?
17:12 Steph Smith? I am not.
17:13 Speaker 00 So the fallacy is that there's a lump of labor. So the idea is that there are a fixed number of jobs and a roughly fixed number of people to do those jobs. And anything that creates an imbalance in one way or the other will create kind of unfixable disharmony, right? So this is what would drive, for example, a lot of fear that new immigrants to a country will take the jobs from the people who already live in that country. And therefore there will be a lot of unemployment from the people who used to have the jobs, right? But that's not what happens, of course, because when immigrants come in, they are also consumers themselves. And so they create more jobs. There isn't a lump of labor. It's, it's totally flexible.
17:55 Speaker 00 Similarly, there's always been the belief, as John Philip Sousa had, that new technology will reduce the work available to the same labor pool. So, you know, he's believing that recorded music will replace.
18:11 Speaker 00 Live music in many instances, and therefore there will just be musicians out of work. And to be fair to him, that was true for a while because musicians used to, for example, they would perform live the scores for all movies. So you went to see a movie and the movie was silent and there was a live band playing the score for the movie and then that wasn't necessary anymore. And it was a, it was a difficult transition. Every time that there is a shift, we adapt to it and it creates new opportunities. It isn't to say that it's easy. It's not, it will be disruptive and there will be losers in that disruption. But I think what we need to do as a whole, as a society, is be alert to how and where those new opportunities come from and then how we can start to help people realize those
18:57 Speaker 00 new opportunities and then kind of create new value out of them ourselves.
19:01 Steph Smith? Yeah, I think something that people fight against sometimes is the amount of abstraction that exists in our lives and that is really a macro theme. If you think about many hundreds of years ago, humans, as you said, they were focused on like, how do I have enough food to live? How do I make sure that I'm not getting diseases and dying at age 20? They're really focused on like the nitty gritty of how do I survive? And over time, we've abstracted that from people's lives and that for the most part is a good thing. So we can focus on things that are enjoyable, that are discretionary. Just this idea of this different skills that humans quote unquote should have. I think one great example is people saying, well, Google is removing our memory spans, right? Like, we can't even remember things anymore. We just Google it.
19:45 Steph Smith? But again, coming back to this idea that the way we've operated for a period of time does not mean that's inherently correct. It doesn't mean that you being able to recall all of these historical dates or all of these names from the past or all of these random facts and, you know, ace a trivia test, that's not necessarily good or bad. It just is changing. And so I think that's another important perspective.
20:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's right. I'll credit that to Lee Rainey of the Pew Research Center who had originally put that to me and I was really struck by it. You know, he was saying, look, a sign of intelligence decades ago would be the ability to be able to easily retain.
20:25 Speaker 00 Information, so the ability to read something and retain it, the quick recall of that information, that was a sign of intelligence. Now, a sign of intelligence would be the ability to quickly find and process information. And is that to say that one is better than the other? No, it's just to say that it's different. And that intelligence takes different forms based on the needs and the resources of the time in which somebody needs to be intelligent. And we shouldn't be weighing these things against each other as if one thing is better or worse, because progress just simply doesn't work that way.
21:03 Steph Smith? Progress doesn't wait either. Let's bookend that and move on to number two. What is the second framework that you've developed?
21:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, so the second one is that we don't often know what things are for. And if we don't know what something is for, then we will either be alarmed by it, because it seems like it's, you know, to go back to what we were just talking about, kind of breaking something that we were familiar with, or we just think that it's frivolous. So oftentimes, I'll go and I'll speak to crowds and I'll talk about change and adaptation and technology, and then somebody will raise their hand and say, but you make a print magazine. Why are you still doing that? And the answer is, well, look, I think that it's important to ask, if I'm in the content business, and I am, what is content for? What's it for? Decades ago, content was for monetization. So you could sell ads against your content, you could sell subscriptions to your content.
21:54 Speaker 00 Now, you can do that, but it doesn't make you nearly as much money. And I'm not just talking about entrepreneur, I'm talking about the entire media ecosystem. So I look at content, I think, well, what is this for? Content is for relationships. That's what it's for. Why does Red Bull pour a ton of money into content? If you like extreme sports, then Red Bull is your place. They got a magazine for you, they got videos, they got events. Do they make money off of that? I have no idea, probably not. They probably lose money off of it. You know where they make money? Energy drinks. And the reason that people buy the energy drinks is because they feel really good about Red Bull, because they developed a relationship with Red Bull because of the content. Content builds relationships, and then you can monetize the relationship with products and services that people trust you to provide because of the content.
22:38 Speaker 00 That is why we do it because a print magazine is an unbelievable way for people to feel really good about entrepreneur or media. We do still make money on the print magazine, to be clear. It doesn't lose money, just doesn't make the kind of money that it probably did 30 years ago. But that's how I think we need to think about the entire media ecosystem. What products or services can we build that people will trust us because of the content? Stop thinking about the content as monetization. What is it for? It's for relationships. So anyway, I think that people fundamentally misunderstand oftentimes what the new thing that they're looking at is for. And as a result, they think that it is either bad or frivolous, and therefore they make incorrect conclusions.
23:16 Steph Smith? I think they also maybe struggle to see what it can be for eventually, right? When you're met with a new technology, it's not the perfected version of that technology. And there's so many examples of this where there is an 1865 newspaper editor that I found that said, "Well, informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." And I could see how when that technology is either inexistent or nascent, you're like, "What on earth would I use this for?" But with millions, if not billions of people who are using a technology, there is so much creativity that goes into building out the use cases. And sometimes it does take some time.
23:59 Speaker 00 That is also very similar to something that Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, which is, "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be have nothing important to communicate." And, you know, the funny thing is that Maine and Texas possibly back then didn't have anything to communicate. But as soon as you give them an ability to communicate, they will find something to talk about. They will find commerce. They will find information to exchange. That's the thing. Things aren't fixed. Once you introduce something new, people find ways to use it.
24:29 Steph Smith? That's right. Ken Olson was also famously quoted as saying, "There was no reason for an individual to have a computer in his home." And to your point, at that time, there may have not been because there weren't connections between computers. There weren't certain jobs, certain information that this person had access to that would make that valuable. But with time, with more people who are integrated into that technology, with the evolution of that technology, the increased speed, the increased access, things change. And I think it is important to focus on what something is used for. And remember that your first encounter with a technology likely won't be the version that you encounter as it grows and progresses. And just a final note there, I think it's very common for us as humans to,
25:13 Steph Smith? we basically encounter things and skeuomorphically apply something that already exists. So I mean, email is the perfect example of this, where literally it was like, there's mail, and then we're just going to call it email. But now it's a fundamentally different thing. And I think you see the same thing where people jump on Zoom calls and they're like, let's have a happy hour. And they just apply what we do in the quote unquote, "physical world." But these things will evolve on their own into completely new things. And I think that's also important to keep in mind. Very hard to predict, but just it's worth having that lens of this will change.
25:46 Speaker 00 So if you're on the innovator side of that, what we need to be doing is asking, "What is this for?", maybe of a nascent technology or something that we're developing, and then running experiments, seeing hypotheses through. Because ultimately, the reason why we were able to get to what you're describing there, stuff with a nascent technology that maybe is really frankly for nothing right now, but becomes something that's transformative, is because someone or a series of people had an idea of where this thing should go. And of course, you know, when you look back at time, it's not like these things are preordained. Oftentimes, people had lots of different ideas and directions for technologies. There were all sorts of funny designs for the bicycle that turned out to not be the final one that we have now.
26:31 Speaker 00 But what people were doing was carrying hypotheses out into the world and seeing how people react to it, and then reacting to that. That's ultimately how innovation happens. And so the winners, the people with the competitive advantages, are the ones who are constantly asking, "What is this for?", and then are willing to see if they're right. And if not, Be adaptable enough to take the data that they're learning and build it back into something better.
26:56 Steph Smith? Completely. I think that's a perfect segue into framework number three, which is that innovators don't always build a bridge. Can you speak more to that?
27:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, right. So here's the challenge that innovators often have. It is that they are so familiar with the value of the thing that they have created that they do not realize that other people do not see that value, or do not understand it, or don't understand how it fits into their lives. I think that Silicon Valley is guilty of this all the time, of introducing very revolutionary ideas without doing the groundwork of connecting this new idea to something that people are already comfortable and familiar with.
27:50 Speaker 00 To play that out, I'll take you back on another historical story. So in the 1800s, the car was introduced. People didn't call it the car. They called it the horseless carriage. And that, of course, is if they were being generous. If they were not being generous, they would call it the devil wagon, because they totally thought these things were the devil wagon, and they would throw rocks at them. And if you drove down the street in one of these early cars, somebody would literally yell, "Get a horse, say, get a horse." They would yell, "Get a horse" at you. And when people tell the story now of how cars became the dominant mode of transportation, what they tell is the story of Henry Ford. That Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing and therefore made cars cheaper and more accessible to the masses. And though that is true, it skips over an important point,
28:35 Speaker 00 and an important part of the story that I heard from a car historian. And it was something that Henry Ford was the beneficiary of. It goes like this. So in the earlier days of the car, people are calling it the devil wagon. They're throwing rocks at it. And the auto industry is trying to understand what on earth is wrong. And they start to look at the way in which they're advertising the car. And they...
29:00 Speaker 00 They realized that they are advertising the car as a replacement to the horse. They're saying, get rid of Dobbin, Dobbin being the generic name, like spot for a dog. Get rid of Dobbin and get this car. This car is so much better than your stupid horse. But here's the thing, people hated that. They found that offensive and they should have because they loved their horse. Their horse was a member of the family and as far back as they knew, every generation of their family had a horse. And now here come these people saying, I have a totally better way for you to be. And your old way is stupid. People hate that because people hate new things. What they like is better versions of old things.
29:43 Speaker 00 So what we need to do as innovators is we need to build what I like to call the bridge of familiarity. And that bridge goes not from us, the people with a great new thing to the people who we want to have that great new thing. That is not the direction to build the bridge. You build the bridge the other way around. You start with where they are and you build towards you. So back then, the shift that the auto industry made was that they stopped talking about the car as a replacement to the horse. And they started talking about the car as a better horse.
30:23 Speaker 00 So they started popularizing terms like horsepower and naming cars after horses, which we still do today with the Bronco and Mustang. Oh, it's kind of like my horse and I can sort of respect it like and use it like my horse. Well, that, that makes a lot more sense to me than someone just coming along and telling me to get rid of my horse. This is what we always need to keep in mind. I was just talking about a guy who, um, he had a product that they were calling it chicken chips. Chicken chips.
30:51 Steph Smith? Chips.
30:52 Speaker 00 Chips, like out of a bag, like potato chips, but chicken chips. Now, um, does that sound appealing to you?
30:58 Steph Smith? No, I was gonna say, I'm not sure where you're going with this, but I would definitely not grab that off a shelf.
31:03 Speaker 00 Yeah. And, and that's the thing. It did really well in taste tests. People really liked the product. Nobody was buying it because chicken chips sounds disgusting. So after a bunch of kind of consumer insights research, they changed from talking, from calling it chicken chips to protein chips.
31:23 Speaker 00 Why? Because people are already familiar with protein bars and protein packs and protein shakes. So the idea of it being protein first now signals to an existing audience. And where's the protein coming from? Well, you can find out that it's coming from chicken. And that little shift completely unlocked sales for this company.
31:47 Steph Smith? I love that you brought up a current application of this because that was going to be my question. There are so many cases where there is pushback. And in many cases, rightfully so, whether it's Web three, whether it's autonomous vehicles, whether it's different versions of space. There's a lot of pushback in some of these new emerging, perhaps exciting industries. And I think you're right that there is that familiarity gap where people are just like, why do I care if people are going to Mars? Like, I have problems on Earth. Or like, why do I care if something is decentralized? Tell me why that matters. And so I think it's important to use those frames of just like, why does this matter? That simple question, why does this matter to someone today?
32:28 Steph Smith? And even, like you said, using like simplistic terminology can completely shift. And, and I think another area that this reminds me of is, as I mentioned, AI is, you know, we went through AI summer, things are still trucking ahead very quickly. But it's like, how can you reframe something to not sound so scary, right? Like, someone who's a designer is like, oh, this artificial intelligence bot is creating art based on my artwork. That sounds really bad. And in some cases, I can see how there is a negative consequence. But yeah, just thinking through how this can be framed as something new. And I will just add one more thing there, which is your examples of cars and applying forces to them.
33:10 Steph Smith? Reminded me of a conversation I had recently, which is someone basically saying, I want to get an electric vehicle. But man, I just love hearing the sound of my car. They just love that familiarity. And I was like, huh, I wonder, I mean, I could see an electric vehicle company one day, maybe. Just like adding in that sound for familiarity. It's not creating the same emissions, but again, giving someone that bridge that you talked about, that familiarity bridge of what they like and what they love and what they're familiar with. And then just giving them almost like a little step towards the next thing.
33:42 Speaker 00 Totally. Elevators used to be obviously hand operated. And then by the time we got to the 1950s. Automatic elevator technology existed, but people didn't want to get in them because they were used to having a human being operating it. And consider it, there's literally no other example in the world, or at least that the average person will use, in which you walk into a completely enclosed space with no windows and no human operator and it moves you. There's nothing else like it. And so people weren't getting into these things. And there were also all these kind of interesting fear mongering campaigns happening from elevator operator unions that were also contributing to it. But anyway, one of the ways that the elevator industry found could get people inside the
34:26 Speaker 00 doors was by recognizing that what people needed wasn't necessarily a actual human. What they needed was the feeling that there was a human involved and that there was a human touch. There was a human that would be there to their aid if something went wrong. And simply adding in a soothing female voice that said things like going up, going down, floor one, floor two, that that by itself helped a lot of people feel comfortable getting into the elevator. So that reminds me a lot of your example with the electric car making that noise. I mean, we do things like that all the time. Potato chips are engineered not just for flavor, but for crunch. And there's a reason for that. It's because things, people are looking for those kinds of things as signals of quality.
35:09 Speaker 00 So you have to understand where people are and then start to build from there.
35:13 Steph Smith? I love that example because it is one of those things that I have just taken for granted in elevators. I had never thought about the fact that there would be an elevator without some of those things. And now there are, but I never noticed how that might influence people today because we're so used to elevators and just accepting the fact that they're part of our everyday lives. But there was a time where I guess that really mattered. That's so fascinating. Let's move on to number four.
35:38 Speaker 00 Sure.
35:39 Steph Smith? Framework number four.
35:40 Speaker 00 Right. So framework number four is we mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem. So I'll tell you another story from history, which is that the waltz, when it was first introduced centuries ago, people talked about the waltz in society Europe.
35:57 Speaker 00 The way that people talked about Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs a few years ago, right? Like, it was this incredibly scandalous, awful, destroying the youth kind of thing. Society had all sorts of reasons why they hated the Waltz. It was sexual, it involved too much physical contact among young people, but doctors were saying that the Waltz was physically harmful, that dancing the Waltz would take years off of people's lives. Now, this is something that comes up all the time. I, you know, mentioned a little earlier, you know, there were doctors who said that the bicycle made people insane
36:38 Speaker 00 and that novels made women infertile. But I talked to a historian of the Waltz, and he made this really interesting point, which was that in that case, the doctors were actually right. The Waltz was actually very bad for people's health. But the thing was that they thought it was the dance that was harmful, the spinning, the contact. It wasn't the dance, it was literally everything around the dance. So how did people dance the Waltz in like the early 1800s? Well, here's what they did. First of all, they were in buildings that were enclosed, didn't have modern ventilation. They were being lit generally by, you know, sort of oil candles. So you have the lighting is pouring noxious fumes into a unventilated
37:22 Speaker 00 space. Then they were all dancing on top of these particular kind of rugs. And the rugs would kick up all this dust and other particles that people would then be breathing in. And of course, they're wearing these incredibly tight, like corset-like, you know, clothing. So you better believe that that was a pretty unhealthy environment to dance in. The Waltz wasn't the problem. All these other things were the problem. Now, the reason I tell you this story is because we often mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem. People thought that the Waltz was the problem. The Waltz wasn't the problem, the circumstances of the Waltz were the problem. This really goes to, in a way, that 1% again, where it was just to say, people see the 99%. They see-
38:07 Speaker 00 The hardware, they see the processing of credit cards, but they miss that 1%. And sometimes they miss that 1% and they think that the 1% problem represents a 100% problem. In the case of like Lime scooters, these are all terrible and dangerous and let's get them off the street. Where sometimes that 1% is actually the thing that makes it work, that you only understand and that your competitors don't. The more that we can focus in on that 1% and make sure that we're maximizing it, the more in which we are able to create things of value and also protect things of value.
38:37 Steph Smith? I think that reminds me of something I love about digital products in particular. And it's that you get data on all of this, right? So if you were to compare the Lime example to bicycles, well, you could go and have a bunch of bicycles sold and then people distributed throughout the country are crashing and getting hurt or using them for purposes they shouldn't be. But really, it's extremely hard to get that information and to really act on what that 1% problem is. Because those distributions are not foreign in many aspects of life, right? People have heard of the Pareto Principle 2080. There often is something smaller that is accounting for a larger issue. And that's what's so beautiful about these digital products is you can get that information to really tease out, yeah, how do we improve this product?
39:21 Steph Smith? How do we fix something that might be a 1% problem that people are viewing as a 100% problem? And I think you're also right that it's just so hard, and we've kind of spoken to this throughout the conversation, just so hard to understand how technologies manifest. And often I find that people's reservations or fears early on about those problems just don't end up being the very real problems that exist later. So just a quick example that many people would be familiar with is just the phone. A lot of people worried about the radiation from phones early on. And that was like the big thing, like, can we have phones near us? It's going to impact our health in these ways. And no one back then could ever have imagined the very real consequences of phones today.
40:05 Steph Smith? And I'm not saying that phones are net negative, but you know, who could have imagined that these phones that we were worried about in terms of radiation would be the talk of the day in terms of like upending democracy or kids spending too much time on this? I'm not taking a side on either of those topics, but more so just saying like, no one could have ever predicted that those would be the quote unquote issues of the day with that piece of technology.
40:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally right. Just a really useful, quick framework. To try to think through those exact kind of things is, you know, people often ask the question, is this perfect? Or that's at the heart of the 99% their problem is people are seeing an imperfection. And then therefore they say, well, this whole thing is damaging or dangerous and has to be removed. But you know, the problem with asking, is this perfect? Is that the answer is the same every single time? The answer is no, it's not perfect. It's never perfect. Nothing's perfect. So the better question to ask is, is this new problem better than my old problem? Because once we start tracking progress through problems,
41:13 Speaker 00 one, we just create the space for problems which are inevitable. And therefore, when a problem arises, it doesn't shock us. But also that it keeps us focused on the task at hand, which is not to create some kind of perfect balance. Like, you know, we were talking earlier about people believing that we're all in some kind of perfect harmony that gets easily disrupted, but rather that we are a nonstop rolling series of problems and everything that we ever create just creates other problems. And so the question that we must evaluate is, do we have better problems? I would say that for all the problems, and certainly there are many of them, of a, let's say, just interconnected world,
41:55 Speaker 00 that the amount of prosperity and access to information, just for two things to start, the things that come out of that, which is all sorts of problems. I mean, really, you know, large and small. But I think that we have better problems now than we did back then, when we didn't have those same levels of prosperity and access to information.
42:13 Steph Smith? Well, you'll have a plus one there for me. I know not everyone agrees with that, but let's move on to number five, which I think relates to what you're speaking to, which is that people not only resurrect or dig up problems with these new technologies, but they also tend to map them to other problems within society, which may be removed or overlapping to the new technology.
42:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, we imbue our innovations with our own cultural or personal anxieties. You know, we've been talking about kind of technology in a more traditional sense. But here's something that was innovative all the same, which is the teddy bear. So the teddy bear was invented in Germany right around the turn of the century. And then it made its way over to America around 1906. 1907, it became popular enough to trigger its own moral panic. There was a national moral crisis over the teddy bear in 1907. It started in Michigan with a priest named Michael G. Esper, who had given this sermon about how damaging teddy bears are and how dangerous they are.
43:18 Steph Smith? It sounds so ridiculous for there to be a moral panic around teddy bears. And it always just reminds me of the fact that people probably will look back 100 years from now and there will be something like the teddy bear. I don't know what it'll be, but it always just reminds me that like this is
43:34 Speaker 00 Oh, it's totally true.
43:35 Steph Smith? so ridiculous today and something parallel will happen tomorrow.
43:38 Speaker 00 Right. It started with a reverend named Michael G. Esper in a little church in St. Joseph, Michigan. And one day he gave this fiery sermon about teddy bears. He said, this is an actual quote from the sermon. "When your little girl asked for a doll and you gave her a teddy bear, your action was fraught with a consequence that is only excusable on the grounds of your ignorance." He called the bears "bundles of horribleness." He said that "they are the most harmful and repulsive nature fakes ever perpetrated." Now, what is going on? How could somebody be this worked up about a teddy bear? And well, first of all, I should say that it wasn't just a kind of one crank in Michigan. What happened was that he gave that sermon.
44:21 Speaker 00 That sermon was then reprinted in newspapers around the country, the kind of 1907 version of going viral. And then it triggered other churches kind of giving their own sermons. It triggered schools banning teddy bears. A national crisis slash conversation took place as a result. Here is what he was concerned about. He was concerned if girls play with a teddy bear instead of a doll. You heard that from the quote. Then they are going to do lasting damage, not just to themselves, but to the family. Why? Because girls, of course, have one purpose in life in 1907, and that is to grow up and
45:00 Speaker 00 become mothers. And when they play with a doll, they develop a maternal instinct, and that enables them to then grow up and be mothers. But if they set aside the doll and play with a teddy bear instead, they will not develop a maternal instinct. They do not develop a maternal instinct, they will not grow up to be mothers, and thus we will have, you know, the end of the human race. That was his real concern. Now, you listen to that and you think, well, that's a real logical leap. What could possibly be going on here? And the answer is that if you look at what was happening in the culture of the time, women were becoming educated in a way that they had never been before, and they were also entering the workforce in a way that they had never been before. And that was very alarming to the traditionalists of 1907.
45:46 Speaker 00 And they were distilling all of that anxiety down into the teddy bear. Oftentimes, and then what we see here is we see our own concerns about either shifts in culture, or sometimes our own fading relevance. And we therefore treat something new as if it can only be bad because it is upsetting the delicate control that we like to have on things. I mean, I will tell you, as a longstanding member of the traditional media, you know, you don't get a membership card to traditional media. But I started my career in community newspapers, and then I've worked in national magazines ever since.
46:31 Speaker 00 You know, I'm often deeply frustrated by the way in which I see traditional media cover technology. And, you know, the kind of alarmist look for the worst possible outcome and then report it as if it is, you know, fact or at least certain outcome. I mean, Just one example was that completely absurd New York Times story from earlier this year in which they found out that LinkedIn was doing some like basic A B testing and then they ran this story about how LinkedIn was actually conducting a gigantic hidden secret experiment on whether or not people get jobs. I mean, it's just like, guys, do you not know that A B testing is like a really basic thing that actually improves?
47:14 Steph Smith? And that your firms do it as well?
47:15 Speaker 00 Yes, that the New York Times does it as well. I mean, this was just really nuts. But anyway, what's driving this? I'll tell you, I think that it, and I don't think that people are doing it consciously, but I think that generally speaking, people in traditional media are very, very afraid that the systems that kind of drove the relevance of the organizations that they work in, and therefore the structures that people work in, are going to get upended.
47:38 Steph Smith? I completely agree. And I think in some cases, it's not just anxiety. It's really protecting an investment of some sort. And that could be an investment in a skill, like a journalism degree. That could be an investment in a taxi medallion that no longer is relevant, or is less relevant, or worth less, literally, than it was prior. And so, yeah, I think it's important for people to keep that in mind on both sides. I like that you pointed out. It's not just important for the person who might be anxious or scared, or protecting what they've invested in. It's also important for the people who are developing these technologies to understand that technologies, especially if they're game changing, will upend power. They will upend structures that already exist. And there's beauty to that, but it's also
48:20 Steph Smith? very scary for someone on the other side. And so figuring out how to bring that technology into the masses in a way that's understandable, in a way that's clear, in a way that's perhaps, if possible, less scary, is important. So why don't we dovetail that into the final framework, which I think is related?
48:42 Speaker 00 We oversimplify problems. And when we oversimplify problems, we inhibit our ability to come up with meaningful solutions. Because you cannot create a meaningful solution to something if you do not really understand the underlying problem.
49:01 Speaker 00 So my story for this is again more of a recent one. After the 2016 presidential election, you know, there was all this concern about how Russia had interfered and pundits and politicians all had this word for it, which was unprecedented. You know, you would just, it doesn't matter what cable network you turn on, you would hear them talk about this was an unprecedented attack on democracy, et cetera, et cetera. And they all blamed in one way or another, social media, and particularly at the time, Facebook, and to a lesser degree, Twitter, on the problem. And I had started to wonder, as I was hearing people talk about this being unprecedented, if it was unprecedented, because it just seemed, seemed maybe too simplistic to say
49:45 Speaker 00 that Russia interfering with American elections was unprecedented. And so I found this, this guy named David Shimer, a historian and foreign policy analyst, who had just written this book called Rigged, about the 100 years of Russian interference in American elections, and called him up to ask him about it. And he said, I'm just going to read you what he said to me, because I just thought it was really powerful. He said, "If you treat something as unprecedented, what you're saying is there's no history behind it. What you're saying is it's never happened before, and that makes it much easier to create rumors, myths, and even lies about this subject." Now, then he went on to basically explain to me how for 100 years, Russia had run the same exact playbook on American elections, and that was to utilize the dominant mode
50:29 Speaker 00 of communication at the time, which could either be newspapers, or radio, or television, or social media, to exacerbate existing tensions in American culture. And that was the playbook. Now, of course, in 2016, social media played a larger role in American life than it ever did before, and it hasn't been around that long. But what Russia did with social media was not really any different than anything else it had ever done. And I asked David, "Okay, that's a really interesting academic point, but what are we supposed to do with that?" And he said, well, look, you know, as a starting point, it's this.
51:12 Speaker 00 Right now, the conversation is entirely about social media. And that's not to say that social media is blameless. Facebook, for one, could have certainly had a smarter approach to this problem, a more proactive approach to this problem. But if we simplify the problem of Russian interference in American elections down to it's a social media problem. Well, then, look, you could throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail and you could shut Facebook down today and you wouldn't solve that problem because that problem is bigger than social media. So if everybody is focused on only one part of a problem, then you are not solving the problem. We need to have smarter conversations about exactly what is underpinning
51:56 Speaker 00 the problems and the challenges that we face, either culturally or at an individual company, and then start to really develop meaningful, comprehensive solutions.
52:07 Steph Smith? Yeah, I think you're right about that. I also wonder sometimes whether, as I mentioned before, we're becoming so abstracted from the things in our lives, how that plays into all of this. And what I mean by that is, you know, social media is one example that you give, but you could also give like self-driving cars as another example or some of the other things that we engage in that we just don't understand. Even you and I on this call, I cannot explain to you the technology behind this call, like the really nitty gritty, like what bits are moving where and why? And how this is so much faster than 20 years ago? I can kind of speak a little bit to it. And we're involved in technology. We interview people who create these technologies.
52:51 Steph Smith? And then I just think back to people who, you know, I mean, the New York Times example that you gave earlier, where someone doesn't know that A B testing is happening. Well, there are people who are even further from the technology than that, right? Who just don't understand the world that they are now placed in. And so I do wonder, I think you're correct, that people simplify these problems because that's the only tool they have. They don't know the nitty gritty about how these algorithms are working. They maybe don't have the historical perspective to understand, like the scholar you spoke to about all of the different. You know, pieces or ways that Russia was involved in the past. And so I don't know if I have a solution. Do you have any thoughts there? Like, we are becoming more abstracted.
53:33 Steph Smith? And then simultaneously, these technologies are becoming more complex. And so it's hard for people not to simplify, if that makes sense.
53:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, I think that's absolutely right. People will and must simplify. And I think on an individual basis, there's just kind of little that you can do about that. It'll be a kind of chaos of noise and out of which will come use cases that make sense to people. Right? I think about AI right now and the way in which people are using these new tools to do every random thing. I was like laughing today at these AI images that somebody had created of Avengers characters if they were in a Wes Anderson movie. Like, it's so funny. And then we're going to start to imagine all the ways in which this could be used for bad or for good.
54:26 Speaker 00 And people will try all sorts of things and it'll be noisy and chaotic. And I think when you put something out into the world, in a way, there's kind of nothing that you can do about that. Outside of if you are an innovator, an entrepreneur, then find the use case that is going to solve people's problems and really focus on it. And then tell a story that is so compelling that it breaks through that noise or it helps clarify to people why this is useful to them. You know, of all that we've talked about today that were incredibly disruptive and that were feared and resisted. You would think that electricity would be this thing that's going to invade my home and animate my objects. What a terrible, terrible thing.
55:12 Speaker 00 But the thing was that at the very beginning, electricity for the average resident of a home.
55:19 Speaker 00 Had only one use case, only one. And that was safer lighting. People were lighting their homes by gas. And they understood that that was incredibly dangerous because if the flame goes out and the gas keeps coming in, you could get poisoned to death. Electricity was an ability to remove that danger in your lives by bringing in safer lighting. For that reason, people welcomed it in their homes largely. There wasn't the kind of mass panic over electricity. And once we had that, we could start to build and create new uses for it. There was a new familiarity of this thing in our home. And now, of course, we wanted to see what else it could do. And what is that? That's problem solving.
56:04 Speaker 00 That's storytelling. That's also being aware of and building into the very foundation of the thing that you're building. If you're a company, if you're creating something new of what people need and where the shifts are in their needs. I was talking to this disruption expert. His name is Hamzah Madassir. And he was telling me about this really interesting theory of what killed Kodak. The story, of course, is that the digital camera killed Kodak. And there's good reason for that. You know, Kodak, very famously, they were part of developing the digital camera. They basically put it on the shelf. They saw it as irrelevant or competitive or whatever they thought. And then, of course, somebody else, many other people came along and created digital camera.
56:49 Speaker 00 The business was gone. But he says, no, no, no, that's not what killed Kodak. What killed Kodak wasn't the digital camera. It was Facebook. Why? Because when the digital camera first came out, people saw it as a novelty, but they didn't see it as a replacement to the camera film. Yeah, you know, the photos were grainy. And even if they were good, what were you going to do with them? People were used to printing photos out and putting them on their refrigerator or putting them in albums. And you had really nothing to do with the digital camera. But then Facebook comes along. And Facebook is really the first major use case for sharing and storing digital photos. Now people know what to do with these things.
57:33 Speaker 00 And as a result, they know what to do with their digital cameras. And as a result, they like their digital camera more than they like their film camera. And that's what killed Kodak. Now, what's the moral of that story? The moral of that story is that Kodak was so busy thinking of itself as a camera film company that it thought all of its competitors were companies that made camera film. And therefore, the way to compete against those companies was to make camera film better, faster and cheaper. But as a result of that, they didn't see disruption coming from a completely different space. But they could have if they didn't think of themselves as a camera film company and they thought of themselves as a memories company.
58:18 Speaker 00 And if they did that, then what they would be obsessed with was their consumer and how their consumer shares memories and captures memories and what they want to do next. And they would have seen Friendster and they would have seen MySpace and they would have anticipated that eventually somebody's going to come along and make a much better version of those two platforms that were pretty buggy. And eventually, people are going to want to share memories in different ways. But I guess the reason I'm telling you that story is that we need to build into the way in which we operate, the assumption that there will be problems and that there will be change.
58:59 Speaker 00 Change, not just that we are introducing into the world, but change that we are navigating ourselves. The change will constantly come for the thing that we make, even if what we made changed things for others. And if we are aware of and alert to that change is always going to come to us, we will start to build structures and approach the world in a way in which we are anticipating that change, or at least operating in a belief that the thing that we do today is not the thing that's going to happen tomorrow. That's really the only way to solve these problems. That's how to make things seem complex, is by never allowing us to simplify, to oversimplify, but to realize that everything that we do is just part of a complex structure and that
59:44 Speaker 00 whatever balance we find, if we find it at all, is going to be very temporary.
59:49 Steph Smith? You're so right to say that balance is temporary. We always find these like temporary states of the world, but that is just subject to change. And I think the six different frameworks that you've provided today are really helpful, as we've talked about for someone who is the innovator or someone who is part of this wider world that is being innovated on. So why don't we just quickly wrap up by you sharing the six different frameworks?
1:00:13 Speaker 00 Number one, we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability. Number two, we often don't know what new things are for. Number three, innovators aren't building a bridge to the people that they're trying to reach. Number four, we mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem. Number five, we imbue our innovations with our own cultural and personal anxieties. And number six, we oversimplify problems. Now, you know, it's funny, Steph, we've been calling these frameworks the whole time. As I read them back, I realize that really what we're talking about here is major problems. But of course, if we think about what's driving those problems, then we drive solutions and that's really where the frameworks come from. So if we are grappling with why is something not working?
1:00:57 Speaker 00 Or why are people not understanding or valuing this new thing that we have spent so long creating with such care? Then I think thinking through those problems will help us identify maybe where we have gone wrong and where the beginnings of solutions are for people and ourselves.
1:01:16 Steph Smith? I couldn't agree more. And I know we only have a few more minutes, but I want to play a quick game just to make this, as you're saying, this relevant, this tangible for people today. So we're not going to be able to get through all of these, but I have, there's going to be two parts to this very quick game. The first part is looking at a couple of pieces of technology, and we're using that broad sense of technology, where I'm going to read you a headline from the past for a particular piece of technology, and you're going to tell me which different problem or framework, as we were using before, applied. So let's just, let's go with the mirror, which I mentioned before. So we have the mirror here. Okay, the quick headline is "Little Aids for Vain Women."
1:02:00 Steph Smith? And then there is a much longer paragraph, which basically talks about how a woman no longer has to go into a store or go back home in order to fix up her makeup or see her face. She now has it on her. She can now see herself at any point in the day. Little aids for vain women. Where do you think this fits in?
1:02:19 Speaker 00 Okay, so that's definitely number two, which is that we don't often know what new things are for, because they're describing something very similar to how we talk about selfies today, right? Which is that these mirrors are exacerbating and playing into people's vanity. And, I mean, those old articles about the mirror would talk about women who will like literally not pull their faces up from the mirror. There were concerns that women would be wandering out into streets and get hit by cars because they're looking at the mirror the whole time. And of course, now we talk about that with our cell phones and with selfies. But what people didn't understand was that, you know, the mirror wasn't going to override our basic humanity. The mirror was going to be a wonderful new tool that people used in certain circumstances, and that frankly, everybody would be happy
1:03:04 Speaker 00 to have one.
1:03:05 Steph Smith? Exactly. I also think it plays into, I think, is it number four or five, where basically, I think people were just a little worried that women would have a new tool to use in ways that they, they didn't like. But with that said, let's move on to something else we've talked about. The camera. All right. This actually relates to the prior point. So maybe actually we'll move on to the next one. But basically, this headline says, "People who photograph their vanity." And it goes on to talk about how, "But now, a stroll down Broadway reveals hundreds of unknown faces taken in the imperial style of photo so much in vogue." So basically, now, not only could rich, wealthy, famous people be photographed or painted, but now everyone could.
1:03:44 Speaker 00 Yes. So this is, I'm slotting this into number five, which is, "We imbue our innovations with our own cultural and personal anxieties." Possibly what those writers at the time were reacting to was, when America was a far more dominantly religious country, there was a belief that vanity is a sin, is, you know, is one of the sins. And, and people were really taught that any focus on themselves, you know, this is, we're kind of rewinding back to like a 1700s, 1800s timeframe, that any focus on themselves was vain, and therefore an insult to others and an insult to God. When the camera came out... People were actually often very concerned about photographing themselves and sending
1:04:29 Speaker 00 the photo to others because it was such a sign of vanity. And so there were these really interesting, like Emily Post-style etiquette guides, explaining that you taking a photo of yourself and sending it to someone else is not vanity, it is a gift. Because, you know, the camera's coming out at a time in which people are moving, but in which, moving around the country, but in which transportation options are not that great. And it's possible that a family member of yours would move away and then you would never see them again. And the best that you ever had was these little photographs. That was the way in which you could look into your brothers, or sisters, or aunts, or whoever's eyes. And that was a gift.
1:05:14 Speaker 00 That wasn't vanity. And that was a real tension around the camera. And I think it's a tension that we're seeing play out now in the way in which we, we share things from our own lives today.
1:05:25 Steph Smith? I agree. There's a level of judgment in both. All right.
1:05:28 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:05:29 Steph Smith? Final one in part one of this game is the airplane. All right.
1:05:33 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:05:34 Steph Smith? So I like this one because it's a little different. And the headline says, "No Chance For The Airplane." And interestingly enough, this one also relates to women. It says, "It can never have the support of the feminine sex, and that alone is all that is needed to relegate it to an inescapable and dingy obscurity." And this is one of many headlines that took many different forms. I think I read another headline that said it would take over a million years for the airplane to be successful, only to which I believe the Wright brothers took flight two months later. So what do you think? What do you think about the pushback against the airplane?
1:06:07 Speaker 00 Oh, that's a really interesting one. Okay, I'm gonna slot this one into, this is a complicated one, but I'm gonna slot it into "We Don't Often Know What New Things Are For." And the reason I'm going there is because this is really about the dawn of the technology. And it took some time, not just obviously to perfect the technology, but then to develop it out into a way in which it was really commercially viable. So at the time, I could imagine that people would look at the airplane and they would wonder, well, even if you get this right... What am I gonna do with it? Right, it's sort of in the way that like, right now,
1:06:50 Speaker 00 Richard Branson can send people into space, but there isn't really a point to it at this point, right? It's just a kind of joyride for wealthy people. But it's very possible that at some point in the future, there will be a true purpose for going into space. I can't anticipate what it would be, but for the average person, that is. But, you know, in the same way that when the car was introduced, people often didn't know what to do with it because the very idea of a commute didn't really exist. People didn't, they weren't commuting long distances. So they were mostly joyriding with these things. And a lot of people were saying, well, this is obnoxious. I don't need this like thing to joyride. So I think that people just didn't know what it was for because they couldn't imagine how it could develop into something that served a purpose
1:07:33 Speaker 00 and in a world that was so connected that there would be reasons to be flying around all over the place.
1:07:39 Steph Smith? I think you're right. I think that was one of those, you know, exponential technologies where if you're early on in that curve, it's just so hard to see how this could progress. Okay, second part of this game is to share things today that people are pushing back on. Or maybe, as we've been talking about, maybe are earlier on in their adoption curves. So one of them that I'm gonna skip by, but I'm just gonna call out because it relates to what you just said, is space. So I think part of that is it's just really hard to imagine a future where people, the everyday person, is engaging with space. Let's go to one that's a little different, that I think you might find interesting, which is remote work. So again, this is not like a specific piece of technology,
1:08:22 Steph Smith? like a phone or a laptop or a camera. But I think it's kind of like some of the other things we talked about, maybe like more cultural phenomena. So remote work is something that many of us are doing now. We certainly are leveraging the technology there. But there's a lot of pushback. A lot of people wanna send people back to the office. What do you think this fits into? The current pushback around remote work?
1:08:45 Speaker 00 So I am slotting this one firmly into, we mistake a 1% problem for 100% problem. I think to the companies that I have called who have shifted to four-day work weeks, who are generally always remote, and they tell me this really interesting thing, which is that if, you know, if you get it right, if you can implement the four-day work week, then productivity remains the same. People are working one day less. They're much happier. It's a great retention and a recruitment tool. But here's the problem. After about a year, people start to say, I'm starting to feel disconnected from my colleagues. Because the problem here, of course, is that how do you get to a four day work week? Well, what you do is that you eliminate meetings and colleague chit chat.
1:09:30 Speaker 00 And basically, anything that feels inefficient so that everyone's just focused on efficiency. But it turns out, all those inefficiencies had a purpose. And that purpose was building the fabric of a company culture. So you could ask, to go to this point that I said a second ago, is this perfect? And the answer is no. And then you must ask, well, is this new problem better than the old problem? And here, I think if you asked, is this perfect? And said, no, and then got rid of the four day work week? Or any other form of remote work, right? That, oh, well, you know, my managers don't feel like they're able to properly oversee their, you know, direct reports. And so that's a problem and we need to get rid of this whole thing. Possibly what you have is a 1% problem. Possibly you have a management training problem. Possibly in this case, what you have is, in the case of employees not feeling connected to each other in four day work weeks,
1:10:15 Speaker 00 what you have is that you haven't figured out how to replace those longer meetings and ways of people communicating with other ways that are more efficient, but that are still building those kind of bonds, right? That is a 1% problem that can be solved, rather than 100% problem that you had to get rid of. I think that the remote work is fantastic. I work from home. That's not to say that it is not without its problems and we need to be solving those problems. But I think that we have better new problems than we did before.
1:10:46 Steph Smith? I completely agree. Let's see if we can fit in two more, although I have a bunch more. So maybe we'll do a full separate episode.
1:10:52 Speaker 00 Shorter answers.
1:10:53 Steph Smith? Okay, AR and VR. Right now, there's a lot of hype. People talk about this term, the metaverse. What do you think? Where does this fit in to your different set of frameworks?
1:11:04 Speaker 00 This, to me, is very clearly a, we don't know what things are for. I don't think that the killer use case for AR, VR, or the metaverse has been introduced yet. And so what people are hearing is a lot of hype. And then if they get the Oculus, I got an Oculus. You know where it is? It's in my closet. And the reason is because I didn't really know what to do with it. I couldn't find enough. Ways to integrate this into my life. I think the technology is incredibly impressive, and I just don't think that the use case for mass adoption is there yet. So we don't know what this is for, and I think it's incumbent upon the very, very smart people who are building these things to make that argument to the consumers who are waiting for the answer.
1:11:47 Steph Smith? Great. This one's a little different. Biohacking, or you could say longevity science, you could say genomics. I know those are all slightly different, but they all overlap. There's some concern around people doing certain things to their bodies. There's also cultural issues with changing what babies you might have and what genes they have. What do you think about this whole space of maybe biohacking?
1:12:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, incredibly complicated, intersects with a million moral questions, but I'll slot it into we imbue our innovations with our own cultural and personal anxieties. I think that the big disruptive potential of biohacking leads to just unbelievably large questions, fundamental questions. But are we gonna get there? Is that where this is really headed? I don't know. I have a hard time parsing what is realistic and what is somebody's kind of hyperbolic fever dream. But I do think that as we introduce these and anything else, it's worth having really intelligent, serious conversations about the world that we want to build
1:12:52 Speaker 00 and how the innovations that we have can help us get there.
1:12:56 Steph Smith? I couldn't agree more. I know we're out of time. I'm just gonna quickly share for listeners or watchers at home. I think a good exercise would actually be to go through the six different frameworks that Jason has shared here and just think about where this might fit. So we've got NFTs, which we didn't get time for. We've got autonomous vehicles or cars, right? And then this is similar, so it's cars, but ride sharing. So we're kind of over the hump for this one to a degree, but maybe think through what some of the pushback there was. And there's the train, something that also had pushback when it was being introduced into society. But Jason, I want to say thank you for taking the time here and for sharing all of these thoughts through your many years of research and talking to different people within this field. If anyone does want to find you or your book, where should they look?
1:13:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, so Steph, thanks. This was so fun. I really enjoyed it and really I'm just honored you had me on. I've been a long time listener to the show. So my book, where a lot of this comes from and much more, is called Build For Tomorrow. You can find it audiobook, ebook, hardcover, wherever you get books. And it's really, it's designed to be a guide to adaptability to help people think through great changes in their careers and their lives. And otherwise, get in touch with me. My website is jasonfeifer.com, J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. There you can get links to my social media accounts, my newsletter that I write on this subject, and I'd love for people to reach out. And I promise I will respond to anyone who does.
1:14:20 Steph Smith? Wow, that's a big, big commitment. I find it hard to keep up. But Jason, thank you so much. We'll include all of those links in the show notes. And we'll have to do this again sometime.
1:14:30 Speaker 00 I would love it.
1:14:33 Steph Smith? Thanks for listening to the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at youtube.com/a16z-video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.
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