Thinking like a gardener, slime mold, the adjacent possible: Product advice from Alex Komoroske

Alex Komoroske is a strategic leader who merges the practice, theory, and mindset necessary to tackle complex problems. He spent 13 years at Google, where he worked on Search and DoubleClick and led Chrome’s Open Web Platform. He also spearheaded Augmented Reality in Google Maps and developed toolkits to align companywide strategy from the ground up. After serving as Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe, he is now co-founding a startup aimed at reimagining the web for the AI era. Alex created the popular “Slime Molds” deck, which offers fresh insights into organizational dynamics. He is also the author of the widely read “Bits and Bobs,” a collection of thought-provoking reflections. In our conversation, we delve into: • “Organizational kayfabe” • “Gardening” vs. “building” • How AI will soon change how we build product • How and why to embrace the adjacent possible • The power of reflection and how to build it into your workflow • How to create emergent properties in organizations • How to run effective “strategy salons” or “nerd clubs” • Much more — Brought to you by: • Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/ • Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny • Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace: https://coda.io/lenny Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/unconventional-product-advice-alex-komoroske Where to find Alex Komoroske: • X: https://x.com/komorama • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-komoroske-6597336/ • Website: https://www.komoroske.com/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Alex (01:53) Alex’s Bits and Bobs document (06:20) The Compendium and note-taking process (10:10) The impact of AI and LLMs on product development (14:24) Skills to lean into as a product manager (19:02) How AI makes us better as individuals (23:04) Organizational kayfabe (31:48) Gardening vs. building (34:46) Emergence-oriented thinking (41:55) Slime molds and organizational structure (45:15) Identifying resonant ideas (47:05) The power of metaphors (48:02) Strategy salons and nerd clubs (52:30) Building and sustaining communities (55:59) Productivity hacks and self-control (01:01:04) Life philosophy and personal insights (01:07:52) The adjacent possible (01:15:56) Lightning round Referenced: • Bits and Bobs Google Doc: https://groups.google.com/g/komoroske-updates/c/2rPJ9EyKVYY?pli=1 • The Compendium: https://thecompendium.cards/ • WebSim: https://websim.ai/ • Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/dylan-field-live-at-config • Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ • Claude: https://claude.ai • Steve Jobs on Why Computers Are Like a Bicycle for the Mind (1990): https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/ • Kayfabe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe • Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012 • How Perplexity builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-perplexity-builds-product • Slime Molds: https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ • Ken Stanley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-stanley-3a159b/ • Evolution through the Search for Novelty Alone: https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/DevelopmentalRobotics/lehman_ecj11.pdf • Tim Urban’s X post on “idea lab” culture: https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1639003239801602049 • For self-control, “always” rules are better than “sometimes” rules: https://medium.com/@komorama/for-self-control-always-rules-are-better-than-sometimes-rules-4c38be32f318 • How to Stop Procrastinating on Your Goals by Using the “Seinfeld Strategy”: https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strategy • The Iterative Adjacent Possible: https://medium.com/@komorama/the-iterative-adjacent-possible-af3e7038357d • “The Hallmark Card Fallacy” on Infinite Loops: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7IgApdfBjNI • Tim Urban’s website: https://waitbutwhy.com/ • Adnan Ahmad Sheikh’s post on LinkedIn: Happiness = Reality - Expectations (by Tim Urban): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/happiness-reality-expectations-tim-urban-adnan-ahmad/ • The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society: https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Remaking-Economics-Business/dp/1422121038 • Thinking in Systems: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557 ... References continued at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/unconventional-product-advice-alex-komoroske Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like, I have a plan, I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen. 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 guarded, 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 curate over. And it's a totally different mindset for it. If you do this properly, it looks like magic. I've been told that this is completely against 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.

• 0:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Alex Komoroske. Alex is one of the most original, 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 the new toolkit to align 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

• 1:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  as AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, what companies can learn from sly mold, organizational kayfabe, 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 going to 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 for YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Alex Komoroske.

• 1:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  Alex, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  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 I love. And we're going to 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 this doc, Bits and Bobs? What's it about?

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's, I think it's like 600 pages now. It's just one Google Doc. Every so often, almost every day, someone will accidentally add a suggestion, like out of 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. 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. It's not that I'm just disengaged. I just, 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, you know, sometime in the past, sharing those

• 3:12Speaker 00

  publicly. And it's now become a thing I literally can't stop doing. Like, I just find, someone was like, oh, if you get more exposure for this, if you broke these up into tweets that you sent out once, you know, throughout the day, it's like, dude, I did this for me. I'm like, happy to let other people see and like peek into my weird mental process if they want. This is 100% about my own self-reflection. 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. I want people to have to work a little bit with it. And it's not going to lay it out on a platter. It's going to jump between different things. I'll use terminology sometimes that is, what are you talking about? And I

• 3:55Speaker 00

  do that specifically. I don't want anyone to read it and be like, oh, it sucks. Wasn't worth my time. It's like, cool, like, it's a 75 page Google Doc of like, by just unspooled insights. Like, you know, it's okay for you to not want to dive into that.

• 4:09Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 4:54Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 5:28Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 6:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/leni. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash leni.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  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. If you look at it currently, it looks like I haven't touched it in years, but that's actually incorrect. I built this about five years ago. I use it every day. And so I have, I think, let's see, I currently have 17,248 unpublished working notes. And so what I do during the week is I'm taking notes very quickly in meetings. And then 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.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  And then what I do on Friday afternoons is I sit down and I go through all the notes I added that week. And 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 in a more long-term format. And then on Monday mornings, I publish them. And again, it's a deep, for me, it's like, I can't imagine not doing this. It is the place where I find most of my most interesting insights is by reflecting on interesting conversations.

• 7:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  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.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  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, you know, the mundane, pointless bullshit will take every square inch you give it. So you gotta make that space to sit back and reflect and absuriate 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 I've told people, like back at the very beginning of my career, I used to work from home on Fridays. And people gave me so much shit for this. And they'd say, oh, you're working from home on Fridays. Like, first of all, I will line up my like output any day of the week. You know, 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.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  I'm just running between, I'm singing, you know, pinging people and scheduling things and. Flicking 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 before the week started would have saved me tons of time and effort that week. So for example, maybe in 10 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 idea and the way I framed it worked for everybody. Well, you know what? That should probably be a document, right? If the same idea worked for 10 different people and now in the future, there's probably 10 other people need to hear it and now I'll write that document in 30 minutes and now

• 9:19Speaker 00

  I have it as 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, wait, if I went like that, that would have a wildly different dynamic. And you can only find those when you take a step back. And I find that people, I told someone, I mentored someone, 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. And 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, you know, intrinsically. It's something I do because I think it makes me more productive and effective.

• 10:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm very tempted to go down a whole direction of just how you structure your time and your productivity calendar and all this stuff, but I'm not going to do that. That could be another episode.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  I could go on for that for hours.

• 10:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  What I want to do instead is pick on some of the bits and bobs that you've been focusing on noodling on that I think are going to 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 want to get your thoughts on how AI and LLMs are likely to impact product development. A lot of the listeners, 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 going to be. So let me just ask you this.

• 10:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  How do you anticipate L L Ms and Gen A I are going to change how products are built in the next three to five years?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  I think they change a lot. I think L L Ms 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 in one that doesn't really fit yet. To me, L L Ms are magical duct tape. They are formed principally by the distilled intuition of all of society into a thing that operates between a cost structure between a human and plain old computing. So much of how the industry is built presupposes the idea that software is expensive to write and cheap to run. And L L Ms undermine both of these. So it makes it L L Ms allow writing shitty software to be significantly cheaper. That's not good software, but like, you know, good enough in certain contexts.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  And also, it means that there's certain software now that isn't plain old computing that can be run cheaply. It's relatively expensive, marginal cost. And so if you're going to do a consumer startup, it can't be based on advertising. It's just too expensive. Advertising cannot clear the inference costs, even with it 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 its axis by five degrees. Everything looks roughly the same. And yet now the dynamics, the force of gravity is pulling in a different direction than it was before.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  You didn't even think about the force of gravity before because it was so omnipresent and never changed. That it's just a blank in your head. And now gravity has changed effectively for for your perspective. And all kinds of intuition is now wrong. I put this thing on the table, it's going to stay there and then it slides off and falls into the wall. You know, all kinds of weird stuff will happen. And I think L L Ms to me feel like that. Like, I can't tell you the number of people who are at some point, like a year or two, someone came to me like, I just built a prototype product that would have taken three months. And I can't, I was a startup, it's 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 LLMs.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  And LLMs 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. And only some people have learned the skill of programming, like the arcane magical incantations to 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, but they do typically do kind of roughly what you meant. I see these places where people will build products, and they'll say 80% of the time, 90% of the time, it's great. 5% of the time, it punches the user in the face. And they're like, oh, we're going to reduce the number of times it punches them in the face. It's like, even if you get it down to like 99% 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 work?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  People use these things a lot as like oracles. I'm going to have it, I'm going to formulate the answer, and it's going to be a fully fledged answer. And of course, strawberry has been really stable. I've gotten a chance to play with it. They are getting better at some of these kinds of behaviors at great extents. But in a lot of cases, I instead would rather say, how can you take LLMs for granted? How can you assume that you now have this magical duct tape? Don't assume it's going to solve all your problems. Don't assume it's going to do it autonomously, be able to give high-quality results in every case. But what can you now build now that you have magical duct tape?

• 14:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  You're a product manager for most of your career. Now you're 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 going to 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 oriented. 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?

• 14:52Speaker 00

  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 AI is WebSim. WebSim is so weird. What a weird idea. Like, who, why? And then you play with it and you realize, oh, this is something that could only exist in a world where LLMs exist. And I think these kinds of odd, interesting, weird, provocative, generative things will be where a lot of the interesting patterns are found. Because right now, we're so used to, like, you know, if the playbook, if the cost structures have

• 15:35Speaker 00

  changed, the kinds of things are now possible, the playbook is wrong and we should throw it out, or at least ignore it to some degree. So like, it will feel like we are navigating through a whole new industry that it has in the past. You know, anytime that an industry gets really, really, really, really, really good at like, you know, vertical SaaS, 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 consumption and execution velocity and, you know, and all this. But like, vertical SaaS, I think, is not the right model of how you would attack a problem that is sort of an AI-native SaaS problem. 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. It'll turn out that like, they, you know, they only

• 16:19Speaker 00

  work 95% of the time and 5% of the 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 thing will be more important. One of the ways I put this is, we've 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 slop. 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.

• 17:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's so many threads I want to follow here, but maybe on just this last one, when you say taste, what do you mean by that? What should people think when they're like, okay, I gotta work on my taste?

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Taste, when we're looking at this is differentiate from what the LLM would have written if given the same prompt. How different, how distinctive is what you have to say? And 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. And now, of course, if you do, if you lean into something and you're doing something sort of out there and nobody resonates with it, then like, doesn't count. Like, good taste is something that is individual and also compelling to others. And so find what things you say that resonate with other people and lean into that.

• 17:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that. Back to the WebSim example. We're going to link to this, but definitely play with WebSim. I was interviewing Dylan Field at Figma Config and this was his, I asked him like, what's the number one thing you think people are going to get more excited about in the future that you're playing with now? Cause he's really good at identifying things that are getting to be bigger in the future. And 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, LLS.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  That's insane. I mean, as in, 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 that's coherent with the things that you have recently seen. And so you can steer it directly and you can watch, you know, fascinating people that cover all kinds of wacky little techniques to get, to generate like, generate a game for your kid that's on a specific type, like you do all kinds of stuff. And I'm not saying necessarily WebSim, WebSim 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, you know, take an existing playbook and like slap some AI on it, you know?

• 19:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  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, it helps you collaborate better, and AI is the opposite. It makes you individually better. Can you talk about that insight?

• 19:18Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. Like, I think this is one of the reasons there's a question right now of like, okay, everyone's talking about AI and yet nobody's doing, like, there's no interesting breakout success other than OpenAI and topic, obviously. So is it just all, is there any value being created? I think it's entirely possible. And Ethan Mollick, who's a good friend, who has an amazing blog, it's absolutely worth reading, has pointed out too that there's, this is things that make individuals better in a way they might not want to tell their manager about, you know, like, I can do my job like twice as fast. And if the organization sees that, they might go, what is that? What if we got, if we can get rid of some extra people or something? And so if this stuff is magical duct tape,

• 19:59Speaker 00

  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, you know, seeing like the state, seeing like the organization. The organization almost won't see it or 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, if everything is happening in 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 talked to Claude 20 times a day. You know, I just have long conversations with it. I have tons of projects loaded up with all kinds of context on different topics. And I

• 20:44Speaker 00

  literally could not do the job I do now without having a conversation partner like Claude.

• 20:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let me follow that thread real quick, because a lot of people are like, okay, people keep telling me, you know, play with AI, gotta use ChatGPT. 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?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  I use to 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 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 I just say, you know, just play with the, give me 10 examples of that thing, or then critique these ones, or it kind of feels like this one's the best one to me. What, what works about this? Why is this one the best? Or I want to work in an angle now that has something about, you know, Helen's inbound concept of contextual integrity. How would I like layer that in? It's just, think of it as having a extremely well read, but slightly naive friend,

• 21:43Speaker 00

  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 doctor or something, you know that that time is extremely valuable. You have a very small slice of time. And so there's tons of questions you don't even bother to ask. That's a dumb question. I don't want, I'm not going to spend $1,000 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 allow 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 they can go, oh, that works. So I use LLMs 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 in them.

• 22:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that metaphor because it builds on Steve Jobs's that computers are a bicycle for the mind. And that's really a beautiful way of thinking about it, that LMs are like the electric bicycle for the mind.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  I don't think that's my, as someone else's, the, um, I don't know where I came from. But part of my job is a collector of ideas, right? And so I try to put myself in the most 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 allow myself to like, oh, that's a really good idea. And let me build on that or let me like these. So I don't even know where this, that particular one came. But I'm 95% sure that somebody else said that.

• 23:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to 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 want to touch on another bitten bob that I love that you come back to occasionally, which is this idea of organizational kayfabe.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Talk about what this idea of kayfabe is on its own, and then how this applies to organizations in your experience.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  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 want to be very clear, I'm hyper optimistic, and I also believe that the important, like one of the moral precepts is how you maximize the agency of real humans as ends in themselves. And so sometimes when I get excited about this, people go, wow, that is so cynical. So no, I'm just trying 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 this system can tweak and nudge it. So I just want to flag that before I dive into this. You know, the, I have this slime mold 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

• 24:09Speaker 00

  the big hug and 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. But once you do, now there's all kinds of options that pop up. Oh, given that this thing is way more expensive than it looks, I can now do this. Instead, that one's 10 times cheaper. Of these two options, this one is way cheaper, way more likely to succeed. So once you see these forces, you see them more clearly. So kayfabe is, I think, a lens that's useful to understand how organizations actually work. Kayfabe 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, any organization. So kayfabe in the small is optimism, enthusiasm. When someone says, we're gonna do this thing, you say, yeah,

• 24:54Speaker 00

  we're gonna do that. Even if like, I think this thing is gonna work. If you say, oh, this thing is gonna work, everyone loses hope and it definitely doesn't work. So having a little bit of this is extremely valuable. It's the lubricant that allows organizations to believe they can do something and to attempt to do it. The problem that you get is as organizations get larger, Imagine you are five levels down or something and you have this project you're working on and you're trying to give a status update to you rolled up to leadership and it's currently a yellow and your manager asks it and you know it's not going to be presented to leadership and enrolled up until next week. It's yellow, but I've got my arms around the problem. I know how to fix it. I'm going to go talk to Sarah. I think we have a solution. By the time this is reported up, the chain is going to be green. So if I make it yellow, there's a non trivial

• 25:38Speaker 00

  chance that someone's going to swoop down and say, well, what's going on? We have a review and it will be way harder to fix. So I'm just going to put a little white line. It's green. 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, the same, and the same. And levels up, you can be many orders of magnitude off of the ground truth. And so the KFA, the thing that everyone pretends to believe is true, is obviously incorrect. And the dangerous part about this is it can lead you to make very bad decisions. And if you, as someone who sees this, can see that, wait a second, the official strategy is definitely not going to work. You're like, I gotta, I gotta tell somebody. We're doing work. It's going in a bad direction. It's not going to work.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  And you go and say, I think that it's actually not going to work for these reasons. And what someone will say to you, and this happens, by the way, I'm not subsuming any particular organizations. 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, if you share that, and everybody, the whole thing will shatter and we can't do anything. And so, help me fix it. Like, don't, don't say the ground truth. Just help me 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 going to go

• 27:05Speaker 00

  and hit the ground truth button, before you do, you'll be flying tackled to the ground by somebody and stabbed in the dark because you will destroy everything. And so it becomes correct to hold on to this idea of if you acknowledge the KFA is false, then you are 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 this increasingly in the limit, it can be good to a point where the easiest way is if I, if I let go of this idea, if I do, if I hold on this idea, we might create significant value for the company. If I let go of this idea, I die. So the easiest way to maintain this split brain thing is to just turn this part off and just earnestly believe the K-Fabe. This has been organizations become zombies.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  And anyone individually you talk to behind the scenes will agree, this thing cannot possibly work, that turns out that these things work this way. And yet, the entire organization lumbbers on. And this is a kind of death state for large organizations. It happens all over the place in any number of different conditions. And this is one of the reasons it shows up. And 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 going to hear it. And then it will build up and build up and build up and build up into a supercritical state that could shatter.

• 28:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  The, 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 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.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Like, disconfirming evidence hurts. And so you won't, you won't realize it because it hurts at any given moment. It's a distraction. We're just trying to get this thing done. And so it comes from a good place to not get it. But if you're busy, that's 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 disconfirming 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 reasons that large companies are radically different than smaller companies. And one of the traps that you can get into of not realizing that this dynamic is happening, and you can make very bad decisions if you don't understand that is inherently what's happening. People go, oh, we'll have some bad actors.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  No, no, 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 still dumb. Because if you do, they're the person who decides, oh, this person's not performing or whatever. And that one little asymmetry, that one little fact, in most cases, it 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 change per se.

• 30:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love your caveat at the beginning that continues to resonate in my head as you say this, like, you're not cynical about the sucks, it's more, here's what I'm observing. We need to think about ways to get around this.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I mean, I think so much pain and misery is caused by us being not acknowledging these fundamental inescapable things. I can almost, it's almost impossible, like entropy is one of those things. Entropy emerges because there's more ways to go away from a point than towards a point. It's fundamentally like must be true in really any universe you can possibly imagine. And so if you're going to fight entropy, like, you're going to lose at a certain point. So like, if you are aware of these things, you can find subsets of ideas that do work despite these challenges. And that's some of the stuff, the tactics I advise are often things that look playful, that looks 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

• 30:58Speaker 00

  small seed I am planting is so cheap that yes, I can't tell you for sure this will work, but I could tell you there is a chance that it will work. And the downside of this is basically the opportunity cost of planting the seed in this one moment. And the person who's planting it enjoys planting it, so that opportunity cost really isn't that much because 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 going to 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 sometimes will see this as like, I've been called a nihilist before because they say, 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 put these ideas, and then he responds to the ones that are

• 31:43Speaker 00

  working that are viable, it doesn't really matter if you didn't know ahead of time which ones were going to work.

• 31:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's a great segue to talking about this core idea that again informs a lot of the way you think, which is this idea of building versus gardening, the magic of acorns. Talk about this general idea and then I want to follow some threads.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like, I have a plan, I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen. 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 curate over. And it is a totally different mindset for it. So it's like a lead by gardening kind of vibe. I don't try to pick the things in the system. I try to work with what I've actually got and I try to lean in on the ones that turn, I think are going in the direction that I believe is valuable based on constantly seeking disconfirming evidence. And if you do this properly, it looks like magic.

• 32:47Speaker 00

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

• 33:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there an example that you can give from either from something you worked on or something someone worked on that came from this? Cause I think people hearing this might be like, but I had shift, 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.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  If there's an ecosystem approach, if there's something that if it works, it'll sort of be self accelerating. So, okay, we're going to do this thing. We aren't entirely sure it's going to work. But if a developer writes a thing and somebody uses it, it'll attract more developers, attract more users, and then this would grow on its own. And it's cheap to do the little example of the thing. It's cheap to like build a little open source, like tinkery little thing and just put it there. And if nobody uses it, it's fine. It was fun to build. It took you three hours. It's fine. If someone does use it, then you just invest an incremental bit of you each time that you find a signal that somebody is finding it useful. And then you stop if you ever cease getting that information. It's like I would use this, anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect. And many things have network effects, have some kind of compounding loop.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Compounding loops are not rare. They are, they're, they are, look, there's like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked, 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, you know, where the power goes up with a number of users or, but it shows up in all kinds of problems that we don't normally apply it to.

• 34:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  Along the same lines, you also advise people to think more emergence oriented versus top down. Kind of 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. Could you just chat about that?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  A 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's hard about it, in my opinion, is you're going to look like you aren't very serious. You're going to look like a weirdo. You're going to look like a cook, you know? And one of the downsides, 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 resigning for emergence and something amazing happens, even once it happens, people go, ah, it was luck. I didn't, 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, was promoted to director at Google.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  I was like, cool. I never want to be promoted inside of a large organization ever again. And the freedom to now do the highest impact work, even if I can't make it legible to the organization, was so powerful and I was able to like 10x my impact for the organization. Because I didn't have to worry about making it measurable specifically in a way that would show individual effort. And I think that's the hardest part. And you have to have like typically what I would advise for PMs, my approach at Google was 70% of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and create value. Maybe it's boring linear value, but some kind of value. You're trying to minimize the chance that any other person in a company will say, what does that team do anyway?

• 36:32Speaker 00

  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 aren't 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 even think about it, of course they should. But now, once you do this, you have like 30% of your extra time that you can plant all these seeds. You can find interesting little things where maybe a junior PM on the team has an idea you think is kind of silly, but they're really into it. And the reason is thing, it could work out great, actually. If you tweak it like this, there is a potential, like I guess I could see how that could work. If that PM is going to work on that anyway, they want to do it anyway. Instead of saying, no, no, no, we don't have time for that, be a little bit more productive over here, say, go for it.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Here's my concerns, 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 exercised their agency, they've learned, they've gotten stronger, they've gotten, they've grown. It has the upside if it turns out to actually work. And worst case scenario, you know, they, the opportunity cost of doing that thing that helped them grow and they learned and they liked. So like, I don't know, don't try to force it, don't try to stop it.

• 37:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's a really good example of actually how to go about doing that on your team. The way I've always thought about this is the visual I share with people is like, you want to create cover fire for your team where your team's just hitting goals, moving metrics. And then while with that cover fire, you're kind of building the doomsday bomb inside, protected where no one's going to come and stop you.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Because one of the hardest parts about an acorn, when you plant it. Is making sure a squirrel doesn't dig that flicker up. You know, like there's so many things that can destroy it and just keeping it, allowing it some space and allowing it some time 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 their superpowers in a way that adds up to something greater than some of its parts. That takes time, takes effort.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  It's very difficult to make legible up to the rest of the organization, but that is where great things come from.

• 38:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  It reminds me of something Ed Catmull 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.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it sucks that 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, I mention them, I try with it within the first session or two, whenever I can sort of get a hypothesis, I 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 going to stretch farther and they're going to respond to nudging feedback even better because they know that you're not trying to tell them be different.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  You're trying to 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, assume that everyone I talk to, everyone I talk to is, you know, is 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 dirt clubs I run about, They help facilitate about treat everybody like the Buddha. I think is I'm messing this up, but like this notion of like, imagine everyone you talk to is the Buddha in a Buddhist mindset. And how do you see and find that those seeds of greatness and treat everyone with respect intrinsically as an end of themselves?

• 40:30Speaker 00

  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 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 the world.

• 40:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar, Coda is my go to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets and apps to help me get more done. And Coda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations and identify risk areas. You can also access hundreds of pressure tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision making frameworks.

• 41:32Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 41:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  Coming back to a phrase that you used earlier, sly molds. I want to spend a little time here. So interestingly enough, the first time I heard about you and what got me interested in your stuff is I did a newsletter post with the company perplexity about how they build product. And as they were describing how they organized their team, the, the co-founders described, they organized like slime mold. And he linked to your deck about slime molds. And I was like, what the heck is this? Can you just briefly describe what you mean when you talk about sly molds and how that in how sly molds are related to the way companies organized and how they should think of the organization?

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the main thesis of the sly mold deck is that the core dynamic that makes organizations hard to navigate as they get larger, even if you assume everybody is actively good at what they do, actively collaborative and actively hardworking, is this emergent force of coordination of finding the like subset of projects to work on and when everyone's super busy that everyone agrees and commits to and actually work on together. And finding this coordination cost is in, you know, grows kind of with the square of the number of people who are working on that thing. And so what companies typically try to do is fight this or ignore that it exists. If you're going to fight it, the one way to look at this is think 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 steer, everyone acknowledges you are allowed to steer,

• 43:17Speaker 00

  they're ever going to be, why is he steering it that way? 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 rig like a sports car, you're going to be a danger to yourself and others on the road and you're going to grind the engine. And so you've got to drive the car that you actually have. So what I see a lot of things happen in larger organizations, if 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, people go, oh, it means go slow. No, no, no, that means pivot less. It means have a little bit more like, you know, be more intentional about the times

• 43:59Speaker 00

  that you adjust the steering, invest more in program management, invest more in processes, give a little bit more slack in the planning process to absorb any kind of unsurprising things that you can still all reach the 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, you know, and strength of the bottom up. The downside is other people externally will look at and go, well, that team and that team clearly didn't talk. And you'll say, yep.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  You have to decide how bad that is for you. Apple has chosen the former. Is it very important to them to have the illusion of perfect coherence in their products? It works very well for them. They execute it marvelously. AWS has picked the exact opposite thing. AWS is like, yeah, there's like 15 different ways of doing everything. They clearly don't, 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 slime molds, I think, is like acknowledging that organizations are, especially ones that focus on autonomy and agency of their individual employees, which a lot of tech companies, they are more like slime molds than we realize. And if you fight that factor, you're gonna have a bad time. And if you embrace it, then you can start realizing slime molds are actually kind of amazing. They can find solutions to problems you didn't even know you were searching for.

• 45:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Alex, you have the best metaphors. I don't know how you do this, but they're so evocative and correct.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  I can tell you the process I do if you're interested. So I think by talking, I'm an external processor. I literally can't think if I'm not talking. And so I 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, they go, aha, that's a win. That's a mark that's a good one. Just randomly casting, but I 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

• 46:06Speaker 00

  who resonate with the thing you're saying? The intuition of this is if you find in a social network, you want to see what's going to go viral, if something is shared and it's shared within a set of people who 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 it, people that are 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 a signal 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 this during this chat, but in most conversations you will see me as I'm talking, writing down stuff like, "Ooh, that was the best formulation of that one so far."

• 46:49Speaker 00

  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's sick. One of the benefits of metaphorical thinking is you connect nine of the 10 dots and you allow, you invite 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 10 dots and it's like, "Oh, that's the official strategy." Then you are instantly, you know, a dangerous thing. Whereas if you leave one dot unconnected, people can go, "Connect the dot and go, 'Oh, my God, I think that applies to us.'" You're like, "Oh, my God, what? Like, yes, of course. That's why I picked that."

• 47:30Speaker 00

  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. One of the reasons a slime mold deck got so much traction is partially because slime is gross. It's bad. And yet it's talking about why slime is good. And so that has this kind of instantly subversive thing. I only know this after the fact of trying to figure out why did that deck get so much attention for, you know, of all the things I've written.

• 47:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  It also is all emojis, basically, which is not how you often read a deck. It's very beautifully made. I love that you've been talking about the way you think and come up with ideas is by talking to people, having conversations. We also talked about how you write 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?

• 48:26Speaker 00

  So these I also call now like nerd clubs, and these are my secret weapon. And I have a blog post I 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, 40-page draft of a thing that I'll probably never finish. But I've used this tactic. I discovered it many years ago as, as I strengthened some of the techniques I'd used in open source community organizing. And, you know, the, the, the situation was I was just joining a new team at Google. I've been in it for many years. And there was like, at the time, 12 different groups working in different aspects of this overall problem domain. And in classical fashion, they add up to significantly less than the sum 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.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  And I knew that if you try to do pairwise executive reviews on this very complex, ambiguous, open-ended problem, you would get really expensive pageantry that would obscure more than clarified. So what I did was I created a secret group that I called Navel Gazers with the original one. And I wanted people, when they hear about it, I want people that 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, yes and kind of energy. So then, within these groups, 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 you think is an actively dumb idea, you are free to not engage. Just leave it. That's fine.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Right? Because nothing's going to happen. We're deciding anything interesting or important here. And if you want to engage and you don't like it, a productive way of doing that is saying, oh, it's so interesting. I would never would have thought to apply that lens. I typically 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. Feel like, ah, how can you possibly get rigorous thinking into the yes and? It turns out, there's limited amounts of time. And so people will choose to build on the things they find most interesting. This is things, interesting things are surprising and potentially valuable. And so if lots of different people in the group are building on the same idea, that's a good sign there is something very interesting going on. And the third thing you do is you dribble in new perspectives.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  So every, you know, one to three a week, you put in lots of new perspectives all at once. The norms can all scramble. If you have one, five people who all 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 they even doing here? Like, at, like, you want to minimize the chance that happens. But secondarily, and more importantly, you want to have as, people with as different a perspective as possible added into the group. And so what you're, this is what Ken Stanley might call, for example, novelty search. You're novelty searching through the different perspectives in the overall thing.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  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 so this is like an idea lab, what Tim Mervin McQuinn idea lab. And this creates amazingly interesting insights. You just can't force it to do anything. It has to be a bottom up and emergent, which means if you try to steer it towards the outcome, it won't go. And so, but if you do these, they are amazing places to riff and to share ideas and half formed ideas. And this is anywhere I go, I terraform the culture around me and create these because

• 51:55Speaker 00

  I need it as a place to have, to experiment and try out different half formed ideas and build on them and be inspired by other people. And, and that is one of my secrets, my sort of strategy secrets that I've been doing now for probably 10 years ago is when the first one started. And there's now, I can count like eight or nine of, I've started over the years, some of them emerged, many of them are still at Google. And I think it's like, they're just wonderful environments that can create a lot of value.

• 52:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I love it's a perfect example of your approach of emergent properties, letting things emerge versus a top down, here's what we're doing, 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?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Communities are all about momentum. You want to have a, a space too small, a time too short. Like if you have a big cavernous space, a lot of people in it and no one's talking, people go, I guess it's the place where we don't talk for whatever reason. So what you're doing is you want the smallest seed of people that you know are going to be actively engaged. So maybe there's four of you that already talk over lunch, you have a 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 going to like that already as it currently exists. And then you need to feed it. So you want to make sure that it never dies. And the community that has only one person talking is, 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 so you're trying to maximize the chance that there's an interesting conversation,

• 53:20Speaker 00

  even when you as the kind of facilitator are not there. This takes some active policing by the, like a garden has a gardener, there's somebody pruning back and saying, hey, Just so you know, I think that came a little bit strong to Sarah'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 reach out to you and ping you, they go, hey, let's talk about 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 give 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 norm in the community. And it's not a secret. It's not like a, you're not like, if someone asks, yeah, I told Sarah to share that. The people watching don't realize that. And so it becomes a place that people do take risks and feel

• 54:05Speaker 00

  comfortable sharing. The other thing you do is once a, once a week or so, you need to, you want to make sure that you never propose something in the group that people go, eh. You always want to do a thing, people go, 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 are so fun, but like, then it goes, ah, yes. 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 going to do an experiment. We're going to have an hour long conversation over lunch on Wednesday. Anyone in the group is free to come. And then what you do is you make sure it is always has quorum, because if it doesn't have quorum, then the thing, you know, it looks like the community is dead. And then what you do is you send FOMO stuff afterwards. So then you say, here are my notes from the thing, or thanks, you know,

• 54:47Speaker 00

  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, do it. You, you can't do it if you don't have somebody with a lot of energy. I am 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 kind of gives a sort of foundation that can, I grow. But like, look for the people who already roughly want it. Don't try to convince, if, don't try to convince somebody who doesn't want it to want it. They will not, they'll grow in the whole thing.

• 55:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  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.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  I, I have, it's a, it's a long essay in a, it's just not, you can see it in bits and bobs. Like if you asked, if you gave the bits and bobs to Claude and said, please write a thing about nerd clubs and essay and the style, it would do it. Cause there's a lot of the pieces are in there. It's just not factored out.

• 55:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  I see writing something down right now, which tells me you just articulated something in any way that you want to say.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 55:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  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 and how to be a little more productive?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  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 an activation energy, especially the tasks you don't really want to do. And then when you complete it, there's a there's a little burst of energy. So if you do this properly, you can get small things that are extremely easy to knock out in like 10 seconds of effort. And then you do one that takes 30 seconds of effort. And then you do one that takes, you know, a longer bit of effort. But if you give it too much space, it's too it's harder to do. So like, you almost want to find, okay, listen, I got 10 minutes. I gotta do this thing where I figure out how to add, you know, do this thing in gusto that I've been putting off. Like 10 minutes shouldn't be enough time to do it and structure it. So like,

• 56:58Speaker 00

  okay, right now is the only time I have to do this, right? To do it. And, you know, another trick is, um, I use is like, I have a one of my original media messages, actually, one of the original public ones is about sometimes rules, always rules are better than sometimes rules for self control. And so if you're gonna diet, you're like, I'm gonna eat only, I'm never gonna eat, you know, 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 will be 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. Now it's over. Whereas if you say a thing you know you can do, I will not have a dessert, unless it is, it would be socially awkward for me to not eat it. For example, in a small

• 57:42Speaker 00

  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 since the pandemic started. And once I do start going back into the office, if I had to commute into the office, I would sometimes do a meditation to check the box for that. But if I'm not commuting, I've done a full, I'm not deathly sick, I've done a full workout since then. And the idea of each day of like, is today the day of all the hundreds of days in this streak? That is the worst or the hardest for me to do this thing? Is this the day? No, of course it's not. I will do it. And so that keeps you in this sort of streak that makes it harder and harder to get out of it.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  And in some ways, of course, you can torture yourself in an unproductive way. Like at a certain point, maybe you should stop that streak. But, but I think those kinds of structuring help you get the things done you need, you want to get done.

• 58:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's like the Seinfeld trick of productivity where you just cross, you just keep track of how many days in a row you've done something essentially.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And 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 when you have other people who are depending on you for something and will know that you didn't do the thing that were so much better. So like just little tricks like this help you get, be wildly more productive.

• 59:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  I actually want to go back a little bit. I'm curious what you wrote down when we were chatting earlier that you thought was a good articulation? If you're able to share, if it's interesting.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  I wrote down, and the reason I wrote it down is I never, and the, 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, doesn't yet realize it's dead. That's what I wrote down.

• 59:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  So fun. I love this practice that you have.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  By the way, the reason I can do it, I can type insanely quickly. And undergrad, I wrote my thesis on the emergent power dynamics of Wikipedia's user community. And I did 150 hours of interviews with different editors in Wikipedia and I transcribed them myself. And so I got really, really, really good at like, I can just pipe an idea straight into my fingertips and still listen to other stuff. So like, that's another superpower is I just constantly, I'm able to capture it very, very quickly. I've written notes that are at least good enough for me to clean up, you know, within the next day or two into something that's more stable.

• 1:00:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  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 move?

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  I just realized later that like, I could take really good, really fast, I could just pipe it straight through to my fingers and it worked. And I don't know, I don't know, if I hadn't written my thesis, would I have discovered that? I don't know.

• 1:00:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  I feel like everything you do is like on super speed, like the way you think, the way you write, get stuff done. There's a lot.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  I just realized when you're feeling productive, you're unstoppable. And so just 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 invest my time in situations that don't have that characteristic. And but like, so when I work on something that I believe could work and have a big impact, I just, I can't stop. Like, you know, sometimes I'll wake up at four in the morning. 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 just think there's that thing that's really cool here. And I let myself lean into those kinds of when I have the moment. I also find that like often if I have an idea and I just have 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.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  But like that first act of creation, I do it whenever the muse hits. 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 the idea? Like, how does that work again? 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. I collect them and put them in my collection as quickly as possible.

• 1:01:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Or garden, as one might describe it.

• 1:01:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  This touches on a quote I wanted to talk to you about. It's, I think you described it as your life philosophy. Do things that give you energy that you are proud of.

• 1:01:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Talk, talk about that.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  So to me, it's, it's a 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 kind of like infinite energy. It's just, it's like negative opportunity cost. Because it energizes you more than the sort of opportunity cost of the time to like go spend to other things. And two, there are ways to.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  There are ways to give yourself energy, like for example, playing an addictive video game, or is there any kind of mind altering substance that might give you that kind of like, ah, it 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'll look back and say, I'm glad I did that. I'm proud that I did that. And if you take the perspective of a 10 years on, looking back on each decision and thing that you're doing, and imagine seeing this decision played in front of a thousand people whose opinion you care about, your family, your friends, your role models, would you be proud? Is a good sign of life that you're taking a broad enough 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, it's gonna suck, but when I once I do it, it'll be fine.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  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 a kind of a husk of yourself. And so I think those two 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 are actively proud of. You know, and that help make sure you don't take a bunch of shortcuts.

• 1:03:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  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 another quote that I love that 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.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  So this, 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 want to share them and you go tell someone, 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, you heard it when you weren't ready, and now it becomes a trite, duh, everyone says that, it can't possibly be a meaningful statement. The reason people keep on saying it is because it's meaningful, you know?

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  And, and so I think that having that space of recognizing that when you have these epiphanies that come from. 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 are or share ideas that are kind of like little seeds that you can shoot into someone's brain. Even if the soil is not ready for it's kind of rocky or croggy. And raggy at some point in the future. If there's a little, you know, something goes through there, it opens up a crack that's sitting there to grow into an idea.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  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 will search me out years later and say, Alex, I just want to let you know, you probably don't remember talking to me. But that Tuesday at the, you know, building, 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. And I just want to tell you, thank you, because I finally understand what you were trying to tell me. And I realized that that influenced me in decisions like that, to me, is one of those meaningful things I can hear. And so like I just find that like you can't force it before people are ready to hear certain topics, you know?

• 1:05:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  Man, that must feel so good to hear the 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 had this very, 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 us telling people they're like, shut up. It's like.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  Oh, do you just do psychedelics? Yeah, it's funny, I have, I have a lot of folks in my broader space who obviously have used psychedelics. I never personally have myself and but I find it's there's various ways, like the transcendent mindset is this feeling of being part of something much, much, much larger than yourself and kind of losing your ego in this thing. There's different ways of doing it. Some people find it in hiking and being out in the wilderness alone. Some people find it being at a concert and thousands of people perfectly in sync to this thing. Some people find it in religious experience. Some people find it, you know, using psychedelics and others to help get there. But a lot of it is it's that same just being willing to be in awe. There's so many times that people feel the feeling of awe or wonder or curiosity is treated as a not very serious or childlike thing.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  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, you know, your ego gets hurt when you get disconfirming evidence. You don't want to hear it. And so you'll construct the world around yourself to not get that disconfirming evidence. But this confirming evidence is what makes systems strong. It's what makes you strong. And so how do you put yourself in a situation to get that kind of information and really receive it? And I, and part of it is just coming in terms of the fact of like, you know, early in my career, someone called me kooky. I'd be like, oh man, I should be embarrassed. I'm like, okay, fine. Yeah, I'm kooky. Look, whatever. I'm like, I'm totally at peace with the idea that like,

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  some people track 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.

• 1:07:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  To start to close our conversation, I want to 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 what's a constraint you have and lean into the constraints and use that as a guide. Can you just talk about this and how this might inform how people think about product and strategy?

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  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 designers in my life were the ones who were 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 in like flying leap to something. And in reality, the adjacent possible is quite small. It's like very, it's within his arms reach. And people will kind of 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 proposal is relatively small, you realize that you actually have full agency to pick within the subset that is within your reach.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  And your actions matter because you've taken action and now the world reconfigures. And now you get a next set of 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 have a principled approach, you can arc to wildly different outcomes than looked like they were possible. While at each point, each individual action is safe and reasonable. And so you can combine both of these things. I think so many times we try to like jump and we 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.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  That's fine. Go in other directions for a while. If it does, then take another step and another and another and another. And this allows you to get rid of a lot of the risk and still be exposed to all the upside. And so the risk comes from trying to jump too far ahead in an unknown environment.

• 1:10:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  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.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  If you believe, you need both. So if you only do incremental, you will follow the shortest, like the steepest gradient in front of you. So UX R says, a user wants to do this and it was do exactly that. And you will end up random walking through the thing. So you need coherence about where you're going. And the way you get that is by creating a kind of North Star for yourself. It should be in three to five years in the future. It should be very low resolution. It should describe a thing that every single person who reads it, who has any kind of knowledge that might be useful or relevant, agrees that it is plausible. If this happens, I would not say, whoa, a miracle happened. It's say, I could see how that could work, you know? And lawyers say, I could see that could work. And someone who's worked on this 30 years ago at a similar product at Microsoft said, I can see how that could work. And that if you got to the endpoint, everyone would high five. Because if it's going to be a thing of like, I guess that could work. At the end, they'll be like, oh, yeah, neat.

• 1:10:57Speaker 00

  Like, that's not worth it. You want a North Star to be like, yeah, you know, like, great. Like, wow, we kick off, we change the way this entire industry works or whatever. And now this is your North Star. Your North Star should update, but it's because it's far off in the distance. It will update, it will slide up kind of across the sky a little bit. It won't be, you won't be kind of jerking around. You'll be kind of like arcing slightly differently. And then what you do is you look in your adjacent 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 because if you don't do, if you only do incremental, then you'll end up random walking into a corner. And if you only do long-term, you end up dreaming big and designing castles in the

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  sky that are impossible to actually manifest.

• 1:11:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  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 them just like, how do you be, how do you achieve success and want to be successful while not doing that? And their metaphor is point your card in a specific direction that you want to go. Like just push your, point your card in that direction, essentially in your example of North Star and just start walking. Don't figure out, this is exactly the path I'm going to take to get this end destination.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  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 in 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 work. So like I'm much sure that I have a path that's slightly inefficient because we're navigating unknowns and we couldn't know at one point. Like I can't tell you the number of times I've found where people say, I need to know for this strategy, you know, in, uh, that someone was, you know, trying to get me to look at and then say, uh, is this number in, uh, in five years, is it going to be 93 or 95? And it's like, I don't know. And it doesn't matter either it's going to be, if it's going to be that order of magnitude, it doesn't matter. And we don't have to do that analysis. Like if we believe that the order of magnitude is of that thing, it'd actually be, we'd spend

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  all the time to get the illusion of precision, uh, which at great expense. And then it's the, people say, oh, data driven. I want to really run the, the analysis to ground. There's always stuff you can't know ahead of time. So if you're getting a, a false precision at the beginning, that's a comfort blanket. That's just helping you feel like there isn't uncertainty. There's uncertainty everywhere, all the time. You know, and trying to ignore it by trying to pin it down with like fake numbers that you just made up for yourself at great expense is a really bad idea. Like, and that's why if, if the ideas are strong enough, like things that have a compounding return, don't give you, oh, we'll either get 93 or 95. It's like, we'll either get zero or we'll get 1,000. You know, great. It doesn't really matter, which if it's 1,000 or 1,001, who cares? It's or is a matter too larger than the alternative. And so it is better.

• 1:13:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's really freeing. I noticed again, you're writing something. I'm again curious which you wrote down that you thought was insightful.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  I actually, this time I was not writing, did something down. I was checking a thing I thought you might say that I was going to reference was Tim Urban's happiness is the reality minus expectations. I always get that backwards. But have you heard this frame?

• 1:14:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's get into it. Yeah, we're not going to cut this. This is great.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Happiness is reality minus expectations. And this is Tim Urban, uh, from Wait But Why. And I think it's a very simple distill, 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 going to be, you know, my kid's birthday, she's going to remember it's going to be a best birthday I've ever had. And we're all, it's going to be perfect. Because then when it doesn't go perfect, it starts rating that day. You get all worked up. She just said, no, I want to make, I want to spend this day in a way that I can look back on and remember fondly. And that will

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  include, yeah, it changes. If ever, 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 10 years. So if it's funny in 10 years, try to see the humor in it now. And this one in particular was a friend, their, their newborn would, every time you changed her diaper, would poop. That was only the other, and when they did it, it would often be projectile. And so it was like a trap, like you change diaper.

• 1:15:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

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

• 1:15:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  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?

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  I think we covered it. I think we covered a lot of that. And again, we could go on for hours and hours and hours and hours. I could just do a random, I got a feature in the companion where I can pull up a random idea and like, but let's not do that.

• 1:16:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, amazing. Well, Alex, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  I am ready.

• 1:16:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  First question, what are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinharker, which is great. It's about a 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 that I met, I was thinking in systems, which is short, easy to read, very approachable. In fact, if anything, people think of it as not serious enough, it's too easy to read. 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 totally the way. So she's one of the people who talks about dancing with systems. Let go and dance with the system.

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  Is one of her lines, and I think it's just phenomenal.

• 1:17:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  For me, I was thinking about this. It's The Green Knight, which I watched. It's, I think, a few years old. It's about the Arthurian legend. It's a challenging movie. In fact, when I watched it, I was like, I dislike this. I do not find this interesting. And then I couldn't stop thinking about it. And it helped me. I think this is one of the reasons I like to write in parable, is that parable is open-ended. It encourages and requires the listener to engage into the idea and play with it and see how it affects them and how they affect it. And so for me, The Green Knight, again, I'm not excited to watch it again, but I found it to be the most impactful movie I've seen in the last couple of years in terms of amount of thinking that I kind of caused to do afterwards.

• 1:18:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, that says a lot. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  To me, I think the answer for me is WebSim. It's the one that I like playing around with a lot. And I've said it before, I use Claude 20 times a day. I find that it's almost impossible for me to imagine doing work. I mean, of course, now I gotta use Strawberry and see how that feels, but yeah.

• 1:18:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  One use case of WebSim that I found really fun that I used with Dylan is if you do Gmail, if you give a Gmail dot com slash someone's name, it just comes up with what their email looks like. And you could do it for famous people, like for, you know, Patrick Collison or whoever. And it's like, wow, that's really good.

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  The elements are really good. One of the things we played around with is having a thing that generates fake data of arbitrary schemas. And I just gave it a short back, write a short backstory of a person and then have it generate data that fits in this fictional user person's world. And like, it's just amazing, the kinds of stuff, like the coherence it has with like, uh, you know, it's weird and it's very specific to that story. But like, elements are just so, they're like these little holograms, right? Of all this information of humanity is like interesting sort of informational pattern, this little thing. And all kinds of, it's like a mirror that, that different things reflect back out of it at you. And it just, it's shocking sometimes to see humanity, like.

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  Reflected back at you.

• 1:19:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's like a, it's like a zip file of all human knowledge.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. And it's because it's trained on all the things we've written, right?

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  All right, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful and work or in life?

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  I've, I guess I've said to, 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. Words to look like.

• 1:19:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  All right, final question. Uh, I, you can go in one of two directions. One is what's something that you are going to 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.

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  Um, okay. So this is, this is the, I'll just read this off.

• 1:20:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Great.

• 1:20:15Speaker 00

  We've forgotten, this is written a year ago. Uh, we've forgotten a world without aggregators. Non-aggregator ecosystems make it so participants don't have to fear empowering their overlord, like where you have to worry about, you know, the each bit of action you're doing, the aggregator is getting it more and more powerful. MySpace was the Wild West. Facebook made it so you can't change the CSS, which was better for users, containing some freedom. Aggregators make sense in the late stage of an era, but the beginning they curtail too much exploration. That's just my, like, random reflections. I don't even remember what conversation that came from originally, but of 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 different.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  And I kind of don't love this outcome that we're in, like the idea of like, you know, you're 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. Uh, it's one size fits all. It's non-composable, doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the broader ecosystem. And it's also only allowed to exist if some of the largest companies in the world say it may exist, which is insane to me. To me, software is alchemy, is 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 this commentarial possibility of human agency. And somehow, in the past decade, we've become convinced that all of this potential should

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  be squeezed into about a dozen little boxes on your phone. And now with the power of AI, everyone just is default assuming that what's going to happen is we're all going to be locked inside of a box with a super god AI clippy. The only thing that people disagree about is which clippy is it going to be? Who's clippy is it going to be? That to me is bonkers. I don't want that world at all. I want a world where we use this magical duct tape to escape the box, to allow software and humans using it to lean into their agency. And I think aggregators are amazing in an environment where you have a safe environment to have all kinds of interesting stuff that can't be fully open-ended because the aggregator can't allow it to escape the possibility of that ecosystem. And so for me, one of the reasons I'm excited about LLMs being a disruptive technology is

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  I think that it allows us to get out of this monolithic sense of like, whatever, we're all just beholden to a decreasing number of very powerful organizations and lead into everybody being able to be creative and collaborative and exercise their agency in a pro-social way.

• 1:22:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. Well, you blew our mind as a final 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?

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  Kameraski.com is where my husband gives me so much shit for because it looks like it was designed in the early 2000s, which it was. A link to all the different posts there. If you click, there's a Google group, but now where you can subscribe to my updates whenever I post in the bits and bobs or any Medium article. That's a good way of taking touch as I publish stuff. And then the way that it could be useful to me is I have office hours on my site that are open to anybody to join in. I am continually, 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 it before, just reach out to me. And I love, love, love talking to people, interesting people, especially who have life experiences

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  and backgrounds that are different from mine. But 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, you know, it's like, I would find all these crazy connections that had never occurred to me before. And so people just reaching out and sharing ideas, and I love.

• 1:23:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Alex, you're awesome. This conversation was exactly what I was hoping it'd be. 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.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:24:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.