Podcast appearances and mentions of andy matuschak

Bruno dives deep into the note-taking and Obsidian rabbit hole with Andy Matuschak's evergreen philosophy. Are we building cathedrals of knowledge or just stacking bricks of fleeting thoughts? From daily brain dumps to crystallized ideas, we're exploring the evolution of note-taking, journaling, and gathering ideas. Are we heading into an agents vs. co-pilot future, and are we switching from the classic seats SaaS model to the getting tasks done model? Gen-AI investments spiked in Q3 2024 while we live in an MVP and prototype world.**Follow us on Twitter:**@morkeeth@0xago@ericzakariassonStay journaled, stay wavy.

Andy Matuschak is an independent researcher who explores user interfaces that expand what people can think and do. He sits down with Scott to talk about how we learn, why we learn, and what learning means in a world of AI and AGI.https://andymatuschak.org/

This episode is sponsored by Command Bar, an embedded AI copilot designed to improve user experience on your web or mobile site. Find them here: https://www.commandbar.com/copilot/ Dwarkesh Patel is on a quest to know everything. He's using LLMs to enhance how he reads, learns, thinks, and conducts interviews. Dwarkesh is a podcaster who's interviewed a wide range of people, like Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, and Marc Andreesen. Before conducting each of these interviews, Dwarkesh learns as much as he can about his guest and their area of expertise—AI hardware, tense geopolitical crises, and the genetics of human origins, to name a few. The most important tool in his learning arsenal? AI—specifically Claude, Claude Projects, and a few custom tools he's built to accelerate his workflow. He does this by researching extensively, and as his knowledge grows, each piece of new information builds upon the last, making it easier and easier to grasp meaningful insights. In this interview, I turn the tables on him to understand how the prolific podcaster uses AI to become a smarter version of himself. We get into: - How he uses LLMs to remember everything - His podcast prep workflow with Claude to understand complex topics - Why it's important to be an early adopter of technology - His taste in books and how he uses LLMs to learn from them - How he thinks about building a worldview - His quick takes on the AI's existential questions—AGI and P(doom) We also use Claude live on the show to help Dwarkesh research for an upcoming podcast recording. This is a must-watch for curious people who want to use AI to become smarter. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here. It's usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: - Subscribe to Every - Follow him on X Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Teaser 00:01:44 - Introduction 00:05:37 - How Dwarkesh uses LLMs to remember everything 00:11:50 - Dwarkesh's taste in books and how he uses AI to learn from them 00:17:58 - Why it's important to be an early adopter of technology 00:20:44 - How Dwarkesh uses Claude to understand complex concepts 00:26:36 - Dwarkesh on how you can compound your intelligence 00:28:21 - Why Dwarkesh is on a quest to know everything 00:39:19 - Dan and Dwarkesh prep for an upcoming interview 01:04:14 - How Dwarkesh uses AI for post-production of his podcast 01:08:51 - Rapid fire on AI's biggest questions—AGI and P(doom) Links to resources mentioned in the episode: - Dwarkesh Patel - Dwarkesh's podcast and newsletter - Dwarkesh's interview with researcher Andy Matuschak on spaced repetition - The book about technology and society that both Dan and Dwarkesh are reading: Medieval Technology and Social Change - Dan's interview with Reid Hoffman - The book by Will Durant that inspires Dwarkesh: Fallen Leaves - One of the most interesting books Dwarkesh has read: The Great Divide - Upcoming guests on Dwarkesh's podcast: David Reich and Daniel Yergin

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Building intuition with spaced repetition systems, published by Jacob G-W on May 14, 2024 on LessWrong. Do you ever go to a lecture, follow it thinking it makes total sense, then look back at your notes later and realize it makes no sense? This used to happen to me, but I've learned how to use spaced repetition to fully avoid this if I want. I'm going to try to convey this method in this post. Much of my understanding of how to create flashcards comes from "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics" by Michael Nielsen and "How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding" by Andy Matuschak, but I think my method falls in between both, in terms of abstraction. Finally, I want to credit Quantum Country for being an amazing example of flashcards created to develop intuition in users. My method is more abstract than Michael Nielsen's approach, since it does not only apply to mathematics, but to any subject. Yet it is less abstract than Andy Matuschak's approach because I specifically use it for 'academic subjects' that require deep intuition of (causal or other) relationships between concepts. Many of Matuschak's principles in his essay apply here (I want to make sure to give him credit), but I'm looking at it through the 'how can we develop deep intuition in an academic subject in the fastest possible time?' lens. Minimize Inferential Distance on Flashcards A method that I like to repeat to myself while making flashcards that I haven't seen in other places is that each flashcard should only have one inferential step on it. I'm using 'inferential step' here to mean a step such as remembering a fact, making a logical deduction, visualizing something, or anything that requires thinking. It's necessary that a flashcard only have a single inferential step on it. Anki trains the mind to do these steps. If you learn all the inferential steps, you will be able to fully re-create any mathematical deduction, historical story, or scientific argument. Knowing (and continually remembering) the full story with spaced repetition builds intuition. I'm going to illustrate this point by sharing some flashcards that I made while trying to understand how Transformers (GPT-2) worked. I made these flashcards while implementing a transformer based on Neel Nanda's tutorials and these two blog posts. Understanding Attention The first step in my method is to learn or read enough so that you have part of the whole loaded into your head. For me, this looked like picking the attention step of a transformer and then reading about it in the two blog posts and watching the section of the video on it. It's really important to learn about something from multiple perspectives. Even when I'm making flashcards from a lecture, I have my web browser open and I'm looking up things that I thought were confusing while making flashcards. My next step is to understand that intuition is fake! Really good resources make you feel like you understand something, but to actually understand something, you need to engage with it. This engagement can take many forms. For technical topics, it usually looks like solving problems or coding, and this is good! I did this for transformers! But I also wanted to not forget it long term, so I used spaced repetition to cement my intuition. Enough talk, here are some flashcards about attention in a transformer. For each flashcard, I'll explain why I made it. Feel free to scroll through. Examples I start with a distillation of the key points of the article. I wanted to make sure that I knew what the attention operation was actually doing, as the blog posts emphasized this. When building intuition, I find it helpful to know "the shape" or constraints about something so that I can build a more accurate mental model. In this case, th...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Building intuition with spaced repetition systems, published by Jacob G-W on May 14, 2024 on LessWrong. Do you ever go to a lecture, follow it thinking it makes total sense, then look back at your notes later and realize it makes no sense? This used to happen to me, but I've learned how to use spaced repetition to fully avoid this if I want. I'm going to try to convey this method in this post. Much of my understanding of how to create flashcards comes from "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics" by Michael Nielsen and "How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding" by Andy Matuschak, but I think my method falls in between both, in terms of abstraction. Finally, I want to credit Quantum Country for being an amazing example of flashcards created to develop intuition in users. My method is more abstract than Michael Nielsen's approach, since it does not only apply to mathematics, but to any subject. Yet it is less abstract than Andy Matuschak's approach because I specifically use it for 'academic subjects' that require deep intuition of (causal or other) relationships between concepts. Many of Matuschak's principles in his essay apply here (I want to make sure to give him credit), but I'm looking at it through the 'how can we develop deep intuition in an academic subject in the fastest possible time?' lens. Minimize Inferential Distance on Flashcards A method that I like to repeat to myself while making flashcards that I haven't seen in other places is that each flashcard should only have one inferential step on it. I'm using 'inferential step' here to mean a step such as remembering a fact, making a logical deduction, visualizing something, or anything that requires thinking. It's necessary that a flashcard only have a single inferential step on it. Anki trains the mind to do these steps. If you learn all the inferential steps, you will be able to fully re-create any mathematical deduction, historical story, or scientific argument. Knowing (and continually remembering) the full story with spaced repetition builds intuition. I'm going to illustrate this point by sharing some flashcards that I made while trying to understand how Transformers (GPT-2) worked. I made these flashcards while implementing a transformer based on Neel Nanda's tutorials and these two blog posts. Understanding Attention The first step in my method is to learn or read enough so that you have part of the whole loaded into your head. For me, this looked like picking the attention step of a transformer and then reading about it in the two blog posts and watching the section of the video on it. It's really important to learn about something from multiple perspectives. Even when I'm making flashcards from a lecture, I have my web browser open and I'm looking up things that I thought were confusing while making flashcards. My next step is to understand that intuition is fake! Really good resources make you feel like you understand something, but to actually understand something, you need to engage with it. This engagement can take many forms. For technical topics, it usually looks like solving problems or coding, and this is good! I did this for transformers! But I also wanted to not forget it long term, so I used spaced repetition to cement my intuition. Enough talk, here are some flashcards about attention in a transformer. For each flashcard, I'll explain why I made it. Feel free to scroll through. Examples I start with a distillation of the key points of the article. I wanted to make sure that I knew what the attention operation was actually doing, as the blog posts emphasized this. When building intuition, I find it helpful to know "the shape" or constraints about something so that I can build a more accurate mental model. In this case, th...

TL;DRTacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos—aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I'll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, George Hotz, and others. What are Tacit Knowledge Videos?Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows:Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual [...]The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 31st, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXJGSPeQWbACveJhs/the-best-tacit-knowledge-videos-on-every-subject --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject, published by Parker Conley on March 31, 2024 on LessWrong. TL;DR Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos - aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I'll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, George Hotz, and others. What are Tacit Knowledge Videos? Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows: Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery. In my observation, domains like housekeeping and cooking have already seen many benefits from this revolution. Could tacit knowledge in domains like research, programming, mathematics, and business be next? I'm not sure, but maybe this post will help push the needle forward. For the purpose of this post, Tacit Knowledge Videos are any video that communicates "knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction". Here are some examples: Neel Nanda, who leads the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, has a playlist of "Research Walkthroughs". AI Safety research is discussed a lot around here. Watching research videos could help instantiate what AI research really looks and feels like. GiveWell has public audio recordings of its Board Meetings from 2007-2020. Participants include Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise, and others. Influential business meetings are not usually made public. I feel I have learned some about business communication and business operations, among other things, by listening to these recordings. Andy Matuschak recorded himself studying Quantum Mechanics with Dwarkesh Patel and doing research. Andy Matushak "helped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy". I found it interesting to have a peek into Matushak's spaced repetition practice and various studying heuristics and habits, as well as his process of digesting and taking notes on papers. Call to Action Share links to Tacit Knowledge Videos below! Share them frivolously! These videos are uncommon - the bottleneck to the YouTube knowledge transfer revolution is quantity, not quality. I will add the shared videos to the post. Here are the loose rules: Recall a video that you've seen that communicates tacit knowledge - "knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction". A rule of thumb for sharing: could a reader find this video through one or two YouTube searches? If not, share it. Post the title and the URL of the video. Provide information indicating why the expert in the video is credible. (However, don't let this last rule stop you from sharing a video! Again - quantity, not quality.)[1] For information on how to best use these videos, Cedric Chin and Jacob Steinhardt have some potentially relevant practical advice. Andy Matushak also has some working notes about this idea generally. Additionally, DM or email me (email in L...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject, published by Parker Conley on March 31, 2024 on LessWrong. TL;DR Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos - aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I'll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, George Hotz, and others. What are Tacit Knowledge Videos? Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows: Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery. In my observation, domains like housekeeping and cooking have already seen many benefits from this revolution. Could tacit knowledge in domains like research, programming, mathematics, and business be next? I'm not sure, but maybe this post will help push the needle forward. For the purpose of this post, Tacit Knowledge Videos are any video that communicates "knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction". Here are some examples: Neel Nanda, who leads the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, has a playlist of "Research Walkthroughs". AI Safety research is discussed a lot around here. Watching research videos could help instantiate what AI research really looks and feels like. GiveWell has public audio recordings of its Board Meetings from 2007-2020. Participants include Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise, and others. Influential business meetings are not usually made public. I feel I have learned some about business communication and business operations, among other things, by listening to these recordings. Andy Matuschak recorded himself studying Quantum Mechanics with Dwarkesh Patel and doing research. Andy Matushak "helped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy". I found it interesting to have a peek into Matushak's spaced repetition practice and various studying heuristics and habits, as well as his process of digesting and taking notes on papers. Call to Action Share links to Tacit Knowledge Videos below! Share them frivolously! These videos are uncommon - the bottleneck to the YouTube knowledge transfer revolution is quantity, not quality. I will add the shared videos to the post. Here are the loose rules: Recall a video that you've seen that communicates tacit knowledge - "knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction". A rule of thumb for sharing: could a reader find this video through one or two YouTube searches? If not, share it. Post the title and the URL of the video. Provide information indicating why the expert in the video is credible. (However, don't let this last rule stop you from sharing a video! Again - quantity, not quality.)[1] For information on how to best use these videos, Cedric Chin and Jacob Steinhardt have some potentially relevant practical advice. Andy Matushak also has some working notes about this idea generally. Additionally, DM or email me (email in L...

aaaand we have another wonderful conversation from summer with Steve Chapman All his art, content, Podcast, talks and wonderful things can be found at: CAN SCORPIONS SMOKE? https://www.canscorpionssmoke.com/innercriticonline/ We start with the question: Why does Steve do the stuff he does? he lost touch with his intrinsic side until around 35 years He doesn't make stuff because of the fun because he cant not do them Example: February Challenge A Project is like a Flower. Start and End of a project is just in our minds everaything is always becoming because of Dyslexia Steve sees himself as a very good improviser Do you think it is possible to start an organization to give people like us a "Job" The projections people put on art self saboteurs Education and Kids 4 philosphies as guidance :) as soon you say 3 things in a talk people get out their pen and papers 1. be fascinated (not only interested!) swim in sharky waters 2. open windows in your world so people can SEE you working fascinated (Andy Matuschak) - interestred papers are interesting 3. learn to live without your means - it is not gonna happen 4. hang out with weirdos and outsiders - self taughts The Book - It sounds like a lot of micro burning mans weirdos meet and sparks mor inspiration and fascination creative resilience talk the community of outsiders Popup Radio Station the portsmouth symphonia - a Talk Also sprach Zarathustra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpJ6anurfuw Inexpert conference the Inexpert Conference a structure steve coached the speaker get as much into a place of not knowing on stage https://www.canscorpionssmoke.com/inexpert/ Sound of Silence the dyslexic monkey mind brought out the podcast 2 minutes of recorded silence with special guests 100 episodes The paradox of not knowing you cannot get good at it because then you would be knowing "You cant sepnd anytime in nature without being surrounded by death and decay." Who trains our muscles of stopping or walking away the quality of the compost the more it gets a familiar discomfort... existential philosophy ernest becker denying death "humans fear impermancne and insignificance" - everything is an immortality project Book - Rooted - Lyanda Lee Haupt on a scale of 1 to 10 what is your fear of death experiment in B2B: find a team that is open to doing stuff differently - introduce a agenda item "2 minutes and contemplate in which order they would die" philosophize THIS Steves Childhood and school writing stories the tea group - 4 days for 10 hours with 16 people and 2 fascilitators what are some signs of the discomfort feeling like being musunderstood and no logic will help Zen Monk - Psychotherapist 3 zen monk trades - bare witness - not knowing - compassionate action the obstacle becomes the path Sharons Mom: Raised with the concept of honorable witnessing Imagine you are the finished article be inspirable and retain a childlike level of openness not wanting to die is kind of Ego-based The great pause and its opportunities Imagine the world without humans for 60 seconds calm the distrubed and disturbed the calms pandemic was the invitaiotn to do ANYTHING Keith Johnson -. dont try to be celver - your job is just to be obvious creative adventures with the inner critic Steve's TED Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnf-Ka3ZmOM This talk isn't very good. Dancing with my inner critic at TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells I AM A CURATOR OF WEIRDOS

A few weeks ago, I sat beside Andy Matuschak to record how he reads a textbook.Even though my own job is to learn things, I was shocked with how much more intense, painstaking, and effective his learning process was.So I asked if we could record a conversation about how he learns and a bunch of other topics:* How he identifies and interrogates his confusion (much harder than it seems, and requires an extremely effortful and slow pace)* Why memorization is essential to understanding and decision-making* How come some people (like Tyler Cowen) can integrate so much information without an explicit note taking or spaced repetition system.* How LLMs and video games will change education* How independent researchers and writers can make money* The balance of freedom and discipline in education* Why we produce fewer von Neumann-like prodigies nowadays* How multi-trillion dollar companies like Apple (where he was previously responsible for bedrock iOS features) manage to coordinate millions of different considerations (from the cost of different components to the needs of users, etc) into new products designed by 10s of 1000s of people.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.To see Andy's process in action, check out the video where we record him studying a quantum physics textbook, talking aloud about his thought process, and using his memory system prototype to internalize the material.You can check out his website and personal notes, and follow him on Twitter.CometeerVisit cometeer.com/lunar for $20 off your first order on the best coffee of your life!If you want to sponsor an episode, contact me at dwarkesh.sanjay.patel@gmail.com.Timestamps(00:02:32) - Skillful reading(00:04:10) - Do people care about understanding?(00:08:32) - Structuring effective self-teaching(00:18:17) - Memory and forgetting(00:34:50) - Andy's memory practice(00:41:47) - Intellectual stamina(00:46:07) - New media for learning (video, games, streaming)(01:00:31) - Schools are designed for the median student(01:06:52) - Is learning inherently miserable?(01:13:37) - How Andy would structure his kids' education(01:31:40) - The usefulness of hypertext(01:43:02) - How computer tools enable iteration(01:52:24) - Monetizing public work(02:10:16) - Spaced repetition(02:11:56) - Andy's personal website and notes(02:14:24) - Working at Apple(02:21:05) - Spaced repetition 2 Get full access to The Lunar Society at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

In this episode, we cover "Cultivating depth and stillness in research" by Andy Matuschak. We go over tons of actionable strategies and tips to optimize your brain for longer periods of focus. The article is chock full of graphs and data, so make sure to check it out. Along the way, Joe and I realize we suck at deep work (for now), we make New Year's Resolutions (even though we just claimed we don't like them in a recent episode), and Evan has an epiphany about ChatGPT.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conversational canyons, published by Henrik Karlsson on January 4, 2023 on LessWrong. Conversations are streams: they pass by without leaving much behind. But if you add a notebook—if you write down short summaries of what you talk about so you can return to it in later conversations and expand—then you have a landscape for the conversation to flow through, and this changes it in interesting ways. When I started writing summaries, I thought it would be a small change. I already kept a detailed journal—I could just as well keep one for conversations, too. I could jot down a few notes about the key ideas, turning a two-hour conversation into 400 words or so. After a few months, however, it became clear that these notes were in fact not a small change. The notebook had entirely altered the shape of my conversations. Because I had the notes, I would review them if I was to speak with the same person again, adding comments about thoughts I'd had in the interim, rank ordering which topics I wanted to revisit, and so on. This way good ideas and topics would not be dropped but revisited and expanded. They would be connected to new insights, merged, and refined. Through this, the conversations became richer. They became more useful and interesting. The conversational stream was flowing through a landscape. On its banks ideas would wash up. Gradually, the banks would move, too—the landscape is shaped by the flow of words into a canyon. A canyon that shapes the stream of words in turn. I don't write down the conversations I have with most people. But there are a few who I keep coming back to—friends with minds that are forever churning, minds like mysterious machines I can never fully grasp but am continually delighted by. When we talk they all take me to different places; when I add a notebook they all go deep. The first conversation I wrote down was with Torbjörn, a software engineer who has an uncanny ability to guess my thoughts. When he gets excited he SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS, and he gets excited about everything. At the time, we talked on the phone once a week for about two hours. I would set off from my house toward the ocean and cross into the nature reserve. Walking along the ravine and the cliffs for a few hours, I would talk to Torbjörn about open research questions and software projects we were involved with. He would ask me for strategic advice about his consultancy. We also talked about our relationships, aliens, the ravings of the world around us, mopeds. While talking, we would take turns jotting down keywords to aid our memory, and then, when I got home, I would add what we had said to my note-taking system. I revised old notes in light of how our thinking had evolved, adding new links between different ideas, and so on. (For this particular conversation, I used Obsidian. But the tools are not important. And I roughly follow the note-taking strategy that Andy Matuschak outlines here. But that is not important either.) If Torbjörn wanted some of the notes, I would email edited excerpts to him, so I didn't have to format my notebook in a way that makes sense for him to read. First, I mixed the conversational notes in with my other thoughts. But I've since found that keeping the conversational notes separate from other notes is better—it creates a stronger sense of place. Now, I enter the Torbjörn notes, and all past conversations flow up. Mixed in with the other notes, they were diluted. (I do interlink it heavily with other notes, though.) During the week or so until we talked again, I would occasionally revisit the notes and add a thought or two. It kept the conversation alive in my mind. I'd update a list of topics I wanted to cover next time, shuffling their relative importance. This priority list, which was added to deal with the mess the notes became after a few...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conversational canyons, published by Henrik Karlsson on January 4, 2023 on LessWrong. Conversations are streams: they pass by without leaving much behind. But if you add a notebook—if you write down short summaries of what you talk about so you can return to it in later conversations and expand—then you have a landscape for the conversation to flow through, and this changes it in interesting ways. When I started writing summaries, I thought it would be a small change. I already kept a detailed journal—I could just as well keep one for conversations, too. I could jot down a few notes about the key ideas, turning a two-hour conversation into 400 words or so. After a few months, however, it became clear that these notes were in fact not a small change. The notebook had entirely altered the shape of my conversations. Because I had the notes, I would review them if I was to speak with the same person again, adding comments about thoughts I'd had in the interim, rank ordering which topics I wanted to revisit, and so on. This way good ideas and topics would not be dropped but revisited and expanded. They would be connected to new insights, merged, and refined. Through this, the conversations became richer. They became more useful and interesting. The conversational stream was flowing through a landscape. On its banks ideas would wash up. Gradually, the banks would move, too—the landscape is shaped by the flow of words into a canyon. A canyon that shapes the stream of words in turn. I don't write down the conversations I have with most people. But there are a few who I keep coming back to—friends with minds that are forever churning, minds like mysterious machines I can never fully grasp but am continually delighted by. When we talk they all take me to different places; when I add a notebook they all go deep. The first conversation I wrote down was with Torbjörn, a software engineer who has an uncanny ability to guess my thoughts. When he gets excited he SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS, and he gets excited about everything. At the time, we talked on the phone once a week for about two hours. I would set off from my house toward the ocean and cross into the nature reserve. Walking along the ravine and the cliffs for a few hours, I would talk to Torbjörn about open research questions and software projects we were involved with. He would ask me for strategic advice about his consultancy. We also talked about our relationships, aliens, the ravings of the world around us, mopeds. While talking, we would take turns jotting down keywords to aid our memory, and then, when I got home, I would add what we had said to my note-taking system. I revised old notes in light of how our thinking had evolved, adding new links between different ideas, and so on. (For this particular conversation, I used Obsidian. But the tools are not important. And I roughly follow the note-taking strategy that Andy Matuschak outlines here. But that is not important either.) If Torbjörn wanted some of the notes, I would email edited excerpts to him, so I didn't have to format my notebook in a way that makes sense for him to read. First, I mixed the conversational notes in with my other thoughts. But I've since found that keeping the conversational notes separate from other notes is better—it creates a stronger sense of place. Now, I enter the Torbjörn notes, and all past conversations flow up. Mixed in with the other notes, they were diluted. (I do interlink it heavily with other notes, though.) During the week or so until we talked again, I would occasionally revisit the notes and add a thought or two. It kept the conversation alive in my mind. I'd update a list of topics I wanted to cover next time, shuffling their relative importance. This priority list, which was added to deal with the mess the notes became after a few...

Andy Matuschak invents tools that expand what people can think and do. His current research focuses on a new written medium which makes it much easier to remember what you read. In previous roles, Andy led R&D at Khan Academy and helped build iOS at Apple. Website: andymatuschak.org Twitter: @andy_matuschak   For show notes and transcript visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/andy-matuschak-software-engineer-and-researcher/   If you're enjoying the Cool Tools podcast, check out our paperback book Four Favorite Tools: Fantastic tools by 150 notable creators, available in both Color or B&W on Amazon: https://geni.us/fourfavoritetools

From language and writing to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, computers and Adobe Photoshop, our species has a history of inventing tools for augmenting our own intelligence. But what comes next? Andy Matuschak is a developer and designer. He helped build iOS at Apple, founded and led Khan Academy's R&D lab, and now works as an independent researcher investigating 'tools for thought' — that is, technologies that can transform human cognition and creativity. Full episode transcript available at: thejspod.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Interested in KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION or how humanities can help us understand the present? Then this episode is for you! In today's chapter, Dean of Arts and Humanities Hollis Robbins joins us to talk about the extraordinary way in which she views the world. We dive deep into how to scaffold students' learning, how knowledge production works, and how the humanities of the 19th century can inform the present and the future of technology. Furthermore Hollis shares her thoughts about organizational systems, how society systematizes information, frameworks for organizing knowledge and mapping the 19th century into the 21st century. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/rhyslindmark JOIN OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/PDAPkhNxrC Who is Hollis Robbins? Hollis is a Dean, Professor with a long standing academic focus on 19th century African American history and literature; film and film music; poetry and artificial Intelligence. Hollis writes about leadership in higher education, and is author and editor of several books. She will be joining the University of Utah as Dean of Humanities on July 1. Topics: Welcome Hollis Robbins to The Rhys Show!: (00:00:00) Key things that we can learn from the 19th century to apply to today: (00:02:23) 19th century a function of globalization or a function of industrial revolution?: (00:05:12) Standardization process in the 19th century: (00:06:20) About present fragmentation process and restandardization both in technology and culture: (00:10:36) About being on the same page with the current thing: (00:16:10) Should we realign around better kind of agreements that we have on internet?: (00:18:42) What Hollis thinks the new agreements should be: (00:25:51) Providing structures on how to help people navigate the future: (00:31:55) Pushing forward towards a scaffolding: (00:38:55) About memory app as an anti oblivion frame: (00:40:53) The purpose of attending weekly a clubhouse with Sci-Fi authors: (00:44:12) Utopic science fiction books that show us what a positiver world looks like in the near term: (00:47:50) Why Anecdotal?: (00:50:44) Mentioned resources: Tweetscape: https://www.roote.co/tweetscape/vision AnkiApp, Memory App: https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Andy Matuschak: https://andymatuschak.org/ Clubhouse Sci-fi talk: https://www.clubhouse.com/@anecdotal The Martian, book by Andy Weir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel) Severance Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(TV_series) Moby-Dick, book by Herman Melville: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick Uncle Tom's Cabin, book by Harriet Beecher Stowe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin Connect with Hollis Robbins: Twitter: https://twitter.com/anecdotal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollis-robbins-12642898/

Interdisciplinary artist, designer, technologist, and DJ May-Li Khoe teamed up with friend and independent researcher Andy Matuschak to make what they thought would be a fun project on a short timeline. While Playdate's schedule extended a bit, and then a bit more, the pair had a great time creating a whimsical music and dance maker that is a joy to use. Lay down your drum and bass tracks, add a melody, and tell your pizza to twerk with this sparkly composer that's full of fun details!

Andy is a software engineer, designer, and researcher working on technologies that expand what people can think and do. In past lives he helped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy. Now as an independent researcher, his methods bridge the gap between academia and Silicon Valley.

Hello, Playdate Community! This week, Nick and Don dive into week 2 of Season One with a music-maker, Boogie Loops, and a challenging pixel-perfect crank puzzler, Crankin's Time Travel Adventure. Join us here each week as we examine all of the Season Pass games, as well as discussing news and indie finds from the Playdate community. Featured Season One Games: Boogie Loops by May-Li Khoe and Andy Matuschak - (04:03) Crankin's Time Travel Adventure by uvula - (17:16) Indie Games of the Week: Life's Too Short by Ollie Coe - (31:37) AiR BALL by professir - (33:56) News/Links: tinyyellowmachine on Twitch Destination Playdate on YouTube Our Previous Podcast, Gaming On Ten Intro/Outro Music - Made with Boogie Loops on Playdate Contact: Hello Playdate on Discord Hello Playdate on Instagram Hello Playdate on Twitter Playdatepodcast.com Helloplaydatepodcast (at) gmail dot com For Amusement Only Podcast Tags: video games, gaming, handheld, handhelds, panic, playdate, play, date, yellow, crank, gameboy, ds, pocket, videogames, nintendo, sega, xbox, playstation, sony, vita, psp, ngage, itch.io, Keita Takahashi, katamari

Tasshin talks with Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) about memory, spaced repetition software, working for Apple and Khan Academy, independent research, meditation, and more. Andy on Twitter Andy's Website Andy's Notes Andy's Patreon Quantum Country Orbit If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting Tasshin and the Reach Truth Podcast on Patreon.

Read the full transcript here. How can we accelerate learning? Is spaced repetition the best way to absorb information over the long term? Do we always read non-fiction works with the goal of learning? What are some less common but perhaps more valuable types of information that can be put on flash cards? What sorts of things are worth remembering anyway? Why is it important to commit some ideas to memory when so much information is easily findable on the internet? What benefits are derived from being involved in all stages of a project pipeline from concept to execution (as opposed to being involved only in one part, like the research phase)? Why should more researchers be involved in para-academic projects? Where can one find funding for para-academic research?Andy Matuschak invents tools that expand what people can think and do. His current research focuses on a new written medium which makes it much easier to remember what you read. In previous roles, Andy led R&D at Khan Academy and helped build iOS at Apple. You can read more about his work at andymatuschak.org and follow him on Twitter at @andy_matuschak. [Read more]

Read the full transcriptHow can we accelerate learning? Is spaced repetition the best way to absorb information over the long term? Do we always read non-fiction works with the goal of learning? What are some less common but perhaps more valuable types of information that can be put on flash cards? What sorts of things are worth remembering anyway? Why is it important to commit some ideas to memory when so much information is easily findable on the internet? What benefits are derived from being involved in all stages of a project pipeline from concept to execution (as opposed to being involved only in one part, like the research phase)? Why should more researchers be involved in para-academic projects? Where can one find funding for para-academic research?Andy Matuschak invents tools that expand what people can think and do. His current research focuses on a new written medium which makes it much easier to remember what you read. In previous roles, Andy led R&D at Khan Academy and helped build iOS at Apple. You can read more about his work at andymatuschak.org and follow him on Twitter at @andy_matuschak.

How can we accelerate learning? Is spaced repetition the best way to absorb information over the long term? Do we always read non-fiction works with the goal of learning? What are some less common but perhaps more valuable types of information that can be put on flash cards? What sorts of things are worth remembering anyway? Why is it important to commit some ideas to memory when so much information is easily findable on the internet? What benefits are derived from being involved in all stages of a project pipeline from concept to execution (as opposed to being involved only in one part, like the research phase)? Why should more researchers be involved in para-academic projects? Where can one find funding for para-academic research?Andy Matuschak invents tools that expand what people can think and do. His current research focuses on a new written medium which makes it much easier to remember what you read. In previous roles, Andy led R&D at Khan Academy and helped build iOS at Apple. You can read more about his work at andymatuschak.org and follow him on Twitter at @andy_matuschak.

✨ Click here to take the listener survey! ✨ (Or, if the above link isn't clickable, visit clearerthinkingpodcast.com and click on the bright yellow survey button at the top of the page!) How can we accelerate learning? Is spaced repetition the best way to absorb information over the long term? Do we always read non-fiction works with the goal of learning? What are some less common but perhaps more valuable types of information that can be put on flash cards? What sorts of things are worth remembering anyway? Why is it important to commit some ideas to memory when so much information is easily findable on the internet? What benefits are derived from being involved in all stages of a project pipeline from concept to execution (as opposed to being involved only in one part, like the research phase)? Why should more researchers be involved in para-academic projects? Where can one find funding for para-academic research? Andy Matuschak invents tools that expand what people can think and do. His current research focuses on a new written medium which makes it much easier to remember what you read. In previous roles, Andy led R&D at Khan Academy and helped build iOS at Apple. You can read more about his work at andymatuschak.org and follow him on Twitter at @andy_matuschak.

David and Grace discuss the problem of finding money to pay for science, and unsurprisingly end up talking about economics. r/LinkedInLunatics (https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/) Science funders gamble on grant lotteries (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03572-7) Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html) Andy Matuschak is creating tools for thought | Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/quantumcountry) The Development Abstraction Layer (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-abstraction-layer-2/) The Brexit Possibility (https://stratechery.com/2016/the-brexit-possibility/) St. Petersburg paradox - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox) Planet Money T-shirt (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/planetmoney/planet-money-t-shirt)

Audio Source: https://share.transistor.fm/s/d717f16dFollow Julia Che's work on Openess, her new open source funding/community startup.Topics Discussed  in sequential order, but timestamps arent available bc the audio has been cleaned. Swyx shares about his background, previous career in finance, Gamestop & shorting it, transitioning to tech at age 30, community building. What it means to be a GitHub star, what's so appealing about open-source & why participate? "Open-source sets tech apart from every other industry because we share so much.” Figma CTO Evan Wallace's design tool, esbuild. The future of open-source, corporatization of open-source. The biggest pain points in open-source. GitHub sponsors, Patreon and HackerOne. Learning in public, React and the beginner's mind Deep work vs. learning in public, Andy Matuschak's working with the garage door up. On creators being enslaved by their own structures and systems in producing creative content. Living your life in high-definition, idea velocity. Building a personal brand as a developer. The Developer's Journey & community building. Diversity, equity & inclusion in open-source. Where open-source devs could use a helping hand. Governance “Ultimately software is an expression of values and if you fundamentally disagree with the values of the people running the project, then you will eventually disagree with the code as well because it will just encode the values over time. Having welcoming and inclusive values is important.” Swyx's favorite open-source project: Svelte. Hawker markets in Singapore, “Food is the great equalizer in Singaporean society because rich & poor people eat the same things.” How to get started in open-source as a developer. Space in the community for non-technical contributors. Transcriptswyx: [00:00:00] I was recently on the building openness podcasts with Julia Che. Julia is building a startup to solve open source funding and build open source communities. This is her first time doing a podcast interview, so there is a little bit of awkwardness here, but I thought it went off relatively well. We talked a little bit about learning in public, being a GitHub star and building developer community. So here it is! Julia Che: [00:00:26] Swyx I am so excited to chat with you today. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this inaugural interview of this podcast. You're my, literally my very first guest ever on the show. So I couldn't be more delighted, honestly, So you have a pretty strong following of dev community on Twitter.And so they know who you are, but for others who might not have come across you before, can you share an overview about yourself, who Shawn Swyx Wang is and what you're currently up to?  swyx: [00:00:55] Sure. And thanks for having me. It's it's an honor to be considered and I'm happy to help launch your podcast, which is pretty exciting.I'm Shawn. Aye. Work at Temporal is head of developer experience. And I'm originally from Singapore. Mostly work in New York previous career in finance, where I did everything from currency derivatives to treating GameStop in, shorting it and actually making money. But I transitioned to finance transition to tech at age 30, and then essentially did a bootcamp.And since then I've been, I've worked at Netlify AWS and now at Temporal on the side, I do quite a bit of community work. So I used to be the moderator of our stature, BRGs, which is the subreddit for reactive Oliver's the largest JavaScript framework. And that, that grew from like something like 40,000.When I joined to over 200,000 now  I recently left that to run my own paid community, which I run for my book. And that's available at learninpublic.org as well as a, another framer community, just cause I like it. But this time starting from zero, I literally started to, I think we just hit like 9,000 or something like that.And we're going to launch our third conference this month. So, yeah. I like community stuff. I like blogging. Happy to talk about any of that. Julia Che: [00:02:10] Awesome. Yeah. I mean, you're a very active member in the open source community. You're even a good pub star. So I'd love to know what that means.And furthermore, what open source means to you? swyx: [00:02:23] Honestly, it's just. Beta test slash super user program. Just like a lot of companies have like some kind of recognition for people who are  maybe prominence users. Also, they give you some swag. So this microphone that I'm using is what I'm good hub. And yeah they give you events, look at some of their upcoming features and it can ask you for feedback.So it's a little bit of a status in recognition in exchange for some work, but every one of us love give up, get up so much that we don't mind. Cool. Julia Che: [00:02:54] And so what do you find appealing about open source and what makes you want to participate? swyx: [00:02:58] The source is one of the things that make makes tech.  So different from every other industry.Particularly, I came from finance, sorry, let me turn off my discord because it's going to do that maybe in a few minutes. Well, opensource makes sets, sets tech apart from every other industry because we share so much. So there are two, there are a few benefits coming out of that. One is that we have to duplicate work a lot less.Like we can just stand on the shoulders of giants a lot faster. And And build faster, in theory, the practice is that it's very messy, but in theory, if you find the right things that you can reuse, that you can use them forever and it's totally free and you can inspect the source, you can change it.It's a really wonderful thing. The second thing is that you actually get a lot of scrutiny over the highly used open source. And I think some of the, I don't know who said this, but. No sunlight is the best disinfected. Whenever people write software there's bound to be bugs, especially security holes.And when and more people looking at it, the better. So that's a very strong reason to open source. But me personally, coming into the industry, I think that the personal reason is that it's a great way to learn because that the code is a source of truth. And you can literally just open up the code and read what, what goes on under the hood.Not a lot of people do it, but every time I do it, I find I learned something new and it really is a reliable way to level up very quickly. So I think I owe a lot of that. It's open source. Like when I. Was in finance. A lot of the way that we used to learn was like you go to college, you learning some textbook and then you pass some CFA exam and then you try to work on your investment thesis or your pricing model, and that's proprietary.And you do not share that with any other banks or hedge funds.  And I realized that's fine, but it's very zero sum. We have to look at things like I win only if you lose.  Whereas in tech it's a fundamentally more positive somewhere. I can give the way my what I, my secrets are the things that, the thing I spent millions of work on and not only do I not lose, I might actually win from like getting more reputation or getting contributions from the external community or even.Increasing my reputation as a  an employer. So people want to come work with us based on the work that we've, that we do internally. This is an example actually, of something that happened recently, Figma is a very popular designed tool. Their CTO, Evan Wallace actually started working on a build tool in his three-time called yes.Build. And it's just such a high quality. Tool that actually, it definitely increased my own perception of what it's like to work at Figma because if the CTO does this for fun, imagine what it's like working with him on a real thing at work. So it's that, there's definitely a marketing angle to it. Julia Che: [00:05:34] And so that is that indicative of a shift that's happening within open source and. What are your thoughts on the present state? What that shift is and what the future possibly is of open source? swyx: [00:05:47] That's such a huge question. You cannot possibly have a good answer to that. I'm sure. Open source used to be a more stick it to demand type of thing.Very famously. Unix was a very closed source, licensed operating system. And Linux was started just to clinic because they didn't want to pay for your next.  And I think that really, that culture, we persist in some way today, but now there's a lot of corporatization of open source. Like open source is my business model and try to create some funding around it.That's by the way that's what the company I work at. Does we have an open source framework anyway, trying to monetize that by doing a cloud hosted offering, but that's a normal way. Any different from elastic search or Mongo, DB, or name any other  open-source company. Yeah. And then, and now that, it's so established, I think that a lot of people will try to.Really like open source, which is not a thing that used to happen. So, which I think is a positive, because a lot of people will be screened out by the traditional hiring processes. Like you have to go to a recognizable university or you have to right. Pass the right interviews. No, but what if they actually wrote software that you already use?Like yeah, you should hire them. So, so yeah, I think it's a positive, like it. Julia Che: [00:06:57] Cool. Cool. So based on your experience, what are two or three of the biggest pain points you face as a developer in opensource? swyx: [00:07:06] Well, that's interesting, based on experience, what are the two or three of the biggest pain points I faces as a developer in open source?The first one is definitely that documentation internal documentation is pretty lacking. So when I. Try to want to contribute. There's not really a map. You just have to figure your way out around there's a movement towards documenting the architecture and the design principles. So there's a blog post or movement called architecture.md where they want you to rate your sort of overall organizing principles for contributors.But I only see. Two or three people actually do that. The vast majority just have they're caught out there and they just assumed that you'd still be in the deep end and you just figure it out. So it's, so the learning curve is just pretty hard. And then I think the other thing is just making it worthwhile because a lot of the times I look at a lot of open source projects out there.I'm very, I admire them.  But they're never going to pay me anything. So it's literally just doing stuff for fun. And I can think of a couple other things that I can do for fun. That would pay stuff. So I would, I'm more inclined to go do that. So that's definitely me as an indie hackers type mentality where.I definitely am more focused towards trying to try to do interesting things and get paid for it as compared to someone who just does things purely for intellectual fulfillment. And that's fine too. That's like, if I never had to worry about money ever again, I would do that. Cause I just, I love ideas and I love like, Hey, this thing should work.How come? No one's done it. And then I just go do it. And then it, and it blows everyone's minds. That, that, that seems like a wonderful way to spend time. Unfortunately, I, I'm still very much in trying to Pay my loans more so, so I'm not there yet, but I would like to be someday. So I think funding.Yeah, I think it's my, Julia Che: [00:08:56] so what are your thoughts about these two sort of monetizing models? One would be the GitHub sponsors or Patrion, and then two is that hacker one bug hunting, bounty source type of program. swyx: [00:09:10] Well, hacker one is successful. So a way for them, particularly how they keep people anonymous, which is very important to have your culture. But that's only you focus on security, right? So, and a lot of the times it's very scoped when you set up a bug bounty program and the real surface area of your attacks. Sorry, the real attack surface area of your company is completely on scope. It's like people can pull you in a thousand different ways. Then talking about GitHub sponsors. I don't like it. I don't think it's right. I think it's Becky.  And a lot of times it's developers paying on a dual buckets to the open source developers. When it really should be the companies that employ them. Why should the, why should developers be paying on the dual pockets after tax as well?Which is sorry. So yeah, I mean, I think it's a, well, it's a nice move. I'm not gonna, heat on that. I think GitHub that he's doing something is better than not doing anything. And they also matched donations for the first year, but I'm not sure it solves anything.Julia Che: [00:10:06] Okay. Yeah. Thanks for your thoughts on that.  So with regards to learning in public, you've written extensively about learning in public. Can you share your thoughts for our listeners on what it means to learn in public and why this has become such a significant part of your process and your work?swyx: [00:10:23] Yeah. So learning and public is this idea that the vast majority of our lives we've been conditioned to learn in private all the way from a formal education. Even to the way that we learn at work it's very much like, go through courses try to skill up to yourself and then execute that there's no.Recognition of the value of putting stuff out there. And when I look back at my own career that the most positive, higher return on investment things that I did were things where I learned in public. So literally writing up notes on whatever I just learned or writing notes to myself from three that's six months ago.And it's not this idea that you should broadcast every single waking moment of your life. We're not talking about becoming the Kardashians but the default is 0% public. And I think that people and developers in particular are not at all well served by having things zero by default. So I was mainly just encouraging people to go from zero to five or 10% public.So the vast majority of the time, you're still going in private. And what happens to it when you're learning in public are quite a few things which are very similar and tied into opensource which is for example, you you put your, when you write your stuff up when you write up your knowledge or rehash it in certain way and put it in your own words, you retain more, right.And that's the value. It's a valuable thing in and of itself. Even if you, if no one else read it, you still win. And then I really like, I'm really a fan of. Single-player games. The second thing is if other people read it they're very incentivized to spot mistakes because that's how the internet works.When someone on the internet is wrong, you're cheating. You're just crawling over broken glass to go fix that. And lastly I think it really helps for people who are working on the thing. So let's say I used to do a lot of writing on reacts and now I wrote about the react library. You can bet the core team of reacts developers are reading it because they want to know how, what the external perception is.And if they, if I get a right then I'm helping to amplify their voice because I have something that they don't have, which is a beginner's mind. The, if they've lost the ability to relate or understand what it's like to come into something fresh. So you can provide a lot of value for other people, but mostly I pitched learning in public as a selfish thing.Don't do it out of the goodness of your heart, do it because you genuinely believe this is the best way to learn do it because you've learned faster this way. And you grow your brand, your network, your skills all at the same time. And when you survey the menu of other possible things you could be doing in order to learn and grow your professional skills, this is by far the clearest and most effective way to do that.And you can do it sustainably for a very long period of time. Julia Che: [00:13:01] I love that. I really do. I would love to do it more myself swyx: [00:13:05] while you are with the podcast. Yeah. Julia Che: [00:13:09] My first podcast interview. Yeah. So you know what to share and what not to share. I saw on one of your most recent newsletters that you talked about deep work versus learning in public.And so is learning in public. Something that you've been maybe rethinking lately with that newsletter, or where would you go with that with regards to deep work and learning in public from a personal perspective? swyx: [00:13:30] Yeah, that's a great question. And thanks for picking up on that in the newsletter.I think the newsletter is definitely the main, closest thing to like a public journal where I just. Right. What I'm going through every week and enough people find it useful that I just keep going for now. I never really know when these things end, but I enjoyed the journey, it's not about the destination.So the idea, the problem comes when. Because learning in public is very tied to feedback. Like the whole goal is swyx: [00:13:54] that to establish this vicious or virtuous cycle of feedback loop, right? You put something out and get feedback and you improve it. Maybe you're wrong, maybe you're right. You just get encouragement or you get an indication of where to improve and you just keep going and going.And the whole idea is that, that, that loop is a lot faster than if you did it by yourself.  The problem comes when you try to have a feedback loop that is too fast and you're constantly, you're putting out you're tweeting something and then you're constantly refreshing the, see the number of likes that it gets.That's completely pointless. There's no point to doing any of that. So, there's a conscience, you should try to do some deep work and some amount of that means that you should ignore. The the people around you or the people trying to give you feedback? I think the two of them are not necessarily at odds because you can just, have long checks, deep work, and then and then share it and interact with your leaders and your peers and your mentors.And then go back and go back to the deep work cycle all over again. But the work is done something new to me. I don't struggle with it because I do multitask a lot. And I think that I've lost some ability to focus for long periods of time. So I'm trying to get back more into the habit swyx: [00:15:03] of deep work and cutting out some of the more noisy parts of learning in public that haven't been so useful to me.So it's definitely a balance there's definitely ways to do. Then any public badly. For example, if you pretend show yourself to be an overnight expert.  I'm definitely, always in favor of being more authentic. I like the idea that the way that Andy Matsu shuck, who's a former we ask what's team member, but I think now he's like an independent researcher and just general writer and thinker.He calls it working with the garage door up. So you can be working on your stuff in the garage, and really deep into it. And you just leave your door up. So you're not really looking at whether people are looking at you or not, but some might someone might be learning from what you do.And that's a nice analogy. I'm not sure how well it translates because your behavior just changes. Right. So when you know, people could be looking at you. So for example, I used to live stream on Twitch when I was writing and I found that was very distracting because I would be trying to narrate whatever was doing or I'd be checking the comments to see if anyone was like responding so that I could respond to them in times that they will stick around more.And that's all very.  Secondary to just writing the damn thing. So,  so I think there's ways to do deep work and learn in public. Right? And you have to think about what makes you want. Julia Che: [00:16:13] And so what are your thoughts on creators who feel as though they become enslaved to their own systems?For example, as it relates to creating content on a schedule and constantly having to draw out creativity from yourself on that on that system schedule that you create for yourself. Wow. swyx: [00:16:31] Good question. Is that a fear or is that a, I don't know. I F I feel like, so I think people approach it as in a few ways.Sometimes the use that as a crutch or a certain, they use that as a mental barrier to prevent them even getting started in the first place.  But then also I do see that people after, a couple of years of doing this stuff And so both are, so on the one on one side I'm supposed to tell you, no, it's bullshit.Just do it, see what happens. And then on the other side, I need to be very sympathetic and go like, yeah, burnout is real and you got to take care of yourself and just take a break and come back. And at some level I think that's a, that's where I've landed. I have been studying a lot of creators and it seems like the sustainable humans schedule is once a week. And you do that for a hundred times in terms of consistency. And you work your way up towards some level of quality where you figure out your voice, your creative pursuits your your favorite topics. And after that, whatever, paying your dues you're welcome to. Lessen Slack off on the consistency and just work on quality based on your inspiration.So, the model I have for this is well, but why, which is Randall when roles thing? I think no, Tim urban, Tim Mervyn. And he used to, he actually did a couple of interviews where he laid out. The process he used to get started, which is literally consistently post every single week for two years.And once he got only once he got to some level of readership, then he let himself come and go as in terms of creative output. So now you'll see entire months where he doesn't pause anything and that's fine because he's working on stuff. He's gained the trust of readers. People still pay him on his Patrion, even though they don't get anything from him.And that's a wonderful place to be in. A lot of people don't, they'll get there though. So you are a slave to your  that's not your slave. You are beholden to your schedule a bit especially for people who are like, in the middle rungs of like just getting, going and like making a promise to their subscribers.I especially see this from like sub stack authors, writing these newsletters. If you sold a one-year subscription, you have to write for a year. And they're like, Oh, what if they anxious? Hadn't done anything this week. No, suck it up. You'd just gotta write it. So for those people, I say that just, this is a idea of weighing in my mind, try to live your life in high definition.And what I mean by that is that there's a lot of joy in life. There's a lot of interesting stuff in life that we just skip because we try to live life fast. Slow down a little bit and notice that the cool, interesting. Beautiful things and write about it and talking about it. Like there's a lot of ideas that just come up in casual conversation, a lot of stories that can be told that haven't been told, just because you take them for granted slow down and, go over them again and realize that this is interesting to someone.And you can tell it because not everyone knows about it and Yeah, I think it's very reasonable to come up with at least one idea a week. So w the challenge I've set for myself currently is Ivy mixtape, where I come up with a podcast or audio snippet once a day. And if you put that, put yourself through that which in the finance, what we call idea velocity like the process or the discipline to just come up with, Hey, this is a story.Hey, this is a cool thing we can write about to come up with something like that every single day. Then once a week is walking the park. Julia Che: [00:19:40] Cool.  So how important is it to build a brand as a developer? swyx: [00:19:46] How important is it to build a brand new developer? That's interesting. I personally, yeah, it's only important.It's minorly important. It's not it's not the be all end all. And nobody likes the person who was all about building they're building up their own brand.  But it is vitally important that everyone that matters to you that you want to potentially want to work with knows that you exist and knows who you are and is when you can do and wants to work with you.There's this fuel rungs of. Of the, with the brand building, right. First, get that to know that you exist second, getting to know what you do. Third, get them to want to work with you. Once you're there, then you'll have all the opportunities that you ever want in your life. And you can start building event because what's the point of being super famous.Everyone would just want to tell you what to do, or, govern your life in some way. So a lot of people, when they get to a certain level of recognition, just stop. Because they realize that there, there are pitfalls to more reach as well. So I'm not there yet. I will be, and I can see it because I have friends who are already way past that.And it's a struggle because first, you want to get noticed for the stuff that you do. So you do, you didn't want to have some sort of reach. But too much. And then it starts to become a liability. And there definitely there's a lot of cases in celebrity culture that have documented that.Julia Che: [00:20:59] Cool. Yeah. I'd love to switch up a little bit and talk about your article that you posted on dev Tio with regards to the developer's journey. As a funnel, can you explain this for our listeners? swyx: [00:21:11] Ah, so this is about the community builder thing. Yeah. So, I work in developer relations for another fine AWS, and now I help to manage developer relations people.And  it's very closely tied to marketing, right? Like the whole point that you hire these people is to better communicate to developers than traditional marketers, because you are a developer yourself and the. Traditional way of viewing these things as a marketing funnel, which is very similar to the process.I thought about there's top of funnel and there, one is they haven't heard of you. Second is like the one is they don't even know they need you, or they're not even aware of their problems. So you've got to make them aware of the problem. Second is you've got to educate them about like the number of solutions that are available in their space.And third is you've got to sell them on why you're the best. Something like that. They should give you money now,  that's a traditional marketing and sales funnel. And that, I think that's where that a lot of marketing functions in tech companies are set up, which is fine.There's nothing wrong with it. I think there's Well, what we're trying to do is create a more human approach to that alternative to that where you don't necessarily know sometimes because a lot of times when you do, when you. Structure these things in such a linear fashion, then when you end up doing is making everything very transactional to the point where, when I was going to conferences, I would be asking for everyone's name tags and signing up and asking for their emails and putting them into our CRM so that we can follow up and all that bullshit.And it was, it made our conversation very strained and artificial because I wasn't, I clearly didn't care about them and he goes to care about making them my number, go up. And it's very ineffective because the bicycles are so fricking long in tech. I can hear about a thing and I would just decide to not, and this is literally what I do for new technology.So I'll hear about an Utelogy I'll say. All right, cool. Very good. Roughly get what it's about. And then I sit on it for a year. Right. Just to see if it sticks around. If, because if it doesn't stick around, then I w I'm not gonna waste my time. But if I'm still hearing about it a year later, then I'll go try it out.So show me a compensation or evaluation process that. It is evaluated over a year. None. Right. Everyone wants instant ROI preferably within the quarter. Just doesn't happen. So, so, I think that there's a lot of effort towards breaking out of this traditional marketing performance marketing role, because that's what you do in e-commerce.That's fine. E-commerce like, yeah, you want to sell handbags or a shave or I don't know. That's what you do with that. That's great quotes, but if you want to sell. Tech developer technologies where like they'll be working with you for years. It's a much longer cycle and it's more relationship based and sometimes people can the word that comes to mind is orbit because the company that sort of made this started this movement, it's called aura.love.And so instead of modeling it as a funnel, they call it orbits. Like sometimes the people coming closer to orbit, sometimes they come out, it's no longer a linear thing. It's just more based on where they are in their lives. And and the only thing that you try to do is bring people closer.And, but you don't really beat yourself up if they floated away for whatever reason, And I think that's a very healthy way to do these things. And it also means to me, which I didn't really write about and then vocals, I also means to me that you should have some empathy for how people feel about your competitors as well.Like, if your marketing funnel is just about you, then you're serving yourself and really you should be serving your customer, your intended target audience or intended user. Understanding what they need and sometimes recommending them to do other things. If your yours tool is not their best solution, right.You're not trying to cram your stuff down people's throats. So I think that's what the, sorry, this is a very long winded answer to say. I think the funnel is very linear and transactional way of doing things very yeah, finite some very, a very finite game and. The S the cycle or the orbit or whatever we were calling.This is the alternate is the opposite. We want to play infinite games with on a relationship based basis. And to understand it from the perspective of a customer, not from the perspective of the company. Julia Che: [00:25:14] Yeah, I love what orbit's doing. I'm following Rosie or we're following each other on Twitter and just starting to get to know each other through that.Have you used orbit and what are your thoughts on tools such as these for not only community building, but also open source? In swyx: [00:25:29] general? Yeah. So I've used Oregon forest spout society, youth just like as an open source thing.  Well, it's good for, getting numbers. Which that's the thing like a lot of developer relations professionals are existential concerns right now is just with justifying their cost to the people that pay their money.So it's a valuable thing to justify ROI and have numbers and track growth over time. And all you want is just tries to go up into the right  That's great. I just wish that there were, there was more that it could do. Obviously they're working on this, it's still pretty early days. But yeah, like, instead of just telling me who my highest reach or increased change in in, in love, developer love and is what they call it.Just tell me, give me suggestions, like, Would this is, are these two developers, interested in the same things, but they don't know about each other. Okay, great. Like, tell me to make the intro and myself as the community manager, I can go out and meet the intro.A lot of that is gonna be locked up in a basically manually done by the community manager, just holding everyone's interests and profiles in their heads. But really you could, make the suggestions out of that. I don't, there's a lot of things I'm sure they've thought about this way more than I have.Right now I just look at it as an analytics tool, but what I would really like for it to become a suggestions or like, idea, generation tool of like stuff that we could do with our community.  Julia Che: [00:26:47] Yeah. So what are your thoughts on diversity, equity and inclusion? The Eni and open source.swyx: [00:26:52] In opensource. Wow. Okay. The baseline is that partially people, nobody knows who you are. You're if you're just a username on GitHub.  So on that level, if you want, nobody can really discriminate against who you, unless you show who you are. That's a very, that's a very first cut answer. The more realistic sort of social economic reason  I hesitate to mention this is that a lot of people will contribute to open source only do they do it because they have the time and the resources will do it.So a lot of others don't therefore the people who learn faster during an open source are the ones who are already privileged. Therefore if you hire.  And you look at someone with an open-source track record and you look at another person with, without an open-source track record you may be accidentally biasing against someone who just straight up, just didn't have the background to do it, or it didn't have the friends or didn't have, or whatever.There's any number of reasons to to not get involved in opensource. And that's completely fine. I mean, we need to be aware of that when hiring but otherwise, That Al a bunch of caveats. Okay, well, this is very unfair and in some ways open-source is also very unfair but compare it to a world in which open-source did not exist.And we ha in tech hired the exact same way as every other industry, including finance opensource creates opportunities that did not exist before. And that should be celebrated.Julia Che: [00:28:12] So at openness which is a startup that I'm exploring and building right now. Yeah, we're exploring how to help open source devs to do more of what they love. And so where do you think open source devs could maybe use a helping hand?swyx: [00:28:25] Where are you open source, devs, helping hand. Wow. I have a very small, and I don't know if like a bit, this is the biggest answer or not. But it's just the first one that comes to mind because I have a investment in this space. So a triaging issues. When when you open source something you take on. Not just, you're not just responsible for the code and you're also not suddenly responsible for every single user who comes in and demands a bit of your time. Whether or not it's default for holding your software wrong  or is actually something that's an issue in your software that you need to fix.So, I do think that a lot there's no culture of like a separate triage system that gets on the maintainers to figure out the priority level of the thing. And it's just a lot of work. And actually a lot of people just refuse to open source stuff just because they don't want to handle all that stuff.They just want to quietly ship and it's completely fine. It's just, that, that means that a lot of stuff does not get open-source then that could have been if only we had a better. Contribution or triaged culture.  So one of the things in which I'm personally interested in a front end space is to decrease the cycle or make it a lot less of a burden.And so we replay that IO is a company that basically spun off from Firefox, from Mozilla and essentially they're recording apps in the browser, so that People can create bug reports very easily in play, and the developers can play them back to exactly spot what went wrong. So instead of like typing and describing what you did, just send a replay and people can step through the code themselves.And that's a very nice deterministic way to fix bugs in triage and prove that you actually faced this bug. So, but in, in larger open source, I actually, I've actually named this idea before.  Which with with Henry Zhu who runs babble and it's this idea called maintainers, not MD or like this, the separation or maintain or concerns, because right now a maintainer is expected to be full stack.They have to handle everything from start to finish community all the way down to code. And probably we could split that up and probably we can make them limited term because. Something that's super annoying as well, is that there's no end of term, once you take up a responsibility, you're stuck with it until you just vaguely walk away and there's it's perceived as a chore rather than an honor.I like it to be an honor. So the model that I think about is actually the social clubs of like our parents' generation, where. It, they might, vote in like a president or a treasurer and they would all have distinct jobs and they will all hold it for a certain term, right. For six months or a year.And you can just go like, yeah, I was president of this club from like 2016 and 17, and here's the next president and the next president. And. And it's nice, a nice limited term of responsibility. It's it's sectioned off. So not like it's not one person that's handling the whole thing. And I think we could do that in open source.I haven't really, ever really like, meet any noise about this idea, but I think it's interesting. I think we should try it. Julia Che: [00:31:18] That actually plays into the next question quite well. Is. How does governance play into the future of open source and why, and how is it growing as a field of interest? swyx: [00:31:28] I mean, it's, I don't know if it's growing. I think it's always been important.  I think bad governance certainly can make me choose not choose the projects. W despite everything else being great about it. Ultimately open-source ultimately software as an expression of values.And if you fundamentally disagree with the values of the people running this project, you will eventually disagree with the court as well. Cause it would just encode the values over time.  Yeah, so, having, welcoming inclusive value is important. And don't know what else to say about that.I, I, there's and the ones that say, like, how do you communicate with your users when you release projects? How long were you going to support things? And back port security fixes and stuff like that. You're doing all of this. There's 101 things that you would like to promise to people, and then you're in limited time and your resources.So, so you have to let some things go. And it's a very difficult conversation because people don't want to let go of their pet topic, like, and and so everyone's making their own trade offs in various ways. I don't know if we can improve upon that, but that's just the way I see things.Cool. Julia Che: [00:32:30] And so what is one of your favorite open source projects right now? swyx: [00:32:36] Huh spell it is my, so one of my favorite open source projects just cause I'm working on the community side of it. And I am friends with the creator and it's just a very interesting in the independence framework that is doing extremely well against a much, much larger competition.And I like, I like seeing the underdog perform. And I also love when I read the code, how simple it is. And I think.  So sometimes we get too wrapped up in complexity that we don't see that there's an alternative that is good enough. And I definitely see salt in that way. Pushing back against the complexity of some of the software that we've created for ourselves and saying like, yeah your thing is great, but you may not need it. And yeah, just, I love that kind of story.  Julia Che: [00:33:20] I'd love to ask you a personal question about Hawker markets in Singapore, if you don't mind. Yeah, when I was there, I became, yeah.  When I was in Singapore, I became really quickly obsessed with Hawker Martin because obviously food is the food is amazing and then the price point is even better.But what have you tried the Michelin star stalls? And please tell me about it. swyx: [00:33:40] I've tried it once. There's a very long line, obviously, this guys that's one of the first street food stalls ever get a Michelin star.  But it's like not that different from what you normally get from non Michelin starred restaurants.So this restaurant is randomly got picked by whoever. So I don't really care about, some random, critic's opinion that, they're just all generically, like quite good because the formulas. Pretty well-known and I appreciate that. So, my, my thesis around this whole thing is that food is the great equalizer and seeing the same in society because rich people and poor people eat the same things and they don't pay very much for it.And that's wonderful. Julia Che: [00:34:17] Yeah, that was what I loved about it, as well as people go for the food and the enjoyment and it brings people together, which is the best part about it. Okay, thanks for humoring me about that. So what would you recommend to devs that may want to get more involved in open source?And what's the best way to start,  swyx: [00:34:33] Start with something that you already use, because then you already have a lot of familiarity with that project and you feel a satisfaction when you've made a contribution and you see it in, in the day-to-day use of your own work. So, so don't. Don't do the thing where someone opensources a hot new project that you haven't used and you try to contribute to that.But you just won't have empathy and you not gonna stick around anyways. So don't even waste your time. Don't waste their time as well. But yeah. Start with something that you already use and and always check with them on your direction first, before filing the pull request because a lot of people do drive bipole requests and that actually increases maintainer stress because they know they have to say no to you or massively change your work because they, you never checked with them in the first place.It's very impolite.  Yeah. Th there is an etiquette that you learn, when you first get started that. Maybe someone should write down then probably if you already have, but you just have to learn it after a few rounds was doing it.  And I think, yeah, no, it doesn't have to be code as the other points that I always give people.So people always want more documentation. And even if you want to code, you don't have to contribute to quote code. You can write tests and there's never enough tests and people always want to increase more coverage of their code or replicate or reproduce the bugs that are people.Our reporting, just like the triage issue that we talked about earlier. So all of these are contributions that are very valid and you can work your way towards landing a PR in, in, in the core code. But yeah, I do highly recommend that people get into it. It's possible to over-commit. So, be fast to, to just say like, okay, I've been off more than I can chew.I need to, put this down or give this out to someone else. The worst thing is to take up responsibilities. Like I'll be in charge of that and then to drop the ball because other people are relying on you. So don't do that. And then just everyone does it, everyone over commits.So just recognize when you've done it and just go back and just getting like, yeah, I've taken on too much. Julia Che: [00:36:22] Do you think there's space in the community of open source for. Non-developers or yeah, non-technical folks. swyx: [00:36:29] Yeah. We have we have a couple in a small society court core organizing team.And yeah they're there for the people. It's a very nice community and they can do project management. They can do event organizing. They can talk about like,  the marketing and the blog posts and the YouTube tutorials. There's so much there's in fact, like the court is the smallest part of what it takes to run a successful community.So yeah, if you want to do that's great. It's just I think it's very rare because as a developer, like if you're not a developer, swyx: [00:37:01] What are you really you don't really use the. The tool that you're supporting in the first place. So why are you there? You just, yeah, you just genuinely like the people but you could be doing any number of other things.Like, I don't know, like gardening, like astronomy, that's the same level of connection there. Julia Che: [00:37:17] Yeah. For myself, it's. My brother was an open source developer. And yeah, so I had that little bit of osmosis, like 20 years ago. And then more recently I've been consulting and  in this space a little bit more anyway, we won't go too much into that. It's your interview here? swyx: [00:37:33] No is fine. I like that people share their perspectives and yeah, I mean, I don't what the motivations of other people are. I just, I just have my own lens of things and it'll really think about scent too much time thinking about what other people are motivated by.Yeah. Julia Che: [00:37:47] Okay. So where can we find where can we find you online? Sorry. Right. I'm gonna ask that again. Where can we find you online and learn more about what you're learning in public? swyx: [00:37:56] Sure. So I always send people to my site now, six.io. It's got all the links to everything else, if you ever need it.And I, I do have a weekly newsletter that you can subscribe for more thoughts. I always love to share the best of what I read in other people as well. And yeah I think if anything, I hope to encourage people to go through the same journey that I did because it's really changed my life.And I wish that people would try it out just to see what it can do for them. Julia Che: [00:38:22] Well, thank you so much for your time.

There aren't many things that can be lost forever. But thoughts definitely can. This episode's speaking is unedited - I didn't cut out any stumbles or stutters. I want this podcast to be an accurate representation of my speaking abilities. Where I currently write: https://postulate.us/@laura Inspired by: How I Use Learning in Public as My Personal Knowledge Management Strategy by Samson Zhang: https://www.samsonzhang.com/2021/01/27/how-i-use-learning-in-public-as-my-personal-knowledge-management-strategy.html David Perell's notebook: https://perell.com/notebook/ Andy Matuschak's notes: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ Postulate - an all-in-one tool for collecting and publishing your knowledge: https://postulate.us/ I also take notes as Tweets sometimes: https://twitter.com/laurgao

Andy Matuschak joins the show to discuss how different learning models will help students in different ways. They discuss how students best remember material and how we should consider cognitive science when constructing a teaching technique.What is the purpose of primary school? Why do we group children by age for learning in school? What is the best way to learn from flashcards? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How to prototype advanced gestures; how to organize your Muse boards; and how to spot good ideas. Plus, a peek at the long-term Muse roadmap. @MuseAppHQ hello@museapp.com Show notes Ferrite listener questions thread Balsamiq, Framer, Origami Studio Make it real infinite canvas memo reductionism spatial reasoning Growing ideas with Andy Matuschak retrospective Paul Buchheit Slow Software self-hosting End-user programming Minecraft redstone MySpace customization Figma plugins

In this conversation I talk to Luke Constable about the complicated tapestry of finance, funding projects, incentives, organizational and legal structures, social technologies, and more. Luke is the founder of the hedge fund Lembas Capital and publishes a widely-read newsletter full of fascinating deep dives. He’s also trained as a lawyer and historian so he looks at the world with a fairly unique set of lenses. Disclaimer: nothing Luke says is an offer to buy or sell a security or to make an investment Links Luke on Twitter Lembas Capital Theory of Investment Value (John Burr Williams) 1,000 True Fans (Kevin Kelly) Quantum Country Patreon Lembas Capital’s Open Questions The Empire of Value (André Orléan) Who Gets What and Why (Alvin Roth) The Mystery of Capital (Hernando de Soto) I, Pencil (Leonard Read) The Crime of Reason (Robert Laughlin) Andrew Lo’s papers Transcript 0:01:05 BR: So if technology creates a lot of wealth, why does it feel like most people in finance are hesitant to invest in technology?   0:01:19 Luke Constable: So that's an interesting place to start. I think you have to understand, no one invests in technology. If you think about investors, investors invest in businesses that use technology, and so that's probably the first frame I would use. Investors aren't hesitant to invest in technology, investors never invest in technology. What investors do is they invest in these products that are going to generate cash flow streams, and so that's sort of the first thing. And then the second thing is, a lot of the technologies that you and I think about, they seem obvious at a macro scale, where you take a high level view and you say, "Well, it would be so much better if we had a blank sheet of paper," and I said, "We should do X."   0:02:10 LC: For instance, you could make an argument about housing technology in San Francisco, and you could say, “All of these houses built in SF, they're old Victorians, they don't really have washing machines and laundry machines, you could probably change the structural engineering, probably build them higher”. And if you look at them and said, "Oh, I have a better prefab housing technology," or "I have a better way to do it," you'd miss the point, which is just because you've invented the physics, and this is the other thing, you actually have to sell it into a market. You have to work within the market, and so that's usually where I see a lot of the interesting technical products fall down.   0:02:53 BR: So the thing that I want to poke at in the assertion that people invest in businesses is that people invest in things that are not businesses as well, people invest in gold, in currencies and other, I guess, assets would be the high level thing, and so I guess the question is why isn't technology itself an asset, and there's probably a very obvious answer to this, I just...   0:03:25 LC: Sure, so let's take a step back and talk about the various asset classes, there's sort of a couple of ways to break them down.   0:03:32 BR: Okay.   0:03:33 LC: One way people do this is they'll say there are real assets, these are things like real estate, some people put commodities in there, and then there are sort of these yield assets, these are debt that is putting out a cash flow stream, and then you have equities, and there's some argument that cryptocurrency is sort of its own asset class, and then currencies might be their own asset class too. And what you'll quickly find is these things kind of blend together. A lot of them are different ways of financing sort of the same project. And then you have the ones that are just traded for their own sake. So there's sort of two questions you're asking, the first is, why isn't "technology" the same as like gold or silver or real estate, for instance? And so there's a use value to all of those commodities, and that's why they have value, and that actually is a cash flow stream, we actually do use gold, we do use silver, and that's how that works.   0:04:43 LC: But if you think about what's valuable, there's sort of something that's value... And I should have started with this. When you think about what value is, there's value in exchange and then there's value in use. So the value in exchange ones, these are often, you could argue, cryptocurrency or a lot of currencies, gold is actually usually thought of as a medium of exchange, that actually is valuable for cash flow purposes just probably not in the ways that you think. So what happens with these currencies and these stores of value is they sort of become Schelling points where I just know there are enough people transacting in that thing that I can find the liquidity, I can actually go convert to cash, and I can go basically get that cash when I need it. That actually is a cash flow need. It's just not often thought of that way.   0:05:40 LC: Now, liquidity is really valuable because you might be invested in the best business of all time, and it might have a very, very, very high net present value and be doing a lot of good for the world. But if you take a step back and say, "Wait a second, I have to pay off student loans," or "I have to pay off my mortgage," or "I just want some cash to go on vacation" or whatever you want to do with it, you look at this and say, "Gosh, I do need some liquidity," and that's what those other sort of trading assets are for.   0:06:10 BR: So basically, technology contributes to the use value of an equity asset, is that the right way to think about it?   0:06:22 LC: I don't think of technology that separate from... It's sort of so baked into the environment that it's just difficult to disentangle. Technology, lazily put, is just ways of doing things hopefully more efficiently than we're already doing them. And so if you think about why certain assets become tradable, either they're creating these cash flow streams, or there is some value in exchange. I mean, the way that I often frame investing for the people who I invest for is there's sort of two sets of flows that determine an asset's price. There is underlying asset's cash flows and then there are the capital flows of all the investors. So you have sellers for some reason, maybe they have liquidity needs, maybe they can't hold an asset for a regulatory reason or a legal reason, and then you have buyers who come in, because they're interested in that asset, and it could be because they think it's an interesting thing to invest in, it could be because the regulators told them that they have to buy it, it could be... You laugh, but this is actually...   0:07:32 BR: What sort of things do regulators mandate that people buy?   0:07:37 LC: Sure, so if you go look at banks and sovereign debt, well, actually banks and all debt. So you have the bank regulators set risk weightings on various types of debt, which is sort of a nice way of saying, there are all of these different cash flow streams, and the regulators are saying to you that certain cash flow streams are riskier or less risky. And shockingly, they often argue that their sovereign debt is less risky than some other cash flow streams.   0:08:13 BR: I'm shocked.   0:08:14 LC: In practice, that may or may not be true. It's a weird thing to think about, but, in some cases, a multi-national corporation might actually be a better credit than a country. But that's not how these things work, and so what happens is a bank regulator will sometimes go to a bank and say, "The risk weighting on the sovereign debt is far lower than the risk weighting on this corporate debt,” which effectively is pushing the bank to go buy a certain type of debt, which then goes and funds all of those projects. So then coming back to all of this, if you think about investing in sort of these two sets of flows, like that underlying asset's cash flows and then the capital flows of all the investors, you basically, in practical terms, want to think about markets in terms of what's driving someone's action.   0:09:05 LC: And when you think about that, that's when market prices start to make sense. They won't make sense to you if you think that you're just going to sit down and solve an analytical equation where you just sort of put in a few inputs, you make a few estimates and then the price gets spit out. It's much more of a socially constructed thing.   0:09:25 BR: And going back to your point about liquidity, it feels like there's this... I don't know how to describe it, like sort of a weird effect where it feels like there's a consensus that investing in... I won't say technology, I'll say investing in a business that is proposing to build a technology with a very long-term time scale, there's consensus that that will eventually create something... Will eventually create a lot of value, but then at the same time, because of these liquidity constraints, very few people are doing that, and that's the argument for why people are not making those investments, but it seems like that would be a point where you could arbitrage. It seems like there should be some people who are willing to not get cash flow for a couple of decades, and they would be able to reap the rewards of making these sorts of investments, but you don't see that, so I assume that those people are smarter than I am. And so the question is, why don't you see people doing that?   0:10:50 LC: So you actually do see people doing this literally all the time, but it's not for the sexy technology concepts that you are thinking of. So go look into the public markets right now. You'll see a handful of software businesses that are trading at very high multiples to sales. So the idea is that you sort of have this trade-off: you could get free cash flow after taxes right now, or effectively more free cash flow down the line from some company that's growing quickly, and so what you do is you pay some price based on that free cash flow multiple. What happens when the free cash flow is really, really far down the line, we don't even use the free cash flow number, we actually just use the sales number. And sales is obviously much higher than just free cash flow, 'cause free cash flow is after all of your expenses and taxes. So when you go look, and you see some company that's trading at 15 or 20 or 25 times sales, the stock market is betting on that business being around and generating free cash flow over a 25 or 30-year period. That's the only way that math works. In practice, the reason the stock gets priced that way has something to do with those cash flows and also a lot to do with the capital flow landscape, but that is what's happening.   0:12:15 LC: These companies are getting funded on a 30-year time scale, and so the right question shouldn't be, "Why aren't good projects getting funded?" They actually are. The right question is, "Why aren't other good projects getting funded?" And so I think it comes down to... I think it comes down to what is legible to institutional finance, and so you might look out into the world and say, "There are trillions of dollars of capital... " I mean, there's just oceans of money out there, and it seems like someone could raise billions of dollar to go trade a building with someone else or something else that seems like it isn't actually moving the world forward and this sort of simplistic take. But why can't we take that billion dollars and put it towards some technology, something that might be obvious in your opinion toward moving the world forward?   0:13:15 LC: So the first thing is you have to understand what matters is, in practice, even though it looks like there are trillions of dollars of capital out there, risk-adjusted or uncertainty-adjusted, there's actually very little capital available. And the right way to think about it is to say, what type of product are the capital allocators buying? And so this isn't, again, a place where we have an analytical equation and you just pop your numbers into the equation and you say, "Well, the return to society would be X percent higher if we invested in this type of technology that will have a payoff in 25 years." The right way to look at it is to have empathy with the person who is in this capital allocator's seat, in this investor's seat...   0:14:08 BR: I.e you.   0:14:08 LC: Well, me or anyone else. But again, I'm not trying to paint myself upfront, there's the intellectual side of capital allocation, and then there's the reality that a lot of people are using an element of gambling in this. But it's to understand what they're buying. And so the reason people are comfortable investing in that real estate or investing in an enterprise software company is someone has come up with a set of metrics that has convinced the market that those cash flow streams are durable, that they will exist and be predictable 20 or 30 years out. And so what you've done is you've created this yield product, and what you've really done is you've created a sense of certainty. And I think what people don't like is uncertainty, they really want to essentially have something that they don't have to do too much intellectual work to understand and that they feel like they can trust. And so the problem is actually sort of one of search costs.   0:15:20 BR: A really dumb question is, What does it mean for something to be risk or uncertainty adjusted? Because you said that there's trillions of dollars out there, but there's actually not that much when they're risk or uncertainty adjusted, and is that basically just say that capital allocators don't have the incentive to spend most of that money on anything that they perceive to be risky or uncertain?   0:15:50 LC: Not exactly.   0:15:51 BR: Okay.   0:15:52 LC: It's two things. So first, in terms of how most people think about risk, so the way that you might think about this before you start really looking at it is you'd think, Well, we're just trying to sort of predict the future, the future is relatively predictable, and we can make some educated guesses about probabilistically what is going to happen, and then we can sort of model out those payoffs, those defaults, and sort of go from there. And so sort of the canonical text in finance for equity evaluation is called The Theory of Investment Value, and it's written by a guy named John Burr Williams. I can send you links after this. It's written by a guy named John Burr Williams after the Great Depression, and he was basically trying to sort of scientifically estimate the value of all free cash flows. You may have heard of this concept of discounted free cash flows?   0:16:48 BR: Yeah.   0:16:48 LC: He's arguably the person who invented it or at least codified it. In practice, though, you quickly find it is unbelievably difficult to figure out and to actually estimate the cash flows of something, even four, five or six years out. The world just changes really quickly, competitive positions tend to change really quickly, and so you actually could come up with this range of outcomes, but they become somewhat uncertain. So you take that as sort of the investing reality, and now let's look at sort of the funding reality. A lot of the people who fund investment funds or who are making investments, they have cash flow needs. They have sort of real cash flow needs, and then they have sort of intellectually forced cash flow needs. The real cash flow needs are, look, we have to fund our endowment, we pay X percent out per year so that the college can function, so that the hospital can function.   0:17:53 LC: And then the intellectual cash flow needs are, look, here are the risk models that we use, and when we see the prices of our investments fall 8%, we consider that as fundamental information that our investments aren't performing well, and so we need to sell out. And so they actually don't just need cash flow to look good, they need the pricing information in the market to look good. So we're talking about arbitrages. This is probably one of the biggest arbitrages that exists in the market, but it's unbelievably difficult to capture. So let me give you an example, imagine that you had a row of 10 houses in a neighborhood and they were all... Let's just say for these purposes, valued at $100. So let's say one of the neighbors, they are in a rush and they need to sell their house because they got a good job offer somewhere else, so she sells her house for $97 because she'll just get whatever she can get. And then another neighbor gets a similar job offer, and she sells her house for $95, and suddenly some other neighbor along the street looks around and says, "Oh no, prices are falling on our houses, everything else is getting sold off, we need to sell." And so they might sell just because they're scared, because they think there's sort of fundamental information in those transactions, in saying, "Okay, the market price has fallen."   0:19:22 LC: So you've seen the marked prices fall from a $100 down to $95. The problem is the market shows the prices of transactions, they don't necessarily tell you the fundamental value behind those transactions. So as a result, you being a portfolio manager, say you're invested in houses, you might have a view and say, I think that those houses that sold off, those were forced sellers. That doesn't mean that the price of the assets have actually fallen, these prices will come back up. Someone else might say, "No, no, that's pretty arrogant of you. The market has spoken and job opportunities have changed and people are going to leave the neighborhood." Now, it's really difficult to capture that sort of arbitrage, and arbitrage isn't even the right word, but capture that valuation spread, because it actually comes effectively down to who is right, and that ends up being a grounded matter of opinion, but effectively a matter of opinion.   0:20:32 LC: You can do a lot of diligence, and then you can maybe figure out if you're generally more right or generally more wrong. Ideally, if you get really, really good at sourcing information on the asset cost that you're investing in, and then you go around looking for these situations where the market has sold them off, but you recognize that they're sort of incorrect in doing it. But for the big portfolio managers, again, there's an information search cost. Every single time one of their fund managers underperforms, fund manager is of course, going to come back and say, "No, no, it's temporary. We're right, the strategy will come back. Don't pull your money."   0:21:12 LC: And so the difficult thing for the allocators to funds is they sort of have to diligence the fund managers who are then diligencing the investments. And so you can see that as you sort of go down this line of information being passed from person to person, the search costs just rise. Whatt it really comes down to is basically trust, where the investor is investing in a company or in some operator, and then the allocator is investing with the investment fund. And all along those links in the chain, it's so expensive from an information perspective to figure out who's being honest and who isn't. That trust is actually the fastest way to figure out what is a good investment and what isn't.   0:22:06 BR: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but then I sort of extrapolate that to the thought that it's actually very hard to build up trust in someone who's proposing to make, say, a 25-year bet, because you would need 25 years to build that trust, right?   0:22:31 LC: Sure, and this is actually the problem. And so if you look at it, most fund cycles for the investment funds themselves, they typically have about a three-year window to prove themselves. So if they can't show marked prices rising within two to three years, or they can't show cash flows coming out in those two to three years, it's in practice really difficult for that fund manager to go raise more money from an allocator. The best allocators, they really get it. But in practice, most people are sort of looking at each other trying to understand what we all think is valuable and what we don't, and people are actually pretty good at it. But if you're not seeing results within three years, it's difficult to go raise the next VC fund, the next private equity fund, or just to raise more money for whatever your next fund vehicle is. And so what happens in practice is, people don't go spend their time investing in projects that are going to take a really, really long time and won't get marked. So what that means is, for an entrepreneur or for someone who's trying to get funding for something, getting that asset mark is unbelievably important because that's what lets the great investors go invest in you.   0:24:00 LC: So it's really important that for the VC company to get that Series B or the Series C or the Series D done. That single mark in time is hugely important because everyone can sort of concentrate on that, take it as a market price, even if it's not a perfect market price, and then write that in their books, measure it, sort of trust it to some degree, and everyone can sort of coordinate around that because you have a market clearing price there. And so if you think about it, just on the equity side of it, every founder's equity actually is a product in and of itself. I always find this interesting because I think most people don't think of it this way.   0:24:42 BR: I don't.   0:24:45 LC: But when you start a company, you're actually... You're selling two products. The first is sort of your individual product. This is the thing that you think you're starting. And the second is your company itself. And so your company can turn into a product where you sell your debt or you sell your equity or you sell some other sort of financing scheme, but that's a product, too. And the way that product is priced is, in the private markets, you have one-off auctions where you sort of game the options as much as you can to get the highest price. This is where everyone in their C, Series A, B, C... Well, not so much in C, but in A, B, C, you basically create auctions where you try to get all of the partner meetings on Monday morning to be talking about you, put all of your meetings into a week, and then you get everyone to bid all at the same time, and then you maybe don't go to the highest bidder, but you go with some mix of the highest bidder plus the people that you want to work with.   0:25:35 LC: Then the public markets are actually a totally different mechanism, it's a different distribution method where it's a continuous auction, where there's bids and asks continuous in time, at all times. And so you can't actually create these small little one-off auctions where you can rig the price up because the bids and asks, they just keep coming. But the benefit is, if you know how to... If you do well in that channel, you then have a lot of liquidity and you can usually get a higher price and arguably more capital. It's not actually even clear that you need to do that, but that's sort of the argument. And so I think if you start thinking about it that way, you can start to recognize, "Alright, that's why some projects are getting funded and some aren't." It's because the projects that are getting funded, they are products that work well in that market, and they are actually products, it's not just a throwaway phrase.   0:26:37 LC: I was chatting with someone about this earlier. I think it's probably good to take the emotion out of whatever project you're working on and think about this for unemotional things. So one of my friends is trying to get a research project funded, sort of like an arts VR research project funded. And we're talking about this and she's like, "Oh, now I get it. I should think about this like soap." So imagine you are a soap manufacturer, and you have made the best soap in the world. You think it's better than any other soap. You wouldn't expect to sell that just because you've created it. You'd think, "Okay, how am I going to get it out there? Am I going to get it on to Amazon? Am I going to start a store on Shopify? Am I going to go to the people at Costco or Walmart and cut a deal with them so it's distributed?” Because I might have the best soap in the world, but some mediocre soap that gets into the Costco channel and then works with those constraints, they are going sell more than I am. That product is going to do better. And if you care about people using your product and you're sort of not just cash flow-driven, but you actually care about the impact, you really, really need to think about that distribution channel and how you're going to get it out there.   0:27:50 LC: What you quickly find is that often the constraints that people place on their products, it's not that they don't realize they're making their products worse, it's that they want those products to get distributed and they think the tradeoffs are worth it. And so the really interesting new products, they recognize that, "Oh, there's some constraint or there's some tradeoff that a lot of other people made with their existing product lines, and I don't have to do that," because the way you distribute it has changed, or some assumption that they've made, they actually don't have to make that tradeoff. And I use something like soap because it's boring and unemotional to at least most of us, but it's almost definitely true with research funding. And so you and I talk about this a lot, but I mean, if I were trying to go raise money for research, it would depend what I was trying to do, but I think there are probably new distribution channels out there, so I mentioned with small scale... Sorry, you were saying?   0:28:50 BR: Oh, there's just three different directions that are really exciting to go with this.   0:28:56 LC: Oh, please.   0:29:00 BR: Yeah, so I think what I'm going do is I'm going to lay... Actually, I will lay out the places that I think are all tied into this that are all really interesting, and you let me know how you want to weave through them. So one is actually this... So both this point about a project as a product is a little bit mindblowing, and I think that it's tied to an earlier point that you made that I wanted to dig into about what it means to be legible to institutions. And if I am understanding correctly, the marking of valuations is one of the ways in which... At least, in the startup world, venture capitalists make themselves, their firm, as a product legible to other institutions. And so Shopify comes along, and you can now distribute your soap through an online store that you never could. What would be the project funding equivalence of that new distribution channel?   0:30:17 LC: So I absolutely don't think that this is that new, but it seems to have come somewhat in vogue, and I think it's just patronage. And so if I were trying to go do research where I was trying to make, say, call it $100,000 a year or something along those lines, basically enough that you could live a really good life, afford rent in any city and sort of have basically time to yourself, I think the obvious way to do it is to try to build an online following. And this is not a new idea. Kevin Kelly wrote that old essay, I think it was 1000 True Fans, where he said, “Look, at 1000 True Fans paying you $10 a month, that's enough.” I think a mutual friend, Andy Matuschak, who has Quantum Country has done a great job with his Patreon. I think it would be really, really, really difficult to do this. But I would think a lot about what really causes someone to say, "I'll pay $5 a month to go read this newsletter, or to go basically fund some research I find interesting." And this distribution mechanism didn't really exist before, and so I actually think in some ways, we're still pretty early on. And all I would do is think, "Alright, I need to get 2000 people to sign up all over the world." The Internet rewards niche behavior, and so how do I get into the community of these people find it just sort of interesting, and this is sort of entertaining to them, and I would think a lot about how I could create something around there.   0:32:01 LC: For the larger amounts, I would actually do the opposite. So for the larger amounts, I would go become friends with everyone in the funding world. So they have incentives too. And what you'd want to think through is normally... I guess I'll put it this way, and I was chatting with my friend about this. Normally, the way that the great researchers I know think, they're almost... They're quite dogmatic, to be honest. They say, "Okay, my project is the best project. This really will advance the field." But in practice, what might make it easier to sell the project is to understand what gets the person funding the project promoted? What makes the funder feel good?   0:32:40 LC: What will get to that next level of funding for the person above them too? And then if you're able to map that out, you can represent it in a way that basically works for everyone. And she was actually pushing back on me and saying, "Look, I don't want to lie. I don't want to represent my project that way. That seems sort of fake or it seems like a veneer." But the truth is, is that the project that she has in her head only exists in her head and doesn't exist in anyone else's head that way. And if she doesn't communicate it in a way that actually makes sense to them, then it's not going to get anywhere.   0:33:21 LC: So I think the really frustrating thing to come out of this is that basically everyone's in sales in some way, shape or form, and I think a lot of people don't want to be in sales or think that it is a sort of a difficult thing to go do. And so as a result, they just sort of shy away from it. And so this is, again, why I think the distribution analogies really, really can work well, because it sort of takes the emotional weight out of it. And then if you look at this and say, "Oh, this isn't the best grant maker in the world, this is just Costco, and I'm just trying to get into the new line," I think it can feel a lot less heavy. And you can maybe treat it, and maybe the field might open up to you a little bit more.   0:34:05 BR: Okay. I guess, the tension I see there is building up trust with the people who are the capital allocators, almost feels like the opposite of figuring out a different way of making yourself legible to an institution. Institutions are obviously made up of people, so these aren't two separate things. But I think that there's something to the fact that you need trust when you're doing something that is not institutionally legible. So it's like you don't actually have trust with a lot of the companies that are publicly traded that you invest in, but they are... They've packaged themselves in a way that is sort of institutionally legible if that's... And I think this might actually be a good point to really... What do you mean by something being institutionally legible? What does that mean?   0:35:20 LC: It's a vague handwavy way of saying you just need to be recognizable to the people who are buying your product, and you just have to understand, in practice, how those relationships work. And once you understand the practicalities of whatever market you're working in, then you'll be able to understand how to craft a product for the people who actually want it. And, again, I think the difficult thing here, this is not intellectually that challenging, it's much more of an ego thing where we have to put aside what we think are the best products that everyone should be buying or what everyone should be doing. So if you think about it, since we're talking very abstractly here, what capitalism really rewards is, and actually this is true of all non-violent selection, it rewards behavior change. And so what we're really saying is how do you get someone to sort of change that behavior. And when you think about it that way, what's legible in your head, if someone else hasn't learned all the same things you have, they're going to end up using some sort of abstraction, some sort of shortcut.   0:36:41 LC: And that's sort of what I mean by saying intellectually... Or sorry, institutionally legible, is you understand the abstractions they use, you understand basically the mental models they're using to try to understand what's going on, and then you are able to fit your product into that. So I can give you a couple of examples and findings that are...   0:37:02 BR: Yeah, please.   0:37:04 LC: So I don't know how deep into accounting you are, but there is a metric that's really commonly used called EBITDA. And effectively, it is a free cash flow proxy metric. And it was invented by some people in the cable industry who wanted to raise a lot of money to go roll out cable systems all across the US. And they wanted to be able to quickly raise debt to go buy these sort of small cable operators and then put them all together. And with this metric that they invented, all of these other investors suddenly had a Schelling point. Suddenly, all of these investors had a new unit of measurement to look at this type of business. And because they accepted it, they were willing to go fund those purchases. Suddenly, a whole wave of those purchases were done, and basically a whole wave of these projects were financed because someone figured out a way to make that institutionally legible.   0:38:11 LC: And a similar thing has happened in the last 10 or 15 years with what we call enterprise SaaS companies, where we now have a new set of metrics that weren't really in use 20 years ago. These are metrics, I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, these are metrics like...   0:38:26 BR: The CAC.   0:38:27 LC: Gross churn... CAC, gross churn, net dollar retention. And if I went to someone today and I said, "Oh, I'm investing in a business that has an average customer life time of six years, an LTV to CAC of 4:1, it has 98% gross retention and 127% net dollar retention, and I think those numbers are going to persist for the next four or five years, that is something that I almost wouldn't even have to explain what the product is. If something met those metrics and truly met those metrics, it's a company that would get a huge valuation in today's markets. And it's again, it's because it's now institutionally legible. Someone has basically convinced the world of that. So then the question should probably be, why do these things get institutionally legible? And what I find is that, we're actually re-using the same math over and over again and finding new situations where we didn't realize that math applied. And so usually what's happening is, we're finding relationships that are really durable, that are really, really, really resilient.   0:39:40 LC: So I have this little questions page on my website, and the first one is, "What is the next durable customer relationship that we haven't really seen yet?" So what happens is, once the market recognizes that there is a durable customer relationship, and you can build that into our models. These models actually should come from how we model these bonds that last 20 or 30 years. If you can fit the customer relationship into that model, suddenly, all of the bond investors and sort of the bond valuation metrics that we used as proxies, they drift into the financing world. And people say, "Oh, this is also a durable relationship, so we should go fund it." And coming back to your first question to say, how do some of these huge technology projects get off the ground, it's because someone has convinced a set of investors somewhere that there is this long durable, and that's important, resilient set of cash flow streams 20 or 25 years out, and then we discount that forward, so that's how that works.   0:40:45 BR: Oh, man. Okay, so to riff on that and to go back to your analogy to products and distribution channels, what basically... You could almost think of it as someone coming in being really good at sales and arguably like marketing, and basically changing taste and creating a new product category where people didn't know they wanted gluten-free things, and then they go and they create that new marketing category, and now customer tastes change, would that be...   0:41:29 LC: And it's funny you use the word taste, that is... It's both fundamental reality of, Oh, in a true Bayesian universal sense where we're updating our priors correctly, imagine we had all knowledge, that does matter. But then taste does matter too, that's exactly right. There's another book I'd recommend called "The Empire of Value" by a guy named Andre Orlean, who is this really interesting French economist. And so in this book, he makes this argument that prices are completely socially constructed, and it's like you're saying, it's taste. As a side note, it's totally unclear to me why all of the people who are coming up with the socially constructed value theories are all these French people. It makes one wonder what's in the water in Paris. But similar is to say, actually, I think, and everyone else thinks, and we're all sort of self-referentially thinking, therefore, the thing exists, the price exists, the value exists.   0:42:32 BR: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.   0:42:33 LC: It exists as this organizing principle, which everyone else then cites as a real reference and then it takes on a momentum of its own.   0:42:44 BR: And what... And so, I guess, do institutional structures like C-corps and LLCs, do those relate to institutional legibility? In my head, they do, but I might be going a step too far.   0:43:04 LC: Yes, they do, but I want to backtrack in terms of what you're saying.   0:43:12 BR: Yeah, do it.   0:43:14 LC: So what they do is they basically... The legal structure sets the landscape for markets. I should completely confess my own bias here. I am massively, massively pro-markets. I think virtually, no other social mechanism that we know of has raised so many people out of poverty. But as much as I love markets, I recognize that it's not sort of this shallow teenager's love of markets where I overdosed on Ayn Rand. It's more of on the lines of...   0:43:45 BR: Be nice to the little libertarians.   0:43:49 LC: No, I was once one when I was 14 too, I get it. And I think the problem is, you have to understand markets are these amazing and emergent phenomena that pop up basically naturally everywhere, people trade with each other. But efficiently functioning markets are actually very, very expensive public goods to maintain. And that means that you're depending on the bias of all the regulators to try to make the best guess as they can to create and maintain these liquid markets to make sure that people are transacting fairly. To give you another book recommendation, there is an economist named Alvin Roth, who wrote a book called "Who Gets What and Why," and a lot of his students went on to go work at Uber and Airbnb to sort of create these marketplaces. And if you look at it, they're actually quite intentional about how they're sort of creating the markets. So now, let's take one step further back and say, “Alright, all of the countries are creating markets themselves, too, and they're creating the balance of these markets.”   0:44:54 LC: So as you know, I'm a lawyer and was a history major and sort of loved looking into this stuff. I would argue that one of the least appreciated social technologies of the last few centuries is the concept of limited liability. And so it used to be, before we had easy access to creating limited liability organizations, if you started a business and it went bankrupt, you personally went bankrupt. Maybe you were thrown in jail, maybe your family went bankrupt, and so you couldn't go that far out onto the risk curve. And so, socially, if you were thinking about this sort of like an agent-based modeling perspective, if you could basically increase the variance of what agents could do, if you could basically socialize some of the risk, then you let people take a little bit more risk. Maybe it doesn't work out as well for a few people, but socially, you get to that higher hill in the hill-climbing analogy. And so you're asking about how C corps work and LLCs work. Do you want me to just run through the history really quickly?   0:46:01 BR: Well, I guess more what I'm poking at is just talking about how, at the end of the day, these aren't laws of nature, the structure of organizations and...   0:46:14 LC: Not at all. So why do we have Delaware C corps? Coming back to limited liability, in the late 1800s, New Jersey created a charter that let anyone go get a corporation. And then after that, later in the 1800s, New Jersey passed a set of laws that are colloquially known as the “Seven Sisters,” And these were these terrible laws in the view of all the businesses who were registered there, so they were looking for other places to register. Delaware saw this as an opportunity, so around 1900, Delaware lowers their taxes, lowers their registration fees, and they bring a lot of corporate registrations in. And then they set up their court systems so that they specialized in registrations, at which point Delaware becomes the de facto place. You get a runaway phenomenon, then all of the good corporate lawyers want to go practice in Delaware or they want to be corporate judges in Delaware, and all of the interesting cases go to Delaware. And it's literally gotten to the point where everyone in the US references Delaware corporate law, and non-US companies will create charters saying they'll defer to Delaware corporate law, and countries who are still forming their legal systems will effectively copy and paste a lot of Delaware corporate law. And so coming back to your point, it's not a law of nature. These are people doing the best they can to optimize the landscape, and that's how it works.   0:47:47 BR: And so my thought would be that that does relate to institutional legibility, because if I went to someone and said, "I'm using a B corp structure," they'd be like, "What the heck is that? I'm not touching that with a 10-foot pole." But if I say that I am using a Delaware C corp, then that is a legible abstraction, so I guess that would be my argument for why institutional structures matter.   0:48:24 LC: They do, and I think what it comes down to is you have all these degrees of freedom when you're starting any organization or any project, and you just want to think about where you want to innovate and where you don't want to innovate. So you look at US business organizations, I should say this, since I'm a barred attorney, this is not legal advice. There are basically four options. You default into being a partnership where you actually have unlimited liability. You can be a limited liability company, which is done state-by state. You could be an S corp, which is a tax status of LLCs, or you can be a C corp, which is the one that you're talking about.   0:49:03 LC: And what you go see when you run through all of these things is, well, there might be a better way to do this, but for the company that I'm starting or the project I'm starting... So the fund that I run, we have a Delaware LLC. I could argue to you that there are things we could do that would actually be better for the investors and better for the whole strategy, but you then look at this and say, "Hmm, it's just not worth the marginal effort given the payoff of actually trying to overcome that sort of legibility hurdle." And so I think what ends up happening is you end up getting these innovations around the edges where someone says, "Okay, here is one use case that's a little bit better, and we'll keep everything else the same except for that," and then the new standard arises. I don't think it ends up being worth saying, "I want to create a new legal structure and a new product and do physics research all at the same time," just because there's not enough time in the day.   0:50:11 BR: Yeah, I guess it just... It makes me wonder, because it feels like these legal structures do impose certain constraints, it just makes me wonder out in the landscape on a completely different optimization mountain what other constraints could be imaginable.   0:50:40 LC: So probably the most difficult cost to measure out there is opportunity cost, because it's so difficult to say, what could things be if we organized everything differently? And one hopes that when you have 50 states, that's how federalism works in the US, one hopes you get people experimenting with regulation, and you can get maybe a new project started off the ground somewhere else, if not in the state that you live in, and then of course, with more countries, you can maybe go overseas and do it too. And it's interesting, you brought up Spotify a little bit earlier, it's unclear to me that Spotify could have gotten started in the United States, given the state of music laws at the time. But then what happens is all of these European customers start using the product, and that has an institutional legibility of itself, and people say, "Oh, okay, I can see it's working in that country, it will probably work here," and I wasn't involved in the record label negotiations, but I assume that's basically what they were looking at. And then you look and say, "Oh, okay, then the laws can change."   0:51:52 LC: The other thing that I just want to point out is that when a law is set, that's a much more fluid thing than I think most people realize who haven't spent a lot of time looking at this. So in practice, a lot of times, there are sort of these gray areas of the law, and I'm not saying people should go break the law. But there's a gray area of the law where the products that you're working with don't really fit into the regulation, or customer demand is just so massive that the regulators will actually change their mind once they see that demand. Now how far you want to push that boundary is really up to you. There are arguments that Uber or Airbnb were illegal when they were first started. There are arguments that they're illegal right now. I don't think so, and I think they did the right thing, and I think the world's a better place for giving everyone the options. But it’s also really, really important to realize is there are these constraints, but the constraints, when you read a law, it's not a law of physics. And the other thing that you have to understand is laws are executed by regulators, so understanding why they are enforced or what they actually want to enforce is also really, really important.   0:53:09 BR: Yeah, and do you think there's... So to your point about there being different regulations in different places, do you think that it's then problematic that you see so much copying of Delaware law and sort of copy-pasting that around the world? 'Cause wouldn't that then sort of make everything... Wouldn't that be a very strong attractor?   0:53:37 LC: I think what ends up happening is it's a good enough baseline. So I can't remember what the book is called right now, but there is another famous economist named Hernando de Soto who wrote about just the importance of property rights and how if you are able to sort of import the property rights regimes from the US into a lot of different countries that don't have them right now, it would be a huge driver [0:54:00] ____.   0:54:00 BR: It wouldn't necessarily work.   0:54:01 LC: And so I don't think we live in a world where we figured everything out so perfectly that all we need to do are these sort of minor experiments. I think we live in a pretty uneven world where if we just had relatively good legal functioning across the world, not just in terms of the laws that are written down, but sort of culturally how they're practiced, we could make life a lot better off for a lot of people. So it does make a lot of sense to me that if you and I were trying to start up a corporate law and corporate practice in some small country somewhere that was just starting to figure it out, or just decided they really wanted to change their system, I think we would go look at best practices. I think that's normal. It's unclear to me though that we are actually doing enough experimentation on the regulatory side, it's just really, really hard to say how much because it's just sort of this abstract opportunity cost question.   0:55:03 BR: Yeah, it's... And I guess these are sort of the same thing where I think of it as it's very hard to talk about counterfactuals, and actually, to riff off of the point about opportunity costs, my impression about... Of one of the reasons that large long-term projects don't get funded is because the opportunity cost is so high in that if I see that the stock market is increasing at a... It's like the number in my head is 5% of... I think of stock market 5%, I'm not... Is that roughly...   0:55:47 LC: I think nominally, the numbers, depending on the timeframe you look at, are along the range of 8%-10%.   0:55:56 BR: Oh, wow, okay.   0:55:57 LC: But there are actually a lot of people who right now think that 5% is what you're going to see for the next 10 years.   0:56:03 BR: Okay, well, let's...   0:56:05 LC: Anyway, doesn't really matter. Let's say 5%.   0:56:06 BR: Yeah, exactly. So in order to make the argument for something like the opportunity cost of investing in an illiquid thing is the compounding returns that you would get from 5% growth in the stock market, plus the amount that... Like the liquidity that you're giving up, which is, as you pointed out, a really big deal. And so it's... And then put uncertainty on top of that, so it's not even a guaranteed in the future compounding... Like you need to be... So it just... It seems like it's a fairly straightforward... It's actually a very, very large opportunity cost to propose an alternative investment to just the stock market.   0:57:07 LC: So I think it is and it isn't. First of all, I think you framed all of that correctly, that everything is subject to an opportunity cost. And so, of course, when I'm looking at whatever investments I'm making, and you are too, or deciding where to spend your time, you're going to look at your other alternatives and then choose. I don't think that necessarily should mean that it's impossible to go find a project worth working on. I think what it means is you just need to really, really understand what you're building. So that you understand why it's really valuable, and you have to go after sort of basically big projects or you have to have really, really fast experimentation, so you can just try out a lot of things and say, "Okay, maybe the opportunity cost is high over five to seven or eight years or 10 years, but I am going to try 2,000 different types of Shopify stores programmatically, I'm going to figure out which ones work, and then I'll have the revenue stream that I want once I've tested out and pulled out to the best 25, and then go on from there."   0:58:16 LC: So I do think that that it's definitely doable, you just have to recognize the opportunity cost. But you're right, there is an opportunity cost. I just think you shouldn't sell yourself short. I think implicit in what you're saying is that the world is relatively efficient, and because the world's relatively efficient, how on earth could I earn more than 5%? But I have to say, I look around everywhere and see a lot of products that, they were built on the constraints of the past distribution channels, they were built on the constraints of the past production approaches, or they were built on social relationships that have broken for whatever reason.   0:59:04 LC: So you look at this and say, huh, I think there's probably a better way to do it. And if I'm right, and if I really, really focus on figuring out what's wrong and how we can do this better, you're going to find that the returns you earn are massively more than the stock market. I just think you have to be really focused and intentional in how you're doing it, and I think you have to spend a lot of time understanding the people behind the process. If you ever... I'm trying to think. Have you ever read that essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read? There's this idea that if you look at any sort of product in front of you, so you look at a pencil, an uncountable number of relationships went into building that product. So for the pencil, someone had to chop the wood, someone had to mine the metal, someone had to refine it, someone had to put it all together, someone had to paint it, someone had to build the eraser, and someone had to invent all of that and patent all of that, and start all of those companies and then figure out how to market it, and then figure out how that distribution channel worked, and then figure out how consumer tastes were changing, and just look through all of that.   1:00:11 LC: There are so many relationships there, and if you think about it, there's just... There's no... It's extremely unlikely that we've reached the global maximum for almost any product, because you only need one of those relationships not to have been done perfectly, not to have been optimized, to have an opportunity to do things better. And then you look at the constraints that they used to have 80 years ago versus what we have now... Software has changed so much in the last 15 or 20 years, the Internet has changed the world a lot in the last 20 to 30 years. You look at this and say, there probably are better ways to organize these things or to sort of optimize things. And I think that's true... I'm looking around my apartment now, when you look at, I don't know, a glass, or you look at a countertop, or you look at any art or any hardware, I actually think this is true for almost the most mundane object in your life.  And actually I find... Once you start getting into the details of all of these mundane objects, it's not mundane, it's totally...   1:01:19 BR: My concern is actually the opposite, where I think that there are tons and tons of dollar bills on the ground, but the payoff you need to convince someone of becomes inordinately larger, the better the stock market is doing, it feels like, because of the opportunity cost.   1:01:45 LC: So yes and no. If you look, for reasons that are separate from this conversation, at demographics and the way that capital is structured, interest rates are low and look like they're going to stay low for a while, which means the required return for a project is going to keep falling. So yes, when the stock market is doing really well... Imagine the stock market were returning 40% a year, it would be harder and harder to get new projects funded because people would just put their money in the stock market. But as those returns fall from 8% to 5%, or you used to be able to get 6% or 8% over a 10-year period in a 10-year bond and now you're getting 2, 2 1/2% a year, you actually are more and more willing to go out onto that risk curve and sort of fund something new. So I actually don't think the problem is as much opportunity cost, especially today. Socially venture capital is so popular that I don't think the problem is opportunity cost. I actually think the problem is alpha. And so if you think about what alpha is in the finance world, it's basically, you're looking for an information advantage, and it's going back to cash flows and capital flows.   1:03:07 LC: You're looking for an information advantage on what's going on with those cash flows, with the product, the customer sort of thing, or what's going on with capital flows. So your alpha could be, you understand there's going to be a forced seller here or a forced buyer there, and then you bridge the liquidity into that market. And to throw one more book out there, the best book I know of to think about information sourcing is a book by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Robert Laughlin, it's a book called "The Crime of Reason." Have I ever mentioned this one to you?   1:03:39 BR: No.   1:03:39 LC: So it's really interesting. Frankly, it's a shocking book when you really process it. He basically argues that all economically valuable information is kept secret. And so you think that you really understand a lot about the world, but you actually understand, say, 98% about some topic, but that last 2% that really matters to get the project off the ground, to get the product built, to actually get funded, that's really kept secret. So the reason I think this is interesting is we've turned an opportunity cost problem of, "Well, there's really nothing I can do about it, I hope I come up with a good idea," to an information sourcing problem. So the way I think about this is I say, okay, there are really two places that you find information in the world. It can either be recorded or it can be in someone's head. So recorded could be like written and natural language, or in numbers in a database. And I often find, unless we're talking about you going and coming up with some new fundamental algorithm, all you really need to be doing is collecting all of that data and joining tables. It's not actually that complicated from an intellectual perspective, but it's really about finding those tables and joining them. And then on the side of, oh, it's in someone's head, it just ends up being about building relationships with people.   1:05:01 LC: And to your point about there being lots of dollar bills on the sidewalk, there are, but it's almost like they're invisible, so you need to go find the information to really understand, oh, that's a real one, that's a fake one. And it just ends up being a shoe leather exercise where you say, "Okay, I'm just going to go reach out to a lot of people, become friends with a lot of people, talk to them about their work, really try to understand what they're going through, and then I'll recognize what they want and what they don't want, and then I'll find effectively that alpha." And I think that's probably a more useful way to think about it than opportunity cost, because it's more empowering once you think about it that way.   1:05:38 BR: I like that. To change tracks a little bit drastically, but to just get to a point that I think it is really important to talk about... So you invest primarily in public equities, right?   1:05:52 LC: Mostly public, but public and private companies, yeah.   1:05:55 BR: Yeah, and so there is a argument that... I'm on like... There's basically an argument that short-term is like short-term thinking on the part of public investors has sort of pushed public companies to slash R&D costs and basically caused the fabled death of corporate labs. I think it is pretty clear that corporate labs don't sort of have the sort of world-changing output that they used to. However, I'm agnostic about the cause and still trying to figure that out, so... What do you think about that argument?   1:06:42 LC: So, I think it's complicated. I also think I'm not sure, but I can think it through with you.   1:06:50 BR: Yeah, let's think through it.   1:06:51 LC: Sure, so if you look at the valuations in the public markets today, they are very high by any historical measure. And so high valuations do not imply short-termism. They imply that the market is placing very, very high prices on companies. Now, it just turns out that a lot of that has to do with the way capital flows work today, not just with cash flows. And so what's going on effectively is we changed the retirement system in 2005. So we default decided to put a lot of people's money into index funds. Index funds just blindly buy a set of equity as a set of stocks, just as capital flows into them, and so we've had more and more retirement flows, so you see all of these stocks get bid up. That has been a huge reason for valuations going up. But anyway, you look at this and say, alright, so just on a project basis, companies are actually getting huge valuations. Now quarter to quarter, companies face unbelievable pressure to sort of make a mark that Wall Street thinks is good or bad. And what ends up happening is people are definitely optimizing over the quarters, because the research analysts, it's so difficult to see inside the companies that these are the metrics that they use to measure what's going on.   1:08:13 LC: So it's sort of a mixed bag. We are getting really high valuations, but there is still a lot of quarter to quarter pressure, but at the same time, I mean I look at this and say... I think it's actually closer to the journalism and editorial arguments, where it used to be that these newspapers were monopolies and then separately or sort of for social reasons, they were also safeguarding these unbelievable journalists, and it was this huge benefit to society. The reason it worked was the newspapers were monopolies, so they really didn't face competition, and then culturally it became normal for them to sort of support journalists. And then it was like a social competition, like "Who is going to win the Pulitzer price this year? Who's sort of funding the best journalists?" If you go look at the big corporate R&D labs, you find that it was a set of funders that were basically semi-government entities. They were such great monopolies, and culturally, the people who are running those companies also wanted the R&D labs, maybe out of the sense of patriotism, maybe out of some other sense, but I think that's sort of how they came to be. And when those monopolies were broken up, they basically weren't able to keep funding the R&D labs.   1:09:40 LC: I do think that some of today's monopolies and oligopolies, these are the Facebooks and the Googles and the Microsofts of the world, they are able to fund big R&D labs, and we could argue about whether it's the same as Bell labs or PARC... But they're definitely trying, they have been inspired by those old examples, and my friends who work there, I do think are quite brilliant. So I do think that the ones that you're talking about and that I've read that you've written about, I think that it was basically this really nice side effect of monopolies that also doing it. But at the same time, not every monopoly... And in fact, almost every monopoly isn't going to have that cultural imperative. And then on the flipside, let's look at the ones that aren't monopolies, and this is again, partially a narrative problem and partially a reality problem. People haven't come up with a good metric for outsiders to know that research projects are going to do well long-term, so the outsiders feel comfortable funding them.   1:10:48 LC: So an example is that over the last 15 years, you can go look at pharmaceutical companies, and you'll see that their R&D budgets are getting cut. And what happened was a lot of investors were looking at the returns on that R&D over a three-year basis and a five-year basis, and they were saying, "Look, we're not seeing any returns here, it really doesn't make sense for you to be spending money." And of course, people trot out the worst examples when they're making arguments, but there was a set of pharmaceutical companies that maybe was abusing the R&D line. Maybe they were basically not really doing great research, and they were paying themselves a lot of money to not do great research. And some hard-charging Wall Street hedge funds came in and really, really pressured those companies to stop spending on R&D. Now, you'd say socially, that's terrible outcome. We could say, "Look, maybe the R&D is a public good, not a private good, so we need some way to incentivize that and we can have that conversation." I think it's possibly solvable if we come up with a new set of metrics that everyone actually believes.   1:12:07 BR: Yeah, so this goes back to the legibility point.   1:12:09 LC: It does. So you and I have spoken about this one privately before, but there's a professor at MIT named Andrew Lo who proposed that you bundle cancer research projects together or any pharmaceutical projects together. And say you take 100 of these projects or 200 of these projects, you bundle them together, you give each of them, say, a couple million dollars, and then you bundle all the payoffs together. And so the idea is that, hopefully, that's institutionally legible enough that someone would be willing to fund it because they think, "Okay, there's actually a good chance that of these 200 projects, one or two of them will hit, and then you'll have this unbelievably valuable drug that will really be good for the world, and maybe that's a good way to push us out on the risk curve." I haven't seen this type of thinking really take hold because we're still very much in that project-based milestone-based financing approach where it's like, okay, you have the metrics that makes sense for your series A, for your series B and C and D.   1:13:18 LC: And there's also an argument that maybe the smartest biotech investors and pharma investors are already cherry-picking the best companies, the best projects. So maybe you'll sort of have this adverse selection where maybe of the top 200 projects, this would have worked, but if the best five are just going to go off on their own, you're just not going to get the good ones. And this is again, sort of that information s

Verbal sketching on why the alt-right is so bothered by Harry Styles in a dress, why we love true crime and conspiracy, how phones have effected the quality of our thinking, how to create living documents, and how we can solve the problems with copyright law? https://apps.apple.com/app/id1521804753 (Humbly Fm) https://youtu.be/DqNhlN1FGOk (Bruce Chatwin and his notebooks. Interview with wife Elizabeth) https://www.itmattersbutitdoesnt.com/who-was-jennifer-fairgate/ (IT 0023: Who Was Jennifer Fairgate?) https://www.itmattersbutitdoesnt.com/learning-is-cyclical-not-linear/ (IT 0004: Learning is Cyclical Not Linear) https://andymatuschak.org/ (Andy Matuschak) https://itmatters.substack.com/p/newsletters-arent-the-answer (Newsletters Aren't the Answer) https://youtu.be/quO_Dzm4rnk (RiP! A Remix Manifesto) https://youtu.be/4QOaPu8RI04 (Prince Rakeem "Ooh, I Love You, Rakeem" with Original Sample) https://youtu.be/O7_3tlhlm78 (Prince Rakeem "Ooh, I Love You, Rakeem" with Replaced Sample) --- Head over to https://www.itmattersbutitdoesnt.com (itmattersbutitdoesnt.com) where you can http://patreon.com/chadhall (become a patron) https://www.itmattersbutitdoesnt.com/support/ (find other ways to support the show) https://chadhall.ck.page/d2ec2d5cfc (sign up for my book recommendation newsletter) leave a voice mail by clicking the blue button https://www.itmattersbutitdoesnt.com/episodes/ (browse the full episodes archive) and more FYI I use affiliate links whenever linking to books as a way to help support the podcast. I offer both Amazon links & Bookshop.org links. Bookshop.org costs a bit more but every purchase supports local, independent bookstores. Consider using their links if you can afford to. https://bookshop.org/pages/about (learn more here.) Support this podcast

Mehdi Yacoub is an engineer and entrepreneur from Paris, passionate about optimizing health, longevity and well being. Through Lifetizr, he is building a solution to help people optimize their metabolic health, prevent chronic diseases, and live healthier and longer. Mehdi also writes a weekly newsletter (The Long Game), were he shares the best stuff he comes across each week. He covers a broad range of topics, always including health, wellness, and tech. In a given episode, you can read about the Horvath clock, the art of doing nothing, pricing strategies, risk management, the VIP world, behavioral biology, Bruce Lee, and Michael Jordan. Podcast Notes: Lifetizr and their work through Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) Personal experiences monitoring glucose levels and benefits of tracking Moating and how startups understand their strengths and positioning Tips on fasting, 72 hour fasts, cold showers Could immortality be achieved? David Sinclair's Information Theory of ageing Need for utopian science fictions (White Mirrors) Twitter as the true social network Increased polarisation of societies and rise in social media wokeness Andy Matuschak's mnemonic writing

In this episode, we talk with Aravind Balla, a software developer working remotely from Hyderabad, India. He loves JS and CSS, and is the co-host of the Learning Curve podcast, sharing his findings, discoveries, and, his learning journey with fellow host Bretik.In the #roamcult community he is known for creating Gatsby-theme-Andy, a digital gardening theme inspired by the works of Andy Matuschak and is based on Gatsby-theme-brain.We talked about:Aravind's note-taking workflowHow Notion and Roam plays different roles in his workExamples of evergreen notes from Aravind's graphThe origin story of Gatsby-theme-andyDefining what is publishable in a digital gardenPlanning episode for the Learning Curve PodcastEnjoy!Timestamps03:24 From Evernote to Notion and Aravind's meta questions05:54 No more Evernote except for Kindle highlights08:40 There was no friction in transitioning to Roam09:38 Notion vs Roam for Teams10:58 Loading up Roam in low network connectivity13:09 "Once it is loaded, it never dies. So I never turn my MacBook off"14:53 Aravind's main workflow, information capture and more17:06 Some fleeting notes are thrown away, and examples of permanent notes18:18 Aravind Balla's Evergreen notes from [[How to Take Smart Notes]] and Linchpin20:02 Have empathy towards your work21:58 Publishing notes online can strike ideas in the person who's reading it23:05 How Aravind remade Andy Matuschak's digital garden theme in Gatsby25:47 Gathering around digital gardeners and Andy's followers28:38 What's considered publishable? Defining a digital garden34:56 How did the Learning Curve podcast start?37:46 Predicting conversations with #roamcult, and Mental Agility42:48 Aravind's keen for the API to rollout45:48 Planning an episode for the Learning Curve Podcast49:48 [[How would you describe Roam to someone who hasn't started using it?]]51:48 [[What does Roam mean to you?]]LinksAravind's TwitterAravind's WebsiteAravind's Notesgatsby-theme-andySupport the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/normanchella)

Andy Matuschak joins Mark and Adam to talk about rituals for deep thought, how to develop an inkling over time, and the public goods problem of research. @MuseAppHQ hello@museapp.com Show notes Andy Matuschak: homepage Twitter Patreon How can we develop transformative tools for thought? Michael Nielsen Bret Victor on representation of thought Quantum Country spaced repetition Anki IDEO iBooks deliberate practice Solitude and Leadership LiquidText evergreen notes exponential backoff Heroku haiku names positivism and existentialism deontological ethics intelligent tutoring systems ALEKS Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Ivan Sutherland / Sketchpad Palladium Magazine mechanical keyboards on Reddit Pricing niche products: Why sell a mechanical keyboard kit for $1,668? tech transfer Genentech and recombinant DNA Dolby Pixar Why does DARPA work?

Andy Matuschak joins Mark and Adam to talk about rituals for deep thought, how to develop an inkling over time, and the public goods problem of research. @MuseAppHQ hello@museapp.com Show notes Andy Matuschak: homepage Twitter Patreon How can we develop transformative tools for thought? Michael Nielsen Bret Victor on representation of thought Quantum Country spaced repetition Anki IDEO iBooks deliberate practice Solitude and Leadership LiquidText evergreen notes exponential backoff Heroku haiku names positivism and existentialism deontological ethics intelligent tutoring systems ALEKS Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Ivan Sutherland / Sketchpad Palladium Magazine mechanical keyboards on Reddit Pricing niche products: Why sell a mechanical keyboard kit for $1,668? tech transfer Genentech and recombinant DNA Dolby Pixar Why does DARPA work?

Our guest in this episode today is Robert Haisfield, Founder of Influence Insights, as well as the behavioral product strategist at Spark Wave. Focusing on behavior design and gamification, he applies his knowledge to tech products better accomplish their intended goals. We talked about:Rob's note-taking origin story, from standup comedy to behavioral science papers and consultingThe exploratory behavior of people, what they expect from entering digital gardens and public RoamsWorkflows, usages of Roam, in particular 'pruning' your database for quality useEntry points to one's Roam to accommodate for different readersEnjoy!Timestamps2:20 Writing down everything, note taking and standup comedy4:38 Research through Notion, Bear and now Roam8:14 How Rob found Roam, and older Notion workflows111:34 Testing Roam out with projects, and note-taking hygiene13:49 Overwhelming graphs, Bear vs. Roam17:37 Switching from a keyword approach to an evergreen note approach20:13 Roam's accessibility for non-Roam users...there's none23:36 Higher bar on a public Roam, articulating ideas26:14 Exploring 2-dimensional navigation and Andy Matuschak's notes (follow along!)29:52 "I love getting lost" The fun part about exploring hypertext34:52 Expressing through outlines and blocks, and the value of a digital garden36:18 The different ways people search for things37:48 The open notebook, Rob's hypertext40:12 Hypertext adventures, and behavioral economics sets up a choice architecture42:33 Entry points, and Obsidian's graph view47:59 Rob's future projects and tips for starting Roam53:41 How would you describe Roam to someone who hasn't started using it yet?54:36 What does Roam mean to you?LinksInfluence InsightsSpark WaveRob's TwitterRob's Public RoamVIDEO: Rob Haisfield's Tour of Roam Researchhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO_qvM-URHYVIDEO: Chatting with Glue - Close reading / Analysis / Note Takinghttps://youtu.be/NMzr-qsv188Andy Matuschak's NotesVisit the RoamFM Public Graph for more info!Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/normanchella)

My guest today is software engineer, designer, and researcher Andy Matuschak. He’s focused on Tools for Thought — which is a fancy way of saying that he works on technologies that expand what people can think and do. Before working as a researcher, he helped build iOS at Apple, focusing on foundations like multitouch, animation, and inter-app coordination. Then, he worked at Khan Academy where he led and co-founded the Research & Development group. In this conversation, we talk about the structure of online education, how to take notes, strategies for developing new ideas over time, secrets of creative partnerships, and what it means to do creative work. This conversation begins with a discussion of my online writing course, Write of Passage. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

What did Plato actually argue two and a half millennia ago? Show Notes We really only did one thing in this episode: talked about Plato’s Phaedrus! What did Plato say? How did he say it? What does it mean? There are, though, lots of interpretations. Relevant to our next episode: people have cited Lyotard a lot. Oh… and Alan Jacobs is back on Twitter. The Andy Matuschak post referenced in the episode Music “Oak Forest” by Ivan Muela “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Today we’re speaking with two guests, Andy Matschak and George Zonnios about the topic of spaced repetition software. This podcast starts… The post ERRR #035. Andy Matuschak and George Zonnios on Spaced Repetition Software appeared first on Ollie Lovell.

Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak), joins Erik on this episode. He is a technologist, designer and researcher. They discuss:- The key thread throughout his work and what he’s trying to accomplish.- Why people read books despite remembering little of what they read.- What books should look like and the features they should have in the digital age.- Why spaced repetition is so powerful.- His requests for startups in the space.Remember to apply for the winter vintage of our Network Catalyst accelerator! It is a personalized program that features masterclasses from some of the best in Silicon Valley and a dedicated network leader focused on making the introductions you need to turbocharge your company. You can participate in-person in San Francisco or virtually from anywhere around the world. Find out more and apply at villageglobal.vc/networkcatalyst.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak), joins Erik on this episode. He is a technologist, designer and researcher. They discuss:- The key thread throughout his work and what he’s trying to accomplish.- Why people read books despite remembering little of what they read.- What books should look like and the features they should have in the digital age.- Why spaced repetition is so powerful.- His requests for startups in the space.Remember to apply for the winter vintage of our Network Catalyst accelerator! It is a personalized program that features masterclasses from some of the best in Silicon Valley and a dedicated network leader focused on making the introductions you need to turbocharge your company. You can participate in-person in San Francisco or virtually from anywhere around the world. Find out more and apply at villageglobal.vc/networkcatalyst.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Software Engineer Andy Matuschak talks about his essay "Why Books Don't Work" with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Matuschak argues that most books rely on transmissionism, the idea that an author can share an idea in print and the reader will absorb it. And yet after reading a non-fiction book, most readers will struggle to remember any of the ideas in the book. Matuschak argues for a different approach to transmitting ideas via the web including different ways that authors or teachers can test for understanding that will increase the chances of retention and mastery of complex ideas.

We read and discussed an interesting article titled ”Why Books Don’t Work” (https://andymatuschak.org/books/) by Andy Matuschak. We felt the problem isn't so much the medium or how to write the book. It’s something else...

Support these videos: http://pgbovine.net/support.htmhttp://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-302-videos-better-than-text.htm- [PG Vlog #274 - videos are experiential](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-274-videos-are-experiential.htm)- [Why books don't work](https://andymatuschak.org/books/) by Andy MatuschakRecorded: 2019-05-12

Twitter: https://twitter.com/pgbovineSupport with PayPal, Patreon, credit/debit: http://pgbovine.net/support.htmhttp://pgbovine.net/PG-Podcast-Hour-18.htm- [Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: Shareholder Meeting Information](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/sharehold.html)- [PG Vlog #226 - media swarming](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-226-media-swarming.htm)- [Living in NYC during a Crisis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcyPbfAFw4A) by Casey Neistat- [Liar's Poker](https://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Norton-Paperback-Michael-dp-039333869X/dp/039333869X/) by Michael Lewis- [Why books don't work](https://andymatuschak.org/books/) by Andy Matuschak- [Thinking, Fast and Slow](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00555X8OA) by Daniel Kahneman- [Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning](https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning-dp-0674729013/dp/0674729013/) by by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel- [The Ph.D. Grind](http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm)- [Watch Me Play](http://watchmeplay.cc/book/) by T.L. Taylor- [Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less Paperback](https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg-McKeown/dp/0753555166/) by Greg McKeown- [What I would've wanted to know as a 3rd/4th-year assistant professor](http://www.pgbovine.net/third-fourth-year-assistant-professor.htm)- [Overcooked game](http://www.ghosttowngames.com/overcooked/)- [WWF attitude era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_Era)Recorded: 2019-05-12

Soroush: That One Optional Property Massive View Controller Sandi Metz: Nothing is Something (RailsConf 2015) Finite State Machine (Wikipedia) StatefulViewController Soroush: a state machine where invalid transitions can't compile A gentle introduction to dependent types Less gently: Dependent Types at Work D Oisín Kidney: In which I Misunderstand Dependent Types Validated Andy Matuschak: A composable pattern for pure state machines with effects Functional core, imperative shell is from Boundaries by Gary Bernhardt

Summary Benoit Marchant, create of the Montage Framework, and Andy Matuschak, UIKit engineer, researcher and head of mobile engineering at Khan Academy, join us to discuss UI components. We reminisce Benoit and Andy’s extensive history of web and native engineering at Apple. We debate various challenges and best practices of component reusability, encapsulation, gestures, data binding, and collaboration between engineers and designers. Panelists Benoit Marchant @benoitmarchant Andy Matuschak @andy_matuschak https://andymatuschak.org/ Host Ray Shan @rayshan https://shan.io Links  WebObjects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects  Montage Framework http://montagestudio.com/montagejs/ UIKit gesture recognizers https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/EventHandling/Conceptual/EventHandlingiPhoneOS/GestureRecognizer_basics/GestureRecognizer_basics.html Gestures in React Native https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/handling-touches.html https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/gesture-responder-system.html WebComponents http://webcomponents.org/ Elm http://elm-lang.org/ Khan Academy Long-Term Research http://klr.tumblr.com/

Today's show is a rare two-person episode featuring previous-guest May-Li Khoe and newcomer Andy Matuschak. In this episode we do things a bit different, digging into tough topics like fear, learning how to learn, designing with convictions, working on the right problems, and so much more.

In this episode: investing money, finding AppleTV devs, introducing developers to Swift, self-teaching, and state machines! If you have questions of your own, you can tweet us at @immutablefm, email us at questions@immutable.fm, or join our Slack team! Topic 1: As a software dev, we make pretty good salaries. What type of things do you guys invest in? I know Sam has mentioned owning a house, but how do you guys manage your $$$? CPA Andrew's website CPA Andrew on Twitter Topic 2: How do I find AppleTV devs? tvOS Drew Wilson Kloc - Drew Wilson's AppleTV app Github Topic 3: How can I best introduce someone to Swift? Swift Objective-C C++ Treehouse Apple's iBook on Swift "The Swift Programming Language" Pasan Premaratne Amit Bijlani Topic 4: Self-teaching on a large solo project or multiple mini projects? Treehouse Code School One Month Codecademy StackOverflow Canvas Apple Developer Forums Topic 5: How do you learn problem solving techniques or create own algorithms for problems? Little background of how this question came into my mind: some time back while working on app which has many states (stages) and based on the server response the app will behave. I went ahead and wrote some dirty codes and my friend suggested me to take a look at “State Machine” which i never heard of. After couple of hours i started customising the same in objc. Now i feel more happy and any change come in is solvable very easy now a days. So now i am actively searching for new techniques or algorithms to solve problem. finite-state machines or "state machines" Andy Matuschak "Functioning as a Functionalist" at Functional Swift Conf. Justin Spahr-Summers "Enemy of the State" at Functional Swift Conf. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Andy Matuschak, creator of the Sparkle update framework for Mac, member of the UIKit team from iOS 4.1 to iOS 8, and current mobile engineering lead at Khan Academy talks to Guy and Rene about helping to bring a world class education to everyone in the world. Show notes Sparkle UIKit Khan Academy Controlling Complexity in Swift Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic: Implications of Piaget's Theory Debug 56: Laura Savino and Khan Academy Guests Andy Matuschak Hosts Guy English of Kicking Bear Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations Feedback Question, comment, recommendation, or something you want us to follow up on for the next show? Email us at debug@mobilenations.com or leave a comment below.

In this week's episode we discuss the release of Swift 1.2 beta with the Xcode 6.3 beta. Swift 1.2 includes many performance improvements and additions that may or may not make Aaron's life easier. We discuss the recently completely RWDevCon in Washington, DC. Tim discusses meeting members of the RayWenderlich.com team, who's members are spread across the world. The conference used a unique tutorial style presentation new to iOS tech conferences. Episode 26 Show Notes: Swift 1.2 and Xcode 6.3 beta Swift 1.2 - NS Hipster What’s new in Swift 1.2 - Greg Heo RWDevCon 2015 Post-Mortem - Ray Wenderlich RWDevCon with Ray Wenderlich and John Wilker – Podcast S03 E04 - Hosted by Mic Pringle & Jake Gundersen Top 10 iOS Conferences in 2015 - Ray Wenderlich Realm Episode 26 Picks: WordBoard Keyboard Andy Matuschak video -- Controlling Complexity in Swift Contact Archiver

This week we discuss Trends in Mobile Apps in 2014, compiled by App Annie. We also discuss the use of 'final' modifier in Swift when declaring classes, methods and properties. Also discussed is the growth of zombie apps on the app store. This week's picks: Apple's Mystery Car, PhoneExpander, Gentlemen...Ricochet Mini! and building Frameworks in iOS 8.   Space Shuttle Discovery at Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia Ray Wenderlich gets feedback from an attendee at RWDevCon Episode 25 Show Notes: App Annie reveals the top 9 mobile trends of 2014 The Importance of Being `final` - Human Friendly The Official raywenderlich.com Swift Style Guide. Andy Matuschak on Twitter Functioning as a Functionalist - Andy Matuschak “Zombie” Apps On The Rise – 83% Of Apps Not On Top Lists, Up From 74% Last Year Rob Enderle Bill Simmons on ESPN Securing iOS User Data: The Keychain, Touch ID, and 1Password - Tim Mitra Episode 25 Picks: Apple's Mystery Car Gentlemen...Ricochet Mini! PhoneExpander - public beta TimmyMe (the Canadian reference for Jaime that Tim couldn't remember.) Creating a Framework

Andy Matuschak covers automated testing to improve app reliability and make the development cycle more efficient. (December 6, 2011)