Technology, Connected - Silicon Valley Is Selling You Religion

Starting point is 00:00:00 Everyone exists in a mirrored cage of algorithmic distortion. Given all of the above, it's not exaggerated to say there is no central source of truth. 21st century humans are quite comfortable in our house of mirrors, letting algos tell us what they think we want to hear. Part of how Sam Altman has done that is he recalibrates danger. So the danger of not trusting him is enormous. We don't think about what's happening in that trapbot at all. That's how cults get made.

Starting point is 00:00:27 And so you have what is arguably the brown swell of a global cult being built using the tools that cults have been using Rick Kedavit. Your customer is choosing a cage of information, limitation and distortion. You've got to walk into that cage and be comfortable there. Disruptors and Curious Minds. Welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper where we unpack the future with people building it. So Mark, you said you had a pretty full. fun question to kick us off. Where's your head going? After you joined us last week on an exploration of space and how you can play your guitar on the moon this week, we're back down on terra firma.

Starting point is 00:01:19 Speaking about the enshrification of the internet, the enshittification of internet culture and how by the end of it, your brand, your personal brand, your business will have a better idea of how to connect, hopefully, with your customers, with your audience. the whole internet tumbles and crumbles into a big pile of AI impersonal slop. Our guest is Nick Reichsmeier. He's the founder of Gross Strategy, Consultancy, CultureCraft. He writes at Dam's Given. Nick, thank you for thinking on paper with us.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Welcome to thinking on paper. Thank you. And I have to admit, I have a bit of a trust issue myself. We all do, so here we go. So to alleviate my fear, how can I, and the thinking on paper audience, trust anything that you're about to say? That's interesting. I don't know that you should. You know, to kind of go off the beaten path here, like, so this may be a subsequent question, but we'll start with.

Starting point is 00:02:27 What do we mean when we talk about trust, right? So trust is something that actually doesn't work very well as like the headline of a conversation, because we all sort of feel like we get it. And people go, oh, it gets yada yotted really easily. But what fundamentally trust is doing is it's a way back in the brain, like neurological function to keep us alive. So it's this little test of like, hey, are you going to kill me? Is this thing going to fundamentally end my existence? And so our brain just does these little tests, way back in the reptilian brain of like,

Starting point is 00:03:01 is this safe? Is this safe? Is this safe? Is this safe? Is this safe? And it aggregates into this feeling called trust. So, you know, we're going to talk a lot about brand in marketing today, I suspect. And what's interesting about that is there's not a lot that we can do to produce like an upside to trust.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Trust gets us to like a playing field where I'm even willing to be in the room with you. And then good things have to happen from that. So as your question of can I trust you, your brain already made that decision. There's almost nothing I can say because the prefrontal cortex has very little to do with trust. There's almost nothing I can do to convince you to trust me. In fact, me trying to convince you to trust me is probably going to make it make it. That'll make it worse. Right.

Starting point is 00:03:41 Before you go on, let me, so we had a conversation with a great guest last week about about the dance of communicating with somebody and, you know, this little back and forth. And I would argue, I want to push back on that a little bit. Because I think trust gets a little bit better as you lob something over to someone else. they kind of grab it and lob it back and there's this little bit of back and forth. How do you balance that with the first case? Like, holy cow, this guy's not going to throw an axe at me. But I may not want to jump into bed and build a business with him, right? Yeah, that dance comes later, doesn't it?

Starting point is 00:04:20 First, you can't start dancing until you've put down your weapons. The dance part. Yeah. I like it. The threat of violence is a function of every person-to-person engagement. So even if I don't see you holding an axe and think you're going to come at me with it, how you look at me, like right now I'm getting a side eye from Mark, right? So there's a threat there in the side eye.

Starting point is 00:04:45 That's my listening intent. That's my, I have to listen carefully. That's Mars resting bitch face, right? No, that shows, no, that's my focused and concentration face. And if we're in a conversation, how you listen, whether you give me space to finish my thought. All of those have little twinges of violence or lack thereof. And so, yeah, absolutely, conversation goes an enormous way in our ability to trust each other, but it has very little to do with the words. The words are in the mix, right? That classic sort of, you know,

Starting point is 00:05:22 90% of communication is nonverbal, et cetera, et cetera. Part of why people say that is because that back of the brain amygdolic work is so much faster than our prefrontal cortex, right? So the back of the brain is already making all these decisions. And our prefrontal cortex will go, oh, gosh, well, Mark said that really smart thing, so I should trust him. But that's really just a validation of a decision I already made. So conversation is incredibly important for trust-biting. It's why the internet's so bad at it. One of the many reasons why the internet's so bad at it is because there's no conversational space really functionally on the internet. There's asynchronous commenting, but it's not really conversational space.

Starting point is 00:06:02 I trust things that I haven't spoken with. People trust brands that they haven't spoken with. I would trust. I've never had a conversation with Jeremy's wife, but I would trust her immediately. Yep, we borrow all the time. Communities and networks are really powerful for trustmaking because we borrow trust from each other, right? We ship credibility across lines of relationship.

Starting point is 00:06:25 That happens all the time. brand is in some ways a really kind of silly mass tool that we use to say if we just averaged out all of that shipped credibility, what do we call it? We call it a brand. You know, so we're, you know, again, we're shipping credibility through all these little channels through communication, through conversation, through following through and what we said we were going to do through color, through sound, through meeting expectations. All of these things are little nodes of trust.

Starting point is 00:06:56 And then to the extent that we fire on those notes consistently or how we fire on those notes consistently creates this funky thing that has been called brand. But brand is really a mass average of something much more fundamental and much more human. How do you build trust with a potential audience or community when the technology you're building is difficult for the average person to understand? In the case that you're like selling technology or the medium through which we're transferring information. So you're building a tech, you're building quantum computers or you're building some kind of significant AI.

Starting point is 00:07:36 You're building space technology. You're seeing, we're seeing in real time a lot of different strategies for this, right? So we can take the Sam Altman strategy, which a lot of people distrust Sam Altman. Some of that's because of media and book writing and things like that. But a lot of people do trust him, right? Right. They use his software. They pay him money.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Part of how Sam Altman has done that is he recalibrates danger. So the danger of not trusting him is enormous. Right. So then we don't actually have to think about him at all. We don't think about what's happening in that chapbot at all. We are just being trained by his media apparatus to believe that the risk, the danger of not listening to him is so enormous. put our everything we can in this little chat bot so that Sam Altman can save the world. And he's co-opted the media, I mean, quite, quite effectively.

Starting point is 00:08:33 And I mean that broadly, social media influencers, you know, he's co-opted the system. And that co-opting is another way of building trust, is we insert intermediaries. That's why the influencer thing became as big as it did, is it was just a simple way of co-opting trust in a very trustless space. So social media does a really bad job of building trust over time because it does so many trust-breaking things. But if you can insert people who I feel like I can trust, influencers, right? It allows me to use this mass media tool in a way to circumvent the trust issue, right? So influencers is a big piece of how we've used the Internet to bypass kind of the trust issues. kind of getting back to sort of the technology question difficult technology

Starting point is 00:09:23 not everybody's got the sam altman technique although musk is very similar he uses that sort of if you don't listen to me the world ends kind of logic um one of the main ways they do it is they don't they don't talk about technology there's very little convers and this is an old steve jobs trick right it's not a phone it's 10,000 songs in your pocket and that that methodology of we're not selling you technology we're selling you a feeling and that's classic marketing 101. And I think the way that Silicon Valley has amped that up quite effectively, no, I'm not endorsing this because it's had toxic effects, but the way Silicon Valley has amp that up is we're not just selling you a feeling, we're selling a religion that consistently

Starting point is 00:10:01 produces a feeling. And if you buy into our religion, if you buy into our view of the world, you are going to have the good feelings. And that is incredibly powerful. That's how cults get made. Right. And so you have what is arguably the groundswell of a global cults. being built using the tools that cults have been using for 10,000 years. I'm always scared by the word cult. Reasonably so. Well, it's the same, it's similar playbook. It's similar playbook, right?

Starting point is 00:10:33 Scaled in different ways. The unshittification of the internet. First question, was the internet ever good? Was the internet ever not shit? I think there's gradations, right? You know, like, I think for those of us who were there, I'm in the early stages of it. And I don't want to preach Corey's book for him.

Starting point is 00:10:54 Corey Dr. Rose book who wrote In Shittification is a phenomenal book we haven't read it. You know, Corey's point is that the first part of any of these mass tech buildouts is the tech is really good to the users as a way of creating addiction. And so if you look at a certain era of the internet like 08 to 2012, something like that, you had a lot of really big, incredibly funded companies that were burning money, making it good for users. The very brief period of ad-free Facebook. Google, when it was just a search line and an email client and a few other components, right? There's this period of time where we were lulled into the belief that this thing can be free and non-extractive forever. When really it was just an addiction play, it was just handing out cigarettes to teenagers coming out of high schools.

Starting point is 00:11:44 In the sense of the cynical, your cynical question was, it always shitty? Well, yeah, that was really shitty. You know, to addict an entire generation of people using, you know, freemium solutions. But it didn't feel shitty. I mean, we were...

Starting point is 00:12:01 My space was awesome. Right. You know, like, there was this level of autonomy and control and you could find any piece of information and, you know, there were, it's hard, I think I would be hard pressed to say that like the internet in 06, 07, 08 wasn't a really freaking good time.

Starting point is 00:12:19 For those of us who were making use of it, early Twitter, I mean, God, early Twitter was a blast. And then to the point of, you know, Corey's book is then the extraction begins because investors have to get paid. And I don't blame investors for wanting to get paid. It's just the entire game in which it's happened is built on addiction methodology. And that probably is bad. Monthly active users, MAUs, right?

Starting point is 00:12:44 Daily active users, DAUs, how many people are? cannot leave the thing that you've built and how much attention are you, are you extracting from them? It's, it's really funky when you sit back and think about it because normally you're like, oh, wow, this is a cool little thing. I can find some stuff. I can do some things. But when you really think about it, the fundamental level of it is manipulative and extractive.

Starting point is 00:13:11 Yeah. Well, interestingly, I think the AI thing is going to really mess this whole thing up because people have already started doing the math of like, okay, fine, let's say you entrap all these people on chat GPT, how much would you actually have to charge them to reasonably pay back the investors? It's an ungodly amount. I mean, it's like double or triple what you're paying for Netflix and, you know, other things combined right now. The month, and into perpetuity, every year would have to stay on forever. So the math already says that this is, you know, not that model, that AI is not that model, which means it's a different financial model, and who has the money to pay back these firms for the investment that have been made, not users, not even corporations, right? There's a reason why Palant Lanter is what it is, right? There's only a handful of entities in the world that have the level of capital possible to pay back these investors. How many clients have you lost because of AI?

Starting point is 00:14:15 zero. I don't sell anything that AI does. So that doesn't mean you couldn't build an LLM to pretend to do what I do and then maybe we would lose somebody to that. But I, yeah, not something I lose sleep over. I want to read a quote from you. I love this quote. Everyone exists in a mirrored cage of algorithmic distortion. Given all of the above, it's not exaggerated to say there's no central source of truth. 21st century humans are quite comfortable in our house of mirrors, letting Algos. tell us what they think we want to hear. For sellers who want customers, this means rethinking neutrality. You can't please everyone because they don't even live in the same world as each other. But only community of customers requires accepting and engaging their preferred distortions. Pick your facts, pick your perspective, pick your customer. Wow, questionfully there.

Starting point is 00:15:07 So the distortion, the distortion gap is real. The distortion gap is real. Yeah, what do you mean by that? Yeah, go ahead. What I mean is if it's, you know, like that classic Michael Jordan quote of people from both parties by shoes, right? The reason why he was politically neutral is he was like, well, people of all political persuasions by shoes. The applicability of that thought is shrinking at a dramatic rate. There are some brands that are large enough that that is to some degree true for.

Starting point is 00:15:38 And the way they've handled it is their POV shifts based on whose box they sit in at the, at, at the swearing in, right? But for most brands that are sub, you know, 100 million, you just simply don't have the scale, the resources, the tools, the financial structure to serve a broad swath of people. You've got to get specific of who you're going to serve and how you're going to serve them. And one of the ways you have to get specific is what is the information ecosystem that they are consuming?

Starting point is 00:16:11 Because that information ecosystem isn't just online. idea that there's, oh, there's the online and there's the real world and go touch grass. No, our brains are being formatted by these interactions. How we think. I mean, there's already initial research that some of the word choice narrowing that the LLMs are producing is actually changing the structure of language, how we think about the structure of language. Like your customer is choosing a cage of information, limitation and their end and, and, and, and, and, distortion, you've got to walk into that cage and be comfortable there. I ran across a quote last night from Blake Muskogee, the Tom Shoes guy, that I thought was really

Starting point is 00:16:58 interesting. And I think I'd love to hear what you think about this. So he was talking about a new idea that he had tried and massively failed and kind of put him into a bit of a funk. His quote was, even if your idea works, you still have to understand the system. that delivers it to the world. And I think that we're swirling around that same thing. So how do you, what's the best way to connect ideas to these cages, right?

Starting point is 00:17:25 And that you're talking about and doing it in an authentic way because the distortions in and of themselves are not authentic of the people that they emanate from, right? So if you're pitching to people, you're not really, if you pitch to them, they may not listen. but if you pitch to their distortions, you might, like, that's mind-boggling, man. Yeah, yeah, it's messy. So the short answer is use as few of them as possible. So that doesn't mean that you go and become an analog business

Starting point is 00:17:57 and you send out a printed newsletter and you put flyers under people's windshield wipers on their cars, although maybe that would work. But Bransdy to drastically reduce their dependency on distortion platforms. because the distortion platforms have figured out the game. And the game is, we're not even going to tell you who we're giving your information to. So not only are you dependent on it for distribution, you're dependent on us for customer recognition. You don't even know who your customer is anymore.

Starting point is 00:18:30 We're going to blackbox that too. As soon as they start selling through LLMs, it's just one more layer of black box around who the customer is. So now you're running an enterprise where you don't even know who your customer is. So who is your customer? Well, your customer is open AI. That's a terrible proposition. So you absolutely do not want to get in a situation.

Starting point is 00:18:53 You want to de-risk by being less and less dependent on these, which means you move from a funnel methodology of building a client base, which is lots of people get as much tension as possible, trickle that into a little bit more focused attention, trickle that more focused attention, and eventually sucker people. to a point of sale. Funnels don't actually exist. The internet may just think they did, but lots of people are still doing it, and 90% of marketers are trained on funnel methodology and don't know how to break from it. So you move from funnel methodology to where we started this conversation, which is network methodology, which is everything you need to do,

Starting point is 00:19:31 every decision you need to make as a business sub 100 million, we'll say, is probably something that needs to happen with someone you know or someone who knows someone you know. And I don't need a platform to do that. If I believe and start to build a business model where every decision I need to make is somewhere between someone I know and someone who knows someone I know, then I can start to make decisions on a network methodology way. Now, it doesn't mean I don't have a Discord group or it doesn't mean I don't have, I might put some stuff on LinkedIn or whatever. We're not going to, this isn't an argument for full analog. It's a different discussion. but reducing your digital dependency is, one, a huge de-risking strategy for businesses that they need to think about.

Starting point is 00:20:18 And it's also a way of recapturing your financial control. Because almost every business in America is paying the Silicon Valley tax of spending enormous amounts of money to create digital presence that they've been lulled into believing that they have to have, that they don't have to have. And it's costing them sometimes three. four, five, 12, 15% of their top line revenue, and they're burning money, keeping Silicon Valley well-funded. Give me an example of a company. Talk me through an example of a company that is wrestling with that methodology right now. So we were just, I run a community group and we were doing some coaching with that group this morning. And so we were used to, we will use the same case study. So this is an organization that does professional services. It's like a network of professional service providers

Starting point is 00:21:04 under a central brand. And the owner of that professional services company, much like many of them, is obsessed with the idea that they could go build some branded digital funnel to click, click, click, click, click, click, click. We'll get some customers and then we'll link them to one of our consultants and magical things will happen. Well, that hasn't happened on the internet since like 2018, but sure, let's do it. What we're working with that firm to do is, first we have to re-educate the CEO and then we have to re-educate the board and then we can start to build the processes is we always start with where is there an existing relationship. So in this case, it's a really simple, The founder's been really successful on podcasts. The podcasts have produced an uptick in newsletters. So we're just doing a basic BDR motion of having somebody pick up the phone. And every time somebody signs up for a newsletter, they don't do a sales pitch, they just say, hey, I'm assuming you saw owner Joe on this podcast, we care about you. We want to be valuable to you.

Starting point is 00:22:01 And if you want to talk to us, here's the number to call. And that is based on the belief that the thing, the thing they need to do next is based on someone they know or someone who knows someone they know, right? So they shift. So instead of taking that newsletter person and forcing them into some painstakingly terrible email automation, they bring them into a relationship note. And that relationship note has some potential to bring down defensiveness and bring up trust in tiny little ways. So in every little decision, we bias. Can we can we earn trust here? What's our ups? What's our ups? trust potential versus our downside trust risk.

Starting point is 00:22:42 An email automation, for example, has often way more downside trust risk than upside trust potential. So we don't do them very often. Never do. You mentioned community note. I think you said community node. Talk to me about that. Where does that live?

Starting point is 00:22:55 It sounds a little bit like a thousand true fans in a way that you have to narrow down your field to actually people who care. Yes. About you. And people who care about you are not at. the end of a, well, this digital funnel that doesn't exist. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's a little bit difficult to talk about because it's hard to make it sound innovative and interesting because it's not. Well, it is now because we've bought them one-sided by this. Like, when you were speaking,

Starting point is 00:23:25 just and I'm thinking, yep, that sounds right. That sounds right. And I felt, at least I'm not the only fool in the world because I believe, I bought it to it as well. And you've just made me realize that perhaps, especially for a lot of companies, that it's the wrong. way to go increasingly. Yeah, the reality is there's a thousand people have written books about or described how to do this because this is how humans do things. Networks exist. Funnels don't exist. Funnels don't actually exist. They never existed. It was a way to market marketing. It was a way to get CEOs to buy digital marketing was to invent this idea of digital funnel. Thank you, HubSpot. We appreciate you. Networks actually exist. So there's endless material.

Starting point is 00:24:10 on how to create a great, powerful and successful network, because we've been doing it since we had prefrontal cortexes. So let's do what actually exists in the real world. One of your previous guests said, I think, everything that matters, everything that's real is analog, right? This is another application of that. Everything that's real is analog. And that's true for businesses, too. Everything that's real is analog. It's funny.

Starting point is 00:24:35 The one thing I think people are missing with this, and I think this is where you're talking about the, the Silicon Valley to influence tax, right, is that requires patience. It requires patient investors. It requires intention. It is not the easy button. So,

Starting point is 00:24:57 and it's not an idiot. Well, it's more Dunbar's number than something logarithmic, right? Or exponential. So how do you convince someone to be patient? Well, I think they have to decide where they want to live.

Starting point is 00:25:09 When we're talking to investors or CEOs or helping CEOs talk to investors, we just try to, we suss out first. If you're capital, if you're a source of capital, their comfort zone of risk is we would rather tank 20 companies and have one go 100 X, then you've got to play. You got to play they want to play. And what that means is you've got to burn money begging attention on the internet as fast as humanly possible to get to a certain level of. scale and cross your fingers that someone buys you. That's it. That system is what it is.

Starting point is 00:25:46 And for whatever percent, five, 10 percent of companies, if that's what your capital demands of you and they have no flexibility, it is what it is. Now, there's a big messy middle of sources of capital that are kind of buying into that idea because that's what seems normal, but they don't They don't really have any real conviction. And if you can present to them to say, okay, option A is we destroy 25 companies and the money that built them in the hopes that one goes 100 X and gets sold, that's strategy A, which makes a lot of money for people. It's made some of the biggest positive money in the history of the world.

Starting point is 00:26:27 Strategy B is we go slow to go fast. We build fundamentals. We think strategically. We don't make big bets. We don't use your money to just burn through failure. And we go slow to go fast so that by the time we're ready to scale, we're scaling with real relationships and not bought attention. Are you willing to go on the go slow to go fast journey with us?

Starting point is 00:26:51 And of course, that's a much longer than a three-minute spiel. I find that a lot of people are really open to that because everybody else is as tired of this as we are. It's just no one's getting people permission to do it a different way. There's going to be more people that are going to want to, dig into that. There's going to be more people that are going to listen to records. There's going to be more people that write in really cool notebooks. There's going to be more people sitting around a table like a salon in Vienna in the 1600s to unpack ideas for the shit of it, right? So I think it's an interesting thing to be talking about right now. Yeah, sociologically, I agree. I think

Starting point is 00:27:28 we will, 100 years from now, there will be the web primacy era. The web will always be here as a function of society, just like many other archaic technologies. But there will be a brief period of time in the early 2000s where the web was the central feature and people actually believe that we were going to sort of digitally replace analog existence. And then eventually it's going to become the phone company. And it's this thing that we use and as a part of our life and connects things and it's in the background and has probably all kinds of regulatory problems with it. And we're going to realize like, oh, actually the human shit matters, right? Listening to records writing by hand and you're seeing you know there some of this people thought it was sort of a

Starting point is 00:28:13 trend in COVID and I think COVID did trigger some things but this is this has long-lasting the COVID trend people are really asking fundamental questions of what makes a good life are young people asking this question because we do you we get around this and what about the TikTok generation what about the 18 year olds now I find they're not coming around to it I think they're leading it in some it's innate it's yeah yep it's not not something to be unlocked. It's present. It's there.

Starting point is 00:28:40 It's, yeah. You watch how these, these guys actually use the technology. And I would argue that in many cases, it is much healthier than how their parents are using the technology. That's a very good point. You have a bunch of late gen Xers or, or, et cetera,

Starting point is 00:28:55 who are like still think Instagram is real. I mean, which is insane that someone in their 40s or 50s thinks that what they're seeing on Instagram is anything replicating reality. 17-year-olds don't think it's real. It's a game to be played. TikTok is a game to be played. They know it's a game.

Starting point is 00:29:15 They know they're being manipulated. They know they're participating in the manipulation. It's a gamified. And that doesn't mean it's not toxic. But there's just a whole different level of consciousness that's in play, I think, even in the so-called TikTok generation. So I've got kids that are, my oldest is in college, my youngest is a sixth grader. Mark has kids that are a little bit younger. younger than mine. And we always talk about, you know, when they should dive into technology

Starting point is 00:29:40 and that sort of thing. So I see different uses. And my son that's a freshman jump, like, throws all these really interesting ideas out to me and his understanding of space technology and all this weird stuff that I get involved in. And he's like, I found it on TikTok. It's a very interesting balance. And I think the older people struggle with it more. They're sitting there just pepper and Instagram feeling bad about themselves because, you know, they don't have the abs this guy has and, you know, they don't have a coaching business that throws $5 million a month, you know, there's an artificiality of what you see, like you said. Well, we saw that when we read the Alan Turing report on AI, generative AI use in schools

Starting point is 00:30:21 in the UK and they interviewed the kids, 8, 9, 10, 11 year old kids about what they thought about AI. And the responses were much more thoughtful and much more profound and much more poetic than literally 95% of the posts I read on Twitter or LinkedIn about generative AI. So is this because, as Jeremy alluded to, it's innate? We are analog creatures. Is there a rebellion to what the generation before is doing? This is a punk rock movement. Are we going to not do this because our parents do this?

Starting point is 00:30:55 What do you think culturally is happening? I think the human soul remains undefeated. That is a core tenet of mine. I think there is a punk rock, you know, thing. I also think consciously, in terms of how our consciousness works, we consciously engage something that we were, that is our soup differently than something that we discover. Right. So for Gen Z technology, the web-based technology is the soup.

Starting point is 00:31:26 It's always been. They were born into it. And so they have a different relationship to it. They're not impressed by it. Right. None of us are impressed by a telephone. We were never impressed by a telephone because we were born into it. Gen X and a little bit millennial, like saw these things come up out of the ether and particularly come up out of the ether in the hands of some demigod level marketers. And so we still think it's cool. Like, I mean, you talk to Gen X and millennial, mostly Gen X people about technology. They still think Steve Jobs is in the room? I'm like, is he still here? Like, because. Because it was just, this technology was delivered to us. It isn't all about Steve Jobs, but just by some legendary once in a generation, even once in multiple generations level marketers.

Starting point is 00:32:15 And we just grossly underestimate the impacts of that. We just got sold so hard. Yeah. I mean, people still talk about that stupid 1984 commercial. It's really not that good. I think the more people talk about it in like ad schools and agencies and all of that. circling back to that point, it just gives it more power. Totally.

Starting point is 00:32:38 So Mark and I have had this, had a very interesting debate. Dare I call it potentially heated debate? I think in one of our last shows related to curiosity. It was heated on my behalf. I don't know about you, but I was very heated. Yeah, no, it was good. So we talk a lot about curiosity. It's another theme.

Starting point is 00:32:56 I believe it's the fuel source that powers all the things we want to do. And if we can access it in the right way, you know, we're lighting ourselves up. And Mark, Mark has a different opinion that curiosity can be co-opted. I think attention can be hijacked. Can be hijacked. I think attention can be hijacked.

Starting point is 00:33:14 Mark believes curiosity can be hijacked. My question for you, I believe it is being hijacked. There you go. My question for you is, why could marketing be considered manipulated curiosity? Well, I think in some cases it is. I mean, I don't, this probably bite me in the butt to say this on a public forum, but like, I just think marketing as a discipline's not great.

Starting point is 00:33:40 Most of our clients, we try to help them do as little marketing as possible to get to where they want to go. Particularly since it's become primarily digital marketing, it's really not great. I don't think it treats companies well. I don't think it treats consumers well. I think it drags us to least common denominators. I think we've all just sort of accepted a level of. of all of until it's just marketing that dehumanizes us in a way that's just not necessary. I think we can grow businesses, earn clients, add revenue.

Starting point is 00:34:11 We can do all those sort of fundamental business development things, bill brands, and just not succumb to these sort of really sad lowest common denominators. I think to the question of, is it manipulated curiosity? Sure. It's manipulated a lot of things. I don't know where this lands in you all's great debate. I missed that episode. But I think anything truly generative about the human spirit is manipulatable.

Starting point is 00:34:40 Because it's the soft tissue of who we are. And soft tissue gets wounded and can be damaged and turned into something dark. The only way to make it unmanipulatable is to not have it. And that would be really sad. Mike drop, Jeremy. I like that. I like that. There's one quote that I saw that I found really interesting. I want to try and try and find it here. Related to efficiencies. Do you know what quote I'm referring to so I don't have to dig it up? We spent a generation obsessing about efficiency only to find that the inefficiencies are load-bearing. Talk to me about the low-bearing side of that. What do you mean by load-bearing? That sometimes things that take a really long time are the things that hold the roof up.

Starting point is 00:35:24 Conversation is inefficient. Democracy is inefficient. Sex is inefficient. Good sex is inefficient. The things that matter are not easily optimized. And if you try to optimize, you ruin them. And so when optimization is in our top tier of priorities, we are absolutely on the risk train to destroy what matters. We can't, I'm not saying ignore optimization.

Starting point is 00:35:47 But we've built a culture and an economy where optimization is in spot one or two at almost any given time. And so no wonder we burn the whole freaking thing to the ground. Because inefficiencies are load bearing of what matters of everything that we do in our social relationships, in our communities, in our businesses. What might be an example in business? Almost everything. I mean, I think in a business environment, user research is inefficient. If you're talking about technology, like really understanding what your users want and why they want it. Qualitative side of that, right?

Starting point is 00:36:29 Yeah, qualitative user research, not just like gaming it so that you can justify the spend, but like actually engaging. It's a really inefficient process because people's opinions aren't easily categorized. in the ispace risk management is grossly inefficient like actually getting under the hood it's really hard to get under the hood of an LLM and figure out where the risk is because the data is not even there

Starting point is 00:36:55 and even if the data was there the mapping of the data is totally right so you actually have to invent categories and invent questions to even start mapping data to to even go well what we don't even know what risks were exposed to much less how to measure those. Like the process by which we would actually think about risk management for LLMs is so complex and end grossly inefficient because we've never done it before. But I don't know, maybe we should do it anyway.

Starting point is 00:37:23 Well, that's the beauty of it for them is that it's so unbelievably complex and no one's going to attempt to do it because. Right. So they get some headlines and go, we've got a thousand people working on risk mitigation. And people go, okay, check. You know, and talk to people who are actually worked in those. risk mitigation arenas. Ask them what it was like. I mean, it's fascinating. Let's talk. So let me give you a musical example of inefficiency versus efficiency, right? So the things that matter. You said we're in danger of losing the things that matter. And I think you're absolutely right. Our

Starting point is 00:37:57 economy is built on companies that are optimizing efficiency and scale for us in various ways through platforms, tools, things that they are producing, right? And this is really an interesting thread. So you think about music, okay? You think about the reason why when you listen to a song where you start going like this and start doing this and you make that little bass face because the groove is so good, right? And then you listen to a groove. When I say groove, it's bass and drums, right?

Starting point is 00:38:30 A groove that is done in a computer that is quantized, very efficient. You don't, you just half play it on a keyboard. you quantize it, it locks in and it's boring as shit. But the misses, the fact that that drummer's kick drum is hitting, you know, just,

Starting point is 00:38:48 maybe just a little late or just a little early. Like Jay Dilla was early. We found Helmless late. Like all of this, that's why it matters, right? Yes. So that's where I go to in thinking about efficiencies and inefficiencies.

Starting point is 00:39:01 Yeah, I mean, and we could even stay in music and take it up to the technology level, right? Like, again, times when the internet was good, right? Back when we would like make playlist based on other people's playlist and you would like go to somebody's place to go, oh, you like this song, oh, I'd never heard of that song and I'd grab it and I put it in a playlist. Of course, we first did that illegally and then eventually we did it on, you know, iTunes. But that was a really inefficient

Starting point is 00:39:22 process. You'd spend hours meticulously scrolling through people's playlist and grabbing them. And Spotify says, well, don't worry. We'll just do that for you. We'll just grab all the songs that people like you like. And of course, now the research makes really clear that the same, you know, 500 songs end up on all the the playlists, because they're the ones that validate Spotify's metric, which Spotify hates it

Starting point is 00:39:43 when you skip out on a song in the middle of the song. Well, you know what songs get skipped out on, ones that are interesting that you've never heard before. Right? But landslide never get skipped out on.

Starting point is 00:39:54 People always listen to landslide till the end. So they put landslide in every freaking playlist. Well, I love landslide, but I don't want any every playlist, right? So it's inefficient to build thoughtful, creative, inspiring, evocative playlists. It's incredibly inefficient.

Starting point is 00:40:12 Doing it an efficient way, you're going to listen to the same thousand songs for the rest of your life. I'm sure Jamie did the same, but I used to record my tapes off the radio with a tape waiting to press record, and that takes it a whole other level of inefficiency. You speak a lot about resilience, and to accept a lot of these inefficiencies, you have to be resilient because it takes time, it takes failure, it takes more time and more failure. How do you think about resilience and how do we get more of it? Yeah, I use an anatomical sort of metaphor for this is, you know, like the reason why lifting heavy things is good for your body is because it doesn't create big injuries, it creates

Starting point is 00:40:57 little micro tears in the muscle, right? So everybody's obsessed about weight lifting because those little micro tears then get healed and the muscle get stronger and gets healed, the muscle gets stronger, right? So that when you eventually have to do something that's really uncomfortable, your body's built for it. And there's no way to shortcut that. It's incredibly, that's another thing's inefficient. Weightlifting's inefficient.

Starting point is 00:41:21 Resilience is a function of a thousand small, a billion small inefficiencies building up to strength. That's what resilience is. Is we take little tiny efficiencies and we add them up and we add them up and we add them up, and we get strength in the end. And that's a really important thing because bad news for everybody, everything's moving to entropy. Everything's moving to falling apart.

Starting point is 00:41:45 So what do we need when everything falls apart? Resilience. So the end game for everybody is a resilience game. The end game for every business is a resilience game. The end game from every small town and city and like the United States of America and its definition of democracy is in the middle of a resilience scheme.

Starting point is 00:42:05 Are we resilient enough to live through this thing and maintain some semblance of who we are? Everything ends in a resilience game. So it's like, it's super important, I guess, to simplify the point. So Kevin Kelly, a thousand true fans. I think he's a relevant name for this conversation.

Starting point is 00:42:25 He left us a questioning. That's all, I guess, on thinking in paper at the end. What do we want humans to be? be and how does technology help us get there if indeed it does? Ironic to our previous conversation, I think we want, I want humans to be curious. I think I want us to be driven to wonder and imagination and what else could we know that's worth knowing. And can that be weaponized?

Starting point is 00:42:52 Sure. But I still want it. I think to balance that out, I want us to be humble. I want us to realize that what we think is big. is so small in the grand sense of almost everything. Right. Our lives are short. Our planet's a little tiny speck.

Starting point is 00:43:09 Like humility allows us to have a more resilient curiosity. And the other thing I thought of is just as relates because we're on a sort of a technology-ish podcast is I want us to be agentic. I want humans to have agency. I want our decisions to have effect. I want the nihilism of our time that says, oh, it doesn't matter. it is what it is. I want to stamp that out like a thousand fires because humans who believe that their choices have meaning and have efficacy are better humans. They just are. And they have the capacity to be better to be better humans. So those are my three. That's what I would want.

Starting point is 00:43:50 Wonderful. I do have a lot of other threads we could go down. But in the interest of time, maybe we could do a round two at some point. But Nick, thanks. Thanks so much for, for George. joining us and being so willing to bounce all over the place with with a lot of these things. But I think all of these are foundational elements to being a human participating in the world with meaning, with purpose, all of that. So thank you very much for sharing your ideas. Thank you guys for the time. I really enjoyed it. And I'm also going to borrow Steele that new thinking on paper logline, a technology, a technology-ish podcast, which is actually.

Starting point is 00:44:31 that is what we do. I've been looking for everything because we're not a 100% technology podcast and I think as we go into the future, we want to speak to writers and authors and more dive, a technology-ish podcast, I will borrow.

Starting point is 00:44:47 I mean, it's part of what I love about you guys is like, you know, it's one episode, it's like, here's how we're going to go to the moon. You know, in the next episode is this really sort of humanist,

Starting point is 00:44:56 deep, you know, soulful thing. It's, I find what you do fascinating. It's like that mixtape, isn't it? Because we're creating a mixtape that we make ourselves rather than this Spotify version. We're going back to recording off the radio. Well, this has been amazing.

Starting point is 00:45:15 Thanks for listening to everybody. You know where to find us thinking on paper. Dot XYZ. Be curious. Stay disruptive. Keep thinking on paper.

Technology, Connected - Silicon Valley Is Selling You Religion

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