Podcast appearances and mentions of devon zuegel

Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] My guest today is Devon Zuegel. Devon is the founder and president of the Esmerelda Institute, and she is creating a new town called Esmerelda in California wine country. Learning of Devon and her plan, I couldn't help but wonder why there aren't more people building new towns. She shares the origin story of her project Esmeralda, a modern reinvention of the Chautauqua community she cherished growing up, and we explore her fascinating work building communities and reimaging how we live together. We discuss how environments fundamentally shape human behavior, how cost of space impacts creativity, the financial challenges of town-building despite their potential for strong returns, and the plans in place for Esmerelda. Please enjoy this fascinating conversation with Devon Zuegel.  Subscribe to Colossus Review. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Ramp is the fastest-growing FinTech company in history, and it's backed by more of my favorite past guests (at least 16 of them!) than probably any other company I'm aware of. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. – This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. I think this platform will become the standard for investment managers, and if you run an investing firm, I highly recommend you find time to speak with them. Head to ridgelineapps.com to learn more about the platform. – This episode is brought to you by AlphaSense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Imagine completing your research five to ten times faster with search that delivers the most relevant results, helping you make high-conviction decisions with confidence. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Learn About Ramp, Ridgeline, & Alphasense (00:06:00) The Origin of Devon's Obsession with Places (00:08:07) Proximity and Cost of Space (00:10:02) The Chautauqua Inspiration (00:11:31) Building a New Town: Esmeralda (00:13:23) Urban Design and Street Importance (00:15:44) Community Values and Peer-to-Peer Learning (00:18:15) Edge Esmeralda: A Prototype Community (00:21:38) Challenges and Trust Building in Development (00:26:45) The Role of Cars in Urban Planning (00:31:10) Mortgages and Taxes: Shaping Communities (00:42:11) Devon's Journey: From Stanford Review to Esmeralda (00:43:41) Tools for Thought and Feedback Loops (00:46:33) Urban Design and Pop-Up Villages (00:50:06) Exploring Las Catalinas and Car-Free Living (00:52:31) Placemaking and Organic City Development (00:56:25) Frontier Camp and Creating Collaborative Spaces (01:02:39) Building New Towns: Financial and Infrastructure Challenges (01:12:05) The Kindest Thing Anyone Has Done For Devon

What if we built cities focused around community, leveraging technology to actually increase human connection, health, and fulfillment? Devon Zuegel, the leader of Edge Esmeralda—a pop-up village that took place in June 2024—joins Possible to discuss how she is reimagining cities to optimize for community. In this episode, Devon, Aria, and Reid get into why designing cities with intention can impact quality of life and strengthen communities. Devon shares what she has learned from Edge Esmeralda—and what she plans to build from here.  Read the transcript of this episode here. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/  Topics: 2:20 - Hellos and intros 4:39 - Computers are like gardens 6:25 - Fictional Cities 8:15 - Cities are the platforms we build our lives on 10:10 - City as a networks and places of opportunities  13:40- Best and worst designed cities 15:40 - AI element  19:20 - What is Edge Esmerelda?  26:00 - Devon's learnings thus far 31:50- Scaling Cities of the Future 36:30- Intersections between technology and cities  39:10- Philosophical manifestos of cities  43:30- Devon's thoughts on California Forever  44:10 -Rapid-fire Questions Select mentions:  Edge Esmerelda ( https://www.edgeesmeralda.com/welcome)  Chautauqua (https://devonzuegel.com/chautauqua-an-idea-embedded-in-a-place)  Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection's Pi, OpenAI's ChatGPT or other AI tools, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

Devon Zuegel is planning a bold, people-centered town from scratch. She has a background in software engineering and has worked at some of the big firms in Silicon Valley. She discovered a passion for urbanism and housing while living in San Francisco when she started looking into why there wasn't more housing, and she draws a lot of inspiration from her childhood experiences at Chautauqua, a small town in Western New York. We discuss the need for more beautiful and community-oriented neighborhoods and the challenges of current housing policies and regulations. Devon also explains her vision for Esmeralda, a town that combines the principles of traditional neighborhood development (TND) and the community-oriented programming of Chautauqua. We explore the concept of experimentation and flexibility in urban planning and development, and brainstorm the importance of allowing for iteration and adaptation in building communities, the limitations of traditional planning processes and the need for more creative and responsive approaches. We talk about how the tech MVP model (Minimum Viable Product) can be applied to neighborhoods (Minimum Viable Place) through temporary structures, such as food trucks and airstreams, in testing ideas and activating spaces. While we discuss problems, it's a fundamentally optimistic conversation! We discuss the need for individuals to take more agency and responsibility in shaping their built environment. Devon was an amazing guest, lot's of energy, nuanced thinking and positive vibes–can't wait for y'all to hear! CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction and Background 07:12 The Need for Building Better Places 11:52 Chautauqua: A Model for Community and Learning 15:10 The Challenges of Building Beautiful and Functional Places 24:35 Creating a New Town: The Vision for Esmeralda 31:16 Building for the Long Term: Evolving and Adapting 32:13 Challenges of Planning and Permission 37:53 The Cost of Locking In Decisions 42:48 The Negative Impact of Excessive Process 47:10 The Importance of Truth and Being Wrong 51:17 Hyper-Specialization and Loss of Agency 01:01:09 Capital and the Vision for the New Town 01:04:54 The Appeal of Esmeralda 01:05:49 Back-Weighted Returns 01:06:27 Investor Preferences 01:07:41 The Long-Term Value of TNDs 01:08:38 The Importance of Aligned Capital 01:09:30 Appreciating Wealth and Capital 01:09:59 The Impact of Wealthy Individuals 01:11:42 The Zero-Sum Mindset 01:13:16 The Infinite Potential of Wealth 01:14:13 Creating Value and Making the Pie Bigger 01:15:10 The Role of Wealth in Society 01:17:19 Building Relationships and Community 01:19:56 Funding through Pre-Sales 01:22:03 The Inspiration behind Esmeralda's Name 01:23:23 The Concept of Edge Esmeralda 01:32:05 Podcast - Outro w Music.mp4 CONNECT WITH DEVON & RESOURCES Blog: https://devonzuegel.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/devonzuegel Summer Event: https://www.edgeesmeralda.com/ Book: Invisible Cities Chautauqua: https://www.chq.org/ CONNECT WITH AUSTIN TUNNELL Newsletter: https://playbook.buildingculture.com/ https://www.instagram.com/austintunnell/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-tunnell-2a41894a/ https://twitter.com/AustinTunnell CONNECT WITH BUILDING CULTURE https://www.buildingculture.com/ https://www.instagram.com/buildingculture/ https://twitter.com/build_culture https://www.facebook.com/BuildCulture/

In today's episode, Mike Solana is joined by Jan Sramek & Devon Zuegel to discuss California Forever, a startup aimed at building an entirely new city in California. We get into why Jan has raising $900M for this project, the problems with current cities, doing the impossible, and the ferocious push back that he has received.  Featuring Mike Solana, Jan Sramek, Devon Zuegel Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Jan Twitter: https://twitter.com/jansramek Devon Twitter: https://twitter.com/devonzuegel TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Jan Sramek & Devon Zuegel 1:30 - Growing Up & The Magic Of Disney  6:30 - California Forever Explained 11:15 - How Our Modern Cities Have Gotten Worse 17:30 - The Massive Push Back From The Press, Cititzens & Local Govts 29:00 - Raising $900M - What Happens Next 38:40  - Who Will Run The City? Local Politics & Safety 41:00 - Why California? 43:45 - Water Management, Country Concerns 48:20 - Comparing Recent City Builds 51:30 - What Happens If The State Gets Worse? Other Problems To Combat 59:45 - Can This Be Replicated Across The Country?  1:04:45 - Thanks Jan & Devon For Joining! 

In this episode, we're joined by Devon Zuegel to talk about Prospera, urban sprawl, James Scott's Against the Grain, Georgism and more. 

Devon Zuegel talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the crazy world of money and finance in Argentina. When inflation is often high and unpredictable, people look for unusual ways to hold their savings. And when banks are unreliable because of public policy, people look for unusual ways to keep their savings safe and to make financial transactions. Welcome to Argentina, where Zuegel finds surprising applications of cryptocurrency for solving problems.

I was thrilled to get a chance to talk about cities with Alain Bertaud - he has been one of the most important thinkers in urban planning for the past fifty years. His book Order Without Design is a must-read and an excellent summary of his research (conducted in collaboration with his wife Marie-Agnes, an urban planning scholar in her own right) project with aim of bridging the gap between urban planning and urban economics. Alain is a brilliant and generous teacher who has greatly influenced me - I hope my questions have done their bit to honour him.TranscriptTobi; Welcome to Ideas Untrapped podcast and my guest today is legendary urban planner, Alain Bertaud, welcome to the show, sir, it's an honour to speak to you.Alain; Thank you very much for inviting me, I'm quite honoured.Tobi; You are aware that some of the biggest cities into the future are going to be in the so-called low-income countries, because urbanization is exploding in cities like Lagos, Kinshasa, and these cities are a bit different from some of the cities in other places around the world, especially in the West, you know, in that they are lower-income, they are a bit congested, they don't have much density, and, it's a challenge for such cities having to host that many people. Now, if I may ask you, what would you say the problem has been in making some of these cities work? Are we seeing a failure of markets or planning or a bit of both? Alain; I think that there are sometimes market failures. But I think that there has been a neglect of infrastructure. For me, a city, and that's something common to all the cities of the world, whether they are, you know, in Europe, in America, in Africa, or Asia, the main things for cities are labour markets, that's why people go to cities to find a job. And that is why a big firm will go to Lagos. They will go to Lagos, rather than a small town somewhere. They will go to Lagos because they will find in Lagos people who are competent in whatever they want to do. They will find a large labour force, you will have a lot of choices. And so if I am a migrant living in a small village somewhere in Africa, and not necessarily Nigeria, I may want to go to Lagos because I know there are a lot of jobs there. So if we accept that a city is a labour market, the most important things are two things. First is transport. You should be able to move in this large city. Within an hour, you should be able, ideally, to go from one side to another side, in order to find the job you want and change jobs. You know, changing job also is very important. That's why company town, you know… sometimes you have a mining town or a town developed around a steel mill or something, and then everybody there is working for one employer - the mine or the steel mill, this is not very good, because you have no chance of changing jobs. I think the advantage of very large cities like Lagos or Abidjan or Dakar, is that there are so many employers that you can fill your way, you know, you can change jobs and learn things from other people, that's what's a city. Now, what should the planning be? Planning should be transport, you know, there should be a system of transport. And when I say transport, I don't mean necessarily a subway, I mean, subway sometimes is necessary, but not always. It could be informal transport, you know, the different minibuses, for instance, so things like that which are private. But the planners often consider them as a nuisance, you know, that they are a little messy, they stop everywhere. Sometimes they don't follow the rules very much. But if they are there, it's because there are people who prefer to take this informal thing rather than a regular bus. So we have to take them into account. And we have to make them more efficient, you know, by having specific stops where they can stop which is wide enough and things like that rather than eliminating them. So the first thing is transport. The goal is to allow people to move from one part of the city to another in less than one hour. Now, in a very large city like Lagos, I suppose it's a bit like Mexico City, you will find that this is impossible right now [to move] from one side of the city to [the other], you know, let's say you go from north to south, it may take you three hours to go there. The goal is to decrease this time, you know, [and] how do you decrease this time so that you can have access? Any individual should have access to the maximum number of jobs. And it's the same for the employer. You know, the employer, when they look for employees, if they move to Lagos, suddenly they need somebody with specialized, I don't know, a welder, for instance, somebody who is very specialized in something. They want to have a choice between competent people. If the transport system works well, they will have a choice between 100 welders and they will select what is best for their company. So transport is the most important thing and you have to take into account informal transport, you know, this is very important. You cannot just say the best will be to have a subway or... you know, it's possible that the subways might be necessary but it's only one part of the transport system. You cannot pretend that one day everybody will move by subway, or municipal buses, or even ferries or things like that.All these modes of transport have to be combined and thought together, including cars, by the way. Many of my colleagues now are dreaming of cities without cars, I don't think it can work because first you have freight, and you have certain jobs which cannot be done without a car, you know, if you are a plumber, or if you are an electrician, you have to move around with your material, you cannot take a subway… if you are a plumber, you know, with your bathtub or something like that. So a large city has acquired a lot of freight, you know, you have restaurants, you have bars, you need to bring food to those restaurants, to [bring] bottles of beers, something like that. So you need a transport system which accommodates all modes of transport. Some of my colleagues have a preferred means of transport that they love, you know, say light train, tramway, or bicycle, or scooters, or whatever, or subway, or monorail. And I think that it's possible that a monorail is a good thing, but it will be only a small component, you know. So the job of the planner is to accommodate all these different modes of transport. And if people prefer to take even a taxi motorcycle for instance, which I think in many countries of Africa, I'm sure in Lagos it exists too, you have to accept that this is the best way for some people, not everybody, but for some people. So you have to also accommodate that and say, Well, what do we do for them to reduce, for instance, reduce the pollution they cause but also reduce accident, make them more convenient, because those means of transport are serving certain groups of people who have no choice, who cannot afford it, or who live in a part of the city which is not served by the normal transport. So transport is very important and transport has to be multimodal, and you have to look at it. The other thing which is very important in every city is housing. People move to the city from the countryside or from another city, and they look for a job, but they have to find housing. And very often, I think [for] many of the cities in Africa, but also in Asia, or even in Europe, they didn't welcome the migrants, they considered that the migrants are a nuisance, you know, because usually, they are relatively poor. Some of them are coming from the countryside, so they do not have the skills. You know, they have skills, but they are raw skills, which are not necessarily very useful in the city. So they have to learn skills. The city has to welcome those people because they are the labour force of the future. They are the ones who are going to pay taxes in the future. You cannot import only people who have PhDs or things like that, I mean, those are very useful, too. But we have seen that during the pandemic. During the pandemic suddenly I remember in New York, but everywhere else, people were saying indispensable people, who are the indispensable people? And we found that the indispensable people were not professors like me, they were people who were delivering food in grocery stores, they were indispensable. They are indispensable for the life of the city. So that's why they have to be welcome too, you know, and for that they need housing. So they need housing, they need land. I think that the big mistake that many cities have done, again, everywhere in Europe, as well as in Asia, or in South Africa, by the way, is to concentrate too much on housing, and not enough on infrastructure. I think what planners need to do is to let people build whatever they want even if it's a shack, but provide clean water supply, provide sewers, and some services like health [centres] and schools, and let people build whatever they want on the lot, even on the very small lot. In my book, I have an example in Indonesia what they call the Kampung development which were villages which were absorbed by the city, and you know, if they were very poor, they will have a lot which is only 15 square meters, and they will build a house of 10 square meters with corrugated iron and bamboo and then that's it. This is okay, providing they have clean water supply and that the dirty water is evacuated. What is terrible is to live in an area where the garbage accumulates, children play in dirty water and there are no health facilities at all or schools. So, to me, the criterion of a successful city is how long do they take to absorb a migrant, a migrant who is coming from the rural area, who has no skills, he has only his arms or her arms. And how long does it take to absorb them so that they can get an urban job where they are very productive for the city and then contribute to the welfare of the city. So some cities have tried to measure it a bit informally and some cities take one or two generations. You have one or two generations of migrants living in extreme poverty, very often being sick because they live in very unhealthy neighbourhoods, and it takes two generations to be absorbed. In other cities, in some cities of Asia that I know, in half a generation, those people are absorbed. So for me, how quickly you can absorb these people in the city life is a sign of success that you can measure. Now, the attitude very often of the housing board or people in government involved in housing, is to say, well, these are poor people, let us be nice to them and build really nice houses for them. So they build kind of a walk-up apartment, or five, six-storey or something like that. And the problem with that is sometimes they are well designed, most of the time badly designed. But when they are well designed, they are too expensive. So the government, instead of delivering one million lot a year to absorb those migrants, they deliver 500 houses. So the houses are nice, you know, they have electricity, they have plumbing, but 500 houses do not solve any problem at all for all the others. So I think that you have to give up the idea of building houses. And this is not very popular, by the way. Politicians like to say, we are going to have one... usually, they say 1 million houses, and then they end up building on the 5000. And they call the press, they build a simple building and they say, you see everybody in the city now is going to be entitled to a house like that, and then never get built. And then we are back to square one. So I think we have to be very realistic, we have to accept poverty, we have to accept that there is a lot of difference in income in a city and we have to concentrate the resources of the government on the few things which are important, like water supply, sewer and things like that. Not, you know, not having an ideal city. And poverty is something which is temporary. For instance, I used to work in Korea, a long time ago, you know, Korea, in 1968-70 I think had about the GDP of Mali, you know, it has about the same and then what happened? And suddenly now it's an industrialized country. They absorbed migrants very intelligently, I think the absorbed migrants and the area which were slums are well developed, you know, you still have neighbourhoods which were former slums which have been developed. So you see, poverty is a temporary phenomenon. It's not a permanent one. And you have to accept it when it happens. But then slowly make the people employed, so slowly, they will emerge from poverty. You don't address the problem of poverty by giving say somebody who has an income of, let's say, $300 a year to give this person a house, which costs you know, $50,000 is not going to solve poverty because you will not give very many houses like that to them. And probably those houses are going to go to people of much higher income very soon. So you see where infrastructure is always useful for everybody. So that's my attitude, those two things. First, the people who live in the city are the ones who are going to make this city so the infrastructure has to serve this. And the infrastructure, in particular the roads, has to give access to a lot of land even if the cities sprawl, so that everybody has access to a piece of land where they can build something. If originally they build a shack which is not very nice,[it] doesn't matter providing they have an infrastructure which allows them to stay healthy, and to have access to jobs eventually. So then they will themselves either move to another neighbourhood or build something which is better. Again, I think my chapter on the Kampung in Indonesia in my book illustrates this very well.Tobi; I'm going to come back to cities as labour markets later, which is one of the most powerful insights I got from your book. So we're talking about housing. For example, in Nigeria, it is popularly reported that we have a housing deficit of 17 million households, there are many independent estimates that put the number higher than that. So how do we, especially, in the face of rapidly increasing urbanization… how do we increase urban housing at a big enough scale? Do we have to democratize land markets in some of these cities? For example, in Nigeria, we have a Land Use Act that places the ownership of land solely in the hands of government, though there is an informal land market but it's, of course, largely informal. So do we have to democratize ownership? And would you say the ideas of Hernando de Soto will be useful here, like, we need to absorb more people into the formal land registry?Alain; Right, yeah, I like your idea of democratizing the land market. That's exactly what you have to do. Now how do you do that? I will give you an example. In Indonesia where I worked again, when the government started investing in the Kampungs, which were slums at the time, you know, pretty bad slumps, actually, but providing the infrastructure in those slums, you know, I was working for the World Bank at the time. And we insisted that they should survey this informal area, and give tenure to everybody, even people who had only say 10 square meters of land. And then the Indonesian told us, that will cost a lot of money, it will be very, very long to do because, you know, all the streets are crooked and things like that it's very difficult to survey. And they say, why don't we just accept the informal market. And it took a long time for us to accept, and then we accepted it. And then we realized that after people were giving water, you know, clean running water in those slums, they had a bill to pay for water. And the bill was a substitute for tenure because they have an address. You have an informal market which becomes formal, because it was legal, because people could do it. So you have to legalize. It doesn't mean necessarily that we have to have a registry in the cadastral, in the formal cadastral, because that may take 20 years. In a way, the Kampung in Indonesia, you could consider an entire neighbourhood as a condominium. So it's a condominium and within this condominium, you establish the rules which are specific to the condominium. And then let people trade. They know what is the boundary of their lot, usually, they're very small. And everybody knows that and says, if you have three or four witnesses, you will have a piece of paper. And little by little, then you could formalize it. But I think that recognizing the informal trading of land, making it legal, and including, by the way, we found then in the Kampung that even banks now accept as a title, just the water bill. you know, there is a water bill, Mr So and so during last five years had paid this water bill at this address, and you know, you don't have the former survey, but you know, the lot is, say 50 square meter, and a bank will accept that as collateral, because it's recognized by the government, it's not going to be bulldozed. The problem with informal settlements is that sometimes the government will just go through and bulldoze that area, or put a highway through, and do not compensate people because they do not recognize the legitimacy of their claim. And so if you do that, then, of course, you create an enormous uncertainty on tenure. You do not encourage people to invest in their own neighbourhood. And of course, banks will never touch it, because you know, if they learn something, and then a highway goes through and there is no compensation. So I think that integrating the informal sector, not necessarily making it formal in the sense that they have to follow the same rule as the formal, but have special role for the informal sector to make it legal. And then look at land use regulation. That's been my problem all over the world. And that's true, by the way, in New York or Paris, that there are standards for housing which are not really reflective of what people want. For instance, in New York, the government imposed by regulation, larger apartments than what people want. You know, there are a lot of people now in New York who are living alone who are a small couple with only one child or no child and the regulation do not reflect that, that those people will be very happy to live in a studio and they are not allowed to build a studio. So I think it's the same in developing countries. If you are poor, you can live with your family in 10 square meters, but if that 10 square meters is close to jobs and have, again, access to clean water, and if there is a school nearby, this is what is important. And you should be able to live there legally, you know, legally without the threat of being exploited or things like that. And again, you know, you were mentioning at the beginning housing deficits, right. I don't believe in housing deficit. Deficit is only, what is your minimum standard for a house? Have you measured all the houses in Lagos to know which ones are below the standard? And what are your minimum standards? You know, is it 10 square meters? Is it 100 square meters? Do you need two bathrooms? For instance, the UN have this thing, I think you have to have, I think it's one room per person or one-half person per room or something like that. And if it's below that, it's a slum, and it's informal. It's a deficit in the housing, I don't think it is. By definition, all the people who live in Lagos live in something they can afford. The problem with housing is that they can afford very, very little, and there's no water and no electricity, maybe, I don't know. And so you have to increase the consumption of housing of the people who are already living there, it is not a question of saying this is not housing, we need to build a new house somewhere to compensate for this house. So I think that the idea of deficit, you know, doesn't lead you to good policy. It's too abstract. You could say, you know, in Lagos, for instance, we can produce only, I don't know, 20 litres of clean water per capita, per day. And so we want, of course, to increase it to, for instance, 60 or 80 or 100. And then you will need to bring more clean water or use more clean water in Lagos, that's legitimate. Let's say you have a deficit of water in the sense that you want to increase the consumption of water. Now, when you do that, you will have to look at the income distribution curve within the city, you know, but in my book, I have several of those curves, and you will have to see if you increase the supply of water in Lagos, you have to make sure that the ones who increase their consumption are the ones now who consume very little. And so you increase their consumption. So you have to measure the consumption of these different groups. Clearly to increase consumption is not to build more houses. And people will build [for] themselves more houses if there is enough land with infrastructure. So the goal of the city is to develop more land with infrastructure.Tobi;So urban planners are by nature very practical people, but I'm going to ask you a bit of an abstract question. Do you think part of the problem with this housing thing is that on some level we do not really respect or extend that abstract idea of property rights to poor people? Is that part of the problem?Alain;Absolutely. Absolutely. I think there is a paternalism, let's say, of the elite, who consider that poor people will always be dependent on a social program. And in a way, you have a society that largely lives on markets. But then you try to condemn the poor into a kind of non-market things, you know, like putting them in public housing or saying well, wait for public housing, we are going to provide you with public housing, you know, don't worry about it. So they are in a socialist system with no property rights. You know, their property rights is going to be given to them by the government, it's not something they will acquire by themselves. So you have these two societies, and then it creates a poverty trap for the poor, you know, they cannot escape because they never accumulate capital. They cannot invest in their own house because their house belongs to the government, [it] doesn't belong to them. So I think that, yes, it's a problem of poverty right. And very often also, many cities have colonized poverty right only if you have a lot developed very formally of a certain size, you know, they will not allow people to own land if the parcel is not at least 200 square meter or 500 square meters, I don't know. And this is not correct. You know, if somebody owns 100 square meters, you should recognize that this ownership is 100 square meters because if not, if you put this minimum threshold of ownership, that means you exclude from ownership half of the population of your city, and you make them live in a non-market economy while the rest of the economy is working on the markets.Tobi; Let's talk a bit about density. So when I travel to New York City, I enjoyed the fact that from my hotel, I can access a cafe, I can access the cinema, I can go to my appointments, possibly all within a walking distance of 15 to 20 minutes. Alain; Yes.Tobi; That is something that I don't have in my city. Sometimes if I want to see a movie from my house, I have to drive two, sometimes two and a half hours. So how can cities in... I don't like that phrase developing world, but that's what I'll use for now. I don't like it. So how can our cities, and by us I mean cities like Lagos and co., better optimize for density or [as] I'm also seeing, ideas by some other planners or thinkers in that space saying that perhaps some of these cities have to give up on the idea of density altogether? So?Alain; Controlling densities, yeah, you see, every land use regulation, control density, tend to put density down, always. You have a minimum lot size. So some people would like to have a small lot, but they are obliged to have a bigger lot because that's the regulation. And then you have the floor ratio or maximum height of buildings. I think that the height of buildings should be removed. So planners say ah, ah but if we do that, we will not have the infrastructure to serve higher densities. Infrastructure is much cheaper than land, always. Much cheaper than land. So what engineers are doing, they are saying, Hey, you have now a water pipe, which is only that big. Therefore, the density cannot be more than that, because we will not have enough water if the density increases. But they are making a trade-off between land and the price of your pipe. And land is more expensive, and more useful. So I think that if they let the density increase, of course, they have to have a system of taxation on land. But again, if they recognize the ownership of land to a lot of people, they can have a type of property tax or something like that which will allow them to have the resource to pay for the infrastructure. And it's always cheaper to increase the level of infrastructure in [an] existing area, to increase the capacity than to expand further away. So if your regulation restricts densities, it means that people will have to build somewhere else, you know, further away. And they're not going to leave the city because the planners say the density here is restricted to that, they are going to stay there but they are going to live further away and at lower densities. So many of those regulations should be audited. I'm not saying that all regulations are bad, not at all, I think the markets need regulation. But the regulation which regulates consumption, that the people themselves can see... you know, if I go into a studio which is 20 square meter, I know it's 20 square meters, if I want to rent it to buy it, this is my business, the government do not have to tell me, No, no, a studio has to be certain square meter, or at least you cannot buy 20 square meters, this is absurd. Let the consumer decide what is best for them. Because then they can... you know, the problem you were mentioning, they can make a trade-off between living in a smaller house but closer to amenities, or a large house far away from everything, you know, some people may prefer that. So regulation restricts the choice. And of course, regulation, because they have this minimum consumption standards, if you look at the income distribution curve, those minimum construction housing standards have a cost. So they eliminate automatically, maybe 50% of the population from anything formal. You know, informality is really created by regulation. It's not created by anything else.Tobi; I want to talk about, perhaps, maybe, there is a kind of market failure in trying to deliver density. Devon Zuegel, I'm sure you're aware [because] she is your friend, wrote...Alain; She's my friend, yes. Tobi; She wrote a blog post a couple of days ago...Alain; I read it, yes.Tobi; Very interesting. I found it very interesting. And while read in that I, because i liked it...Alain; Yeah, Devon, in the last line of her thing [blog], she says, I have not discussed regulation. And my experience is that most of the inconsistencies or contradictions of densities in cities are due to regulations. And I will argue with her about that. You know, that she has to do a blog on regulation.Tobi; I would love to read that because while internalizing the idea she was putting forward, I thought about my street. So I live on a beautiful street. There is access to a major road and so many other amenities. it's gated well secured and all that. But we have just nine houses. Landlords built these huge compound houses. And I can't help but think, every time I go back and forth, that this is an area that can actually house a lot more people. So would you say that's a failure of markets because I think that equilibrium came to be because the first settlers on my streets prefer building for space as opposed to access?Alain; Yeah, but that's not a failure of markets. The market is a mechanism. It's not a god, it's not a religion, it's a mechanism. So here you have people in your compound who live there because they enjoy having low density. And I hope that they paid for it, they didn't steal the lot. So they paid for it? And so that reflects the market. At a certain point, if there is demand for higher density there, a developer will come to your compound and say, I'm making a deal with you, you know, I will give you that much money, and we are going to build more houses here. Unless. Unless there is a regulation which says you cannot have more houses there, or unless the water company tell you, we will never provide enough water in this area for higher density. You know, there are market failures, by the way, but I don't think that density is part of market failures. I think the market predicts rational densities if they are free to [build]. So let us talk about market failure. For instance, pollution is a market failure, you know, there is no way to decrease pollution directly through markets. I mean, you can do it by taxing polluting cars more than non-polluting cars, you know, this you can do, but you have to address it through market mechanism. But the market itself is not going to create a non-polluting thing. The same with global warming, you know, you have to price carbon. The government has to put a price on carbon because the market will not go into putting a price on carbon. That's clear. And then for major infrastructure, for instance, say, if a large city like Lagos needs more water, you know, enough water, clean water for everybody, you need major work to get the water somewhere - from a river, from a deep well, I don't know. And this major work is not going to be created by markets. The government could use a private company to do it. But the initiative has to come from the government, to say we need that many millions of cubic meters of water in the next 10 years. And our engineers say that to do that, we need to have, say, deep well, or whatever water plants, and that will cost that many million dollars. And that will be recovered from taxation. So it could be tax on land, it could be tax on income tax, I don't know. And then we have to do this major work somewhere in the city or in the suburb of the city where you will have the water plant. So all this is not done by markets, the total amount of water which will be brought to [households] has to be done by government, it has to be planned. And after, you will allow the land market to work. If you are allowed to put a network of pipes with water everywhere, including in areas which are not yet developed, including areas which have very low density but could not densify without more water.Tobi; Finally on housing before I move on, do you think that some of [the] newer propositions or technologies like blockchain, for example, hold any promise in terms of land registration, and generally democratizing property rights in cities?Alain; It's quite possible. I am not knowledgeable about [blockchain]. I'm very interested and intrigued by blockchain but I have not seen an example yet. But it's quite possible that yes, this could do it. Yes. You know, at the beginning I was talking about the problem of formal cadastral you know, the traditional property rights [that is] given the cadastral way [where] you have a surveyor from the government who starts taking [measuring] things, and this is very slow, it's very costly to do. It's possible that there are better ways of doing it. And it's possible that blockchain will be [it] but I've not seen an example yet, but it's possible and it might be a good way to start in a city like Lagos, just to try it, see [if it works].Tobi; Interesting. So let's talk about charter cities. I know you're very good friends with Paul Romer. I became intrigued by the idea when I first saw his presentation. And I've sort of followed how that idea developed. But first of all, why do you think some of these projects failed? The one in Honduras and Madagascar? Yeah. What do you think were the pitfalls?Alain; Because government were not ready to allow a [...] charter city, they saw that as just a new real estate development, and they thought that they could control it. And if the existing government control it, it means it's going to be a traditional city, it's not going to be a charter city. I think that in Honduras it was very clear. In Madagascar, I'm less aware of the details. But in Honduras, I follow the [development]. By the way, there are several new charter cities in Honduras now, I'm curious to see if they will succeed or not. Actually, Devon is involved in one of them. And I'm curious... sometimes I'm a little uneasy when I see that one of the first things that the promoter of a new charter city [does] is asking a big architect to put the design first. To me, a charter city is, again, developed land, and the possibility that you were talking about the beginning, democratising land ownership. That means that if you move to a charter city, and you want to open a small restaurant where you will sell sandwiches to workers, you should be able to either rent or buy a little piece of land where you will build your restaurant. You should not go through the government and say I want to open a restaurant, please give me a permit. So for me, a charter city is first a layout of streets, not building, you know, it's a layout of streets where you can buy very small pieces of land. And you can buy some big one, you know, maybe a department store or an office building so they want a big lot, that's fine. But there should be small lots available to people who move there. Because, again, the indispensable people are not only bankers and architects and lawyers. Indispensable people are the people making sandwiches. And so I think that one of the problems is that they have to start with the layout, and making land available to all sorts of people, including very small lots. And I think that will work. Now, my argument was Paul for the first part of your question, but when we first discuss it, you know, when we started working together, and he told me, well, we think that we could do 50 charter cities, you know. My first reaction is, cities are dictated by location and there are no more locations for 50 cities. The good locations are all taken. So if you want to start from scratch, you go to the countryside, and, you know, you have some farmers there even and you say, Oh, the land is very cheap there because there is nothing, why don't we do a charter city? In Lagos land is so expensive. Don't forget that a city is people, it's not the sewers. You're not going to move to a city because it has a nice sewer system, you are going to move to a city because there are jobs, because there are other people you want to work with or be friends with. So the problem with any new city is, who is the first one? Would you leave Lagos for, let's take NEOM in Saudi Arabia (the city that the Saudis want to build) Tobi; Yeah. Alain; So if I told you, okay, in NEOM we could give you a house for $50,000 and it has this fantastic infrastructure. Would you leave Lagos to go there? Unless you know how many people are already there? Are you going to move by yourself or with your family? And you don't know if the schools are working? You don't know if there are restaurants or bars there, you know, [finding] bars in Saudi Arabia is always a problem. [laughs]And so you see, that's the problem. I have an example to explain the problem of a new city. In South Korea, they thought that Seoul was too large, and they thought that they would build a satellite town which will be self-sufficient. So they calculate how many jobs they will need, how much housing and the Koreans are very good at that, they really planned it extremely well, it was financed very well too. They matched exactly the number of jobs and they use the demographic, everything. And they're very good at logistics too. So they built the school, the sewer, the transport, the buses, all at the same time and well done. And it was nice architecture. So the idea was it will be self-sufficient [and] that the people who live there will work there. When the city is fully built and inhabited, they found that 90% of the people who live there commute to Seoul. They work in Seoul, but they live in the New City; and the people who have jobs there, they come from Seoul, they live in Seoul but they work in the New City. Why that? Why didn't they manage to match the thing? It's a question of the first inhabitants. When the plan is finished and the thing is ready to be sold, they told firms in Korea, well, you know, if you want to establish yourself here, you could have a factory of this and it will cost that much and you will pay that much more for electricity, So very attractive. So the firms say, Hey, we are in Seoul right now, but we want to expand, and in Seoul, we cannot expand because land is too expensive, so let's move to this new city where we'll something more modern. Now, these firms, if they have the money to move to the new city, completely new, it means that they already have employees, they have [an existing] business. So they are not going to fire their employees and say we are going to recruit entirely new employees. So the employees which are already in Seoul, working in the old site are going to commute to this. Now, why don't they say oh, we have this new job there and we are going to move into an apartment in the new city? Because where they are now, maybe they have their mother-in-law who is babysitting their kid and they cannot move. Or maybe they have a school that they like a lot for their children. And they don't want to move their children to a new school which has no record. You know, there are a lot of reasons why people don't want to move, or maybe because there are a couple and one of them is working in the neighbourhood and do not want to commute. So the new firms are attracting existing employees from outside and the people who take housing there... you know, if you are a young couple in Seoul, you are desperately looking for a new apartment, but it's too expensive and suddenly, they propose you a nice apartment in the new city... Now, you will need an hour 20-minute commute but you think well, this is a really nice apartment, there will be a nice school so you move there with your family. But your job is in Seoul, you know, because if you can afford an apartment in the new city it's because you already have a job. So you're not going to quit your job and say, Well, I've moved to the new city, I'm going to look for a job in the New City. Maybe after 20 years, you will do that. But initially, you won't. So you see this is a problem of new cities and that will include charter cities unless the charter city becomes so attractive in terms of, again, the democratization of land use, and of property rights. But again, you have the problem of the first mover, you see. So that's why cities like maybe Abuja or Brasilia are successful because they are civil servants so they are obliged to go there. And the government pays for it and all the taxpayers, by the way, all the taxpayers of Nigeria are paying for Abuja.Tobi; Yeah, that much is true. Alain; Yeah. And this is true also for Brasilia, you know, the people who live in Brasilia are not paying for their infrastructure, it's the Brazilians who live in Recife or Rio de Janeiro who are paying for that. So, you see, those examples are not very good examples - the new capitals. The other thing which is very difficult, and I saw that when I was working in China in a new economic zone which usually piggybacks on a city is the cash flow. You know, when you build a new city, there are certain things that are discrete, you know, for instance, you cannot build a sewer plant for 500 people, you are obliged to build a sewer plant for at least 10,000 people or 20,000 people and when you build that you have to spend for 10,000 people but you will not get 10,000 people before five or six years. So you pay interest on this capital for five or 10 years. So you have a negative cash flow for a long time and that is [for] the sewer plant but that's true for schools, that's true for roads, that's true for the water system, that's true for garbage removal, you know. You need right away to bring trucks to remove the garbage to treat it and before you have [enough] inhabitants. So you have to pay a lot of interest. My experience in developing a new economic zone in China was that the cost of interest during construction (that means the cost of interest before the lots were sold to the private sector) represents sometimes 40% of the entire expenditure. So this negative cash flow, if it's a private city, by the way, you have bankers, so the banker, let's say, trusts you. And they say, all right, you have planned to have, say 1000 people, the second year at 10,000 people, the fifth year... and then 100,000 people in 15 years. So they trust your business plan, but then imagine that it's a little slow at coming. So you are borrowing more and more money, and at the same time the bankers get cold feet, and they say, we are not going to go roll over your loan, because you know, your thing… it's too risky, you are accumulating a negative cash flow much longer than we thought. And then they will cut your finance, and then you will go bankrupt. And that's why the most successful new cities are capitals because the entire country is paying the bill, you know, money was no object.Tobi; Does this mean you're bearish on private cities generally? So I'll give you some examples. And I'll try to be brief. For example, in Lagos, there was this project called the Eko Atlantic project. This was a land that was basically reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean, it raised $6 billion, right. And at the end of the day, they ended up building office buildings for oil companies, banks and skyscraper apartments that cost $2 million. Almost nobody goes there to work, which fails the labour market condition in my view, right. There was also the story of Gurgaon, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right. In India... Alain; A suburb of Delhi. Yes, yes.Tobi; Yeah. So, where, maybe it was partly driven by the labour market, the tech workers and private firms. But we saw that they could not deliver on things like the sewer system... public goods investments failed woefully. But the common thread in some of these narratives and initiatives, and of course, you know that private cities are very, very hot right now in Silicon Valley...Alain; Yes. SureTobi; Is to look at Shenzhen and say, oh, yeah, this was a fishing village of 30,000 people... Alain; Yes, yes. Right. Yeah. Tobi; And it's now the manufacturing capital of the world, the centre of technology with 50 million people. So are you bearish on private cities generally, that was one? Secondly, what are we missing from the Shenzhen story?Alain; You know, Shenzhen by the way, I know it well, because when it was a little more than a fishing village, I was working for the World Bank… the Chinese invited me there with the team. We were five or six planners and economists. So at the time, it was about 300,000 people, but dispersed, it was not really a big city. And they say we want to build the city of, at the time they say, 4 million people and we want the World Bank to finance it. And this is one skeleton in my closet. I told them you are too ambitious. If you want to build a city of two million, up to 2 million, you know, I made a back of an envelope calculation, I say look 2 million is a city is so large, so fast [and] would be impossible because of logistics. You will not have enough trucks, it will be impossible and I was wrong. So after that, I followed because I was spectacularly wrong. I followed what happened in Shenzhen I went there regularly and you know what created Shenzhen? First, location. You know I was telling you at the beginning [about] location. They have a deep port. A natural deep port in Shenzhen and you know the rocks are going there. And it's next to Hong Kong. Hong Kong port is already saturated. They are at a coveting distance from Hong Kong. So when they want somebody very specialized - an architect, an engineer - at the time when they built it, that was in '83, you know, when I was there, '83-'84, the needed manpower will commute from Hong Kong. They will spend maybe the night in Shenzhen and go back. And then you have the Pearl River Delta on the other side of Hong Kong, you had Guangzhou, you know, which is a very important city too. So, they are in between. Now. The major thing which did the success of Shenzhen was Deng Xiaoping [who] for the first time in the history of China, put a line around Shenzhen and say within this area, the firms are going to pay the workers according to [the] market, and people who come to Shenzhen will negotiate their salary with their employers, depending on their skill. In China before that, if you were, say, a geologist, at 30 years old, the government will say your pay is this per month, period. If you are a welder, the government will say, for entire China, this is your pay, and the government will decide where you will be employed. You have no labour market, there was no labour market in China, you know, people were unemployed, but the government tells them where to [work]. Even the kid coming out of high school, the government will say you're going to work in this factory for the rest of your life. Now, in Shenzen, for the first time, you had the labour market, and a lot of Chinese coming from the north, from all over China (the ones who were the most courageous, you know, [it's] a bit like migrants coming to Lagos are the most courageous in a way that, you know, it's a selection of people) they decided that they were trusting their own skill, they say, we'd rather work and negotiate our salary and change employment when we want rather than stay with it. So you had an influx of people, of talent, from all over China. And that's why, you know, Shenzhen is in an area where everybody speaks Cantonese, normally, you know, in the south of China, like Hong Kong or Guangzhou, but you will find that, in Shenzen, most people speak Mandarin, because they came from all over China. They didn't [all] come from there, [the southern part]...some people from Guangzhou, obviously, from the Pearl River Delta, but say the language that you hear the most is Mandarin because they came from all over. So, you see, what created the enormous success of Shenzhen was the market. It was the labour market. It was the first time you had the labour market in China. And then after that, they used experiment, and you had that, you know. And by the way, housing, also… it was the first housing on the market that people will be paid at the market price, but then with their salary, they will have to pay for housing. Where before in China, housing was provided by your employer entirely. That means that you have no mobility and you have no capital either, by the way. You cannot leave your job because if you leave your job, you have no savings, and you have no house. So that's the story of Shenzhen, and do not forget the location. Look at the container port of Shenzhen, it is one of the best in the world and it's because location, you know, it's even better than Hong Kong. It's larger than Hong Kong's. In Hong Kong, they have to do a lot of land reclamation, whereas [in Shenzhen], it's natural. They don't need to dredge it or anything, you know, it's a natural beauty. So that's the story. So I am not bearish. You know, I like the idea of trying new cities and private cities, I think that's a good thing. But let's say, you know, just to think that if you have a good infrastructure, you know, [when] building [a] new city, they say, Oh, we will have this fantastic system for removing garbage by vacuum and things like that, this is good and well. If the city is reasonably clean, that's good enough, you know, and you don't move to a city because the garbage is vacuumed. You move to a city because there is a good job, the city's attractive, you have bars, cinemas, and you know, whatever, if you'd like to go jogging or things like that, you have nice parks. But you move to a city mostly because of the people who live there. So the question of new cities, how do you attract a lot of people right away in the beginning? Who will be the guinea pig to live in this new city? And then there is the financial aspect, you know, this cash flow, you need to have a lot of money in advance to finance it because bankers will get cold feet. Maybe I've been talking too much and not [...] enough questions. I enjoy it. That was very interesting. I hope maybe we can do it again sometime.Tobi; Okay. Thank you very much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

Devon Zuegel, the creator of GitHub Sponsors, tells the story of how an email rant to Nat Friedman on the eve of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub turned into the most popular way to fund open source. She also shares her thoughts on different models of paying for software and where the future of the code economy is headed.Show notes & transcript: about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/devon-zuegel/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

Tech product designers could learn from the immense challenges of designing cities. Devon joins Adam and Mark to share her knowledge and passion on urban design and economics. Theey discuss how open source communities compare to cities; historical preservation versus growth and change; the messy middle of public and private goods; wi-fi spectrum ownership; and what to do when the neighbor's new building puts shade on your vegetable garden. @MuseAppHQ hello@museapp.com Show notes Devon Zuegel / @devonzuegel Order without Design (book) Order Without Design (podcast) episode on Seattle and Berlin urban economics, planning, and design The World Bank Venture funding in 2020 Paris city walls path dependence Miami Art Deco historic protection centrally-planned economy TCP/IP Manhattan street grid plan (1811) Eminent Domain 1960s highway revolts Discretionary Review Berlin rent cap artistocracy San Francisco's privately-owned public spaces (POPOS) LinkedIn public cafe Sacré-Cœur Basilica La Défense Paris business district biography of Gustave Eiffel first-past-the-post voting seasteading charter cities Special Economic Zone Shenzen electromagnetic spectrum auction Georgism universal basic income air rights Prospectus On Próspera voxel zoning laws in Japan no on-street parking in Tokyo The High Cost of Free Parking A History of Future Cities City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism

Tech product designers could learn from the immense challenges of designing cities. Devon joins Adam and Mark to share her knowledge and passion on urban design and economics. Theey discuss how open source communities compare to cities; historical preservation versus growth and change; the messy middle of public and private goods; wi-fi spectrum ownership; and what to do when the neighbor's new building puts shade on your vegetable garden. @MuseAppHQ hello@museapp.com Show notes Devon Zuegel / @devonzuegel Order without Design (book) Order Without Design (podcast) episode on Seattle and Berlin urban economics, planning, and design The World Bank Venture funding in 2020 Paris city walls path dependence Miami Art Deco historic protection centrally-planned economy TCP/IP Manhattan street grid plan (1811) Eminent Domain 1960s highway revolts Discretionary Review Berlin rent cap artistocracy San Francisco's privately-owned public spaces (POPOS) LinkedIn public cafe Sacré-Cœur Basilica La Défense Paris business district biography of Gustave Eiffel first-past-the-post voting seasteading charter cities Special Economic Zone Shenzen electromagnetic spectrum auction Georgism universal basic income air rights Prospectus On Próspera voxel zoning laws in Japan no on-street parking in Tokyo The High Cost of Free Parking A History of Future Cities City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism

I am a mentor for the Notion Advanced track of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Cohort 12. This is the cleaned up audio of the second of 5 mentorship sessions with Q&A at the end. The first session was last week.Recommended reads PARA: https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/  Blogpost Annealing: https://www.swyx.io/blogpost-annealing/ Twitter as Universal Meta-Commentary Layer: https://www.swyx.io/twitter-metacommentary/ Digital Garden TOS: https://www.swyx.io/digital-garden-tos/ Devon Zuegel on Epistemic Status: https://devonzuegel.com/post/epistemic-statuses-are-lazy-and-that-is-a-good-thing Slides and Video.Timestamps Prelude [00:00:00] Housekeeping [00:01:09] Content Recap [00:02:34]  Q&A: Constancy/Consistency [00:11:17]  Q&A: Maintaining the Second Brain [00:14:34] Q&A: Weaknesses of PARA [00:17:55] Q&A: Broken Links in Notion [00:19:16]  Q&A: Automation with Zapier [00:22:34] SMART Goals [00:23:25] Denormalizing Notes [00:25:01] Open Source Knowledge [00:28:27] Brag Documents [00:29:28] Just Do It [00:30:57] Q&A: How do you share in public? [00:31:45] Q&A: Atomicity/Denormalization [00:34:02] Q&A: Why Notion? [00:37:33] Q&A: Book writing? [00:38:28] First Wrapup [00:40:23]  Q&A: Twitter Links Extension [00:42:30] Q&A: Chrome Extensions [00:43:33] Q&A: How do you balance research and writing? [00:44:39] Q&A: Converting Resources to Projects [00:47:37] Q&A: Video/Audio Capture [00:49:11] Q&A: Speaking [00:50:39] Q&A: Writing My Book [00:52:58] TranscriptPrelude [00:00:00]swyx: [00:00:00] Why PARA? Have you considered why only four letters? I really liked the thought process going into that.  That's actually touched upon in the blog post. I'm not sure that you covered it in the lectures, but I think it's just really great to have something that's barely minimal enough that it covers the span of everything that we organize our information because I think in past attempts, I know I have probably, this is a common experience, you try to organize all the things and then you have like 15 different categories to spot stuff in and you just get overwhelmed because  you're like, I don't know where to put stuff in. So the second week, week two is really about organization. So that's what we're trying to optimize for.And that's what PARA is. Christopher says some of the mentors have modified the acronym shock. What, what modifications have they said?  Some mentors only have PAR or PA. Yeah.  I will say my A and my R are merged, Maria says PTARA for tasks with silent T that's. Cool. Yeah, because you do need tasks as well.  So I'll mention something about your calendar as a to-do list, because that's pretty important. Someone should blog about that because then you scoop Tiago. Alright. Okay. So I'm going to get started and I'm going to try to keep the chat alive. Housekeeping [00:01:09]This is a little bit stressful as always, cause I'm not used to such a big zoom but thanks for everyone for making the time on the weekend. This is the notion advanced group that I lead. It's Sundays at 5:00 PM, as you might know. And it's a very developer focused the meet up because there are a lot of developers in BASB, but we do try to keep it generally accessible. Part and just I'm going to give an agenda that's happening cause last time it didn't. So you know what to expect and you can jump off  if you have other stuff going on. So we're going to do a little bit of content recap. I got very positive feedback from last week about what did we cover this week? From my point of view, and then we'll talk a little bit about projects versus areas. I'll give some extra content around what I think para is. I don't have, I didn't modify the acronym. That's a very smart move. I wasn't smart enough to think about that. And then we'll just have a general Q&A . Last time we went for 90 minutes, this one, we try to keep it to an hour, but.Some housekeeping, the three rules that we have from zero, because we start at zero in this house stupid questions are welcome Second rule Often beats perfect. So don't try to do it right, but I try to do the best, just do it a lot and you'll find that you do more than if you try to do the best and third rule this is a discussion, not a lecture, so I'm not an expert and I don't have the right answer. And I fully welcome people here to answer questions that other people have asked, because I don't know the right answer as well. So it's a discussion that I'm  facilitating. So that's the framing that I want to set for this session. Content Recap [00:02:34] Okay. So now into the content recap I'm just basically going to pick the three best slides that I thought really represented this week. So if you remember nothing else from this week, hopefully you remember these slides.So the primary thing I think that everyone needs to get from this week is that completed creative projects by the oxygen of your second brain. In other words, action. Right. Or what did someone say at the start of the session, christopher said, para is a methodology to organize the action ability, basically like optimize for taking action, nothing else matters.And your system needs to help you get there. And your second brain has helped me get there. I like the metaphor of oxygen because without oxygen, your second brain is going to starve. And I definitely find that very true of myself. We all have stuff, we haven't competed. And then we just reinforced this identity of a person who does not complete projects. So the smaller your ambitions the more you can feed them the more you have reinforces image of someone who completes projects and you get more done. This is PARA in one slide, very ambitious. I basically wanted to summarize, what the main aspects of PARAwe should have for those who might've missed it. I did share the slide deck, so you don't have to screenshot or anything. So I'm going to share that in the chat right now. Well, it's actually P stands for projects, A stands for Area, R stands for resource and archive is basically inactive  items from all three categories. And one of the key insights is that it's arranged in order for more actionable to less actionable.And the other order that you see as well is that there are less projects in there. There should be the most number of archives. So I think if you saw Tiago live session, he showed you his own Evernote where he actually showed like the number of projects was like 5% of the total number of notes that he was taking and yet hundreds of archives.And that's what the rough order that you shouldn't taking it. Things can also move fluidly between categories. So something to start off as a project and then broaden out into an area and eventually make his way to an archive, but he can also make us wait the other way. So that's the purpose of this blue and green circle things that's going on. And then finally, the thing that he wanted to really drive home with the project list was that the project should be connected to a goal. And a goal should be connected to a project and the project without a goal is a hobby. And then go without a project. It's a dream because you don't have plans to accomplish it.So that's para in a slide for me. I that's why I like  asking people to summarize what para is, because I think it's a very personal thing because it's the way you organize your information. But I think trying to have a decent summary of what para is for other people helps you internalize it as well.Partially why I'm doing this mentorship thing. Okay. So I think there's something that people have really tried to struggle with is the difference between projects and areas. That's something that toggle mentioned, in, in David Allen's book, getting things done. He mentioned that the people can surprisingly have a lot of difficulty separating between projects and areas. So project has an outcome to achieve, and it hasn't been like, whereas an area has a standard with no deadline,  but as per the standard quality while we were at 50 people already. Okay. So, I just want to share people. Yes. Someone asked me just like that again, it's down here.But I just want to see in the chat a little bit This week, your homework was to figure out your project list  and sort your stuff into projects that areas. So what are some examples of projects that you have identified for yourself? If you can just share in the chat that'd be really great. I just want to see people's projects and I can give more examples if you want.  Dennis's project is a weekly podcast episode.Very nice, man. He says tax filing for 2020. I hope he got that done. Cause I think the deadline was tomorrow or Friday. I got my, I thought that I thought the tax filing deadline was April 15th. So I got my deadline there. I think everyone should have a extension automatic extension for tech solving.Sam Wong says crypto training and seminar. That's excellent. Excellent. So all of these have defined deadlines except for Dennis. Dennis has a weekly podcast episode. Arguably that's not a project it's not specific enough. It has to be this week's podcast episode. Yani is project. Very good. I was hoping for this on and Karen as well. What would them, once you complete the ASB and have a functional second Brain by June obviously that's something that we all hope to get you to at the end of the day Maria says she wants to work on newsletter volume three. Peter brace has a very specific work within the deal. Close the deal with jet Beck. Good luck, Peter. I hope you close that deal. I'm working on a couple of deals at work as well, and Yeah, well is out of my control sometimes. You just, once you've done all the paperwork, yeah. Okay. Slobodan an interesting one, implement power for kids and powerful family.So this is another level of,  once you really internalize para, you want to do it for work. You want to do it for family. You want to do it for kids. It's super interesting. Just, take it easy.  It's a long game. Okay. And Christopher Horn wants to refactor notes. Is that what Gaston by me, 16th? Yeah, have a deadline. And see a lot of people with desired outcomes, but make sure you have a deadline, make sure it's not too far in the future. And if it's too big you gotta break it down. You go more to something  achievable because of the motivational factor of completing projects.Oh, we do have a question from Sam Wong. I think this is relevant to Dennis. The other person want to do podcasts. So Sam Wong's question is how do you handle monthly tasks, invoicing, for example, it is a project when it repeats.Yeah. So you have an area of responsibility, which is a would you say standard to be maintained and it doesn't have a deadline. It just keeps repeating, but it spins out projects every month. That is one way to think about it. But obviously if it's a task, like if it's, if it can be done in one session then it's less of a project and more like a task that you can probably knock it out in five minutes or something.Then yeah, that's why I think people, when they establish a fifth category apart from PARA probably the other one that makes sense is T the task category. So, we'll talk about that at the end. But essentially I just put it on my calendar as like thing I need to get done. There's no point having a to-do lists because the to-do lists.It very wishy-washy it doesn't actually set aside time. So you might as well use your calendar as a, to do this. That's the I'm giving away the ending there, but that's, that's really the conclusion. Okay. I had some feature quotes from this one this week. I thought this week where it's particularly quote worthy, I like collecting quotes. And in fact, if you notice in the circle community, there is a section just for quotes. And I think quotes can help you really crystallize some of the learnings. And that's why I wanted to focus on some, but please feel free to share also in the chat some course that you liked Or did it stuck in your head?You don't have to get it precisely right. But try to remember some quotes because you're going to have to repeat them for yourself, for other people. So one thing I think people don't focus on enough is the importance of archiving. So this is why I want to feature this quote here. We can not do our best thinking when all the information from the past is cutting our attention.That's why that archive stuff is so crucial. Right? That's actually the first thing that he showed how to do in his live demo. The other thing, and this is very much in line with, well, number one, I think that we had the value. It doesn't come from the tool. It comes to you using it repeated thing. So despite people really identifying themselves by the tool, right? Like, we are the notion group. Then they're getting teams that the wrong group and never the Twain shall meet. It's less about the tool because the tool will come and go and it's more budgets getting more use out of the tool. Same for blogs, by the way, a lot of people resolve to start a blog and then they'll write the blog.And they'll say like, you know how I wrote this blog? The first book was a bit of a world. Of course, second blog would be how I meet this blog. And then third blog posts would be, sorry, it's been a while since I last updated. And that blog will be less updated as a two years ago. So definitely, well, you don't want to have that kind of thing where you're, over-invested picking the tool and then you never use it.Okay. So, and then difference between projects in areas, projects of sprints areas and marathons. So you do want to go for sustainability in areas and then projects juggle says, give it everything you've got. That may be a little bit harsh, but  I do definitely sprint a lot for some something projects, which a lot of should have blogging.Right. But also when I published my book last year I realized I didn't. I didn't introduce that part of myself but for those one year two micro yes. Part of the reason why this is an advanced group for BSB is that I do definitely want to people to ship and even make money from shipping.So if you, if your intent is to publish a video or a book something from as a capstone for this course, this is the right group for you. And I'm definitely open to questions about that. Okay. Finally, a project without a goal is a hobby. You go without a project is a dream. That's not something we covered earlier and completed creative project. So the oxygen of your second brain. So that's that those are the quotes that I pulled out. I do definitely encourage you to save your own quotes. That's probably one of my main research areas or  just like collecting quotes, I do like collecting quotes and questions.Okay. Brief reminder that you can also share your stuff here in, in the project list on, on the circle. And I think it's a very good motivational tool to check out what other people are working on and how to how to see what's what's happening there. Q&A: Constancy/Consistency [00:11:17] Questions and discussion on this week's content in general.Speaker1: [00:11:20] So I raised my hand  on the interface, which I'm doing for the first time from an iPad. So I had to reach for it as well. My question is you were talking about the value of what I characterize as constancy, the repetition, the rigor that's my number one problem. And I don't know that I'm unique in that.There's always, I read somewhere that there's always this point when you're cultivating a new mental model or skillset or whatever, That works. It works, it works. And then all of a sudden, the old way that you used to be rears its head and tries to pull you back in and then you fall off of it. And I guess I'm wondering, based on anybody's feedback here, what is the best practice around achieving or cultivating or keeping that constancy?swyx: [00:12:00] Is there a reason you call it a constancy instead of consistency? Speaker1: [00:12:03] Because I'm weird. Okay. That's cool. I read a lot of, I read a lot of archaic texts and when I say constancy of probably drawing from Thomas Jefferson, which I was just reading this morning. Sorry. I apologize. swyx: [00:12:17] Wonderful. I mean, Hey, he's a good person to learn from. Does anyone have thoughts on constancy? Feel free to speak up?  I can give some thoughts, but I didn't want to take all the air in the room. Joseph I don't know how to pronounce the last name. Sorry. You need to form a habit, which means it takes around 60 days to form. I like that. So a lot of consistency or constancyis about identity.I like this. I like this thing about identity change that James Claire has. So he has this three circle thing. We're effectively doing some kind of behavior change and this is. This is effective for para is effective for capture and the other habits that you're going to learn in the other weeks of the class.So, it's around your identity, right? So check out this, there is a behavior change idea. So they're, three shells to your model, right? Like, so, there's your appearance, there's what you do. And then there's your identity, how you, how you think about yourself. So, you can try to be the person who do, who does like a hundred pushups in a row, or do PARA for 60 days. That's a very forced motivational thing. Like you can publicly commit to it. You can pay a charity and say like, if I don't know, if I don't complete this, I will lose some money.There are a lot of little tricks that really hack at the outward appearance of that. Then there's the performance, like the actual actions you take to ensure that you do that. So, so that can be like actually doing the thing. So instead of saying that you're doing it, you actually do the thing.But the one that really sticks with you is identity change. Once you to say, I am a person who does PARA for me, I am now a BSB mentor. Which means I am someone who just like inherently people can come to me to talk to for BASB advice. That has changed the way I approach BASB, because now it's part of my identity and someone who identifies as someone who's cause forming the habit was capturing this building a second, bring.You don't need some trick. It's just a thing that you do. If you're a religious person, you just go to church, you don't have some counter of like how many times I've been to church in a row. You just go. And if you it's okay to break it every now and then, but then you pick the rabbit up again because that's your identity.To me, that's the most motivational thing I don't need anything else, but joseph just let me have other thoughts as well. Yeah, peter says, I prefer to keep my identity inconsistent so that doesn't work too well for me. You do it, you are allowed to change your identity and that, that is a fluid concept. So yeah. Are there other forms of commitment to me work as well? Okay. Hopefully that was a decent start. Thank you for breaking the ice.Q&A: Maintaining the Second Brain [00:14:34] There was another question here, but I'm going to, I'm going to acknowledge Yanni, who has had her hand.Speaker2: [00:14:37] So I think it's actually probably can be a followup out the previous question that Christopher dresser mentioned. I think first of all, thank you so much for sharing the identity part, because I think that's a big owl consider as a principal that I can follow up.I can think of, but now the question is the implementation of that identity. I think I think about the consistency aspect of the second brain comes out the main tennis aspects. So I'm curious about how you maintain your second brain. I used to just unconsciously associate the main tenants as a reviewing process.It can be, but I'm just curious you, Shawn, as a person who creates a lot of value on a weekly or monthly basis, I'm curious how you're maintaining your second brain. At the implementation level. swyx: [00:15:20] Yeah, I knew I was going to be  asked this and I knew I was going to have a terrible answer for this. So Maria, you might want to do you might want to show your system in case I fail and crashed and burned, but I'm just going to be brutally honest. I don't do much maintenance. I I do rent, so I do have I have show this  in the past preview. So, these are resources. I don't. I started on with para and that was a year ago and things have evolved since then.So part of I've been told that it's actually a good idea to show people how para is used in real life, that it shows you that it's okay not to be perfect because Tiago is  perfect PARA.  So I do have projects. One of them is BASB mentoring, for example, that's what we're on today.And I do have resources that I share. I do have special categories of resources. These are just resources that I have for myself. But for example, when I worked at Amazon, I did have public resources that I shared is it public notion. And I think Sharon dozers, reusable resources are, is very helpful because it's no extra work on your part.Other people might find it very valuable. And I do encourage showing the resources as far as maintenance go, actually. The, so the other part of my system is simple note. I do a lot of review on weekends. So every Saturday I do my newsletter and the newsletter helps me triage things as they come in. And that goes in from right to left . From simple note, which is my quick access thing. That's always fast cause notions slow into notion in the right categories. So that's really it for me, in terms of maintenance maria, I don't know if you want to jump in and you have anything to add for maintenance.Speaker3: [00:16:47] Yeah, I put something in the chat about it just really depends on what I care about. So, my projects are maintained daily and then I have a weekly review where I think about like the areas in my life that are most relevant. So it really depends on like what I care about now. And then I organize as I, as things come up.Yeah, so that's, that's about me. That's depends so much on how I do it in notion, but it's like the mindset around that.swyx: [00:17:16] I think it's a good idea to set like a quarterly or annual reminder to archive all the things. And that's something I haven't done, just quite, quite frankly I haven't done any archiving. I have just a mess of stuff since I took BSD last year. So I really should archive it,  check out this thing where I say, Oh, projects, I didn't really archive anything. So it's a good idea to clear the deck every now and then. And just like Jonah says, don't be afraid about archiving stuff. You can, it's always still in the same system. You can always search it. Christopher says he archives annually. That's something that's good as well over a visual overwhelming is a real thing. All right. Thanks, Danny. Thanks. Good question for that. Q&A: Weaknesses of PARA [00:17:55]Julian says, Julian Alvarez says what weaknesses and drawbacks have you experienced implementing PARA and how can those be addressed? So I think a lot of people  have talked about the weaknesses, which is that it doesn't have any room for tests. Julian. So the way that I think about tasks is that so I do have a work to do list. That's a lot of my stuff. I do have 70, this is like the most overused of simple note. I'm not sure if this is like the right thing. I do a lot of speaking, so here's my speaking calendar. So I make sure I'm on top of my my talks and I'm recording and speaking.My blogging goes here. That's essentially all it all. I need, in order to inform my personal stuff, my worst stuff has a different notion tracker, which I probably should not show and publicly. But then I also have this concept of the calendar is a to-do list. So, you're on Kevin calendar as a, to do list. So, I have written that up here. I'm going to share that in the chat. But I do like basically this idea of time block planning that when you want to get stuff done attach it to a time just thinking it to do this without any notion of priority or amount of time estimated to complete is not enough.So that's that's, what's going on over there. If anyone else had like weaknesses, a para that they've come across, I'll just leave room for one more response. Yes. Nope. Okay, parents. Perfect. I am interested in the other questions, the other formulations of para. Q&A: Broken Links in Notion [00:19:16] I'm going to go to Juliana now who also has her hand raised Hey, hi. Speaker4: [00:19:20] Right. So, it's a question about archiving things. I started setting up my bearer and I already have I already have a task management system, so I have a database with the tasks and I started to another database with the projects and another for the areas and another for the resource.And I, I thought it was a great idea because I could Link all the stuff and make relations like in the database, but  I'm having difficult. I, sorry about my English. I am, I'm having a hard time to archiving these things because when I try to move to another archive database, I lost, I lose the relations.swyx: [00:20:13] Oh, okay. Got it. So I don't Speaker4: [00:20:16] know if somebody has the same problem and could help me. And swyx: [00:20:21] and yeah, I think that's it. Great question. I have no idea how to answer this. Cause I don't have a solution for that as well.   Christopher Horn says I created a page and I'm city and that collects all open tasks into one master page.I put it into a template for my daily planning notes. Joshua says filter status of archive works. Okay. So you add a filter status, Juliana, like basically add a filter. Nope. That could work. Speaker4: [00:20:44] Yeah. I filter the task in dance, but like, the projects in the areas, maybe like putting a filter might be good.swyx: [00:20:54] Yeah. Speaker4: [00:20:55] But then I wouldn't, well, I C I can create  another view of the database and just filter with the archive.swyx: [00:21:04] Okay. Joshua. Yeah ductal Joshua is sharing what what works for him? Yeah, we do use views at work for what it's worth notion is our project management too. I work as well. So yes. Music grief for that. Correct. Yeah.  In terms of breaking relations I don't actually know how to fix that. If you move stuff around, I don't move stuff enough to, to answer that I do like duplication. So I'd rather copy and paste that link. But that's just me. I know that people like to link back and forth when stuff  I think the backlink functionality in notion is pretty good.  So if this is if broken links is something that you care about then having that, this is a new, basically the wrong column of notion  you can establish back things and if you move stuff around, I think this was, this will be always correct, because the identified based on the IP of the document is structured within the note taking system.Yeah. Joshua says I like to avoid databases and just link pages with linking instead. Yeah. Which means he can move it without them breaking. So maybe just don't use linking or use backlinking. That seems to be the answer. Filters are really good for what it's worth Joseph. I don't actually recommend using notion is like a read later app. So I noticed that  Joseph says that he has a reading list in notion. I actually use, you can use instead of paper you can use. So I have up next, this is what I have , I'll just add it to up next and then I'll read it on my iPad. But you can use Instapaper, you can use some sort of meet data. Okay. All right. Joshua has book notes. All right. All right. So Juliana hopefully that was good.  I don't think it was like a perfect answer, but maybe notion wasn't really designed for that. Definitely try to make more robust things that won't break.Q&A: Automation with Zapier [00:22:34]All right. We'll take one more question. Thank you. Take one more question. Cameron has has an interesting one. What kind of workflow automations do you use with if this, then that Zapier? So this is about automations. Kevin says I created a zap so that every time I create a new notebook, it creates a new folder on Dropbox that you drive. That's pretty handy. That's more backup. Yanni says I use, I have TTT for Evernote Instapaper pocket highlight evernotes goes to Evernote.Yep. They are all going under inbox folder for me. Maria says Google calendar to notion database with Zapier. Wow. Okay. Why Google calendar like tweets the notion. Wow. Okay. This is really good.  I think this Lightspeed's emotion thing.  That's a good idea. Cause there's it's not intuitive to search your own. The tweets that you've liked before. So having the automation makes sense. The calendar one makes is unusual. SMART Goals [00:23:25]Alright, I probably missed some questions on the way. So I'm gonna leave those to the end, but I'm gonna go into some of the unique content that I think about we've covered some of these areas.I'm going to go into a little bit about some other thoughts that I've had personally, as part of this BSB journey. There's probably one other. Weakness, maybe at the power content that we talked about this week is that we talk a little bit about goals, but we didn't define goals, right?Like we talked about where is it in here? We said PA already, there's no G here. And jeez are very important for projects this and we didn't really talk that much about what a good goal is. So I think this framework, which I use, you can't go very far into, in productivity canon without coming across smart is a good idea for thinking about your goals.Does is it specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound? Timeline is obviously the deadline thing, but the other elements very helpful as well. I think the measurable ones. Yeah. A lot of goals are binary. So did you do it or not? So in that case, it's a very, it's very simple measurement. And I think the other one is attainable that people really should think about like is if the goal is too big, then it doesn't feel attainable. It's gotta be something that's within reach. So I think a lot of goal setting, a lot of smart goal setting is really just narrowing down the size of your ambitions. If you want to do something perfect, or if you want to do some huge, impressive thing you may not have built up the muscle to do that yet. You might need to break it down into something smaller and just make smaller goals along the way to that big goal. Okay. That was the first thing that I have planned.Denormalizing Notes [00:25:01]The second is for a little bit of the developers in the room, because I like these analogies. There's an idea of normalized schema versus de-normalized schema. Normalize is where you split everything into this most atomic categories where you can think things back and forth without knowing what, how are you going to need them ahead of time?Denormalize is where you put everything in a single object where you know, you're going to need it together. So the, my assertion is that projects are essentially de normalize and areas of resources or not. And so you want to break stuff down into the six areas, whereas projects you often are bringing together content from a few different areas of resources and synthesizing them in a special way.That's the idea about thinking about projects and I do encourage actually just copying and pasting. Like if you have, if you come across something useful, some piece of content, that's some thought that's really useful.You can just paste it in areas and paste it in projects. So I do like the idea that you don't follow this strict idea of like. One thing goes in one place. I do a lot of double pasting of stuff and that's just intentional denormalization and the way that I approach this is what I call MES on plots writing.Like you want to place everything that you're going to write about ahead of time in, in a place that you're going to use them. And this is independent of the areas of resources  where you're collecting them. So that when it comes time to write, you're only right. So all this happens, asynchronously serendipitously as a pre-writing phase.And then when you're writing, you're just sitting down and focusing on converting all of this pre work into the final finished product. That's I think, a sustainable way to essentially reduce the amount of time that you spend researching and ideating and looking at the right references. Oh wait. Okay. I do have a, do you have a response there from Christopher Horn, another interesting feature to add to the ethnicity debate? Do you normalization? Yep. Okay. Yep. Great. So I'm going to drop a link to this doc for people who this is specifically for people who write a blog posts, as well as books, I'm going to show you a little bit about when I say I do this, I really take it to heart. This is the, this is how I wrote my book for my BSB sort of capsule last year. I planned out all the chapters that I was going to write originally, all of these things were white. And then I just slowly converted them into blue links, one by one, but each of these linked to the issue where I just slotted ahead of time.The ideas and the resources that I wanted to talk about. So that when I felt that I had, I was ready to compile all these things. I started from a good base of these are the points I wanted to touch on that I spent, three months thinking about and collecting.But everything was in its place. When I finally wrote the final chapter and this is me writing it. And that's something I encourage people especially people who are planning big books. If you're working on, for me, I was working at 40 chapters simultaneously to really think about just slotting everything in its place and having like a measle class attitude to writing.So obviously this works for a book, but you can also think about it as working for a blog where I'm working on simultaneously. 20 different vocals ideas and you should have some amount of idea of velocity where you're thinking of all of these things at the same time. So yeah. I encourage you to try to denormalize for action, at the end of the day, you want to try to produce output and then you're trying to normalize for resources.When it goes to resources, I'm just loving it. I've been here and you can do it twice. It's fine. There's no perfect system. If you figured out a way to automate it, Great for you. I haven't got there yet because I'm so pretty and so busy and focused on producing. Open Source Knowledge [00:28:27]So let's talk about source knowledge.So this is another developer analogy again if you're not familiar with open source knowledge, just think about. The old school, one encyclopedias versus Wikipedia and how Wikipedia completely destroyed encyclopedias because it was collaborative. The assertion here is that resources should be, open-sourced like everything else in para can be close, can be closed, can be private, but there's no reason why resources themselves should not be shared because as long as someone can benefit from it, then you essentially, when a friend while you're sleeping, if you just share it and if people can contribute and that's the open source nature of it then you really benefit because they help to correct you or they help to ask the question or they actually just give you extra things that you may not have known about.So I really liked that. I do have a talk on this copy open source knowledge doc. I really should have edit the link open source knowledge, right? I I'm just gonna give you the slides.That's my slides for open source knowledge. But yeah, I think when you combine para with learning in public, it becomes extremely powerful for building a brand as well as you are a network facing time.Brag Documents [00:29:28]Something that was briefly, very briefly mentioned in Tiago is lecture, which I think is super underrated, is this idea of a brag document. So let me see where he talks about it. So here doing during this is during one of the lectures that he had, and you can see, this is my own notes. I'm going through the course with you. During one of the lectures he had this idea that this comparison between projects was serious and you talk, and he talks about why you need to connect projects to goals. So there are three reasons why you need to collect the goals. You need to know the extent of the commitments need to connect current work to your long-term goals.But then the last part, you also need to know if you're making progress towards your goal. This is something which I think is understated in terms of para, which is at the end of your project, you should. Not just wipe it off, but actually stick it somewhere in a brag document, in a materialized view of the things that you've done this year.And so that you can actually review it because you're not going to, it's hard for you to remember them sometimes. And and especially at work, it's really helpful for a peer reviews and promotion packets and stuff like that. Even for the psychological pick me up, I think it's very helpful.And personally, in, when I work a stack is actually a stack is actually a really good channel like a prototype channel for bank documents. So it might have a sectional with only me in it. And I just post in that channel whenever I've finished something that I probably know, I want to review in my like three 60 feedback session, if you want to brag about yourself you need to be the best bragger of yourself because the one else is going to do that for you.Okay. Just Do It [00:30:57]Glen, I'm going to get to your question a little bit cause we have one more slide left and that is insert generic motivation. Just I think ship Ira Glass, the gap video is also pretty common. Like this idea that you need to just do it more, right? All this there's all this theory.There's all these Images and advice. You just need to do it more like this parable of the pottery class as well, because something that people say a lot and I've referred to it as well, as far as I can tell it never actually happened. So it's literally a parable or a fable. But anyway just do it right.And that's a recap of the kind of stuff that we covered in the extra content section of this talk. So I'm going to head over to questions and discussion. We have a few I did have someone raised their hands, so now's a good time to raise your hands for some chat.I'm going to answer things in reverse order so that I can keep on top of things. Q&A: How do you share in public? [00:31:45] Glenn G says. Could you show how you share your resources in public? Was it making your notion public and people can contribute to it? Or how does the contributing part work? Okay. So notion is not very conducive to public collaboration because I think it will be a mess if people can randomly rearrange stuff.But yeah, these are my notions and then I'll just share it in public. So you can, you're welcome to see my BWS bullshit. But for collaborative stuff, nothing's better for developers than get help. Right. So here is my launch cheat sheet. So when I launched my book I took my notes as a resource and I just posted it all up. And so you can see,  I didn't have that many contributors, but the people who did actually volunteered information and for, and now whenever I need to launch my next thing, I have this resource available so that people can find it. So, Hey, I need to do it endorsements and testimonials.These are all the notes that I've taken for myself. And it's useful for other people, like so far. 500 people have started on GitHub. So probably more people have seen that. And it's also a nice way to promote my own book. So it's a very useful thing. I do this a lot. If you go to my GitHub profile, you see that the extent to which I have bought into this idea that you should open source your resources.So I have done a launch cheat sheet, a CLI cheat sheet podcasts. This, these are design resources. So here are my design resources. This is the biggest one. 5,000 people that start this. And it's just got things I use. So if you want to reference and typography I can pick my fonts in a way that has been pre-vetted by people I trust because I don't know anything about design, but I can, I can look like I know by stealing from other people I can steal code.So here's a fun loading strategy that some expert has approved. So I'm just going to steal that. It's essentially a swipe file and it's open source. So people contribute. So I had 32 contributors so far, and yeah, it's just a really great way to have your resources open. So the work you're doing anyway helps to benefit you professionally.I like it a lot. There's this concept that comes to mind call it the friend catcher, which isn't my idea, but I didn't, I do have the reigning Google search on it. Think. Yeah, I had number one to Google for that.  So this idea that you should make friends online, what you seek by, by sharing these resources.So para are in Paris, extremely soul, super powerfully. We just keep it up and make it useful. Put a little bit of design on it. It's great. So highly recommend. Okay. Do you want to brag about myself too much? Peter braceQ&A: Atomicity/Denormalization [00:34:02]okay. Christopher Horn, let's go.Speaker1: [00:34:04] Okay, there we go. I'm sorry. Head down mute. My question is going back to that French term that I am not going to try to say that ends in the word place. I think. So we have two concepts that I, in my fevered brainer intention. One is the notion of normalization and de normalization. The other is that French term.And I guess what I struggle with and is if I am pursuing a philosophy of atomicity, which is to say that, where I fall on the normalization versus denormalization the reason that one of the reasons I'm doing it is because there are ideas or concepts in my second brain that are not going to feed just one project, but might feed many projects.And instead of pulling them all into one place and associating them with one activity, I might need to refer to them from two different directions at once. Does that make sense? swyx: [00:34:51] Okay. So what's the question. How do you reconcile that tension? So Speaker1: [00:34:55] it feels like what I understood you to say was you pull all the resources into one place and you dedicate it to one task.And I'm just trying to reconcile that with my notion that there might be multiple tasks that need or projects that need to draw from the same swyx: [00:35:08] artifacts, if you will. Yeah. So that's what I was saying. Like I do the lowest tech. Thing possible, which is I just, I double paste I'll, I'll copy it out into the other place, needs it. But if you are a little bit more sophisticated, you can use the linking, you can use the Rome style of the cake to irrigate. Are you familiar with those? I Speaker1: [00:35:30] am. Yeah. It's just a matter of, are you tolerating redundancy or are you just going to handle it by reference swyx: [00:35:36] only, right? Yeah. Yeah. So people are really like starts.I find them in practice, not that useful because they're just pretty. Anything that's great for ultimately I tell you what's the best thing to link to a public URL that you've blocked, right? Like last week, we talked about the three strikes rule.If you reference an idea for multiple times, don't keep it to yourself, just put it on your blog and then link to that. Fair enough. That's a good, I that's a good note. Yeah. And, just break down that idea that you're your, everything you blog has to be as like big thought leading piece or anything.It used to be a resource. Okay. We had some other questions. Julian had a really interesting one that I want to address. Would you recommend using GitHub for open source knowledge that is not coding related? So get helps really good because it has a really good collaboration model, but it might not be accessible for people who are not technical Google docs.So this guy frameworks, the 0.1. So they have that, oh my God, this guy does such a good job. I'm gonna read this to you because it's so true. I realized that the main reason I don't publish as much content online is that I prefer to Erie my thinking continuously making your part to publish something extraordinarily high we'll work around a shipping, an alpha version of a thought.And then blah, blah, blah. He published his work in progress, thoughts as a Google doc. And of course he never actually published the final document. Like that's how it's helped people are  with their thinking. But a lot of discussion happens. There you go. Okay. Yeah. There's so much discussion here. When you can write your, you can write what you're thinking or researching and you let people comment and that's a really nice way to open-source it as well. Some collaborative thing like that, it can be useful to a lot of people. Cause this one went viral, look at them on a discussion it's still ongoing, and yeah, it's a really great tool and actually you should use this more.It's so simple. Everyone has access to Google docs. So there may be other tools, I think there are there like collaborative notepads that are out there that I've used no pads. I forget the name of them though. Deep note, no bureaucratic, no joy. There are a bunch of these that, that you could try using, but there's, they're just like startups, they're less reliable because they might go away some time. So, yeah, you don't have to use GitHub. Q&A: Why Notion? [00:37:33]Okay. We have a question from Probita. Hey. Speaker3: [00:37:35] Hi, John. Thanks. Fantastic succession. So, just a couple of quick questions, if you don't mind starting with a comment I think you do speak very well.You have clarity of thoughts and a it, it like the sort of the wisdom and the knowledge that you applied comes out very easily. So thank you for that. I think I I might've picked up that you took the course last year. Is that right? Yeah. Right. So were you already using notion at the time, or did you, were you in between a couple of programs and then you decided to work with swyx: [00:38:06] notion?  I was even worse than that.  I was using one note going in and then I switched halfway in the middle because I got frustrated with one notes and then I saw that most people using notion. So I jumped on a notion bandwagon. Speaker3: [00:38:17] Yeah, yeah. Right now I'm using Evernote, but I'm just wondering if, for folks who are more tech oriented or tech savvy, it's easier to establish themselves in notion, but that's something for me to just try that out and figure it out.Q&A: Book writing? [00:38:28]But a related question the book that you have published, which looks great. So I will check it out.  Is that like the writing of it? Did you use notion for that? For most of swyx: [00:38:38] it. I used GitHub, like I just showed you, I showed you the process. I don't know if you were here for that. So this is for version two of that. I'm hoping to publish mix in July. But yeah, I use GitHub to draft. I had reviewers come in and these are my editors that came in and gave me comments. So this guy, I paid him to edit my work and he submitted and get up, Salesforce is great. It's a great experience. But like, drafting, I think you can pull in your ideas wherever I just happened to use GitHub. Like the tool doesn't matter to me, just so much as like the process. Right. I did use typable I forget the name of it. Basically. There's a better markdown drafts app. So the motion does export markdowns. And I do use markdown to publish, but it doesn't have I don't like the way it edit stuff. So I needed a simpler interface and Typora. That's the tools use pepper. This is a free open source tool. That just gives you marked down and is not as complex as notion. It only does marco. So no, no fancy blocks. When you slash it, doesn't try to search your whole database for you.It just doesn't work out and it presents it nicely. So that's a really good writing app. I think anything that distracts you from the act of writing can be a negative sometimes. So I used that poorer, if you want to try and check it out. Speaker3: [00:39:47] Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, it sounds like you're just All these tools that you apply them greatly, or you have applied them in the past and you just have a great wealth of information.So think thanks swyx: [00:39:57] for sharing. This is also by the way you can use GitHub projects for people with developers. Like this is literally my launch plan T 14 T minus 14, all the way to T minus one. He has, I hope ended up, whatever tool you can get pretty creative. And I find that my brain doesn't require one tool to rule them all.So I can segment by like, okay, I'm working on book, totally different set of tools than like regular knowledge ingestion and someone that works with me. If you're okay with that, okay. First Wrapup [00:40:23] Thanks, Maria. I want to acknowledge Maria for swinging by the mentor sessions here have always had like this. Do of support and I just want to acknowledge, thank you so much, Marina for swinging by to help out. Okay. All right. I think we're over time. So that's it, as far as the present, the pre-prepared questions have our concerns. You're welcome to email me@swyxandsix.io. That's my email  if you're not comfortable asking questions here or you think of them later on. Email me here and I'll see you here again next week. And yeah, that's it next week is C O D distill. So we're going to go into distilling and I really like the progressive summarization idea, I don't necessarily do all the steps by I'm a fan. I'm a fan of  Reviewing multiple times so that you really get to the gist of of a piece that you're writing about. I'll give you one example of that. So   this is going to look super overwhelming to you. So please don't feel like you need to do this.  I did have an example of people always think about this quality versus consistency. Trade-off of Hey, I want to produce, but do I produce on a regular schedule and trade-offs and quality, or do I infinite highest quality thing I can do and maybe not be so consistent with what I do. And so I've been, I actually collected three different podcasts clips from audio doll. My audio doll from Tim urban and then from James, Claire over here and I synthesize them into this blog post. And that actually did very well for me. I think the, the post that I had by the way, this is a really cool extension. If you work a lot with Twitter, I do use Twitter as my second Brain sometimes. I think this post did really well, just because of the number of people that picked it up independently. You're doing the work by summarizing and synthesizing and comparing, right? So, I was able to find someone who stood out for consistency and made that case.I was able to find someone that stood up for quality of me, that case. And then I just put together that debate and then offered some solutions to it by synthesizing different resources together. And distilling is a key part of that work. So that's what we're going to cover next week. Speaker3: [00:42:10] Okay. Thanks Shawn.Just if you don't mind, three quick questions sorry. I did miss your introductory session last week. So, Shawn Wang, of course, that makes sense doubly or rather why X, what does that stand for? swyx: [00:42:21] That's my English and Chinese initial sec. SW was English and NYX is Chinese. And I don't bother to tell people what the wax is because they're not going to remember.Yeah. Q&A: Twitter Links Extension [00:42:30]Speaker3: [00:42:30] Okay. And then this Twitter extension that you just mentioned with the design, swyx: [00:42:34] So this is a unpublished Chrome extension, just from a friend who wrote this, essentially, whenever you go to some somebody's site, if you want to see the metal layer discussion around this, here's the blog post that I wrote about that. Let's say that's what you want to find the power of blog posts whenever you're like, okay, I read this, I want to discuss it with people.Who've also read the thing what do you do? Right. You drop it in a Slack, you drop in a discord or something. And then people who have also read it. But what's better is you can actually just say like, okay, I'm going to click this Twitter links thing and just plug into the stream of people who talk about this stuff.So Joel talked about it. So Shawn talks about it and then you can respond directly to them. But you can see like the disagreements or you can post about it. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's, it's very useful for, and this is me talking about it. Yeah. I think it's helpful.  You can also do this on hacker news. I just like plugging into the commentary layer because it opens your mind as to if people strongly disagree, if people like, have extra points that they want to make.I think Twitter is a meta commentary. Raider is a very interesting idea.  Q&A: Chrome Extensions [00:43:33] Speaker3: [00:43:33] okay. So because the topic of extension has come up and I've been meaning to find the right opportunity to ask this to someone A lot of people use the Evernote clipper and similar extensions. And when you try install them, be it on Firefox or Chrome, it does ask for permission. And part of the permission is that it, it can have access to all your websites and whatnot.And I'm not necessarily big on confidentiality or whatever security, but at the same time it does yeah. For data for all websites. So is that something that that's just standard or like, do you have any thoughts on that as a tech person? swyx: [00:44:15] Yeah. Unfortunately it's pretty standard people and, and this may be a slightly alarmist, but at the end of the day, you just do have to trust them. The trust model for Chrome extensions is  just that broken. You just have to trust the publisher. If you don't trust them, then don't install it because they can for example, you can look safe at a time of publishing and then you install it and then they can secretly update it.And they might get you that way. So you just have to trust that the, they won't ever abuse that. Q&A: How do you balance research and writing? [00:44:39]Speaker2: [00:44:39] Awesome. So just question around, I really do appreciate the idea of set your focus, your focus on creation. I think that's what the whole point of the second brain. Now the question comes down is how do you eat? I just curious about your personal experience, last preference.How do you balance research and value creation in terms of time and energy perspective? So I do, for instance, when you were making a blog paused. Yes. There's a creation for sure, but definitely there's some, a lot of research going on. It can be the pre-writing work. I wondering how you balance that activities.swyx: [00:45:15] Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yeah, of course. The research is just always ongoing in the back of my head which is why I have this idea of pre-writing right. This is passive. This is just a background process. It's always happening. And whenever it's something relevant comes up to a top favorite problem or a project that I'm working on, then I'll just slide it right into there.I'll find I'll pause what I'm doing and just go add that piece of information. So research the passive for me. And then when I make time to write, which is often like, probably a Saturday when it, like I have like three, four hours open. I think I'm trying to move to one hour a day before work.I think that'd be a really good model for me, but just quite honestly, I don't do that right now. But you should have everything in place. So David Perellcalls this start from abundance or write from abundance. I don't really like the way you phrase this. Okay. Yeah. Start with abundance. There we go. How to cure it, write it, write this book. There we go. All right. So , you can take his word for it, but essentially you just have the research as a background process. And then when you write, just write you can of course, improvise and research here.But if you do too much of that, then you will not ended up publishing, so I totally get it. Yeah. I do have the same process by the way. When you publish, because it's a digital document digital garden terms of service. So I have this idea of a digital gardens. So it's like when you publish you, can you have the right to be, to update it as you go along.Right? So as long as you as a contract, if you're with your with your readers is very clear, then people won't expect you to be complete and you're not promising to be complete. You can even insert disclaimers. So I've been starting to insert disclaimers as well. So for example, stuff like here, I think I have the disclaimer here.So you can have like this where you can say like, blah, blah, blah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna come back from it. It's not fully formed yet. Devon Zuegel has this idea of epistemic origin. So she'll tell you a friend, the kind of work that she put into the post, is it high? Is it high confidence?Is this a high confidence post or is it just the theory? This episode, you guys, and then the amount of effort that was put into it, is this just a random thought or is this like the result with three years of research? And that  sets the tone for people. So they don't get upset, especially if you have a lot of readers, they're like fuck you.Like you're an expert. And you didn't consider all these concepts and you should be open about that. I just, I don't like the word epistemic, cause it sounds very pretentious. So I just simplified it disclosure. When  I tried to make that a thing.Yeah. Q&A: Converting Resources to Projects [00:47:37]Speaker2: [00:47:37] Thank you. Just one last follow up question. So I'm trying to map that blogging whole process to the para modal. So for instance, that the older passive activity going over research, I can see based on my knowledge, you go, we'll go to the resources. But when that let's say that content for specific blog pause is filled like ready for 80% that I think I can, I can see that I can convert that blog post for that particular topic to a project.Is it how you also organize it? I see. Okay. Sounds good. Speaker3: [00:48:06] Thank you very much.swyx: [00:48:07] Yeah, no worries. I have another thing which I, after you publish this, a really interesting conversation you can have with your readers is you should not think about it as like a one to many thing. It should be like a back and forth.So I call this annealing — I almost included this in my slides, but I didn't. But essentially like when you image three, go. Okay. So when you have the idea for posts, right? You're like researching, researching, researching, like accumulating knowledge stuff like that. And then towards the end, when you're ready to write, you'd just do the sprint of writing.And then you have this draft. Maybe you have a group of friends that are peer reviewing. So you're workshopping this idea and I have a separate post on that. And then you publish, but right after you publish, you have a bunch of public feedback and you can actually have a conversation with them. And your posts continues to have increasing quality because you have a conversation with readers, gives people an incentive to respond to you quickly because there'll be shot at there'll be mentioned.This one, I didn't have it, but people mentioned, I, I shut people out one day when to respond. Yeah, it's just a really good model of of don't think about it as a single game. There's multiple stages that it's okay.All right. Thanks, Danny. Yeah.  I'll take one more question.Q&A: Video/Audio Capture [00:49:11]Sam Wong question for Sam Wong. I do a lot of YouTube on iPad and have taken screen capture.Is there a method to sort them into different projects in areas? Every ? I have no idea. YouTube and iPad and screen captures. Who does, if it is  video, any ones? I don't really, I take, I think a timestamp. So yeah. Does anyone have thoughts on YouTube or iPad screen captures like part of the I'm sure. Toolkit. Yeah. Part of the capture toolkit, one of the six is audio and video transcription. I just haven't had, I haven't cracked it.  Yeah. So  part of your toolkit is audio video transcription. And I only do audio I don't do video, so yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure what this tools are, but you can check out the tools that people are using here.Sonic study, I guess. I don't know. I haven't tried. I haven't tried these notion YouTube. Yeah. I do a lot of timestamps, so these are my podcast notes, I'll do here's the, what I want to feature. And the it's 36 minutes in that's essentially the extent of work that I do.Probably no thinking it's really crappy, but at the same time, I'm going to minimalist in the way that I do this stuff. Yeah, right. Thanks that. Okay. Well,  I think that's it. I don't see any other hands up and we've gone over time, so you're welcome to ask me questions through email again, if I can find it a success six, that IO and if not, we'll meet again next week and talk about distilling. So thanks.Thank you.  hang around say hi to people. We'll say, bye. Thanks Dennis. Thanks for all the questions, everyone. It really helps to make this not a monologue. Q&A: Speaking [00:50:39] Speaker3: [00:50:39] I'll just say all those speaking gigs that you do, it definitely shows in your presentation.So you do quite well swyx: [00:50:47] trying to do more. Yeah, this is so for those  who are speakers, this is what happens when you have this extra speaking schedule and no time to update them. So these are, you said the talks that I do.So these are all my talks, but I haven't updated them since december. And these are all the talks I haven't added yet. God. Yeah, I need to, I need to go make myself, I don't, I know I didn't, I need to update my own documentation, but yeah, if you want to do something well, do it a lot and I don't think I do it very well. I have a little bit I speak at it roughly about 10 times. A minute and that's not very good. I think so. Speaker3: [00:51:28] Yeah. No, I think your sort of weapon is what'd you swyx: [00:51:32] mean collegequantity? Yes, exactly. Speaker3: [00:51:38] I was just going to say while the EMEA, so I think you be at writing or be at speaking. I, I feel like that's how you're going about things and the more you do it, the better you get just your, your you're finding the time to do everything, or that's just the discipline that you've developed over the years, but it's, swyx: [00:51:54] it's pretty good.Cool. It's funny. Cause you can think about it as discipline, but you can also think about it as just. Being less perfectionist, right? Like I'm just lowering the bar on what I do in order to do more of it. And I think he also noticed when you have speakers where you didn't think about speakers well there two things.So one is when you think about the greatest features in the world, the Steve jobs and they have very pre prepared speeches, but then when they speak off the cuff, they have all the ums and AHS, they have the false starts and rambling around random rambles. So you don't have to be the best speaker in the world, but you can, you just have to be functional.You can get a message across, you can think while you talk. So you can plan ahead what you're about to say. And the other point I was going to make is that writing helps you speak better because it helps you rehearse things and be heard as the freezing and think of what structure.  I have this quote  in my writing chapter about, again, I'm not going to look it up right now, but when you write, when you have written down something and then you speak about the leader, whether it's a conference talk or workshop, or like a podcast, or just a regular one-on-one chat you sound smarter because you've written about it.So you should write more and you will magically become a better speaker. That makes Q&A: Writing My Book [00:52:58]Speaker3: [00:52:58] sense. What when did you have the thought of writing a book on the specific topic that you have written on the coding manual or whatever manual it is like, when did that sort of come swyx: [00:53:08] up? I have an exact date sorry. So you can see how often I use Twitter as my second break. So, Daniel was a friend now tweeted this if you're tempted by this. So, so Nevada tweeted this, I, there's never been a better time to launch a digital product. This is April last year, which is like the depth of the recession.Right. And then you were like, and this guy, this advice was like create a small product, something you can finish in two weeks and charge $10 for it. So I decided that I was going to do that. I think I did it here. Hmm. I don't know. I don't know where I actually quoted it, but essentially I have, that's the exact date that I started April 10th, 20, 20, 20. I decided that I was going to launch this, this book and then it just carried on from there. And originally was going to, it was going to try to finish it in two weeks, like you said.And it blossom into two months because I found that I had so much content to share. So, books, I hear that it tends to happen to books because people, especially when they're first time authors want to squeeze everything in. I think for, for second and third books, you tend to try to foc

A mathematician by training, Richard Hamming contributed significantly to the computer science and telecommunications industries. Of his work in information theory, digital filters and numerical methods, the most widely known is the Hamming codes — a family of formulas that allowed computers to detect and correct their own errors. This work would go on to be foundational for computers and communications, being used in modems, embedded processors, satellites, and more. For more episodes of Pioneers, including photos and transcripts, please visit: https://www.notion.so/blog/topic/pioneers​ Produced by Notion: http://www.twitter.com/NotionHQ​ Hosted by Devon Zuegel: https://twitter.com/DevonZuegel​ Audio by This Land Films: https://etfilmhome.com/

Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: it’s about open source projects, roles and... https://devonzuegel.com/post/making-is-show-business-now-alexdanco-com Devon Zuegel #clipping #cities #interpersonal #tools-for-thought #programming #travel podcast sponsor my work hereemail newsletter 💌the first heyday of open source in the 90sThe Mythical Man-Monthlearned how to accommodate hundreds of productive contributors"Eternal September"Get it in your inbox every week

This week Oliver interviews Laura Fox, Lyft's General Manager for Citi Bike in New York. Laura has an incredible background with stints in Qatar, working on Mexico cities planning regulations, time at Sidewalk Labs, and as editor for one of the best books on urban planning and economics we’ve found, Order by Design by Alain Bertaud, all of which is discussed, before digging in to the nitty gritty details of Citibike in NYC.This was a great episode - Laura is an amazing thinker and you’ll get a lot out of listening to her.Specifically we dig into:- an explanation of the Citibike setup - its coverage, size (15k bikes!!), characteristics and relationship to the NYC DOT.- How and why they price as the product as affordabiy as they do.- a discussion about the docked system and the benefits/challenges of this vs the more common dockless system ie. bike valets, load balancing with large numbers locked up and how they create ’capacity valves’.- the impact of electrification on the fleet - how the early data from bikes show both 2-3x utilisation, but also longer duration and distance trip durations.- A wider discussion about micromobility and its intersection with urban form, infrastructure and other planning requirements- How they think about discussions over kerbside allocation, the challenges of of competing with car parking and the data/storytelling needed to counter this.- where Laura sees the future going with regards to MaaS, how she think about Lyft's play in that space and who has the power to be the forcing function to promote widespread adoption.- How COVID-19 has impacted their operations, and the changes in ridership demographics and usage that they’re seeing.The book that we mention is called Order without Design, and can be found on Amazon here [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BSYX83S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1]. Would also encourage you to check out Devon Zuegel’s great podcast with Alain and his wife Marie-Agnes about their lives as nomadic urban planners/economists here [https://devonzuegel.com/tag/order-without-design-podcast].

Chad and Lindsey discuss their experiences around, and the pros and cons of, product road maps. Enroll in our free online-workshop on code audits How to supercharge your Rails application with a code audit (https://info.thoughtbot.com/code-audit-workshop?utm_source=GiantRobots&utm_medium=Podcast) Scott Miller on Giant Robots (https://www.giantrobots.fm/356) Quora Thread (https://www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-seen-companies-make-their-product-roadmap-public-Should-they-ever) on companies with public product roadmaps AirPower is Dead. Here's What Happened (https://www.macrumors.com/guide/airpower/) Buffer’s Transparent Product Roadmap (https://open.buffer.com/transparent-product-roadmap/) Slack Platform Roadmap (https://api.slack.com/roadmap) GitHub Universe Conference (https://githubuniverse.com/) Devon Zuegel on Giant Robots (https://www.giantrobots.fm/334) Wistia on Giant Robots (https://www.giantrobots.fm/254) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots!

The Changelog is deep discussions in & around the world of software… and it’s been going for over a decade. We talk to hackers, like Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics… leaders, like Devon Zuegel from GitHub… and innovators, like Amal Hussein… Welcome to The Changelog! Please listen to an episode from our catalog that interests you and subscribe today. We’d love to have you with us.

The Changelog is deep discussions in & around the world of software… and it’s been going for over a decade. We talk to hackers, like Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics… leaders, like Devon Zuegel from GitHub… and innovators, like Amal Hussein… Welcome to The Changelog! Please listen to an episode from our catalog that interests you and subscribe today. We’d love to have you with us.

Devon Zuegel is an Open Source Product Manager at GitHub. She’s also one of the key people responsible for making GitHub Sponsors a thing. We talk with Devon about how she came to GitHub to develop GitHub Sponsors, the months of research she did to learn how to best solve the sustainability problem of open source, why GitHub is now addressing this issue, the various ways and models of addressing maintainers’ financial needs, and Devon also shared what’s in store for the future of GitHub Sponsors.

Devon Zuegel is an Open Source Product Manager at GitHub. She’s also one of the key people responsible for making GitHub Sponsors a thing. We talk with Devon about how she came to GitHub to develop GitHub Sponsors, the months of research she did to learn how to best solve the sustainability problem of open source, why GitHub is now addressing this issue, the various ways and models of addressing maintainers’ financial needs, and Devon also shared what’s in store for the future of GitHub Sponsors.

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris share the news that The Bike Shed won the Best Dev Podcast on the Hackernoon Noonies awards! After a bit of celebration, they get back to their normal adventures with a discussion around onboarding covering the importance, approach, and pitfalls that they've seen in their time joining countless teams. They also touch on the relevance and increasing ease of SSL everywhere, and they answer a listener question about technical debt and rewriting applications. Bike Shed - Best Dev Podcast Noonies Simplecast Let's Encrypt Heroku Netlify Nadia Odunayo on Giant Robots A Guide To Code Hospitality - Nadia Odunayo The Headphones Rule Second System Syndrome Entity Service Antipattern Devon Zuegel on Giant Robots

Devon Zuegel, Product Manager at GitHub, discusses her transition from researcher to product manager, and shepherding the funding, communication, and tooling of open source sustainability. GitHub Devon on The Bike Shed GitHub Sponsors Let’s talk about open source sustainability GitHub Satellite 2019 thoughtbot open source projects Devon on Twitter Learn more about open source at thoughtbot. See open positions at thoughtbot! Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

Devon Zuegel is an open-source product manager at GitHub who is helping build the GitHub Sponsors program. We chat about that program, her philosophical mindset towards open-source, the pros and cons for viewing cities from a top-down vs. bottom-up perspective, and the benefits she's gotten from Twitter. https://github.com/sponsors https://twitter.com/devonzuegel https://twitter.com/RhysLindmark https://twitter.com/mitDCI

Chris is joined by Devon Zuegel who recently joined GitHub in the new Open Source Product Manager role. Devon and Chris discuss the complexities inherent to open source including funding models, managing motivation and burnout, different open source models, and end with a discussion around how we can be better open source citizens, both as consumers and maintainers. Devon on Twitter Devon's Blog Nadia Eghbal - Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure Patreon Sindre Sorhus on Patreon Open Collective ESLint on Open Collective Webpack on Open Collective Babel on Open Collective Sidekiq Pro GraphQL Pro GitHub related issues Clojure Rich Hickey Elm Evan Czaplicki Matz replies to post around Ruby moving slowly Open Source Maintainers Group on GitHub Thank you to CircleCI for sponsoring this episode.

Devon Zuegel (@devonzuegel) joins Michael Gibson (@WilliamBlake) to discuss urbanism, the life and death of great cities, NIMBYism vs. YIMBYism, and why cities like San Francisco make it hard to build new housing.

with Devon Zuegel (@devonzuegel), Denis Nazarov (@iiterature), and Jesse Walden (@jessewldn) The open source movement enabled so much in computing, including the collaborative building of libraries -- that is, building blocks of code that developers could combine together to build applications. But as these applications grew to massive scale, those libraries ended up being somewhat asymmetrical for "nights-and-weekend" developers (compared to say, the disproportionate resources of a large company with billions of users and big data). Blockchains, however -- enabled by cryptotokens that align incentives among stakeholders -- shift open source development from libraries, to the creation of shared, open, permissionless services. Instead of being siloed and repetitively produced as if from the industrial factory era, any smart contract developed on Ethereum becomes a shared service that can interact with any other service... incentivizing developers to improve on existing services, build on top of them, and enable combinatorial innovation at greater scale than ever before. But if decentralized networks are to win the third era of the internet, how will we resolve challenges such as single-purpose services (another form of consolidation), community conflicts, and other issues? In this video, freelance software engineer (and blockchain app developer) and writer (and urban watcher) Devon Zuegel guest-interviews a16z crypto partners Denis Nazarov and Jesse Walden, the co-founders of Mediachain Labs (which was acquired by Spotify in 2017). They draw on their past experiences leading open source development of a decentralized media attribution protocol for connecting creators to their audience, and what the implications of "services vs. libraries" could be for creatives now. And what about identity, stablecoins and crypto finance, and more? Finally, they extend their previous analogy of cities and network effects and how it fits the idea of libraries vs. services in crypto. Please note that the a16z crypto fund is a separate legal entity managed by CNK Capital Management, L.L.C. (“CNK”), a registered investor advisor with the Securities and Exchange Commission. a16z crypto is legally independent and operationally separate from the Andreessen Horowitz family of fund and AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“AHCM”).  In any case, the content provided here is for informational purposes only, and does NOT constitute an offer or solicitation to purchase any investment solution or a recommendation to buy or sell a security; nor it is to be taken as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. In fact, none of the information in this or other content on a16zcrypto.com should be relied on in any manner as advice. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax and other related matters concerning any investment. Furthermore, the content is not directed to any investor or potential investor, and may not be used or relied upon in evaluating the merits of any investment and must not be taken as a basis for any investment decision. No investment in any fund advised by CNK or AHCM may be made prior to receipt of definitive offering documentation and due diligence materials. Finally, views expressed are those of the individual a16z crypto personnel quoted therein and are not the views of CNK, AHCM, or their respective affiliates.  Please see https://a16zcrypto.com/disclosures/ and https://a16zcrypto.com/disclaimers for further information.

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep Up with the North Star Podcast Here My guest today is Devon Zuegel, a writer of code and writer of words who spends her time unlocking human potential through incentive design and tools for thought and cities. In this conversation, we jump from coordination problems to urban planning to travel to architecture. We compare cities like Singapore and San Francisco and talk about the power of urban density and architecture to make us happier and healthier. Then, we talk about writing, specifically the three tiers of common knowledge, how to find good ideas, and the concept that Devon calls playing chess with yourself. One thing sticks out from this podcast and other conversations with Devon. Above all else, Devon lives in obsessive pursuit of high leverage ways to spend her time and energy. In the past, that’s led her to computer science and in the future, I suspect it will lead her to cities and infrastructure. Why cities? Devon offers an excellent answer. Cities are big enough to have real importance in the world and small enough to be nimble and somewhat understandable and there are a lot of cities. You can actually hope to make some comparisons in a way that you can’t really do with countries.  Please enjoy my conversation with Devon Zuegel. Links Bloom Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Georgism Devon’s articles related to this episode:  Advice on Writing Why Flaking Is So Widespread in San Francisco A Day In Singapore: Urban Identity 2:03 Devon on coordination problems and the problems they’ve caused, such as climate change and housing issues, and how clever solutions to these problems are the reason humans have progressed so much in the past hundreds of years 6:19 Human cognition and thought as it is augmented by media, cities and blockchains and the benefits of this augmentation 8:10 The most classic tool for thought and why it’s such a catalyst for healthy and productive cognition, long term and short term memory function and increased IQ 16:41 Devon’s writing process and why she defines it as playing chess with herself 17:45 How Devon has been able to get her writing to flow and the three categories of topics available to write about, common knowledge, obscure knowledge and the intersection in the middle 20:17 Devon’s theory of on why people in San Francisco are so flaky in comparison to sister cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City 28:16 How Devon chooses what rabbit holes she wants to go down prior to writing an article and how to make most topics interesting by creating a model around the idea 32:25 What makes Singapore so interesting to Devon, in regards to history, culture, GDP growth, etc. and her major observations after visiting the country 47:20 The moment Devon became aware of the effect of architecture and how it can make employees less involved with their colleagues by not promoting micro-interactions 50:53 The five metrics that a house should be described with, that are never used, when being promoted on websites like Airbnb, Zillow, Craigslist, etc.  57:00 Devon chooses the three metrics that she’d pick when it comes to the city she lives in and the home she’s living in for maximum interaction, convenience and mental economy 1:03:16 Algorithms To Live By and why Devon sees it as the best self help book she’s ever read, despite it not being a self help book 1:05:37 Devon’s opinion on Georgism and how people talk about economics as a spectrum from capitalism to socialism or communism and the third category of economic goods that it doesn’t touch upon 1:07:30 Devon’s changing opinions and her epistemic status placed on each of her blog posts written with a strong opinion 1:10:03 Devon’s philosophy of travel and why she views it as scale free regardless of how many or little places you visit 1:11:51 Devon’s philosophy of productivity and how she writes down dozens of notes and uses long form emails to repurpose her ideas into publishable articles Subscribe to my “Monday Musings” newsletter to keep up with the podcast. Quotes “I am very interested in coordination problems. I think that they explain a lot of the problems that we see in the world, everything from climate change to nuclear disarming to issues in cities to making it so that people can actually live where they are the most productive to housing policy. I could go on and on. The solution to coordination problems is incentive design, and clever solutions that are some of the reason humans have been able to progress to the extent they have throughout the past few hundred years.” “The most classic tool for thought, and one that I think we tend to take for granted, is writing. Most people think of writing as a way to communicate ideas that they’ve had in their head to other people. Obviously, it does serve that purpose and people sell books for a reason. But, I think it goes way beyond that.” “In the last year, I have found that writing has gotten a lot easier for me. There’s probably a lot of reasons for this but I think the core is that I realized there are three categories of topics you can write about. There’s the stuff that everybody knows that is trivial to write about because it’s easy. On the other end, there’s stuff that nobody knows yet or nobody around you knows yet, so it takes a lot of time to figure it out and it takes a lot of research. Now, there’s this middle area between common knowledge and really obscure knowledge of stuff that you have a unique perspective on because of where you happen to be in life and you understand it so intuitively that you can just talk, think and write about it fluidly. But, a lot of people don’t know it yet. That’s the sweet spot.” “For me, it’s very important that I can walk places. Walking is a way to interact with your community in these small ways, every single day. The way people get comfortable in a place and in a social group is not through one really intense interaction, but through a bunch of smaller ones where you see things from different angles. You experience, what does my neighborhood looks like on a sunny day, on a cloudy day, or when I’m tired. These tiny, trivial things help you understand, much better, how things function. You get to know the vibe so much better and you meet people you wouldn’t meet if you were in an Uber.” “Algorithms To Live By is the best self help book I’ve ever read and it’s not intended to be a self help book, it’s intended to be an algorithmic look at certain problems that people see day to day. But, it helps me frame certain problems that I personally run into in terms of the algorithmic complexity. I realized the stress that I was feeling about certain things I was worrying about, were actually totally rational.” Subscribe to my “Monday Musings” newsletter to keep up with the podcast. TRANSCRIPT DEVON: I am very interested in coordination problems. I think that they explain a lot of the problems that we see in the world. Everything from climate change to nuclear disarmament to issues in cities and making it so that people can actually live in where they're the most productive, in housing policy. Well, I could go on and on and on with the list. So the solution to cooperation problems is incentive design. And I think clever solutions to incentive design are some of the reasons why humans have been able to progress to the extent that they have throughout the last few hundred years. So a primary example is contract law, it makes it possible for people to trust one another. Other examples are the development of risk and the concept of commodifying the risk. DAVID: I was having a conversation yesterday in another podcast and the guest was saying that in 1471, what happened was people were able to pool maritime risk. And what happened was it let big expansive ship voyages happen because you could pull risks together. And so if you invested in a ship and say that ship broke down, then you wouldn't lose all your money. And by pooling risk and by coming up with new financing and coordination solutions, you could do things that weren't previously possible. I thought that was really interesting. DEVON: Totally. That's a great example. Actually. Old maritime risk looks a lot like venture capital today wherein venture a lot of things fail. A lot of things fail spectacularly. But if you can spread out that risk across a whole pool of investments, it only takes a few to like really, carry the whole fund. In the case of maritime investments, a lot of the ships broke down, they had problems. But if one ship came back with a whole load of goods that could repay all of the rest of the costs. However, most, most investors back then couldn't take that risk because most of them would have failed. They might've lost all their money before they hit that one big one. And so by the development of that maritime risk, they were able to get past that sort of short-term problem and to get into the run longer returns. I think that's a really good metaphor for all sorts of problems that we run into wherein the short term it's rational to do a thing that is not as interesting, that it's not as lucrative, but it's also not as risky. But if we're able to coordinate as a society, as a company or whatever level you want to talk about. So one more concrete example to bring it down from like highfalutin, venture capital and maritime risk, you could just look at cooperation problems as simple as when you're dating someone for the first time, there's that standard wait three days until you text them back after you met them because you want to come off as cool. You don't want to come off as desperate, right? But if you really like each other, like all this is going to signal is that you don't like them very much. And that may be rational for you because you don't want to come off as desperate. But if you're both doing that, you end up with an outcome where it seems like you don't like each other very much and it takes a really long time to actually realize that you do. Ideally, you would have some neutral trustable third party who could be a person A, person B, out Alice and Bob like you both like each other. You told me that you liked each other, just go for it. You know, have fun. And I think a lot of healthy relationships that I've seen have actually started in this way because of some small quirk at the very beginning. It can be super useful, but a lot of the pain that I see my friends going through when they date is literally just the result of playing games because rationally, you're supposed to. It's basically a prisoner's dilemma. And so if you can have someone who forces you into the correct quadrant where everyone is better off, that's much better. DAVID: So then let's jump into sort of human cognition and human thought. Maybe begin with media. What interests you? Sort of when I think of where this conversation is going to go today. So much of it is about augmentation, right? Like cities augmenting the potential for humans interact and making that so much easier. And blockchain augmenting human coordination is making that easier. And then here with thought and having tools, augmenting human thoughts and letting us go places that we probably wouldn't be able to go if we were stuck in the mountains on our own. DEVON: I think the underlying reason I'm interested in incentive design is because it allows us to unlock human potential and allows people to do much cooler stuff that makes them happier, healthier, makes life more worth living. I see ways to augment our cognition as serving that same purpose though from a different angle. The umbrella term that people sometimes give this is tools for thoughts and we have basically the same brains that we and our ancestors had thousands of years ago, but we're able to do so much more. Part of that is because we've developed incentive design. The other reason is because we've developed tools for giving our cognition more leverage. And I use the term leverage actually very specifically. You can only get so strong no matter how much you lift. How once you go to the gym, like you're still not going to be an order of magnitude stronger. You're definitely not going to be two orders of magnitude stronger. However, if you design an engine, if you just even add a lever that gives you that leverage, you can do so much more with your muscles. I see that that translates directly to your brain. The most classic tool for thought and one that I think we tend to take for granted is writing. Most people think of writing as a way to just communicate ideas that they've had in their head to other people. It obviously does serve that purpose. People sell books for a reason, but I think it goes way beyond that. So one thing that writing does for you is it expands your working and your long-term memory. With the long-term memory, it's pretty obvious. You take notes, maybe you don't remember all the details, but you can look them up later. DAVID: To your point, even today I was writing something this morning and I wrote something that I wrote about a year ago and I have no recollection of writing it and I read it and I was like, wow, that's actually pretty smart and it really helped me, but I think to your point, there's a permanent element of writing and being able to sort of work through sentences and craft them, makes it so that you can achieve thoughts because of the repetition and the sort of tweaking and editing of writing that you can't do if you're just speaking like we are right now. DEVON: 100 percent. And I've also had that experience more times than I can count of like coming across something I've written and being like, oh, this is interesting, I wrote that. That came out of my brain. And as long as you have enough of a pointer to that idea that you can find it when it's necessary, or it gets surfaced by accident because you happen to open up an old notebook. That's extremely powerful. It makes you much better at remembering. I think even more importantly, a writing helps you with your short term memory, your working memory. There have been a lot of studies showing that a working memory is one of the highest things correlated with IQ and the ability to solve problems. And I think the reason for this is because if you have good working memory, you can hold a lot of state in your head and you can sort of fiddle with that state. You can hold contradictory but potentially correct ideas and outcomes in your head while you work through the problem. And then they collapse into one at the end. DAVID: Describe state real quick for someone who doesn't have the computer vocabulary that you do. DEVON: So state is what is the current status of the world right now. Let's say you're working through a personal problem and with your family or something, and you want to go through step by step and sort of understand the implications of what different people have done. You're getting the story from different friends, like maybe you're helping reconcile like your aunt and your uncle or something like that, having marital problems and you want to understand how they got to that point and how, given where they are right now at that point, like how different changes result in better or worse outcomes. Understanding the current state of the situation and then like fiddling with it and being able to hold all of those sort of partial computations in your head are really important to be able to compare them and to be able to move forward and find a solution. DAVID: So you're saying that writing and sort of computers at large now help us hold more state so then we can move on to higher-order tasks that perhaps aren't memory, that our brains are really well suited for. DEVON: Exactly. And they're more interesting. And working memory can kind of provide abstractions. I think the best metaphor for working memory or external working memory is like scratch paper, that there's a reason why math teachers always tell you, feel free to use as much scratch paper as you want. That's not just because they hate trees and they want to waste all paper. It's because being able to externalize that process is really, really helpful. Offload is the perfect word. DAVID: So back to writing. DEVON: I think it actually goes even much further than memory. With writing, it is fundamentally the process of externalizing an idea which allows you to play with it in ways that I don't think are so easy when it's in your head. I'm certainly not capable of it. Writing things down can reduce the amount of ego that you have as you fiddled with an idea. Maybe I'm just crazy, but when I wrote them down and almost pretend like the person who wrote that wasn't me, it was like, that's past Devon or someone else entirely. I can detach myself from it much more in a way where, when I am a thinking through something just in my head and lying in bed wondering. I'm not going to be as rigorous about it. Now that's not strictly worse. There are other things like everyone has great thoughts in the shower for instance. It's very common. But it doesn't serve all purposes, especially if you're trying to vet and find the nooks and crannies of an idea. When you write it down, when an idea has inconsistencies or gaping holes, they are clear and right in the face when it's written down in a way that is just so easy to gloss over when they're in your head. DAVID: And also when you're speaking, you can sort of gloss over some of the inconsistencies with emotion, right? If I speak really deeper and confident with what I'm saying, actually there's an element of trust there. It was really funny. So we had a meetup in Queens a couple of weeks ago and my buddy goes on Snapchat stories and he goes really confidently, coming to the meetup and he goes "Did you know that the reason it's called Queens is because Queen Elizabeth came to New York in 1754?" and you're sitting there being like "Man, you know, why are you being so smart here?" And then he finishes the thing and he goes "Well, I just made that up, but you believe me because I said it so confidently." So what writing does is it strips out the emotion out of a form of communication and it allows logic to take over emotion. DEVON: Right. And it allows you, it gives you something like almost physical to move around and change. I'm a really big believer that constraints are actually a good thing in your thinking because if you're completely working in a vacuum, you have nothing to push off of. You have no feedback cycles. Whereas if you can just get a draft onto the page, you can fiddle around with it so much more. And I find that writing that draft in the first place, that's usually the hardest part, but once I have something to work off of, it gets much, much easier. It helps you find implications that you didn't realize there were, which again, I don't fully understand like the cognitive science behind why this is. But by putting it on the page, you start seeing these almost trails in your head of like, given this, given I said this, what are the implications there? And you can actually follow those trails and like come back to them after you've written them down and realize, oh, this thing does have an implication I hadn't considered. One of my favorite things to do when I'm writing is just looking up synonyms for words. And the reason is not just to make myself sound smarter. Though, that's always a plus. But much more importantly is that by looking up synonyms, you can think about which words don't make sense here. Even though they are technically synonyms. And why they don't make sense and analyzing that is extremely useful. It's sort of a generator function for coming up with new ideas. Similarly, I think choosing the right word is also really important. Words come with such heavy connotation that picking the right one can be the difference between concepts really striking home and like feeling kind of flat. So I highly recommend people using sources when they write, all over the place. I actually use sources when I write code as well, for variable names and class names and things like that, because it helps you. Computer science and programming is basically the art of abstractions and abstractions is another way of saying names mostly. And coming up with really good names for things is a really critical piece of being able to write good software. So I think the source, I go to thesaurus.com probably 300 times a day. I have never actually counted, but it's a lot of times. I've always idea called playing chess with yourself. DAVID: Walk me through that. DEVON: So I think writing, especially the writing process, before you've published, as kind of like playing chess or yourself. There's that Pixar short, it's called like Geri’s Chest Game or something like that. And it zooms in on this guy sitting on a park bench playing chess and his partner isn't around. And you're like, oh, I guess maybe they went to the restroom, maybe they're coming back and then all of a sudden the camera zooms in and he's like on the other side, playing with the white pieces now. And then he flips back and forth and you realize he's just having a ton of fun and playing against himself. And he's really excited against himself. This is a hard thing to do inside of your own head, but it's actually a lot easier when you've externalized something because once you have that writing on the page, you can treat that as sort of another person almost. And play around with it in a way that is just much harder when you're by yourself. DAVID: Totally. And then the other thing is I think you have sort of an uncanny knack for generating unusual ideas and I don't say this to discredit you, but I think that you've built some systems to make that a hell of a lot easier. Walk me through different tiers of common knowledge. So I got an email last week from a guy who said, I love your writing, but the biggest thing preventing me from writing is that I always think that everybody else knows the things that I know and that's the biggest thing. Stopping. And I responded and I said, well, that's not necessarily the case, but I wasn't able to formulate something that I think that you've been able to grasp in terms of different ways of thinking about what is common knowledge? If you could describe that. And then how does that translate to writing and drafting an idea? DEVON: Yeah, that's a great question. So in the last year, I've found that writing has gotten a lot easier for me. There's probably a lot of reasons for this, but I think the core one is that I realized there's sort of three categories of topics that you can write about. There's the stuff that everyone knows that's like trivial to write about it because it's easy. The sky is blue. Okay, good. That's awesome. No one wants to read that. Very common knowledge. On the other end, there's stuff that no one knows yet or no one around you knows yet. And so it takes a really long time to figure it out, requires a lot of research. I can point to some examples of things I've written where I'm very proud of this writing that I've done, but it was a slog all the way through. Some of the stuff that I wrote about, the federal housing administration last year, just required poring through hundreds of documents from old FHA manuals and things that I don't know if people have looked at in a while and I found some novel stuff, but it also was a ton of work. Now there's this middle area between common knowledge and like really obscure knowledge of stuff that you have a unique perspective on because of where you happen to be in life and you understand it so intuitively that you can just talk and think about it fluidly. But actually a lot of people don't know it yet and I think that that is the sweet spot for generating a lot of streams. DAVID: How would you know when that's true? DEVON: That's a hard question. For a long time, I just thought that this the way I think is the way that everyone thinks. And so I was like, no one really wants to read about like my theory on flaking in San Francisco. Everyone in SF knows that already. DAVID: But what's your theory on flaking? DEVON: I haven't lived really in any other city, but my impression from talking with friends is that the rate of flaking is extremely high, with friends, with romantic partners, et cetera, relative to sort of sister cities like New York or Chicago or LA. I think part of the reason is that people in my social circles in San Francisco really understand opportunity cost well. There's a very casual culture here where it seems like an acceptable flake. And we also are like, even more so than other millennial types, are very technologically savvy. So if 10 minutes before your coffee date you're like, oh, sorry, I got caught up in something. Can we reschedule next week? It feels trivial because it's just a text. You're not going to literally stand them up because they just won't show up. But the problem with this is that it's another cooperation problem where we ended up in this equilibrium where it feels acceptable for everyone to flake all the time and just not show up to their commitments. But then like everyone's worse off because your scheduling is more complicated. You never really know. If things are going to happen when you think they're going to happen, you kind of don't want to be seen as like the pathetic one who doesn't cancel the plan. So you almost are incentivized to flake because if someone flakes on you enough times, you're like, well, I don't want to look like an idiot. I don't want to be taken advantage of here. So, next time we make plans I'm going to double book and see which one feels more interesting that day. And I think that leads to a real breakdown of trust and like happiness and satisfaction with relationships. Since I realized this, I've personally made a stance where I'm like, I will not flake on something unless I have an exceptionally good reason. And my friends I've noticed have also started to like follow up with me where I've put a stake in the ground. It helps that I wrote a blog post about it. I put a stake in the ground of like, I don't want this to be okay anymore because it's like making everyone's life worse. DAVID: What about San Francisco makes flaking uniquely common here? DEVON: I think there's a mentality of casualness where if you walk around the city, no one's ever dressed up. I mean, literally today I am wearing yoga pants and a tee shirt, and people want to look mostly clean cut, but they'll wear athletic gear almost all the time. I think that is indicative of a broader social casualness. Certain social norms are not as strong and in fact, the social norm is to not have strong social norms. And if you want to come off as like cool and casual. If someone is placed on you and you say something and you're like, hey dude, you flaked on me last time too. That's sort of like a point against you. You're seen as uptight or something. Maybe LA is also more similar to this, but I think like in New York, I feel like there's more of a seriousness in the way people interact where it's like your people get dressed up when they go out. Like when I go to New York, I always feel super underdressed. I think that carries over to a lot of parts of the culture. Where you don't break dates unless you have a good reason. Whereas I can look back on my calendar before I had all of these thoughts and honestly I was either breaking or having commitments broken on me like 50 to 70 percent of the time. And I don't think I'm unique in this because I've had conversations with a lot of people on my team. So I want to go back to writing, but I just want to summarize why I think that falls into the second category of common knowledge. So the first category is things that everybody knows like the sky is blue. The third category is things like the history of FHA housing, which probably requires a lot of research and nobody knows those things. But the second category is things that everyone sort of has a common framework for discussing like flaking. But because you are in a social circle that has a high opportunity cost in San Francisco, you have unique insight into that problem. And when we have a common knowledge, a common way of speaking about something and you have unique insight into that same sort of thing, that is when you should go pursue an idea and share it with the world. DEVON: Totally. I think that's a really good framing of it. I especially like the term common knowledge. Because I don't think anything I said in the post was surprising to anyone, but I think finally sitting down and putting the pieces together as to why all of this stuff comes together, I think is the difference. And just taking the time to sort of reflect on like various dynamics in your own life I think can be a really powerful generative tool. DAVID: I gotta ask, as you think about your writing, you think about your learning sort of your process for living, so to speak. It's cool because I like people like this. Your process for living is also a process for sharing, right? It's almost like a co-dynamic between the two where you live, you share, you share, you live, and I think that they, they sort of co-evolve and develop. Who were the people who have really inspired you to become like that and who were the mentors, digital or physical that have really inspired you? DEVON: There have been a lot. And this actually ties really nicely into the framework of like common knowledge to obscure knowledge. I think I used to think that a writing had to be this big formal process where you sit down with an argument or a spectrum and you try to decide where on that spectrum of arguments you lie and then you dive deep into the literature and you study it, and then you pop out weeks later and you've like displayed to the world this thing, this masterpiece you've been working on. A lot of writing does follow that. A lot of great writing. And I don't think people should stop doing that by any means, but I think there's this other type of writing that is treat your ideas less as a final project product and more as a process. Someone who I think does this very well, I don't know him personally, is Ben Thompson at Stratechery. He writes about the same stuff day after day, but each time he writes about it, he turns it a little bit in his mind. He comes at it from a slightly different angle and over the course of years he has built this canon of like what aggregation theory and he has this whole vocabulary that he's built up and you can see when you go back to his earlier writing, the idea is not fully developed at all, but the writing itself was the thing that developed the ideas. And I think that that is a huge mindset shift that I've had where I used to think first you have the ideas and then you write them down, but actually, you should have some seed of an idea. But then when you start writing, that's what actually brings it out and like causes it to flourish and grow. Another person who's played a really big role in helping me realize the value of this is Tyler Cowen (my podcast episode with Tyler). His blog, Marginal Revolution is just like one of my favorite things on the internet. It's the most ridiculous set of things. It's the intersection of all stuff and he doesn't take it that seriously. DAVID: Right. And the juxtaposition of ideas that you find there puts your brain in crazy places because he'll share, NBA basketball, his recent trip to Ethiopia, and then markets and everything in some weird market that you've never heard of. And I think that really cool ideas and really cool ways of thinking come not necessarily when you discover a new idea, but when you juxtapose ideas that you're vaguely familiar with and then your brain just goes in weird places through that. DEVON: Yeah, by having this huge diversity of sources and ideas, it allows for a type of lateral thinking that I think is really missing in the world. And something I particularly love about Tyler's work is that he both does and doesn't take it seriously at all. So by does, I mean he does, he spends all of his time doing this and he cares about deeply. So he's serious in that sense, but he also treats it as this big game where he's just like, you know, I'm just having fun, I'm pursuing the things I find interesting and I will go down the rabbit holes that seem interesting and ultimately they will become useful. DAVID: So talk about that. So that is a really important part of the learning journey, especially on the internet. so if you take before the internet, right? Like, think of the process of going into the library to research a project in college, right? You go to the librarian and you say take me to history and then it's between like book number 800-899 on the little codes and sort of you spend time in history. But you said something there that I don't think you realize that you said, but it is what it means to learn on the internet. It's sort of having hunches and ideas that certain rabbit holes are going to be interesting and having the audacity to go down those rabbit holes. But how do you gauge what rabbit holes do you want to go down? DEVON: So I think it doesn't matter. I actually think that almost everything can be interesting if you try to build a model for it. Now so things aren't interesting if you try to just rote memorize stuff and I think that that's going to be true with basically every topic actually. However, if you try to understand why things happen and build a causal model in your head, everything's interesting. When I was much younger I felt like, ugh, I like playing sports but I don't really enjoy watching sports. And I think this is a pretty typical like nerd opinion to have. But I realized that if you actually watch a game and you tried to understand sort of where the threads are, like if you pull this thread here, what happens to the fabric over there, have this ongoing game. It's extremely fascinating. Same with a mortgage history. Like if the FHA had done this like tiny little thing differently, like what would have been the rippling effects downstream and why do you think that's true? What are the other explanations for that same behavior? So I don't think the specific rabbit hole really matters that much as long as you are actively forcing yourself to build a model. DAVID: It's interesting because I was just watching the NBA finals and with the Warriors. So Stephen Curry, the reason where he is so good, is because after he passes the ball, he runs to the corner and tries to catch it and you just watch it and it's like, it's amazing to watch. But just, it's funny because. And then I would also watch switches on screens and what not. These are things that sound advanced, but they're super simple. And just by having two or three things that I could sort of hook to, then it opened the door for the rest of it. And it was funny because to go back to Tyler when, whenever I try to learn something the best advice that I've gotten from Tyler Cowen is the idea of entry points. Find something that you like, something that it's intuitive, a metaphor that you like, start there. And then as you begin any sort of learning journey, start with an entry point that you're familiar with and use that as your balances, your crutch to go explore new territory. DEVON: I strongly agree with that. So in high school, I thought of myself as much more of a liberal artsy type of person. I was always pretty good at math and science and so on. I didn't struggle but it just didn't click until I was 16, 17. My boyfriend and I at the time rebuilt a 67 Mustang that he owned and we did an engine swap. We replace the rear end, we did a lot of work on this car. And suddenly all of the engineering and engineering related skills that I've picked up over time became fascinating. I was like, I want to understand how all this works. I picked up something like thermodynamics books and like this, this car was the entryway to all sorts of things and now this is a particularly useful one because if we did it wrong we would die while we were driving it. So like we had pretty good motivation to figure stuff out. But I think finding some sort of entryway into that is critical. And I mean working on the car has literally changed my career in the sense that I don't think I would have gone into mechanical engineering and then computer science if it hadn't been for that thing. I mean the guy helps too, but the car was like really this concrete thing I could imagine in my head and then want to understand the pieces that made up the whole thing. DAVID: Totally. Well, I want to switch gears and talk to you about the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today, which is really cities and with the intersection of architecture and incentives. Maybe we can start with Singapore and I'm going to ask that selfishly because I'm really interested in Singapore. I think there's a lot to learn from Singapore, but you were also just there and you've written a lot about Singapore. What is so interesting to you about Singapore? DEVON: Oh man. What is not interesting about Singapore? So Singapore I think is one of the most interesting countries in history. And that's saying something, given that it's only been around for I think 50 or 60 years. It is a city-state. It's only about 5 million people. It is ethnically extremely diverse. There are ethnic Chinese, ethnic Malays, ethnic Indians, and many, many other groups there as well. And it's one of the safest places in the world and it has a booming economy and it has been for a long time, seen as like a center of stability in a region that has not always been stable. So all of those things are incredible about Singapore and that would be crazy for any city or any country, but especially considering where they came from, where they had, I don't remember the exact number, but they had GDP, I think equivalent to like Vietnam in the sixties, and now they have significantly higher GDP than almost any country in the world. One of the highest. Now GDP doesn't measure everything, but it correlates with a lot of important things. The reason I think if I had to pick one reason why I'm fascinated by Singapore, it's because it has one of the weirdest types of governance ever. DAVID: Describe the governance. DEVON: The governance is increasingly less so now, but it's quite to totalitarian. It's not very Democratic at all. DAVID: It's funny because my first thought is whoa, that's not good. But it seems like you're hinting at something else. DEVON: I also think it's not good. And if the whole world were run the way Singapore is run, I don't think that would be a good thing for the world. In part because of the specific things that Singapore does, like it still has like physical punishment and so on for not very big crimes. But then also beyond physical and capital punishment. It also just like having one system for the whole world is not a great thing. It's extremely fragile. Things can go wrong in ways that ripple across the entire world. Now that sounds extreme, but I bring that up because I think Singapore is interesting because it is the opposite. Not only does it not, not only is the whole world not governed the way Singapore is. Singapore is tiny. So even if you really strongly dislike what Singapore is trying to do, what it's experimenting with, it's relatively easy to leave. Now I want to add the strong caveat that like leaving the country you were born in is never an easy decision. And I am not like underplaying that. But it is relatively much easier than leaving a massive country that is not deeply interconnected with the world. And so the thing I find exciting about this country is that it provides this room for experimentation at a relatively low cost. If the entire United States were to take on an experiment, say universal basic income or something else entirely, and if it were to go wrong, it would just, it would be a disaster. It could cripple the country and it would affect roughly 20 million people, something like that. And like you also wouldn't even really be able to know if what the causal mechanism was if UBI was the thing that screwed up or something else entirely. Whereas if you can run a bunch of smaller experiments, which this is the idea of federalism, then you can actually compare the results. People can leave if they really don't want to be part of this experiment. And I think this is really important. People don't like the concept of being experimented on and I get it, but if we don't experiment with new models, we're never going to improve. And so I think the question shouldn't be, should we experimental or should we not experiment. It's like, yes we should, but we should find the ways to have the greatest diversity of experiments while also minimizing the cost. DAVID: Right. Like a lot of what China's doing is sort of A, B testing cities, but the downside risk is impacting millions and millions of people. And I think to your point about minimizing the downside, you know, you could argue that they've gone too far. DEVON: Yeah. I think there's a Slate Star Codex blog post that has a great word for this. It calls it archipelago communitarianism. The concept is like we could have a bunch of cities or very small countries, that had radically different systems and the only promise that they make to each other is that they won't stop the people from leaving those places if they really want to. Maybe there are a few other rules too. I'm not gonna remember the entire details of the blog post, read it a few years ago, but I love this idea of having like little islands of extremity to really push an idea to its limit. And if it, if everyone leaves them, that means that that's not what people wanted. DAVID: Well, that's sort of where the whole voice exit loyalty idea of crypto is coming from. Traditionally in terms of countries, you could voice and you could sort of vote and you could say we want to change the way that things are run by speaking up and there's an exit where you can leave. But traditionally with citizenship, you haven't really been able to leave your country. Even if you're abroad, you still have to pay taxes as an American citizen. And so you're forced to be stuck between voice and loyalty. Whereas now we're switching to where you can still voice your opinion, but if you don't like it, you can exit. And there's a lot of freedom that I think comes with that. DEVON: Yeah. I think it's not just that you can still voice your opinions and also you can leave, it's that you can voice your opinions often better if you have a very small community. A single person has much more sway over the outcome. So it seems very likely to me that it's much easier for a person in a very small community to be able to make a change in that community to begin with and like shape it in their own image than it would be for a massive country like the US or Brazil or something like that. So by bringing it down to a smaller scale, you both get added exit rates, but you also get a greater voice. DAVID: Totally. So you were just in Singapore. What stuck out about being in Singapore to you? Let's go to two places. What is the biggest thing that surprised you when you were there? And what is the biggest thing that you've been thinking about since you came back from Singapore? DEVON: I knew that Singapore had great Infrastructure. I knew that its citizens were well educated, that a lot of its systems just worked. But I didn't realize how much this is embedded in the psyche of the place. It's not just that like, stuff works well and some people forget about it and like go ahead and do their own thing. It's like the most central place of the city right next to Maxwell's Hawker Center, which is like a big destination in the core of the city. There's this place called the URA, the urban research association. I don't remember the exact acronym. Basically, it's this like big gallery on urbanism and like what it means to be an effective city with good governance and what it will take for this to continue and get better over time. I went into this gallery exhibit because I can't keep away if you say that it's like an urban museum. I'm like, okay. It's Devon catnip. I couldn't help but to go in. And I was there at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday and it was full of students, the sense that I got is that like every Singaporean student probably goes there like once a year. I don't even think that we have a gallery like that in San Francisco. And certainly not in the center of the city and kids definitely don't go there all the time. There was this overall sense of understanding of why things work so well, how things won't necessarily keep working well in the future unless we do something about it and like a sense of responsibility that people in the community have to like be a presence voice, which seems very contradictory with some sort of a more totalitarian style of ruling. But Singapore may be the only place in the world where there's a brain drain into the government and not out of it. That is very consistent with what I saw. It's very deeply respected to be a good technocrat. Someone who understands how systems work and like truly wants to make them better. DAVID: They pay well, what else? DEVON: They pay very well. There's really high prestige going in. I haven't really thought about this too hard. DAVID: Okay. Then we'll switch gears. So you said something really interesting about cities before we were recording the podcast that I thought that you phrased perfectly and that you're especially drawn to cities because they're in this middle of scale, right? Where they're big enough to have an importance on the world stage, right? Like a city like New York, San Francisco, Singapore, they're a big deal. But then there are small enough to be nimble and still sort of understandable like it's hard to sort of wrap your head around what it means to be American because they're just so much going on here, but then also sort of what you were talking about earlier in terms of experimenting. There's a lot of them so you can sort of abstract lessons from each one. And so it's this perfect size, perfect density, perfect volume that makes cities really interesting to study. Right? DEVON: Totally. I think that the nimbleness is really important. There is some digital ID that Singapore is rolling out for all of its citizens pretty soon and they're going to just do it. They have 5 million people, which is a lot of people to roll something out to, but it's big enough for this ID to really matter, but it's small enough where they're like, we can just do this, we can just, we can just make it happen. And I think that's thrilling that you can experiment with something of that size. At the same time, you have this really tight feedback loop. If your trash isn't picked up tomorrow, you're gonna notice within a week you're going to probably start writing letters and like your trash better get picked up. I think at the national level, the feedback loops are much longer and it's just harder to know if people are governing you well at all. And that's a recipe for disaster. It leads to much more misalignment of incentives. DAVID: Definitely. Tight feedback is key to learning. DEVON: It's key to everything. Like if you don't have a tight feedback loop, you're just not really going to improve I think, and you're actually very likely to do things that aren't purely for signaling that you care as opposed to actually doing the right thing. DAVID: Go off on that because that's an idea I haven't explored. DEVON: Yeah. Officials in the US tend to do grandstand a lot, at the federal level. And the reason for this is because they don't even really know if they're having the impact they want to have or that their constituents want them to have. The only real information that people get on both sides is like what someone said, even after the facts, even a decade later, it can be very difficult to draw any meaningful causality stemming from a particular leader. I think that's true in any organization ever. Even as small as a single person organization. You can't do randomized controlled trials on like everything or almost anything. But the problem just grows in scale to a huge extent as you get bigger. I think if you can keep it to a smaller size, it's like, well, you either did your job or you didn't. And the problems are much more manageable, the relationships are less opaque. It's just a much more transparent system overall. DAVID: Totally. So, I mean, for me what's been really interesting is in New York studying art decor, one thing that I love about architecture is I've been thinking about this idea a lot, where a lot of history is sort of subject to the narrative fallacy where it's written by the winners and the really good book on this is The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. He admits that it's biased, but he tries to tell American history from the perspective of the losers. And if you have a generic understanding of American history, you're going to get so many ideas pumped into your head that are totally different. So what's really cool about architecture is, if you look at something like the Chrysler building and at the very top of it and in the lobby and sort of the birds hanging off the side, you know, 60 feet below the top of the building, you can see this like technological enthusiasm, this almost sense of like a utopian spirit that technology in the twenties and the roaring twenties was going to come and save the world. And through the architecture of New York, you can really understand the city in a way that understanding history might not allow you to do. DEVON: Yeah. And I think it's especially interesting to see how buildings change over time in reaction to that original time when it was created and how they shift. I think the moment when I really became aware of the importance of architecture was in my very first job, we started out in this very small office that was cozy and like my desk was far away from the restroom and the kitchen. So when I wanted to take a break, I'd have to walk past everyone and I'd have like a little conversation and I felt very positive about all my coworkers and I feel like we had a really good rapport. About halfway through my time there, we moved into a totally different building. It was supposed to be fancier, it was nicer by everything you could put on paper. But the shape of the rooms was super messed up. Basically, everyone was very close. It was more like a doughnut where like all of the good stuff was in the center and good stuff, meaning, like the kitchen. And so you didn't have to walk past anyone to go see it, which was kind of nice if you're focusing on a problem or you want some alone time, there are pluses to that, but you don't end up having these interactions. And as a result, I almost immediately started feeling like the only people I knew in the company were my team and a lot of the work that I was supposed to be doing was cross-functional. So this made me significantly worse in my job just immediately. Now, of course, this doesn't stop you from having coffee with a coworker and the sales team or something or organizing something with the product team or you know, inviting them to sit at your table at lunch. But these micro-interactions are really critical for building that rapport, for making, keeping people on context. I almost felt like I was a remote worker, and I don't mean to insult remote work. I think that there are huge pluses to that, but it's really undercut the benefits of being in the office as soon as we moved into this new place. DAVID: It's funny because I feel like so much of architecture now, we place such an emphasis on the outside of a building what most people see. But I don't know that we have the same sort of rich discussions about the experience of actually being somewhere. And I guess the example that comes to me is natural light. Like I value natural light in indoors just to such a high degree. It's like the number one thing that I care about in a building, but so often we look at the outside of buildings, so we say, oh that's beautiful. It looks great in a photo, but the experience of being inside of it, I don't actually know that the incentives are aligned for architects to think about that. DEVON: I agree. I mean if you have ever spent time looking for an apartment on Craigslist or a place on Airbnb, actually everything and I'll explain that later. But on craigslist it's like it tells you the square footage, it tells you how many rooms, how many bathrooms there are, which are obviously important details, but it does very little to describe features like natural light and things that make you actually happy, how livable it is. I think part of the problem for this is that it's a much harder thing to commoditize, which means that like it's harder to measure. It's harder to compare two things, there's not a strict measure that you can really use. But it really matters. It really matters a lot. The experience of being in a place is totally different from the way people will often describe a room, at least in describing a room in comparable terms. I think maybe it seems possible. Maybe someone just needs to build a vocabulary for it. DAVID: Okay. Let's play a little game. So if you had to take five metrics for deciding a house on Zillow, right? We have rooms square foot, but if you had five metrics that don't exist right now, what would it be? You do some, I do some. DEVON: Okay. I kinda like this, I'm thinking of it sort of like the, you know, the big five personality. It's kind of like that. DAVID: So you get three, I get two. DEVON: Let's see, I'd say flexibility. Like how much can you change the space to fit your own needs? Is it like very tightly custom designed? The purest example of this would be like the cabinets are built into the walls so you can't move the cabinets. Versus like a lot of ability to move stuff around. DAVID: Mine is the density of power outlets. Most houses don't have nearly enough. DEVON: Oh my god. The computer science building at Stanford has almost no power outlets, which is insane because you go there for the office hours and you know, everyone's there for hours and hours and hours and everyone's computer starts dying around hour three and there's one power outlet and the whole building. Yeah, that needs to change. DAVID: Here's another one. Where I really like houses where the rooms are super private and the open spaces are super public. So you have the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, all sort of in the same room because at the houses that I grew up in, the kitchen was always separate from the dining room. And so whenever we would cook as hosts, It was always sort of awkward because you sort of had to choose. Whereas you get this awesome communal vibe, but I think it really helps with family dynamics if all that is sort of in the same room and it has really good natural light and there's a nice ambiance in there because then people can cluster there. But then you balance that with like the privacy of the rooms. DEVON: I'll expand that one to like the ability to pass through. So in the house I live in right now, it's very hard to get to the backyard. DAVID: Yeah, describe this house because it's actually really cool. It's a commune with 10 people, but like really intelligent people here. DEVON: We call it an intentional community because commune has a lot of economic implications that probably don't apply. So I'm one of 10 people who live in this house. We're actually expanding to an upper floor and it'll be 16 soon. And we're just a group of people who we all care a lot about, having really easy relationships and what that means is I think a lot of the most meaningful and happiness-inducing experiences and interactions that you'll often have will be these little micro-interactions. It's very similar to what I was talking about with my old office. Where if it's really expensive to meet up with someone and hang out with them, it takes money, time, and energy. You have to have to call them, which seems like not a big deal. But here's an intention that's necessary therefore it to happen. You're only going to become close with people where you have an explicit reason to do so. Like sort of a motive almost. Whereas if you're just in the same place, this is why people love college so much. If you're just in the same place with a lot of people who are energetic, motivated, ambitious, like these amazing things will happen where you'll just bump into each other throughout your day and like amazing things will happen without intention and I think that's amazingly valuable and really easy to undervalue. DAVID: You make a really good point because that's almost in a place where that's not the case. Having relationships where you meet somebody right away is almost the mark of a good friendship. It was Saturday night, 11:00 PM a couple of weeks ago. My friend calls me and he goes, what are you doing right now? And it was the first time that happened to me in New York, but it was this like moment in our friendship where in order to do that. Like that happened all the time in college. Like that's college 101. Oh, what are you doing right now? But for it to happen in New York? First of all, was like shocking to me and second of all it was like this mark of our friendship where to get there with somebody takes so much more work because of the way that New York is built and that happens daily in this house here, which I think is really cool. DEVON: It's amazing. I mean, it's amazing you say that that's the case in New York because New York is probably one of the best places in the entire US for this. Like in the opposite sense of what you're talking about. Now imagine if you guys lived in Irvine, California or a far-flung suburb of Salt Lake City or something comes up for you to meet up with this person. Like right now it's just, you jump on the subway, you're there in a few minutes. Not that big of a deal. In those places, you have to like get in your car. Maybe you have to get your snow boots on. You can't get drunk and go home, which is also a good way to bond with people. Also, when you arrive, it will likely just be the two of you, probably no one else was invited, whereas like in a city, maybe you meet up at a bar where there's like a bunch of other random people around you who ended up being really interesting. Actually one of my closest friends. I met like at an event at the MoMa, and just because we like bumped into each other at a mixer afterward. That wouldn't have happened if we weren't in the city. You don't have things like the MoMa in far-out suburbs. And so this is like another example of not just architecture but the general built environment, having dramatic effects on the way you actually interact with the world. DAVID: So let's play another game. If you were to take, I gave you three, we're just going to do metrics again, three metrics or three data points that you could pick and you're going to choose where you live, the house that you lived, a location, what city, what the house looks like, what would the three that you picked be? DEVON: That's a good one. One would be, how long does it take for you to walk from where you live to like your top 10 favorite locations in the city? I think if the answer is a long time and especially if the answer is like you can't even walk there, that's not a good sign for me. Now I don't mean this to be normative for everybody. Other people do have other preferences. Some people want to like go on a big ranch in Idaho and like never see another human. Again, totally not my type but good for them. I'm not saying it's the case, but for me it's very important that I can walk places. I think the reason for this is because walking is a way to interact with your community in these small ways every single day where I think the way people get comfortable in a place in a social group is not through just like one really intense interaction, but through a bunch of smaller ones where you sort of see things from different angles you experienced, you know, what does my neighborhood looked like on a rainy day, what does my neighborhood look like when it's a cloudy day, what does it look like when I'm kind of tired? And these sound like tiny, trivial differences. But you can understand much better how things function. Maybe usually on a sunny day people will like to sit outside at Maxfield's coffee down the street, but on a different one, people sort of tuck inside and it has this closer vibe. You get to know the vibe just much better and you end up meeting people that you probably wouldn't meet if you were in an uber going from point A to point B all the time. So walking is one. Another one would be if for random and sort of once in a while type things like I had to get a necklace fixed the other day, how easy is it for this to be a part of your daily routine? So is it like you have to drive like way out of your way and find some really specialty store to do it? Or like what I did, I was able to walk two blocks away. There's a little jeweler who was able to fix it in three minutes and I walked back and that was like not even my whole lunch break. That was just a little pause in the middle of my day. I grabbed coffee on the way and I came back and up until that point, I had no idea that jeweler was there and we had a nice conversation. But it was just right there. And I love that my whole community can be inside of this little circle. Number three. DAVID: I'll give you my three real quick. So my first one would be natural light, as I've said many times before. That's super important to me. The second one, yours is walking, for me, it's like not having to use a car. So I actually sort of like taking public transportation so I just don't like driving and I don't really like being in cars. So those are the two. The third one would be I like being able to walk, especially to food. Like at my old apartment I was super close with everyone who worked at the bagel shop and I'm pretty close with all the ladies who work at maya taqueria, my local taqueria. And the last one would just be a high density of super intellectually hungry people, which for me is why I've chosen to live in New York. DEVON: Oh, I see. So we can expand this beyond built environment. I would definitely make that my third one as well. This is why I'm in San Francisco, New York maybe is a good choice too, but there is just always someone I can talk to about whatever crazy idea I have going in through my head or is going through their head any given day. I find not everybody here necessarily wants to discuss these ideas, but by using twitter you can actually find these people and like create this strong core where I've basically tricked my brain. The thinking that like everyone around me is just this crazy monster of ideas, continually coming up with new things. There's so much intersection of like different types of people doing work in the city. Everything from like researchers to engineers to entrepreneurs to artists. And unfortunately, fewer these days, as a city gets more expensive. And they're all just mixed together in this pretty small city where you can always find them. But then I think the important component is you also have to have some tools that sort of overlay this to help find them. Just walking around the city. Like I was talking about before, won't surface all of these people and you also are less likely to get outside of your current network if you just stick in your small neighborhood. DAVID: Let's do a quick fire round. So I'm going to ask you like five, six questions and try to keep your answers to like 30 seconds or less. Why do you love Stewart Brand so much? DEVON: He is a polymath. A lot of people take crusades on things. They pick one idea and they just drive it for years and years. Stewart takes hundreds of ideas and makes them all good and is still able to keep a really strong sense of identity despite not having like one thing that he ties himself. DAVID: So I have a theory that personality will end up being almost like the last mode and that sort of so much of what's happening in society right now is like brands are sort of disappearing where many people have less likely to have a favorite brand. But I think that the internet has made it really easy to connect with people. And Stewart Brand is always sort of been a pioneer of technology and I think that people can move around and explore different things through their personality in ways that institutions can't. And I think that that's really helped somebody like Stewart Brand. I don't actually think that focusing on the same thing is like a vector that really matters when it comes to consistency with a person. DEVON: I think that's true. And I think Stewart and Tyler are two fantastic examples of this being 100 percent possible. I think that most people don't realize that and they think that they have to pick one thing and so that you see th

with Chris Dixon (@cdixon), Ali Yahya (@ali01), and Devon Zuegel (@devonzuegel) “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcomes.” At the end of the day, observes a16z crypto general partner Chris Dixon, Satoshi's whitepaper [the original bitcoin paper outlining a peer-to-peer decentralized network and blockchain sans centralized third parties] is nine pages of incentives. It's the kind of incentive design that you can use to build many other things on the internet (which itself is driven by very simple core protocols and could even upgrade itself as a result). But only with the right incentives (and alignment of those incentives among different entities), of course. Which is where cryptonetworks come in -- especially since they don't rely on hardware buildout (as with earlier generations of internet deployment), but rather on software (which is essentially just logic, the kind of building block you can use to build countless other things). The breadth of possibilities is endless. This means that platforms and networks (and operating systems, for that matter) can spend less time, energy, money, and frankly, suffering due to fighting -- thanks to distorted business models that lead them to extract value from users and compete among complements (vs. substitutes/better alternatives). The internet-native business models baked into crypto, however, could lead to greater competition and better options for users. But what are the missing building blocks, that can help make such networks more iterated games vs. one-off prisoner's dilemmas? And what will it take for these networks to truly reach web-scale, as it's still just the beginning? Because decentralization is the means to an end -- not the end in and itself -- observes a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya, so what do we need to build next to get there? In this episode of the a16z Podcast (guest hosted by freelance software engineer and writer Devon Zuegel), Dixon and Yahya share their thoughts on where we've been, and where we're going with the internet. Please note that the a16z crypto fund is a separate legal entity managed by CNK Capital Management, L.L.C. (“CNK”), a registered investor advisor with the Securities and Exchange Commission. a16z crypto is legally independent and operationally separate from the Andreessen Horowitz family of fund and AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“AHCM”).  In any case, the content provided here is for informational purposes only, and does NOT constitute an offer or solicitation to purchase any investment solution or a recommendation to buy or sell a security; nor it is to be taken as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. In fact, none of the information in this or other content on a16zcrypto.com should be relied on in any manner as advice. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax and other related matters concerning any investment. Furthermore, the content is not directed to any investor or potential investor, and may not be used or relied upon in evaluating the merits of any investment and must not be taken as a basis for any investment decision. No investment in any fund advised by CNK or AHCM may be made prior to receipt of definitive offering documentation and due diligence materials. Finally, views expressed are those of the individual a16z crypto personnel quoted therein and are not the views of CNK, AHCM, or their respective affiliates.  Please see https://a16zcrypto.com/disclosures/ and https://a16zcrypto.com/disclaimers/ for further information.

with Denis Nazarov (@iiterature), Jesse Walden (@jessewldn), Ali Yahya (@ali01), and Devon Zuegel (@devonzuegel) Cryptonetworks are often compared to firms, people, or even coral reefs -- but, observes a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya, they might be much more similar to cities. Where does that analogy fit, and where does it break down? And what can we learn from how cities both emerge from the bottom up and are motivated by a top down vision/design  and apply to open source networks such as those in crypto? In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- guest hosted by freelance software engineer (and blockchain app developer) and writer (and urban watcher) Devon Zuegel -- a16z crypto partners Denis Nazarov, Jesse Walden, and Yahya share their thoughts on "rough consensus"; shared myths and beliefs; modularity vs. monolithic design; and the rivers and riverbeds that people build cities and code around. At the end of the day, it's all about mass coordination at scale... but what are the incentives for building the infrastructure and ecosystem, for running experiments but also determining governance as well? Please note that the a16z crypto fund is a separate legal entity managed by CNK Capital Management, L.L.C. (“CNK”), a registered investor advisor with the Securities and Exchange Commission. a16z crypto is legally independent and operationally separate from the Andreessen Horowitz family of fund and AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“AHCM”).  In any case, the content provided here is for informational purposes only, and does NOT constitute an offer or solicitation to purchase any investment solution or a recommendation to buy or sell a security; nor it is to be taken as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. In fact, none of the information in this or other content on a16zcrypto.com should be relied on in any manner as advice. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax and other related matters concerning any investment. Furthermore, the content is not directed to any investor or potential investor, and may not be used or relied upon in evaluating the merits of any investment and must not be taken as a basis for any investment decision. No investment in any fund advised by CNK or AHCM may be made prior to receipt of definitive offering documentation and due diligence materials. Finally, views expressed are those of the individual a16z crypto personnel quoted therein and are not the views of CNK, AHCM, or their respective affiliates.  Please see https://a16zcrypto.com/disclosures/ and https://a16zcrypto.com/disclaimers/ for further information.