Making Sense - Sam Harris - #194 — The New Future of Work

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris.

00:00:26.240 Okay. Well, today I'm speaking with Matt Mullenweg. Matt is one of the founding developers of

00:00:36.520 the WordPress platform, which, if you don't know, powers many of the websites you go to.

00:00:45.880 In fact, I believe that 36% of the web is now run on WordPress. That includes my website,

00:00:53.840 I believe it also includes sites like the New York Times. WordPress is everywhere,

00:00:59.940 and it's an open source platform. But Matt, in 2005, started the company Automatic,

00:01:07.300 which is now what drives WordPress.com and WooCommerce and many other companies. They

00:01:14.440 recently acquired Tumblr. And I wanted to speak to Matt because he has unique insight into

00:01:20.160 running distributed teams. As you'll hear, Automatic is entirely distributed. They have

00:01:27.920 over 1,100 employees working in, I believe, 75 countries. So Matt has been thinking for a long

00:01:35.220 time about the advantages and challenges of working from home. So as many companies and their workers

00:01:42.740 are struggling to figure out how to reinvent themselves in this new environment where we're

00:01:47.560 all needing to shelter in place, I wanted to bring Matt on to talk about this. And now,

00:01:53.860 without further delay, I bring you Matt Mullenweg. Well, I am here with Matt Mullenweg. Matt,

00:02:05.140 thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure. Let's get into your background. We're having this conversation

00:02:10.320 in the crucible of the current moment with the coronavirus pandemic raging on 100 shores here

00:02:20.720 now. But let's introduce you properly. Give us your business perch, and then we can jump in.

00:02:28.460 Yeah. I started contributing to WordPress and the WordPress open source project when I was 19. So I

00:02:33.760 didn't have a ton of work experience beforehand besides freelancing and things. I actually thought

00:02:38.520 I was going to be a musician. But then a few years later, I started Automatic to commercialize,

00:02:42.480 you know, basically SaaS services or software as a service around WordPress. So we made WordPress.com,

00:02:47.640 Jetpack, WooCommerce, a lot of the sort of more commercial things. But so there's actually kind of

00:02:52.020 like a nonprofit volunteer project called WordPress, and then my company called Automatic.

00:02:56.380 So you and I have hung out a few times, and, you know, I've known in the abstract that I've always

00:03:02.220 wanted to speak with you on the podcast. We have several mutual friends, and one just put it into my head,

00:03:08.520 that I should talk to you in the current moment because you really have a unique experience with

00:03:15.340 remote work. Describe just how fully you've embraced remote work and how long you've been

00:03:22.260 doing this. Sure. So when Automatic started in 2005, we were coming out of an open source project.

00:03:28.580 And typically, open source projects are volunteers working from all over the world, just collaborating

00:03:33.760 online. What was a little different is we decided to keep that model as we scaled the company.

00:03:39.040 So we are now, you know, if you fast forward to 2020, we're now about 1,200 people, all of the world,

00:03:45.500 all working together remotely, collaborating completely online. We like to not use the word

00:03:50.380 remote even because we say distributed because remote implies that there's essential in remote.

00:03:54.140 So we say we're fully distributed and no end in sight, meaning that, you know, through especially

00:03:59.120 the early days, people said, oh, this works when you're 10 people or 15 people, but it won't work

00:04:02.460 when you're 50 or when you're 150 or reach Dunbar's number or whatever it is.

00:04:05.920 And we've shown we could scale it to, you know, being commercially successful as well

00:04:11.640 as kind of hopefully doing good things for society. And also try to blaze a path where

00:04:15.900 now there's a ton of other fully distributed companies. You know, many are unicorns are

00:04:19.960 valued at multiple billions of dollars and doing some really amazing stuff throughout the industry.

00:04:23.660 So there's like GitLab and Vision. There's a lot besides just Automatic out there.

00:04:28.240 Yeah. So many companies now are confronting this imperative to figure out how to be a distributed

00:04:33.700 team. Obviously, this is totally unworkable in certain businesses. And we're witnessing the

00:04:41.440 closure of restaurants and the decimation of the service industry. And yet some companies like yours and

00:04:48.640 happily like mine, just by sheer accident are in a position of being, I guess, as anti-fragile as

00:04:55.980 to employ the term of jargon of one of my nemeses, or as anti-fragile as you can be in the current

00:05:04.100 environment. What do you say to all of these companies that actually can make this change,

00:05:11.900 or at least put a significant percentage of their workforce into home quarantine, essentially,

00:05:19.080 as, you know, from an epidemiological perspective, that's what is being asked of us? What advice do

00:05:24.660 you have for how to make that transition? Well, there's a lot packed in there.

00:05:30.700 Well, first, I will say that I consider it a moral imperative. So just like we would ask anyone who can

00:05:36.460 work from home, you really should, or it's worse for society. I think any company which can enable

00:05:42.340 their people to be fully effective in a distributed fashion can and should, and in fact, should do it

00:05:47.980 far beyond after this crisis is currently passed. I think there's some interesting parallels. You

00:05:52.700 never want to compare disasters or crises. But after 9-11, we were in a situation where people were

00:05:58.340 staying at home naturally, and they were disengaging from, you know, the broader economic

00:06:02.260 activity. And we had to ask society to say, hey, go back out, go to the movies, go to parks, go to

00:06:08.160 restaurants, etc. Right now, we're asking people to do the opposite. So we're saying, please do not

00:06:13.360 engage in these particularly physically co-located activities. But we do still need to restart the

00:06:20.400 economic engine. And anyone who can contribute to the economic engine at this point, I think, should

00:06:27.540 be doing everything they can to be part of it. Now, you asked, like, what to do for companies

00:06:32.240 transitioning this? First, I would say that this is not a normal work from home situation,

00:06:37.260 right? This is usually when you work from home, your kids might have, like, daycare or be in school.

00:06:44.460 So a lot of people are struggling with sort of unusual family situations when they're trying to

00:06:49.100 work. There's obviously a ton going out, and there's going to be, I think, a lot of challenges,

00:06:54.060 tragedy, and hardship at the same time. But I think that you can kind of zoom out and say, well,

00:06:58.360 how can I use this as an opportunity to essentially build a framework for how myself, my colleagues,

00:07:06.680 my industry, my organization can be, as you put it, anti-fragile, which is not just resilient in

00:07:12.120 the face of turbulence like this, but actually get stronger. I think there's five levels here,

00:07:16.880 but I've been talking a while already. So do you want to go to the five levels?

00:07:20.160 Keep rolling. I want to hear it.

00:07:22.220 Sure. So I'm familiar with Daniel Pink's work, Drive.

00:07:25.200 Yeah. But I don't know that our listeners are. So to me, this is probably one of the most

00:07:30.460 influential books on me when creating Automatic and sort of designing the workplace that I wanted

00:07:35.440 to work in and I wanted to, you know, model for the world. And he talks about, like, if you want

00:07:40.580 people to be happy, motivated, content, satisfied, and fulfilled in their work, like, it's not really

00:07:45.300 about compensation or giving them bonuses and actually some of those things that have the

00:07:48.840 opposite effect, but it's really about three things, mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

00:07:53.880 Mastery being like, are you able to get better at your job? Do you have the sort of ability to

00:08:00.620 accomplish it? Or are you being held, you know, it's the pointy haired boss holding you back from

00:08:05.140 from doing what you are trying to do. The other side that normal organizations can do really well

00:08:10.460 at is purpose. And that's, you know, working for something bigger than a paycheck, something

00:08:14.240 bigger than yourself. You feel connection in your work to something larger that can be intrinsically

00:08:20.020 motivating far beyond any extrinsic factors might be. Or I think distributed organizations can do

00:08:24.840 better than any sort of in-person office-based organization is in autonomy. Autonomy is, do you

00:08:31.000 have the freedom and agency to basically control your environment to get your work done as effectively

00:08:37.680 as possible? That's how I'm defining it. Now, if you imagine what you do in an office, so many elements

00:08:44.800 of your environment are out of your control from the trivial to the serious. Like if you were going

00:08:51.460 to physically co-locate with someone for a third of your life, like a partner or a roommate, you would

00:08:56.900 take that very seriously, right? You would kind of, you know, consider that like a major life decision

00:09:03.560 and make that choice very carefully. But in work, we're sort of just thrust into this physical

00:09:10.420 co-location with a random set of humans who we did not choose to be put there. They're there hopefully

00:09:16.040 because they're competent at jobs and useful to the employer. But, you know, even that can be a

00:09:20.020 question sometimes. And then the environment itself for the sort of compatibility of the whole is very

00:09:26.600 constrained. So you don't have control over the temperature. You're typically using the restroom in 0.94

00:09:32.760 a shared setting. You, you know, pets might be allowed at some point, but maybe you don't like that

00:09:38.300 other people's pets are there or maybe, you know, there's all sorts of fraught things there. Your

00:09:43.720 desk is, you know, probably not everyone has a corner office with a window. There's just so much

00:09:50.520 there. The food, the talking of your colleagues, the temperatures. And it's interesting, like I think

00:09:55.700 you've kind of not been in an office situation for a while, right? No, no. In truth, I've never been.

00:10:01.060 I mean, it's something I have no direct experience of. But the other aspect of it that seems to be

00:10:08.740 true is that for better and worse, you know, often worse, there's a lot of time. There's a lot of work

00:10:15.600 time that's not actually a matter of getting work done. And, you know, I know this from even

00:10:21.140 distributed meetings. You know, many meetings are, in the end, wasted time. So there's probably

00:10:27.540 efficiency to be found, assuming one can actually figure out a way to work from home or work remotely

00:10:34.720 that doesn't open itself up to its own distractions. You can probably get a lot more done in less time

00:10:41.780 if you know what you're doing. And so that's where we get into the levels of autonomy. So you know how

00:10:47.280 there's like different levels of self-driving cars? So I think of the different levels of autonomous

00:10:52.440 organizations. So how far are they? They index on giving people the autonomy to be happy and

00:10:57.600 satisfied with work. So level one, I'm going to find as, you know, the company hasn't done anything

00:11:04.000 deliberate, but almost anywhere today, if you're a knowledge worker, you can, if there's an emergency

00:11:08.920 or something, you can not go into the office for a day and still kind of keep things moving. You know,

00:11:13.500 hop on a phone call, your equipment's probably like your cell phone, your broadband, you can get by,

00:11:19.020 but more likely you're going to kind of put things off until you're back in the office or you won't

00:11:23.680 be as effective if you're not in the office. Right. Level one. That's where most organizations

00:11:27.600 are at, like 98% of the world that can be like this. Level two is I think where a lot of people

00:11:33.020 are heading right now, which is where you try to recreate what you did in the office, but just do it

00:11:38.280 online. So with so many organizations forced into sort of a immediate work from home situation,

00:11:43.340 they're scrambling. I liken this a little bit to in 1922, when radio dramas were first starting

00:11:49.680 and radio as a dramatic medium was, was just beginning. The first things they did weren't like

00:11:54.800 create things just for radio is that they would literally just have actors perform plays. Right. Right.

00:11:59.500 But on the radio. And so there was no like, you know, taking advantage of the medium or cinema in

00:12:06.060 the beginning was, was kind of similar. You know, the terminology at this phase, this level is often

00:12:10.920 rooted in old frames. So moving pictures, or you probably heard the firm telecommute or telework.

00:12:18.200 Yeah. Yeah. I've even used that myself to my embarrassment.

00:12:22.420 What a strange term, like on a telephone, like what is the, at this level, you probably, you know,

00:12:28.920 the company's probably woken up to like, you need to be able to access things when you're not in the

00:12:33.080 office, certain tools, maybe you're starting to adopt things like zoom or slack for chat and video,

00:12:39.040 but still you're recreating the old modes and that everything is assumed to be synchronous.

00:12:44.800 And you might even say like, Hey, everyone needs to be online at these hours, like nine to five.

00:12:49.540 You're just kind of recreating, honestly, what's a factory model of office work, which doesn't make

00:12:54.220 any sense for knowledge work in the first place at home. And, uh, this is also the phase where

00:12:58.980 sometimes companies will want to install software on their employee's computer to like

00:13:02.620 screenshot their screen or make sure certain things are open or that they're logged in. It's

00:13:07.100 kind of the big front brother phase. And this is, you know, I would argue sometimes even less

00:13:12.580 productive than in the office because you're actually removing some of the freedom and agency

00:13:16.000 and you're kind of on, on some worse tools. So a lot of companies are going to be going through

00:13:20.420 a level two now. And I would just advise them to know that kind of old saying, if you're going

00:13:25.060 through heck, keep going. Like if you're going through a level two, like tough it out and start to

00:13:30.440 talk about how you can move to what I'll call levels three through five. So level three is where you start

00:13:36.460 to really take advantage of the medium. So some examples of this, like, let's say you're having

00:13:40.600 a video call, but instead of like, you know, having people typing at their computer or something

00:13:46.340 like that, you could have a shared Google document all open for everyone on their screen and designate

00:13:51.100 someone to take notes. And then everyone else will see the notes being written as they're being

00:13:54.520 taken. Now this sounds like it might be distracting, but it's actually an incredibly clarifying practice

00:14:00.460 in a meeting because you're kind of in real time checking whether, whether the, uh, the artifact

00:14:05.700 of that meeting, the notes being taken from that meeting reflect the shared understanding of what

00:14:10.160 was agreed to. And, you know, communication is hard in general, but in work situations,

00:14:14.420 so often I see so much conflict and drama come from where people thought they were on the same page,

00:14:19.680 but they were using words, the same words to mean different things. And they didn't have a shared

00:14:23.340 understanding of the expectations or outcome. So when you're, the note taking is actually,

00:14:27.600 I think one of the most powerful positions in a meeting. And, uh, and so when it's kind of a

00:14:33.100 shared responsibility there, you get a lot better outcome and expectations for the meeting. You can

00:14:37.900 start to share screens really quickly. So like, Hey, just let me pull up this chart really quick.

00:14:41.960 Let me show you something. And let me show you a website using things like zoom. You can actually

00:14:45.360 like share the screen of your phone. If you want to demo something on an app, like you really start

00:14:49.800 to get to where it's pretty powerful. This is also where typically people start to invest in better

00:14:54.560 equipment. And this could be as simple as like buying a lamp for your desk. So you don't look

00:14:59.080 like you're, you know, the horror movie. So you don't look like you already have COVID-19.

00:15:04.580 Yeah. It's also really fantastic. If I think the best investment at this is actually an audio.

00:15:10.560 So I'm a little heterodox in that I do not believe in muting during meetings if you don't have to,

00:15:17.000 because when you're muted, like if, let's say we're having this conversation and we would have to

00:15:21.120 unmute to talk to each other every time it would really introduce that delay and make it quite

00:15:25.460 stilted. So you lose some of that spontaneity of great conversation, but we ask people to mute

00:15:30.240 because they usually have really terrible mics and a lot of room noise and stuff. Right. Right.

00:15:34.400 The good news is there's like 30, $50 USB headsets. I like one from Sennheiser called the SC30 or SC130

00:15:40.800 that plug into your computer and they have a little, you look like you're in a call center,

00:15:44.600 but just the physics of it is that when the microphone is very close to your mouth,

00:15:47.900 it doesn't have to work as hard and it can kind of be tuned to get just your voice and not all the

00:15:53.220 background noise. And literally like dogs be barking, kids can be yelling. You don't hear it.

00:15:57.420 I also believe this is the area where software is going to have incredible innovation.

00:16:00.680 So there's a cool machine learning tool called crisp.ai. I think it's like 30 or 40 bucks a year.

00:16:05.560 You can run it on your computer and it actually uses machine learning to remove background noise,

00:16:09.760 even from noisy environments. And it can do it both for incoming audio and outgoing audio,

00:16:14.800 which is actually, so if you're talking to someone noisy, it can kind of remove everything

00:16:18.280 except for the voice on their side as well. Can it be run on a phone as well or just a computer?

00:16:22.580 So they have an iOS app, but you have to use the app to make the call. So it's not yet because of the

00:16:28.240 sort of systems level access. But I would also say at level three, you're probably using a laptop

00:16:33.180 more to work. And if you put these tools through the laptop, you actually get a lot more power than if

00:16:38.380 you're just using your phone or an iPad or something. Level four is also where you, or level three is also

00:16:42.760 we invest in written communication. So the written word I think is by far the most powerful for

00:16:48.520 sharing things in a distributed organization and writing quality, clarity, and skill becomes more

00:16:54.740 and more valuable. I think in all organizations, but the more distributed you are for sure.

00:16:59.540 This is going to be a windfall for all the humanities degrees.

00:17:03.820 Absolutely. We screen for it very heavily in our hiring process. Like I actually don't care where you

00:17:08.100 went to college or anything like that, but we do a lot to screen for writing ability, both in the,

00:17:13.100 how you apply, how we interact. We'll hire many, many people without ever actually talking to them

00:17:18.320 in real time or on voice. We do it entirely through Slack and tickets and other things

00:17:22.900 to interact because that's how we work.

00:17:24.640 Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be the final product in many cases. Yeah. That's interesting.

00:17:28.940 Level, can I talk about level four?

00:17:30.040 Yeah, please.

00:17:31.180 Level four is when things go asynchronous. So everything thus far, you're kind of assuming that people are

00:17:37.320 synchronous, which requires people to be on the computer at the same time. And so you're actually

00:17:42.960 not giving people like the agency to design their days or design their productivity to choose how

00:17:49.440 you have the same output. You're judging them on what they need to produce, but not on how they produce

00:17:53.920 it. So I think a lot about the 2016 Japanese relay race team. Do you know that story?

00:18:00.660 No, no.

00:18:01.880 So the Japanese runners, like their a hundred meter dash was a full, like two seconds slower 0.53

00:18:07.860 than like the Usain Boltz of the world. Like they were not the fastest runners by far, but they were

00:18:13.300 actually able to get a silver medal in the 2016 Olympics, beating out faster teams like Jamaica and

00:18:18.700 others because they focused purely on the baton handoff in the relay race. And they were able to

00:18:23.640 shave seconds off the baton handoff.

00:18:26.040 So I think about that all the time. So like, for example, if you can get to where you have people

00:18:32.800 all over the world, uh, level four is also where you can start to hire, tap into the global talent

00:18:36.820 pool. Uh, if you can start to hire all over the world and have those people be able to be just as

00:18:41.500 effective working their daytime or most productive hours and passing off that baton between the people

00:18:47.900 working daytime hours in the U S to Europe, to Asia Pacific, you essentially get a 24 hour cycle.

00:18:55.220 And what might take a normal organization, three days to have three kind of cycles of going through

00:19:00.080 something you could do in 24 hours. Now this is the idealized version. It's never quite that easy,

00:19:04.740 but you can get a lot closer by focusing on that baton pass. Level four is, I think that

00:19:11.680 also where you can start to shift to things. When you shift to asynchronous, your decisions can take a

00:19:17.360 little longer, but they can be a lot better. So you were complaining a little bit about meetings.

00:19:22.120 I could talk for two more hours about meetings, but like most meetings are terrible.

00:19:26.440 And, you know, or there was the funny tweet, we're finding out just how many meetings could

00:19:29.980 have been an email instead. Like emails or status updates, things like that aren't great. And often

00:19:35.280 they use as a forcing function just to get people to pay attention to the same thing at the same time.

00:19:39.780 So we just say, Hey, you know, we're going to get everyone in a room and force you to think about

00:19:43.880 this topic. Now the downside of that, and like, you know, as someone who like appreciates

00:19:49.020 contemplation and deep thought is that all you're getting in that hour is people's reactions.

00:19:55.480 So they're presented with information and this is most meetings. They're presented with information

00:19:59.820 and they react immediately. And you typically, you know, we also get all the dynamics, which are tough

00:20:05.380 in an in-person situations where the highest paid person's opinion in the room tends to carry more

00:20:11.700 weight, more gregarious or outgoing people speak a lot more. Often men speak more than women. So you

00:20:17.300 lose a lot of really valuable perspectives and inputs into the decision-making or sort of that,

00:20:23.440 yeah, the decision-making process. When you can move asynchronous, it actually creates a ton of space

00:20:27.720 for the introverts, for the thoughtful people, for folks who, for whom English might not be their first

00:20:32.540 language to really sit with an idea, play with different hypotheses, and then, you know, contribute

00:20:40.140 something that's very thoughtful back. You know, they've had the chance to take a walk with it or think

00:20:43.720 about it in the shower, whatever it is that sort of contributes to their best critical thinking

00:20:47.660 and contribute those ideas. So this means, you know, it might take a day or two to come to a

00:20:53.740 decision that you might've been able to hash out in an hour-long meeting. But if you can design your

00:20:58.540 business around this, the decision you come to and the insight that was gone into that should be much,

00:21:04.700 much, much better than if you just got people reacting to things in real time.

00:21:08.280 Right, right. Are we at level four now or are we at level five?

00:21:13.240 Level four, there's the level five. Are you ready for level five?

00:21:15.680 Yeah, yeah. This is direct brain-machine interface?

00:21:19.000 Yeah, I like to have level five. I do call it nirvana. So it's always good to have an

00:21:23.680 unattainable level, right? But level five is when you're doing better work than any in-person

00:21:29.580 organization could ever do. And I like to think of level five work, it's fun. So every organization

00:21:34.860 can have a taste of it. So, you know, the fun side of level five, I would say is there's things

00:21:40.300 you're able to incorporate in your day-to-day that would be either socially awkward or impossible in

00:21:44.780 an office. So remember all that stuff we talked about, about being in an office, like not everyone

00:21:48.700 has a corner office, your colleagues are loud, they eat smelly food, like all those sorts of things.

00:21:53.960 This is when you really start to actually be able to design your environment and your day

00:21:57.760 around health, wellness, mental well-being, et cetera. So something I like to do that would be

00:22:04.140 not impossible, but definitely socially awkward in an office is in between meetings. I like to do

00:22:10.380 like 20 squats and then some pushups to kind of keep my blood flowing, keep myself active.

00:22:16.500 You could do that in an office, but I would feel weird personally. I do a lot. I have a desk that

00:22:21.040 can go up and down. And when I start to flag energy in the afternoon, I have to put fun music on and do

00:22:26.160 like a little dancing while I'm like doing my emails and reading. Obviously not if I'm on video.

00:22:30.800 Again, it would be awkward. Treadmill desk are also great for this. I have colleagues who

00:22:34.120 have lost 20 or 30 pounds just because they start putting in tens of thousands of steps during the

00:22:38.240 day when they're not on video or a call, just being on a treadmill desk, doing a very slow,

00:22:42.460 like, you know, 1.5, two mile per hour walk while they're doing what would normally be a stationary

00:22:47.360 activity. Right.

00:22:48.440 My personal favorite here is actually right now I have a candle on my desk. I find that the flame

00:22:53.600 is like very centering. It reminds me to breathe. It also smells really nice, at least to me.

00:22:58.440 But you imagine an office with 200 people in an open office, all the candles, like you'd set the

00:23:03.220 fire alarm off. You can't do that. So you can really, you can design things. And as an organizational

00:23:09.020 level, when everyone's able to operate at that higher level, I do believe they also then can

00:23:14.060 bring their best selves to their work, their most creative thinking, their most productive times of

00:23:19.280 day. And they can start to incorporate things that, again, might make their lives significantly better,

00:23:23.400 but be hard in office. Even if your office said you can leave between 2 and 3 p.m., like we allow

00:23:28.520 people to do that to pick up their kids, you might feel awkward if everyone else in your office wasn't

00:23:32.700 doing that. But when you're distributed, you can go drop your kids off, pick your kids up every day.

00:23:37.200 Very, very common pattern with families, which makes a huge difference in the kids' lives and theirs.

00:23:41.580 But it's completely, your colleagues have no idea if you're, because you're still producing the same

00:23:46.740 kind of output.

00:23:47.200 Right. Yeah. I mean, that's a crucial threshold there where you no longer index on time spent in

00:23:55.300 the office or at the desk, and you simply focus on the output that you care about, right? So it

00:24:02.340 doesn't matter when you get it done or how you get it done. It just matters that it get done. That's a

00:24:07.240 very different orientation than you have by default in a normal office, which is, I mean, I guess, you know,

00:24:13.220 obviously normal offices demand results as well. So, you know, you have people working after hours

00:24:19.360 and cramming to get things done often. But in reality, there's a lot of merely existing during

00:24:26.620 the work hours, and that counts as a full day's work. Whereas if you could do something heroically

00:24:33.720 productive in three hours, that should be good enough. It's just a different value. I mean,

00:24:39.460 it actually kind of links up with the default sense that we all have that even in a world of

00:24:46.900 infinite abundance, everyone should have to work to justify their existence. And this is what Andrew

00:24:53.160 Yang's campaign ran up against in trying to explain UBI to the rest of America. It was just,

00:24:58.800 you're telling me you're going to give people money and they don't have to work? This is just the

00:25:03.760 ultimate subversion of our ethics and our politics. But in a world where we really could just pull

00:25:12.200 wealth out of the ether, then that should be a world where people could just creatively use their

00:25:17.260 time to any purpose that interests them. And you really shouldn't have to find something to do that

00:25:23.800 other people will pay you for. Now, obviously, we are nowhere close to that world. We were closer to

00:25:29.740 that world a couple of weeks ago, and we are quickly being shoved further away, which I want

00:25:35.260 to talk about. But I get the sense that many employers are uncomfortable with the idea that they

00:25:42.940 don't really know what their employees are doing moment by moment, hour by hour, unless they're in a

00:25:50.400 box with them in an office building. What can you say to that concern?

00:25:55.680 That's level one or level two. We inherited this from the factory model, where if you weren't in

00:26:02.920 the factory, you really weren't doing your work. But for some reason, we've carried this over into

00:26:07.520 knowledge work, which actually lends itself to being far more productive when you're distributed than

00:26:11.900 when you're crammed in cubicles or in open office spaces next to 200 of your not favorite people or not

00:26:19.700 closest friends. You know, I think that I've worked in offices before I had, you know, jobs subcontracting

00:26:25.900 for oil companies. I worked at CNET when I first moved out to San Francisco. I honestly think it's

00:26:29.980 easier to slack off an office than it is when you're working from home. And I should define easier there.

00:26:35.420 It's easier to get by with it. So obviously, when you're at home, no one knows what you're doing,

00:26:40.360 right? But the results of that input start to become very, very apparent. And if you start to go a

00:26:46.460 couple days without delivering the thing that you said you're going to deliver, or your output

00:26:51.260 compared to a colleague starts to really diverge, people are going to notice. Whereas if you're in

00:26:57.500 an office and you show up early in the morning, you're well dressed, you asked, you asked smart

00:27:02.660 sounding questions in meetings, you're not drunk, like people don't see Facebook on your screen,

00:27:07.380 you can actually get by for like three, four months before people really notice that, hey, what is

00:27:13.200 what has Joe done recently? What are they really producing? And I think there's a lot more focus.

00:27:18.980 I mean, another moral reason why I think that distributed work can be so much better for the

00:27:23.160 world and society is that by focusing purely on those outputs, you actually remove a lot of the

00:27:29.400 kind of built in lizard brain biases that we all have kind of inherent. You know, like I said,

00:27:36.140 I was joking earlier, someone's not drunk, and they dress well and things. We assume they're doing

00:27:40.860 good work. We also have a ton of other stuff that there's been a lot of research around. Like

00:27:44.300 when someone jaywalks, if they're wearing a suit, people are more likely to follow them than if 0.97

00:27:48.280 they're dressed like a bum. Like we're kind of hardwired in a lot of ways to have these kind 0.53

00:27:53.160 of built in social cues and unconscious biases and things like that. And when you're able to remove all

00:27:57.980 that, I think you get something much closer to what Ray Dalio talks about something like an idea

00:28:02.420 meritocracy, which I think all organizations should strive for, where we're just looking at the work

00:28:08.820 itself in the purest, most objective form and judging that, not trying to bring in all these

00:28:13.980 other things, either conscious or unconsciously, that might influence us about how someone is doing

00:28:18.720 in their role. Yeah. So what are the other barriers here that keep organizations from moving up these

00:28:25.380 levels? One that comes to mind is a concern about security. So if you're all working in an office

00:28:31.340 together and accessing databases and office computers, now we're switching to remote access

00:28:38.780 to every tool you need to use. And I can imagine that certain companies will either balk at that

00:28:46.120 or worry about it or not know how to implement it in a way that actually doesn't compromise the

00:28:53.280 security of their clients or customers or just open them to some kind of risk they haven't had to

00:28:59.300 think about. Is there a generic discussion to be had about this problem? Yeah. The good news is

00:29:05.940 organizations are already moving to endpoint security or bring your own device or untrusted devices

00:29:11.040 already. And even the most sophisticated ones like Google moved to this years ago. So it used to be

00:29:15.840 there was this kind of regulatory capture where there'd be IT departments that had to justify like

00:29:20.440 very complex processes or systems, the name of security. And there was this kind of model that

00:29:24.780 assumed that if you were inside the wall, you were trusted. If you're outside the wall,

00:29:28.580 you're untrusted. Now, of course, this makes it. And as the sort of huge rash of hacks and data

00:29:35.260 disclosures has shown that like, you know, when you put all your faith in the wall,

00:29:39.880 it becomes a single point of failure. You just have to call the receptionist and say you're a prince

00:29:44.720 from Nigeria and you need her password. Yeah, you're in. Yeah. The human element, it's only strong

00:29:50.800 as the weakest link. And you lose what in security we call defense in depth, where you try to have

00:29:55.460 defense layers at every single step. So of course, like if you can have a wall, have a wall. But

00:30:00.620 beyond that, assume that there might be untrusted or malicious actors inside the wall. Actually,

00:30:06.140 a security model that a lot of tech companies are having to move through in Silicon Valley

00:30:09.180 is assuming that trusted people, employees with valid credentials might actually not have

00:30:14.520 motivations, which are aligned with the company. They might be employed by state actors from China or

00:30:19.960 Iran or Israel or other things. And so you really have to look at what are the behaviors that we want 0.76

00:30:25.460 to protect against, not just saying, you know, the access control model of security. And I actually

00:30:33.020 am really excited, you know, if there's any silver linings or anything you look to, be hopeful that

00:30:37.740 we're being kind of jolted out of many old models. I saw the story the other day that Skype and FaceTime

00:30:43.900 were not allowed for telemedicine. Again, there's the tele word because they aren't HIPAA compliant,

00:30:49.000 which is a set of regulations designed to protect patient privacy. But again, regulatory capture.

00:30:54.460 The other reason they weren't allowed was because all the companies selling like

00:30:57.340 super expensive telemedicine stuff that didn't work as well as FaceTime. We're sort of putting

00:31:02.260 these obscure rules in that said, if it's not this, it's not HIPAA compliant. And those regulations

00:31:08.240 have at least been temporarily removed. And I think hope get permanently removed that when certain

00:31:12.120 solutions like a FaceTime has security, which is kind of best in class in the world, we can say that

00:31:18.980 this is sufficient for handling private data, like, you know, discussing how you're feeling

00:31:23.820 with your doctor.

00:31:25.020 Right.

00:31:25.780 So security is, I think, something that, again, as you start to move through the levels,

00:31:30.880 you naturally move to a point where you enable more distributed. At level one or level two,

00:31:36.640 especially at level one, people might not, they might not actually be able to do their work

00:31:40.380 because there's some internal system that they just don't have access to. But again, most knowledge

00:31:45.000 companies, most certainly technology companies, there's no reason for this.

00:31:49.500 So what are the tools that you think of as now just being standard at the moment to do this well?

00:31:56.040 So on tech tools, online stuff, I would say that Zoom, Slack, and something that we use,

00:32:03.780 something to replace email is really key. So email is nice because it's asynchronous,

00:32:08.560 but unfortunately it's private. You know, part of levels three and four are you start to move

00:32:13.000 to be a lot more transparent internally. So information isn't locked up in private things

00:32:17.100 like inboxes. So what P2 is, is essentially an asynchronous blogging system that's internally

00:32:22.720 public, but private to the world that we can use to, instead of email, to have all discussions.

00:32:28.440 So, you know, Automattic's probably a level four organization with glimpses of level five

00:32:32.840 sometimes. I, from my colleagues, get under five emails per month.

00:32:37.900 Wow. And some months it might just be one or two. Basically all I get with email is like private

00:32:43.420 HR stuff. You know, things that need to be one-to-one private communication. Everything

00:32:47.760 else happens on these internal blogs, including if someone wants to ask me a question, they can do

00:32:52.720 that publicly in Slack or, or P2. And then when I answer that question, the rest of the organization

00:32:57.800 has the ability to see that. We've also developed essentially like an internal Google alerts.

00:33:02.120 So with 1200 people producing lots of posts and comments, there's literally thousands per day.

00:33:06.800 It's more than any, any person could reasonably read every day to follow it all. But with this

00:33:11.640 internal Google alerts, you could just get alerted when, you know, someone mentions a topic that

00:33:16.160 you're interested in, or of course mentioned your username. So it allows just a lot more effective

00:33:20.100 sort of tapping into the information you need to without kind of the huge CC chains or like

00:33:25.900 sort of opt out methods that email tried to take to information sharing.

00:33:29.840 And so how flat is your organization? I mean, what are you doing about the

00:33:35.520 tyranny of notifications? If anyone can just use your username and you've got now over a thousand

00:33:41.680 people working for you, how often are you pinged with stuff that is just diverting your attention?

00:33:47.920 That's a great question because I think two things get conflated there. One is the actual

00:33:53.260 organization itself. So we have a totally normal organic around or chart, right? Like,

00:33:59.200 all right, we have a very natural hierarchy of teams and divisions and everything like that.

00:34:03.120 That's totally normal inside automatic. Now communications though, is totally flat and

00:34:07.300 accessible, which is happening in larger companies as well. Like if you work at Verizon,

00:34:11.560 you can figure out the CEO's email and email them. But just by making things by default public,

00:34:16.300 we have kind of these open channels. The beauty of it is you get, you know, folks who might not be in

00:34:22.840 a meeting if you're having a meeting about a topic participating. So for example, maybe a frontline support

00:34:27.620 person is saying, wow, I heard this from a customer. I'm seeing this pattern or folks from a different

00:34:32.300 area of the company who might be working on something, a similar problem can drop in and say

00:34:36.160 things. Now it's a double-edged sword. So what's beautiful about that can also be the downside.

00:34:41.360 So on these kind of asynchronous threads around decisions or design or things like that, you can

00:34:47.380 also just get where people without as much credibility, but lots of opinions or lots of time

00:34:52.280 to argue drop in. So that, that, that can be just kind of like the internet. It sounds like Twitter. Yeah.

00:34:59.160 Or Reddit. So that can happen. You just have to sort of deal with that as it happens, maybe talk to the

00:35:04.580 person or just say, we're looking for this type of feedback, but not for this type of feedback. And then I think

00:35:09.520 it's also really important to have just like there's good meetings or bad meetings, there's good or bad

00:35:14.140 threads. So start to thread with what you want the outcome to be when you need it by. And then when it's all done,

00:35:19.920 summarize it. So maybe there's a hundred comments on a particular thread. And then we like to encourage

00:35:24.800 the best practice where someone summarizes sort of the best arguments on every side and then says

00:35:30.220 what the decision is and sort of why you're doing that. Like we thought of this, but we decided to go

00:35:34.120 this other direction. Are there challenges as a manager that are unique to this distributed environment,

00:35:40.680 or is it basically the same thing, but with different tools? I think managers are actually the biggest

00:35:47.260 barrier to companies moving up the levels towards Nirvana. So I say individual contributors or sort

00:35:55.100 of engineers, support people, et cetera, like that actually fall into distributed work really, really

00:35:59.900 easily, especially because so many people have experience with side gigs or being freelancers or

00:36:04.960 something, where it just feels very natural to do the work. Just, you know, you have a bit more

00:36:09.240 autonomy over your day, need to work a little harder to make sure you have good like processes and

00:36:13.800 schedule and everything, but you know, you can, you can do the work, but managers, particularly if

00:36:18.800 they have a lot of experience, you know, famously, they talk about managing by walking around where

00:36:23.580 people might sort of get a pulse of the organization by walking around the office or the cube farm or

00:36:28.420 whatever, and just kind of dropping in on people, things like that. You lose that kind of ambience,

00:36:35.200 intimacy or information gathering that comes just by being around people. So with all of this, I think that

00:36:43.800 you know, it's not actually inherently necessarily good or bad. It's just different to work this way.

00:36:50.260 And you have to list out the things that you're missing. And sort of from first principles, go back

00:36:54.240 and say, Oh, well, I don't have as good pulse on my team. And then brainstorm ways you can get that.

00:37:00.420 So for example, you know, many managers will still continue weekly one to ones for 30 minutes.

00:37:05.040 Or you might start meetings with kind of a, like a warm up question, where you ask someone like what

00:37:11.380 their favorite cartoon when they were growing up is, and you know, things to kind of break the ice

00:37:15.120 or get to know people. You also, I think, as a manager have to keep a closer eye. Because where

00:37:20.040 you might notice in an office when someone is coming in looking really dejected or sad or low energy,

00:37:26.440 you need to keep an eye out for that. And sometimes even just their origin communication,

00:37:30.280 or how that how responsive they're being, to make sure that there might be something going on in

00:37:35.060 their life, that you could be a better, more supportive manager if you were aware of,

00:37:38.920 but they might feel awkward bringing it up. And you're not going to notice just from how

00:37:42.880 they're, they're, you know, sitting at their desk slumped over. So you start to need to be a bit

00:37:48.660 more attuned for that. I'd say also, if you go fully distributed, like level four, when you're

00:37:53.260 actually global, so meaning that you're able to tap into the world's talent pool, you have people,

00:37:58.000 you know, automatic now has people in 70 countries, the time zones can get a little tricky.

00:38:02.400 So we try not to spread individual teams. So teams are typically five to 15 people.

00:38:08.100 across more than eight time zones. And some companies even go as far as to say, like people

00:38:14.160 need to be within like two or three time zones from each other. So you don't get too big of a,

00:38:18.080 of an hourly spread. But most certainly if you had, you know, someone in Asia, someone in the

00:38:23.300 Americas and someone in Europe, there's no good time for that, at least the once a week when you kind

00:38:28.020 of need to sync up. The last time we spoke about this, it was a few years ago, I think you had a,

00:38:34.200 you did have a physical office. I think it had like 11 people in it and you had close to a thousand

00:38:39.140 people distributed. What's the state of things now?

00:38:42.260 So we went to closing that office. It kind of dwindled because traffic in the Bay Area got so

00:38:47.060 bad. So even though we have a similar percentage of people, I think over a hundred people in the

00:38:50.920 Bay Area, the office, people just stopped wanting to go into. Because they, even though it was a really

00:38:56.320 beautiful office, we had, I think, 3000 square feet per person there. Well, you know, they,

00:39:00.660 they, well, we didn't want that. It just kind of ended up that way.

00:39:03.460 That's enough for a candle and a treadmill desk.

00:39:06.680 Yeah. They just, you know, they could have more control and autonomy over their life at home. And

00:39:11.880 the commute could be a real killer, especially when traffic started to get bad. So we shut that down.

00:39:16.940 Then we also bought a company called Tumblr, which, you know, historically has always had a really,

00:39:22.500 really strong New York office. And New York also being one of those places where many people's home

00:39:27.360 setup is not as conducive to great work. So, you know, when you move to level threes, four, and

00:39:33.100 five, you start to find that people often will start to make changes in their life to just have

00:39:37.820 a better quality life. So often that might be moving to someplace where the same dollars gets you just a

00:39:42.340 lot more space because then you can have a dedicated room for your home office setup or, or, you know,

00:39:48.740 more outdoors or whatever it is that you value. But of course, in Manhattan, that could be very

00:39:53.440 tricky. So maintaining an office there was when we did the acquisition, they said it was super,

00:39:58.900 super important. So we actually committed to maintain one for five years for them. We temporarily

00:40:03.540 moved into WeWork and we're building out a space. That's something interesting has happened. So

00:40:07.500 before they had about 130 people going into the office, as we sort of started to share some of our

00:40:12.840 best practices around distributed work. Previously, the folks who were, and I'll use the word remote here,

00:40:18.720 folks who were remote from the New York office of Tumblr had a much worse experience. So they

00:40:23.240 weren't able to be as productive as the people who were in the office. As they started to incorporate

00:40:27.740 more of the best practices of distributed work that you and I have talked about, they had less need to

00:40:33.600 go into the office to be productive. And it's down to where there's only 40 or 50 people, of course,

00:40:38.280 prior to this current crisis, only 40 or 50 people that were regularly going into the office in a given

00:40:42.660 week. So even those living in Manhattan started to shift away from, you know, going in certainly every

00:40:49.000 day like they used to. And I will say one more thing where it's useful to have a physical space

00:40:54.080 for the office is fundraising. So I raised over $450 million last year. I found it hard to do that

00:41:01.260 from coffee shops. That's right. Meet me at a Starbucks. No, and literally in 2018, I tried doing

00:41:08.140 that. So where I'd meet people like at lawyers' offices or our investors' offices or other things

00:41:13.780 and, you know, tried to do this large round. And to be honest, it was much less successful.

00:41:18.740 Interesting.

00:41:19.060 So we've actually built out a small space that we actually plan to be empty 99% of the time

00:41:24.740 in San Francisco, just for investors. And we'll also use it for board meetings. So our board meetings

00:41:29.500 have been distributed for many years now, but we like to get everyone together once a year.

00:41:33.280 That's actually worth saying the magic of distributed work, which is something that in normal situations,

00:41:38.600 every company should incorporate, but right now is obviously off the table, which is meetups.

00:41:42.500 Yes. So when you join automatic, we say, we kind of flip the script where most companies say like,

00:41:48.620 Hey, 48 weeks of the year, we want you in the office. And then three or four weeks, you can

00:41:52.420 travel or be on vacation, whatever we reverse it. So we say 48 weeks of the year, do whatever you

00:41:57.080 want, be wherever you want. We just are going to judge you on the output, not your input,

00:42:00.120 but three or four weeks a year, you should expect the travel and sort of take that into account,

00:42:05.220 whether you need like home care or someone to water your pets or take your dogs or whatever,

00:42:09.760 like take that into account for your compensation decision as well. That three or four weeks of

00:42:14.100 the year, you're going to need to be away from home. And these meetups have been really, really

00:42:18.640 crucial to us. So paradoxically, like the in-person time is just as important as distributed time for

00:42:23.880 building that trust. And I think, you know, going back to our earlier discussion about like this,

00:42:27.880 there's our lizard brains, it's just things that are happen when you're in person, where you can sit

00:42:32.200 across the table and break bread, when you can see, you know, the full bandwidth of their,

00:42:36.940 of your five senses being engaged by the, by their presence, that is just more powerful than

00:42:42.500 any technology will be able to create, no matter how rich the medium is, or we move to VR or whatever.

00:42:47.660 And the trust you build and the, that in-person time can actually carry you through years of not

00:42:52.780 seeing that person again. And I'm sure we could all think of friendships we have where, or maybe

00:42:57.160 like a family member who we don't see regularly, but like, because we had that really intense bonding

00:43:01.940 time at some point in our history, we just have a deeper level of trust and communication with that

00:43:07.760 person. So that is, you know, in any organization, trust, communication, et cetera, is really, really

00:43:14.280 important. And that in-person time is key for it. Yeah. So are these global meetups where everyone

00:43:20.480 comes to a big conference or do you have, you know, regional meetups that are smaller?

00:43:24.820 So they're organizational. So they're around what you work on less than where you are. So historically,

00:43:30.820 once a year, we've brought the entire company together. Now, as we've gone over a thousand

00:43:34.780 people, that's to me become a bit less useful because it feels more like a conference than it

00:43:39.880 does like really getting to know your colleagues. Although even at that, we'll have a little

00:43:43.580 hacks. So for example, we have a software program where you can sort of, it's a two-way system that 0.99

00:43:48.780 lets you say whether you've met someone or not. So I could say, oh, I've met Sam. And then that

00:43:53.820 also gets marked for you that you've met me. All of our meals at the meetup, we actually have

00:43:58.640 some software that assigns the seating for all the dinners and lunches. So you're seated with

00:44:03.200 people that you've never met before. And so that gives you the opportunity to create as many of

00:44:07.620 those cross-organizational bonds as possible. But we do once for the whole company. And then more

00:44:12.640 often, two or three times a year, you'll meet with your team, which is typically pretty small,

00:44:16.120 usually under 10 people. And then maybe once with your division, which could be anywhere from like

00:44:20.520 50 to 300 people. So those smaller ones, when it comes to org structure, I obsess about this.

00:44:26.600 And I believe all organizational structures are trade-offs. You just have to be conscious about

00:44:30.540 which trade-offs you're making. And we have tried to make where Automatic is fractal. So whichever

00:44:36.720 level you zoom in or out of, it self resembles a whole. You're like Al-Qaeda. 0.92

00:44:43.640 Okay. But more socially positive.

00:44:47.620 Yeah, we try to say like, if there's a 20-person team, that should look and work a lot like when

00:44:52.220 Automatic did when the whole company was 20 people. So we try to make the team super cross-functional,

00:44:56.600 remove the external barriers to them for shipping or iterating. And that is just really,

00:45:02.220 really effective for allowing the, I would say we've actually been able to get faster in our speed

00:45:07.420 of iteration as we've grown, where typically as companies grow, they tend to get slower.

00:45:12.580 You know, I obsess, I know he's one of your intellectual nemesis, but I really obsess about

00:45:16.100 much of the writing of Nassim Taleb because, and Jeffrey West is another one.

00:45:20.320 If you remember his work, you know, this idea that companies are typically not resilient and

00:45:26.380 tend to, you know, head towards extinction and, but your cities can last, you know, survive nuclear

00:45:31.880 bombs and still keep going. And so what it's fascinating, it's, I think that every person

00:45:38.320 running a company should, should read and study that work because what are the elements of the

00:45:42.280 cities? What are the elements of control that they give up? What are the sort of like little bit

00:45:47.280 anarchy and randomness they allow that allows them to persist and thrive and be so creative

00:45:51.760 and actually increase in productivity as the density goes up? I think companies can recreate

00:45:56.040 the same things. So I'd like to segue to our, our now global concern about what's happening with

00:46:03.060 coronavirus. Can I say one thing before we switch? Yeah, sure. I forgot it, but it is so important.

00:46:10.640 So especially in this day and age where sometimes we can be more sensitive, you know, I'd like to say

00:46:15.840 that there's a good woke and a bad woke, like we can be able to be sensitive to what people say.

00:46:20.160 When you shift to distributed, a lot of your communication is going to be written. And usually

00:46:23.880 when you're reading something, there's two ways to read anything. A way which, you know, can kind

00:46:28.600 of get you kind of worked up or mad or feel like the person's attacking you and a way which doesn't.

00:46:33.440 So we, we have an acronym we use a lot internally called API, which normally in tech stands for

00:46:37.860 application programming interface, but we use it to say, assume positive intent.

00:46:42.000 Hmm. That's great. 99% of the time in a work environment, the person who's sending you a

00:46:46.720 message is not trying to make you feel bad. They're not trying to like attack you or anything

00:46:50.900 like that, but we can often feel that way. And again, our lizard brains can kind of flare up and

00:46:54.500 begin to a defensive mode, which can be really, uh, it can devolve quickly, especially when you're

00:46:59.440 typing back and forth to each other. So we like to say like, just assume the best intent and what

00:47:04.460 you receive. We like to say, be conservative in what you put out. So meaning like try to put some

00:47:11.680 extra fluffy language or extra emojis or a gift or whatever it is that when you write a message,

00:47:16.800 try to make it as kind and humane as possible and sort of take into mind that the person receiving

00:47:22.640 it might read it the wrong way. So this is kind of a variation of Postel's law to be like liberal

00:47:25.880 in what you accept and conservative in what you put out. And then I, finally, we like to tell people

00:47:29.820 to jump meetings. So if you find you're typing back and forth a lot and it's getting like a little

00:47:33.220 combative, see if you can hop to an audio call real quick and audio safe because even though

00:47:38.180 people might not be like dressed or ready for a video call, anyone can hop on audio really quickly.

00:47:42.360 And just sometimes getting on the phone can really deescalate things really in a really

00:47:46.540 beautiful way. It's also used being distributed to deescalate yourself. So if you're feeling really

00:47:51.500 worked up, like, can you take a walk or do some pushups or like, just like take a few mindful

00:47:57.060 moments away from the computer in a way that allows you to bring a mindset back to that communication,

00:48:01.500 which is much more, has a lot more equanimity or is more kinder to the other person.

00:48:08.560 Yeah. Emojis are interesting because I was one of the holdouts. I went for a very long time without

00:48:14.660 using an emoji. I mean, emojis were everywhere and I was still, it was some dogmatism based on

00:48:20.340 my identity as a writer. I don't know what it was, but I just aesthetically, intellectually,

00:48:25.420 I just, I was allergic to emojis. And then I just immediately stumbled into their utility once I

00:48:32.340 started spending a fair amount of my time on Slack. And, and once texting became more a part of my

00:48:38.560 life, I was kind of slow to adopt texting as a main form of communication. So, but it, you know,

00:48:44.860 it's just in terms of efficiency and also giving some framing to the text, which is often too

00:48:51.920 terse to, it just takes too much time to close the door to any variant reading that worries you.

00:48:59.960 So emojis can be useful there. I hope that our work tools also get better at asynchronous audio

00:49:05.840 communication. So in WhatsApp or Telegram, it's very easy to send short audio messages and Slack,

00:49:11.160 it's currently really impractical. So I think that'll improve communication as a lot. Like I think

00:49:15.860 level up level four quite a bit. Did you also used to use a lot of punctuation, like periods at the

00:49:20.900 end of sentences? Yeah. It's amazing. Like I was a totally, you know, for the longest time email

00:49:27.140 for me had to rise to the standard of what you would have written as a letter. It made no sense,

00:49:36.080 but for the longest time, it didn't occur to me that it did. I still try to write as coherently as I

00:49:41.660 ever try to write, but I'm much less concerned about typos or I'm dropping the subject from many

00:49:50.460 sentences. I notice now it's the personal pronoun just often doesn't show up in the sentence because

00:49:56.780 I'm, I'm just saying things like, you know, working hard on this now, that's a sentence, right? I never

00:50:02.820 would have done that before. I feel like I've been cognitively rewired by the pace of electronic

00:50:09.100 communication. I think it's actually an interesting difference between level three and four, actually,

00:50:12.880 because it's, it's interesting. If you visualize like the sentence, this isn't what I was looking

00:50:18.500 for. If you imagine that with a capital T and a period at the end, it feels way heavier than if

00:50:25.460 that were kind of all lowercase without a period punctuation at the end. But I've also found, so I've

00:50:30.140 actually started to start to expand my brevity a bit more because especially coming from like IRC and

00:50:35.800 old internet stuff, like it was very rapid fire, short messages, a lot more like texting. But when you move

00:50:42.120 to more asynchronous, you want the message to be as specific and contain all the context as possible

00:50:47.660 for someone reading it, maybe out of context or just in the stream of other thing to have everything

00:50:52.640 they need to, to respond. And so when you have kind of these dangling references to pronouns or concepts

00:50:58.220 that might occur in previous messages, you have more chance for misinterpretation. So I find myself

00:51:04.440 actually spelling things out a little bit more like, and someone saying like, hey, are we, you know,

00:51:09.140 are we approving the salary for these three hires? And we're previously, I'd be like, yes, or that

00:51:14.100 sounds good. Now I'm trying to say, yes, comma, approving the salary for these three hires. Because

00:51:19.520 also there might be other messages in the stream since then, you know, there might be other things

00:51:23.440 that sort of create some ambiguity for what you're responding to, or that person might be stuck on

00:51:28.380 sending you messages until you respond to that specific thing. So it just allows kind of like a level

00:51:33.080 of threading asynchronicity, the asynchronicity to have more of that context in every message.

00:51:37.880 Okay. So how are you thinking about society at the moment? I mean, we're recording this after,

00:51:43.540 I haven't looked yet again today, but I mean, the stock market was plunging for another day.

00:51:50.040 It has in the last week fallen more than at any point in history. And I'm sure it's going to go up

00:51:57.340 again, but I'm sure it'll go down again. And how far down is anybody's guess at this point? I'm not,

00:52:03.620 you know, just to bring people up to speed with the epidemiological picture, I'm not seeing an off-ramp

00:52:09.720 in the near term here where life gets back to normal. So I think we have many months of this,

00:52:17.780 barring some remarkable breakthrough in antiviral treatment, which so lowers the risk attendant to

00:52:24.880 getting the coronavirus that people can behave normally, you know, with it replicating all around

00:52:30.680 them. So, you know, in the best case, we have, I think, months of disruption. We have to retool

00:52:38.680 in some significant way here. And obviously, even if we could get out of this situation in a few short

00:52:46.600 weeks, something like this is going to happen again. And there's no guarantee that it won't be

00:52:53.040 far worse the next time. On some level, we got lucky with the, I mean, it seems perverse to say

00:52:59.220 it, but we're very lucky that this virus isn't 10 times as lethal as it is, because that is

00:53:05.780 absolutely on the menu biologically, to say nothing of what someone could consciously weaponize and

00:53:11.960 spread. So the big picture question here is, you know, how are we going to avoid falling into a

00:53:18.220 great depression here? Do you have any thoughts about that?

00:53:22.600 Yeah, this is definitely the more somber part. I should, I've tried to be a lot more positive and

00:53:28.420 jovial in my advocacy of distributed work, because I think it will be crucial, like I said, to unlock

00:53:35.100 sort of economic engines where we can, and it's really trying time. But like you, if I look forward,

00:53:41.580 I actually become quite quiet and somber, because I think there's, in addition to being, you know,

00:53:48.580 easily a year of disruption, we're going to have a lot of loss of human life and tragedy there,

00:53:53.960 which will weigh, you know, psychically and mentally very heavily on every single one of us.

00:53:59.640 And I already have friends who are very, very sick from this, no one who's passed yet. But just if you

00:54:04.340 think statistically, by the end of the year, we're all going to know a few people who have been on the

00:54:10.080 bad end of this disease. It was just, you know, we ended up, we were supposed to have a big conference

00:54:14.940 last month on the .org side. And on February 12, I had to personally make the call to cancel it,

00:54:20.420 because the team was still kind of didn't have a consensus on whether to go for us. That was

00:54:24.480 over a month ago, got a huge amount of criticism. You know, now, 36 days later, we're now seeing

00:54:31.200 people start to wake up and have a lot more of the social behaviors, which to me feel like they have

00:54:37.020 a chance at lowering the R-naught, etc. But, you know, I worry that we'll relapse, that we'll have

00:54:43.520 premature victories or, you know, lapse of kind of these social distancing or physical distancing,

00:54:50.100 as Adam Ghazali likes to call it, measures. And so that's why it's so key that we really work at

00:54:56.880 kind of getting what we can of, you know, operating in our lives, even in this situation. So I'm really,

00:55:03.480 really curious if we are able to recreate in America, you know, the kind of systems that they

00:55:07.300 had for home delivery of goods and food and things in China, where the kitchen would kind of like 0.98

00:55:13.120 everyone's temperature would be taken and the delivery person's temperature would be taken.

00:55:16.160 You kind of had these things to keep society going, even in face of an incredibly contagious

00:55:21.040 and dangerous disease. Just before we started recording, there was some reports on a resurgence

00:55:28.180 in some of these countries that have had the most success in flattening the curve. So South Korea

00:55:33.560 and Singapore, and even, I believe, in China, in areas that have been fully locked down. I mean,

00:55:39.640 just so it's going to be interesting to see what happens when restrictions on social proximity

00:55:44.660 become relaxed, either legally or just by people no longer complying with strong recommendations,

00:55:51.700 and just how we can find a pattern of life that diminishes the risk sufficiently so that this just

00:55:59.540 doesn't run at a slow boil for a very, very long time. I mean, the counterfactual here is so hard to

00:56:07.200 absorb. If we could all just perfectly quarantine for something like three weeks, we could have this

00:56:17.020 evaporate, right? And we could force this into extinction, barring the people who are already 0.97

00:56:22.480 sick, who need to be cared for in hospitals. We could fully contain this thing, except for the

00:56:28.980 possibility that the virus has some truly rare characteristic where people remain infectious

00:56:33.820 for much longer. You'd expect this to self-extinguish if we could just take our best advice immediately,

00:56:41.800 but we show absolutely no signs of being able to do that. So it's going to go on for a very long

00:56:46.760 time. And it's almost like we're living on another planet here where the atmosphere has become

00:56:52.560 inhospitable, and we each have to figure out how to maintain the integrity of our respective biodomes or

00:57:00.820 spaceships, and it's absolutely bizarre. So what do you think about when you look at the economy

00:57:08.200 shutting down? I mean, the things that you can see, maybe an organization like yours can, you know,

00:57:14.900 keep flying at cruising altitude, I would imagine, without much of anything changing apart from

00:57:20.260 individuals getting ill. But then there are other sectors of the economy where it's very hard to

00:57:26.240 imagine how they can function at all or how they can restart even when the picture with respect to

00:57:34.700 the disease has totally changed. I mean, there's, you know, they're perfectly viable restaurants. I mean,

00:57:40.680 the most popular restaurants in cities like San Francisco and New York and Los Angeles who may

00:57:46.980 just go out of business simply because they can't handle this hiatus in their activity. Can you think

00:57:53.260 of any creative ways, or is there anyone in your world who you know who has thought of creative ways

00:57:58.640 to bridge this gap in economic activity? It just seems to me that there's so many truly successful

00:58:05.920 businesses that may not survive this. Yeah, I think, I think it's a, an opportunity, one that no one asked

00:58:15.320 for, but to really reexamine, if you're a business, what is it that you are selling? You know, to the old,

00:58:22.720 actually, like, you don't sell a drill, you sell a hole in the wall. So are there ways to provide the value

00:58:28.820 that you provide to your customers that aren't just doing it today, this way, because you did it

00:58:35.460 before. And I think we're going to have to reexamine every aspect of our society, which is overly reliant

00:58:42.100 on physical co-location. Because that makes us in an ever hyper connected society where people travel

00:58:49.420 more than ever, etc, makes us particularly vulnerable. And like you said, this, this one being a dress

00:58:55.920 rehearsal for something that could be a lot more deadly. I would bet if you have to decide that we're

00:59:02.560 going to have more situations like this in the future, not fewer, that there will be more things

00:59:07.120 like this that impact our ability to sort of be physically co-located with with random members of

00:59:13.560 society more often. And so if we're able, I think it's a moral imperative for every single business to

00:59:18.880 try to reexamine their supply chain and their delivery mechanisms to customers in this, you know,

00:59:25.420 for those restaurants you mentioned, just pick a specific example. Like, I love the stories. We'll

00:59:30.840 see how it goes. But like a high end restaurants, like an aviary who might have said their product

00:59:35.500 was purely the experience of being there. And it's true. The theater of some of these restaurants is

00:59:39.620 part of it in the ambience, but sort of rapidly shifting to be to go and delivery orders and that

00:59:45.800 they can, they can kind of shift their business model. We started, have you heard about cloud

00:59:49.960 kitchens before? No, I don't think so. I think I have heard the phrase, but it means nothing to me.

00:59:55.420 And it started to shift, you know, with Uber Eats and DoorDash and these different things.

01:00:00.420 You know, when you think of the business model of like a grocery store versus an Amazon Fresh

01:00:06.260 or a Walmart versus Amazon, like these kind of like big box football field side spaces where people

01:00:12.540 come and pick up their stuff is a little bizarre, right? Because it's like inventory plus logistics,

01:00:17.460 plus making people do a bunch of themselves. And then you also get things, you know, there's an

01:00:22.360 industry term called leakage. Do you know that one or shrinkage?

01:00:25.640 No.

01:00:26.800 Yeah.

01:00:27.100 What is it?

01:00:28.020 Shrinkage is not just a George Costanza thing. It's also when inventory walks out the door without

01:00:32.920 people paying for it. So shoplifting or stealing either from customers or from employees is a huge

01:00:38.200 issue.

01:00:38.720 Shrinkage is a euphemism or leakage is a euphemism for theft?

01:00:41.500 Yeah. And it's a very common industry term where typically they'll have single digit

01:00:46.100 percentage of inventory in certain businesses that just walk out the door. So when you can

01:00:50.500 move to delivery, you bypass all this much like the shift to a cashless society actually

01:00:55.840 can decrease corruption quite a bit because now transactions can be tracked and there's

01:01:00.780 no cash register that money can walk out from and things like that. So I think a lot of these

01:01:05.780 things, the digitization and the atomization of society can actually have lots of ancillary

01:01:11.140 benefits in areas we might not even expect the sort of second and third order effects

01:01:16.240 from when you move to being, say, mostly delivery, both positive and negative. You know, there

01:01:21.360 was a spate of delivery theft as people started to rely on Amazon more and more. Now, the technology

01:01:28.060 has started to adapt to that though. So one, they've been able to use data to look at where

01:01:32.680 that was concentrated. So I'm aware of like a company that was running a large national

01:01:36.900 e-commerce chain and they were finding that essentially like, I think it was 60 or 70%

01:01:42.820 of all the loss happening in the country was in one zip code in Massachusetts.

01:01:47.320 Oh, really?

01:01:47.920 That sort of big data allows you to zoom in. And it turns out that in their supply chain,

01:01:53.820 there was, you know, someone essentially telling someone when this high value item was going to

01:01:58.860 be delivered so that the package thefts, the one time IH package theft, they stole some water

01:02:03.820 and some socks. So they didn't get, it was actually a high risk, low reward activity for

01:02:07.820 that person. But if you know, it's going to be a computer or a cell phone or something

01:02:10.680 like that, it sure changes the economics and the risk reward. So that information is very,

01:02:15.740 very valuable, but they're able to identify that. I think there's also shifts like now where

01:02:20.480 you have these smart locks that allow people to leave packages inside the door or inside

01:02:24.520 the fence or something like that. And a more secure fashion, even things like the ring doorbell

01:02:28.980 where like, you know, immediately when someone rings a, rings a doorbell, you kind of see what's

01:02:33.340 happening right there. Or it can create more like, do you know the term like a club versus

01:02:38.240 low jack solutions and security? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they can create more low jack solutions where

01:02:43.220 if everyone on the street has a ring, you'll probably catch someone on video at some point when

01:02:48.240 they're doing something bad versus just like making it less attractive for you, you to be stolen

01:02:54.480 versus others. It sort of decreases the societal benefit and changes the risk reward curve for

01:02:59.260 immoral or society harmful behavior. So I think about these things a lot because I think that

01:03:05.440 the systems we put in place will have many order effects. And we are unfortunately in real time

01:03:11.440 trying to define new methods of privacy, of travel, of communication, of insularness for countries,

01:03:18.120 of how companies are working, that the repercussions of which we're going to feel for a generation.

01:03:22.440 Yeah. No, it really does seem like it's crossed that threshold where we will feel the impact of

01:03:29.360 this for a very long time. I think analogies to 9-11 are misleading. I read that the impact on the

01:03:37.860 restaurant business of 9-11 was something like a 3% decrease in revenue over the course of the next

01:03:47.260 month. It really was minor. It's like it was the only thing anyone was thinking about, but people

01:03:52.880 were still going to restaurants. And I mean, this is just perfectly designed to zero out whole sectors

01:04:01.660 of the economy. And rebooting under any significant uncertainty is very hard to picture. But even once

01:04:09.960 we have a vaccine, still, it's going to take a while to climb out of this. And as you say, we have to

01:04:15.980 find different ways of collaborating that allow for a similar pattern of economic activity and growth.

01:04:24.100 And for certain parts of the economy or certain businesses, it's hard to see what the hole in the

01:04:28.600 wall is that really can be delivered absent the selling the drill in the usual way. And I do have a hard

01:04:35.620 time picturing it for restaurants. Even just food delivery, I would love to be able to support

01:04:41.180 my favorite restaurants if I were comfortable having their food delivered. But it's hard to see

01:04:47.900 how I'm going to get comfortable with that. If I'm picturing a world where a significant percentage of

01:04:53.620 the people preparing that food have to be shedding virus, and that's a world that's coming in a handful 0.98

01:04:59.740 of weeks, under what conditions am I going to be eager to have my favorite meals delivered to my

01:05:06.220 house? I can picture, you know, treating the packaging as contaminated and ordering things that

01:05:12.660 I can put directly into a pan and essentially reheat. But still, let's imagine, like, they could design

01:05:20.240 food for that, right? You know, give you something that needs two more minutes or a minute in the

01:05:25.140 microwave before you eat it, or whatever that final step in preparation can be that.

01:05:29.740 You could have kitchens where everyone is certified, essentially, to either, hopefully,

01:05:34.380 once we have testing, there could be actually some regular testing. For a friend who's a

01:05:38.000 firefighter in Houston, they're starting to do testing after every shift when they think they've

01:05:41.380 been exposed to COVID or to coronavirus. So you can start to build in things to create sort of safe

01:05:47.220 pockets or sort of trusted supply chains. You know, Cloud Kitchens, I'm sorry, I forgot to define

01:05:51.460 it earlier. It's a restaurant with no storefront, no retail space, no place where customers to sit.

01:05:56.680 But they still have a brand and a menu and everything else. They just exist purely in

01:06:01.340 kind of the industrial kitchen space, which, of course, you know, we have a lot of history around

01:06:06.540 food safety and how to prepare food in a hygienic way. And we're pretty good at that, actually, in

01:06:10.980 America. So there's no reason you need all that the rest of the stuff that's actually expensive and

01:06:16.040 adds a ton of overhead to both employ people and sort of maintain that ambient space. And so,

01:06:23.280 you know, we're so many, let's say 98% of restaurants today or 99% of restaurants have

01:06:28.720 that retail space. Maybe in the future, only 20% of restaurants have that retail space because

01:06:33.420 you go there purely for the ambiance or purely for the theater of being there versus the sort of

01:06:39.160 utility of that delicious meal that you want that it turns out can be delivered in an effective way

01:06:44.620 and in a way that comes a lot of safety. I think that delivery networks are going to,

01:06:48.900 if we're going to function as a society over the next year, we're going to really figure out a way

01:06:53.260 to treat the delivery workers as essential functions, the same way that we might say for

01:06:58.680 healthcare, other emergency services, because it'll be really important for the fabric of society

01:07:03.600 and the sanity of society for people to not feel like one, they have to go into like grocery stores

01:07:10.060 to get things and also just to manage the sort of delivery and supply chain. So like,

01:07:15.700 for example, my understanding is a lot of the grocery store, you know, being picked clean

01:07:21.380 was not a permanent thing. You know, it's not that we can't produce enough toilet paper for

01:07:25.680 everyone in the world. It's just that like they normally sell a normal, a fixed amount. And for

01:07:29.840 some reason, everyone decided to buy it at once. So they ran out then, but there's more toilet paper

01:07:33.320 on the way, right? We don't have to worry about this. We're not going to have a global shortage.

01:07:36.880 It's not like a virus that attacks trees, right? So these sorts of things, I think we can,

01:07:42.660 we can assuage a lot of the panic behavior if we're able to maintain some of these basic services.

01:07:49.220 Yeah. So it does seem that testing is the crucial piece here. If you could, and this would happen

01:07:55.120 more or less with respect to every set of hands that could touch the thing you're ordering. So

01:08:00.980 it's both the delivery services and in this case, you know, this micro case, the restaurants,

01:08:06.660 the ability to test and to be confident in the sensitivity and the specificity of the test

01:08:12.180 and the kind of the real time value of it. And also the prospect of, you know, finding people

01:08:18.040 who are immune to the virus because they've already had it. They had a mild case, so they were just,

01:08:22.760 they had just become carriers essentially, but now they just have antibodies for it. So we need an

01:08:26.300 antibody test. Although if that's, if this is a rapidly mutating sort of annual thing, that won't

01:08:32.000 be as effective. Yeah. That's, I mean, we have to understand the virus we're dealing with better

01:08:37.120 here and what it means to screen someone and be confident they're not shedding virus at the time.

01:08:43.680 That really is as far as a landmark on the horizon in our climb out of this hole, that's an important

01:08:50.460 one. Yeah. And when you think about it, we have, we have a version of this, which is easily accessible

01:08:55.160 and a version, which I'm actually kind of optimistic with. So the easily accessible is taking

01:08:58.800 temperature, right? So that hopefully can catch as early as possible. But then of course the,

01:09:04.700 the novel aspect of this is the latent period, but let's assume that we can, you know, cause other

01:09:09.000 countries have ramped up the testing far more than we have in the U S with the sort of warlike

01:09:14.860 intensity of society focused on getting that testing more widely available. Could we get to a

01:09:19.700 point where every American had a number of tests on hand and could test themselves with some

01:09:24.880 regularity? And particularly if they're in like a, a role where they're interacting with lots of other

01:09:29.960 humans, they can't self quarantine as much. Yeah. I think that could, like you say, bring it to the

01:09:35.380 point where we could get a lot closer to eradication than we would through an extreme social measure,

01:09:40.500 like saying everyone, including emergency workers stay home.

01:09:44.120 There are definitely people who can't stay home and that's its own challenge, but this just kind of

01:09:48.400 comes back to the point you made very early on in this discussion that for those of us who can stay

01:09:54.400 home now that shouldn't be viewed merely as a, as the thing that will keep us personally safe and

01:10:02.900 therefore it's prudent to do it. It really is an ethical obligation. I mean, this is the thing you

01:10:08.400 can do that can contribute to the health of society and the rebooting of our economy. If you can work

01:10:16.020 from home, it's a moral imperative now. And to view yourself as someone, especially someone who's

01:10:22.460 young who stands a good chance of getting a mild case of this, if you get it, you are the first

01:10:29.540 line of defense in front of every person in the community who's more vulnerable than you are. I

01:10:34.480 mean, every old person in your life, you know, your parents or your grandparents or any older person or

01:10:41.020 more, you know, vulnerable person, you know, an immunocompromised person, say even a child in that case,

01:10:45.980 who you might meet. And so it's hard to get a visceral feel for this, that you're actually doing

01:10:52.600 something important by doing much less of all the things you want to do by staying home.

01:10:59.620 Well, but to go back to work, I mean, how much of the spread already was because of the social stigma

01:11:05.180 against working from home or the fact that people couldn't be productive when they were at home. So

01:11:08.720 they went into work a little bit sick or maybe when they were still in that early phase. So they were

01:11:13.080 shedding, but didn't display a lot of symptoms yet. I mean, I actually would take it to the point

01:11:18.540 where much like a David Heimer or Hanson, I would say that bosses today who are still forcing their

01:11:24.220 employees to go into work when they don't have to are literally will have blood on their hands in

01:11:28.400 their society. Like we'll look at that almost like a war crime. So there's what you do today,

01:11:34.720 immediate reaction. And then there's what you're doing to build for the future. Any person listening to

01:11:38.460 this that has influence over the future of their organization can and should make it so that they

01:11:44.220 can remove all the stigma, all the sort of otherness or second class citizen-ness of being

01:11:49.760 at home, because we really need, especially kind of a post COVID world to make it okay for someone,

01:11:55.920 even at the slightest, you know, hint to be able to say, I'm not going to come into work today.

01:12:01.680 Assuming we even maintain offices to the same degree that we've had in the past.

01:12:05.400 Yeah, I've been thinking in the last, I don't know, two days or so, it's amazing how long a day

01:12:11.780 is now, how much change one can witness over the course of mere days. But I've been thinking that

01:12:17.680 there has to be a way for us to not forget any of the lessons we're learning here. I mean, we just,

01:12:25.580 we have to make some of the most basic lessons indelible. There are many things we're discovering.

01:12:30.740 Essentially, you know, you see some horrific misstep reported in the media, like the president's

01:12:37.120 spontaneously preventing all travel from Europe. I mean, I say spontaneously, I mean, without warning,

01:12:42.960 and therefore there's a panic. And you have airports where people are packed shoulder to

01:12:48.980 shoulder trying to get through immigration, right? It's like, you see photos of this.

01:12:52.200 That was shocking.

01:12:52.700 And you say, okay, we can never do that again. But I fear that in this blizzard of bad news,

01:12:59.520 the lessons will get lost. I almost feel like we need a Google Doc for all of civilization right

01:13:05.400 now. We're just continually updating just a list of things we can never forget again, right? Like,

01:13:12.720 now is not the time to hammer China about their wet markets. But we can never forget that maintaining 0.89

01:13:20.860 wet markets is completely unacceptable. The first thing on my list is don't play with bats.

01:13:28.400 We need to get the human bat relations down to zero or down to how you work in biocontainment at 1.00

01:13:35.580 the CDC, right? So, and then the list just proceeds from there. And it has political implications. It has

01:13:42.300 economic ones. And it just covers really all aspects of human behavior. It just seems like there's

01:13:49.140 some kind of online project that should, you know, you're in the website business. There should be

01:13:53.380 a website for the lessons learned here that people can contribute to.

01:13:56.880 Well, I think society does evolve. And, you know, if you think of all of humanity as an organism,

01:14:03.660 our, the internet on our communication methods allows us to sort of increase the clock speed of

01:14:09.300 humanity or increase the rate at which we're able to evolve our social mores around these things.

01:14:14.760 But I, while I'm in violent agreement with everything you just said, in specifics, I do

01:14:20.680 think that we have to be careful not to fight the last war. So by definition, you know, let's call out

01:14:28.420 another good concept from Nassim Daleb and say black swan events, right? It will not be from bats next

01:14:33.920 time. So we can eliminate all the wet markets. We can eliminate, maybe we eliminate bats. I don't know.

01:14:38.920 Like we can get around these things and the next kind of novel, there's still evolution happening

01:14:43.980 in these organisms and the next novel virus. You know, I, I worry a lot actually about prions

01:14:48.740 and protein viruses and like, you know, like things that would be infinitely harder to contain and that

01:14:54.760 we have no known treatment for even in the foreseeable future that we don't even have something

01:14:59.120 like an antiviral. So it's going to come from someplace else when we, when we fix the things that

01:15:04.340 happened last time. And so you really just have to think about like, well, two things that I like,

01:15:09.400 I like to think about like, is there a way we can do things the opposite of what we've done in the

01:15:13.920 past? And what would be the pluses and minuses of that? And then I find that almost every problem,

01:15:18.380 especially in business can get a lot better if you think really long-term. So if you zoomed out

01:15:23.580 and said, okay, if we did X, if we fast forward 10 or 20 years, what would our company organization

01:15:30.240 society look like if we continue to do X and everyone else also did X? And that actually can

01:15:36.700 remove a lot of these, the short-termism, which I think plagues our humanity's biggest problems

01:15:42.100 today, including climate change, which we haven't talked to, but like our response so far to the

01:15:46.880 coronavirus does not like me as optimistic about climate change because it's so much more slow

01:15:52.440 moving. But I, I, I do hope that, I don't know, are you fundamentally, are you default optimistic

01:15:58.060 or default pessimistic? I think I'm default worried, which is not quite the same thing as

01:16:03.180 being pessimistic, but I, by default pay a lot of attention to the way things can go wrong or are

01:16:10.540 going wrong and the, the imperative to respond to those problems. No one's ever accused me of being

01:16:16.660 optimistic or Pollyannish, but, but it's not that I don't, I mean, I really do think we have an

01:16:23.620 extraordinary ability to solve problems and really the sky's the limit on that front. I think we could

01:16:29.880 engineer something like a true utopia. It's not that it'd be no problems, but the problems would

01:16:36.160 become increasingly refined. And then in some limit case, we're just trying to make things more and

01:16:43.140 more beautiful and disagreeing about standards of beauty, you know, across all domains. The human

01:16:50.360 experience could become a kind of paradise really. And, you know, we've all experienced moments where

01:16:56.720 it is and yet it has to be shored up against the insults delivered by nature and randomness and bad

01:17:05.680 actors. And that's impressively hard to do. And it, but to come back to your comment about climate

01:17:11.040 change, which is something I said almost verbatim in my previous podcast, I mean, this, the one thing

01:17:16.340 that has made me pessimistic in seeing this drama unfold is how hard it is for so many of us to

01:17:25.540 orient to a threat that is becoming less and less ambiguous by the hour. We're hearing anguished

01:17:33.620 reports from Italy about its healthcare system crashing and doctors who have worked in ICUs for

01:17:40.180 decades, who have never seen anything like this, having to triage patients based on, you know, how many

01:17:45.640 kids they have or, you know, the likelihood they're going to survive. I mean, they're essentially

01:17:49.380 practicing battlefield medicine in the best hospitals in their country and putting two people

01:17:57.140 on a single ventilator, right? And thereby causing them to share any conceivable infectious agent between

01:18:03.740 them, right? Because it's just, they're out of ventilators. This is medicine in extremis. And we're

01:18:09.560 hearing these anguished reports. There's no barrier to us getting this information. We're getting it in

01:18:15.060 real time. And yet we've got people crowding Disney World on its last night of operation and Fox News

01:18:22.120 blaring out misinformation to, you know, half of our population and they're lapping it up. And without

01:18:29.820 any consequence to the business of Fox News, I mean, people have cut together the kind of before and

01:18:36.480 after statements of anchors on Fox News where, you know, they're denying this as a Democrat hoax.

01:18:41.740 And then, you know, a day later, they're telling people to socially distance. And obviously, Trump

01:18:46.160 is patient zero for this kind of disregard for honest communication. The fact that we're here with

01:18:53.720 respect to a threat to our well-being, even just economic well-being, forget about the health

01:19:01.000 implications. The fact that we're so slow to orient to it, honestly, it makes the case of climate change

01:19:07.660 seem totally hopeless. I now think that the only solution for the problem of climate change

01:19:13.960 is a surreptitious one where we just invent technologies and businesses that become so compelling

01:19:22.340 and they become so benign with respect to climate that, you know, people adopt them because that's the

01:19:29.880 kind of car they want. That's the kind of... It's just better, yeah. Yeah, it's just better. And

01:19:33.300 we've never had to persuade anyone of anything. That actually seems truly hopeless to me at the

01:19:39.380 moment. Well, the good news... Oh, sorry. I feel silly saying good news. You be the optimist.

01:19:45.440 Well, I'll catch this by... I think it's going to be really bad, but that adversity does create clarity.

01:19:52.820 So in these things, it's true that there's been no immediate business. I actually have no idea what's

01:19:58.640 going to happen with media, but I think that it goes to show that, you know, in good times, when

01:20:03.960 the tide is rising, you can kind of get by with weak or bad leaders or weak or bad information. But

01:20:12.500 when things get tough, that's what really has to draw people together. And there is a much more,

01:20:19.140 a much higher bar that every person has when it becomes more of a life and death situation,

01:20:24.100 which this is a life and death situation. I resonate a lot with a philosophy that all suffering

01:20:31.940 comes from separation or the myth of separation. And so my biggest, I actually, even more than

01:20:39.740 distributed work, I advocate for open source because I believe that we need more transparency

01:20:43.900 of information. We need humanity working together to solve common problems. And open source is a way

01:20:48.460 to do that in software. You know, an optimism I'm having right now is how much better this is than

01:20:54.080 it even could be at this point by researchers all over the world sharing data in a very open way.

01:21:00.440 You know, we're starting to break up the kind of journal publication and other things. We're saying

01:21:05.360 like, hey, we had this myth, like journal publications, a really good example. Like we had this

01:21:09.480 myth that this peer review process creates correct outcomes, almost like the firewall we talked about

01:21:14.260 earlier, where like if it's on the other side of the wall, it's secure. And we of course know that

01:21:18.760 many things are not reproducible and that process actually isn't always perfect. And also there can

01:21:23.420 be true and useful things that haven't made it through that process or that won't make it through

01:21:27.640 that process. But if you can share things with context, as the researcher in Washington did,

01:21:32.100 who talked about the, you probably saw the sequencing of the virus that said it's probably been in the wild

01:21:38.520 in Washington for four to six weeks. That's for, at least in the technology world, when a lot of us

01:21:44.600 woke up to, you know, if you notice tech companies started like saying work from home and shutting

01:21:48.860 things down a bit sooner, canceling events, pulling out of events before a lot of the rest of the

01:21:53.500 industry. That tweet is, I would point directly to that as the reason that it happens. And so if you

01:22:01.360 can have the adversity bring us closer together, I hope that, you know, they say like much like

01:22:07.000 democracy, once you've had a taste of freedom, it's hard to return to your previous state.

01:22:10.500 That once we see the benefits of kind of the sharing of information, that the kind of better

01:22:15.960 angels of our nature can shine through. And if you believe, as I do, that humans are fundamentally good

01:22:22.560 at their core on average, you know, the adversity can cause us to behave in a more generous or

01:22:28.260 altruistic way. And it's best, but we're going to, we're going to swing in Houston. You know,

01:22:33.700 we have hurricanes and I'm in Houston right now. After Katrina, there was a lot of, you know,

01:22:40.060 because in New Orleans, they didn't fully evacuate for Katrina. A lot of people died. It was a huge

01:22:43.900 tragedy. One of the worst domestic tragedies we've had. And the government response was really bad.

01:22:48.300 There was a hurricane coming to Houston after that and they overreacted. So they told everyone

01:22:55.020 to evacuate and that evacuation of the third or fourth largest city in America clogged all the

01:23:01.420 roads and cars would run out of gas and then they would die. And then the roads would get clogged up

01:23:07.120 more. Dozens and dozens and dozens of people died in the evacuation as a result of the evacuation.

01:23:12.780 And then to top it all off, the hurricane became a tropical storm. It ended up not being even something

01:23:18.860 very severe. And so you had this kind of overreaction to a mistake in the past, which now

01:23:25.180 has created something which, you know, could be similar to how the New York Times talked about

01:23:29.620 the N95 mask, where like we were telling people to do the right thing, but maybe for the wrong reason

01:23:34.420 that you have an overreaction where I worry that as we start to open things up, as the virus

01:23:40.440 recedes a little, we'll then get too open. It'll come back and then we'll overreact the other way

01:23:45.580 it was getting too closed in ways that'll send needless shocks to the economy.

01:23:49.680 Yeah, no, that's totally valid. We've had to thread the needle here in our thinking and our

01:23:55.700 messaging about this because it's true that it's possible that the panic associated with this

01:24:03.100 pandemic and any subsequent overreaction, personal or collective, can be worse than the consequences of

01:24:11.100 the virus ultimately. And that's true even if, you know, a million people in the U.S. or two million

01:24:17.240 wind up dying from this virus, it's still conceivable that crashing the global economy

01:24:23.120 will have worse effects than that, right? So while that is a kind of talking point that people have

01:24:30.040 been using to dismiss the danger here, the extreme version is to call this a hoax that has been designed

01:24:36.560 by the Democrats to unseat the president, which one could hear, perhaps one can still hear it in

01:24:42.180 certain circles, even though the president himself is not speaking these ways. It is a legitimate

01:24:47.120 concern that we not crash our economy unnecessarily and we not crash it for a moment longer than is

01:24:54.780 necessary because a lack of economic activity translates into lives lost in very concrete ways and to other

01:25:02.400 social ills. But crashing our healthcare system because it can no longer function under the load

01:25:08.800 is the immediate problem that we're avoiding. I think you have to be solution-oriented in how you

01:25:14.040 talk about these things. So if you, I'm not as optimistic if you told everyone like, hey, we're not

01:25:20.120 going to have enough masks, please don't buy them, that people would not buy them, right? Like something

01:25:25.420 might kick in where they say, well, okay. If you were to modify that and say, hey, for the next two

01:25:30.880 weeks, we really need health workers to have these as much as possible. If you have extras, please

01:25:36.260 donate them. And in the meantime, we're ramping up all these factories, all these things to make

01:25:41.540 hand sanitizer and mask and all the things that, that will help slow the spread of this. So in a few

01:25:46.840 weeks, there'll be enough for everyone or whatever the actual reality of that situation is. I think that

01:25:52.520 I'm a lot more optimistic about that, but you have to have, you have to think in systems and processes.

01:25:56.520 You can't just, you know, hope is not a strategy.

01:26:01.680 Yeah. And how do you think about the failures of the free market here? Because I've long been worried

01:26:06.760 that, you know, while the free market should do everything that it can best do, there's a kind of

01:26:13.380 free market fundamentalism here and a libertarianism, which imagines quite falsely that it can do

01:26:20.360 everything in the best way and that we need not take, you know, regulatory or, or other steps to

01:26:29.600 produce things or correct for externalities that the market simply can't see. And so we're now

01:26:37.540 learning about all of these things that we have outsourced to China rather often, but, you know,

01:26:43.300 elsewhere for sound, you know, market reasons, but we've lost the ability to produce these things

01:26:51.280 ourselves and in anything like a nimble way. And this goes to, you know, our most basic life-saving

01:26:56.960 drugs. It goes to things like ventilators and respirators. What do you think about an indelible

01:27:03.760 lesson we might learn here with respect to the things we want to be able to make immediately or

01:27:10.160 have on hand always in a crisis like this? I think that you have to assume that regardless

01:27:16.840 of any precautions you take, there will be times when everything goes wrong in a way you cannot

01:27:21.920 imagine. And I'm not a free market fundamentalist, but I am optimistic that, you know, at some point

01:27:29.760 over the next month, we'll be able to produce lots of masks. I'm hopeful that, you know, at some point

01:27:34.380 this year, we'll be able to mass produce enough tests. So we'll have an abundance of that. And then

01:27:39.340 hopefully we also start to keep a strategic reserve. And that's where I think governments

01:27:43.240 can really be really most valuable is when they can plan for the strategic reserve, the insurance,

01:27:50.400 the things to tide over temporary shocks to the system, much like we do for oil. We should look

01:27:57.220 at that for many, many other staples of well-functioning society. I was actually really surprised to hear

01:28:02.080 it. I don't know if you knew this, but China actually has a strategic pork reserve.

01:28:05.520 I guess they've just, at some bureaucrats somewhere said that for the harmony of society,

01:28:12.240 you know, particularly in a country so large, which is relatively authoritarian, it really relies on the

01:28:16.780 citizens being happy that access to pork is actually a key thing to keep society running

01:28:23.400 in a harmonious way. And so they've, they've built up the reserves there. Now that's, that's a funny

01:28:28.320 example, but we can probably have all been woken up to things in our own lives that just having a week

01:28:34.540 or two in the pantry or might not be a bad idea. And I think where it's going to be most hard is for

01:28:40.180 companies because we have this kind of culture of short-termism, stock buybacks, et cetera.

01:28:45.320 And we really need companies to build a lot more of a rainy day fund. And that is, by the way,

01:28:50.140 running a company, multi-billion enterprise, it's hard to make that case because there's often like

01:28:55.780 invest as much as possible or return to shareholders. In fact, that's your fiduciary

01:29:00.900 responsibility that you take on as an executive or director of these companies. So we need a way

01:29:05.280 to incorporate the long-term there. But when we were in the longest, almost uninterrupted bull market,

01:29:11.900 kind of from 90s till now, with maybe 2001 and 2008 being blips, there's generations, including

01:29:18.320 myself, that never really experienced a true downturn. And that's why I think you made the

01:29:22.680 analogy more to World War II than 9-11. And I think that's a very, very apt one. 1.00

01:29:26.260 We are many generations removed from the amount of hardship society has had to go through and what

01:29:31.840 we'll need to go through, both in collective action and personal hardship today.

01:29:36.580 Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe if you can say a little bit more about the business case here.

01:29:42.300 You know, there are startups that have a certain amount of runway. There's all this pressure to

01:29:47.480 grow as quickly as possible. And I got to think a lot of businesses are going to wish they hadn't gotten

01:29:55.400 so far out over their skis in an effort to grow. Even businesses that are designed more or less like

01:30:01.980 yours, where they're optimized for distributed work. It's just there's something about the current

01:30:07.920 environment where it's nice to know you can make payroll for years if you're sitting on profits,

01:30:14.160 whereas taking profit is all too rare in Silicon Valley, right? I mean, Amazon is the ultimate case

01:30:21.520 of this. They weren't profitable for something like 20 years. And then Jeff flipped a switch. And

01:30:26.640 now it's become perhaps among the most profitable companies on earth. But the virtue of being able to

01:30:33.180 not get hooked up to profits for years and years as you grow, that is now the model of achieving

01:30:41.440 escape velocity in Silicon Valley. And I got to think this moment has some lessons to impart for

01:30:49.240 business people, certainly in that space. Well, there's often advice for people, you know,

01:30:53.860 take away five or 10% of your income and put it away. And I think businesses need to adopt something

01:30:58.560 similar. I think all of us as both consumers, and also as job seekers should look to the businesses

01:31:04.820 which today are having to do big layoffs versus those which are saying, hey, even if our stores are

01:31:10.920 closed, we're going to keep paying people. Apple, Lululemon, you know, there's dozens of examples.

01:31:16.140 Those are the organizations that have adequately planned for downturns like this or downturns in

01:31:23.220 general or unexpected events in general. And they deserve our patronage, both as customers and as

01:31:28.400 places where we choose to devote, you know, a third of our life, our working hours, some of our most

01:31:34.340 valuable time, half of our waking hours goes to our job often. And so I believe that we each should try

01:31:41.060 to donate our talents, or put our talents, not donate, you pay for it obviously, but put your

01:31:45.820 talents to where you feel most aligned with the way in which the company is run. There's a backdrop

01:31:52.100 here as well, which is the oil things that are going on. Have you talked about that much? No, no.

01:31:59.460 Well, you have the fight between Russia, I'm in Houston, so I think about energy a lot. You have the

01:32:03.700 fight between Russia and Saudi Arabia crashing oil prices. You know, you're hearing that companies here

01:32:08.600 are going to start to pretty immediately pull back on 20-30% of the workforce because, you know,

01:32:14.700 much of the oil extraction we're doing in the US is just not profitable at the prices per barrel of

01:32:19.440 oil and things that are dropping to. So they're having to do really, really big pullbacks and very

01:32:25.280 quickly and suddenly. Those are the type of things that do create supply shocks throughout the system,

01:32:29.560 because now they're going to all their vendors and asking for an immediate 10% drop in all of their

01:32:35.380 sort of cost, even to SaaS services like internet services. They're going and say, hey, can you drop

01:32:40.040 10% off our bill? And some of that's opportunistic, but some of it's very real, and that they need to

01:32:45.360 bring their cost structures down almost immediately to survive. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the knock-on effects

01:32:50.660 of all of this are extraordinary. We have to remind ourselves, this is only beginning. I mean,

01:32:56.400 this is a very early moment to be having this conversation, and this will change week by week.

01:33:02.380 Are you hopeful for a political change after this? Do you think it'll shock people into it?

01:33:07.200 Cautiously hopeful. I'm worried about many things. I'm worried about Biden's candidacy. I'm worried

01:33:14.160 about ways in which social cohesion can fray. It seems guaranteed to fray under economic pressure,

01:33:22.660 and that will just energize a kind of, you know, more toxic populism that will just ignore

01:33:29.380 how we got here. I mean, the fact that even now, this early, Trump thinks he can successfully

01:33:37.440 rewrite the record and say that he's been on this pandemic all along and has responded effectively

01:33:44.220 to it. And this is now just best described as the Chinese flu. And, you know, modulo the fact that

01:33:52.520 I really do think we have to hold China accountable for some obscenely dangerous cultural practices. 0.97

01:33:58.740 This is a global problem that requires global cooperation. And simply putting this in quasi-xenophobic

01:34:07.300 terms as a problem of China and of Chinese origin, that's falling into the demagogue's playbook here.

01:34:16.260 And I could imagine, you know, certainly as we lose the plot or we begin to encounter the outrage

01:34:23.240 of people who never found the plot politically, yeah, I think that this could become, rather than

01:34:29.560 the utterly clarifying moment, it should be, which is it matters when you hire dishonest, incompetent

01:34:36.780 people who are slow to react to obvious problems and show a total unwillingness to prepare for them.

01:34:43.160 I do worry that it could tip over into something fairly scary. Again, it's early days. It's hard

01:34:49.600 to see where it'll go. I have one last question for you since we're wrapping up. Sure. I have a lot

01:34:54.760 of colleagues for whom the mental anguish of this, especially uncertainty, has been really tough

01:34:59.160 and are starting to explore meditation, mindfulness. What would you suggest to people for whom this is a

01:35:06.420 really stressful and anxious time to just be a human and how they could use those tools? Yeah, well,

01:35:11.820 that really is a softball question on this podcast. Well, but I think it's important.

01:35:16.540 Yeah. You know, as you probably know, I'm putting everything, you know, all the advice I have to give

01:35:22.260 on that front into my app, Waking Up. And, you know, occasionally some of that discussion hits

01:35:29.060 the podcast, but it's really Waking Up is the place where people can find everything I'm thinking on that

01:35:35.160 topic. And actually, I'm just about to release a lesson, which I'll probably put on the podcast to

01:35:41.180 respond to that question, where it's just how to think about meditation in the context of an

01:35:48.200 emergency. And this is a very strange emergency. I mean, it's sort of natural to think that you don't

01:35:54.300 have time to meditate in the midst of most emergencies because you're too busy responding to

01:35:59.280 them. But in the case of this one, I mean, I would argue that that's even a misunderstanding of

01:36:04.380 how to marshal your resources in the case of any emergency. But leaving that aside, in this

01:36:10.160 emergency, really what we're finding is that most of us have, in some sense, more time on our hands,

01:36:16.120 in a very real sense, more time on our hands, and we're forced into comparative solitude. You know,

01:36:22.600 we're being shoved onto retreat by Mother Nature right now, many of us, most of us even. So it's

01:36:30.520 the perfect time to get your mind around this concept of mental training and clearly witnessing

01:36:39.020 the mechanics of your psychological suffering. So you'll notice that most of your anxiety in response

01:36:46.920 to this pandemic and the changes in your life that it's enforcing. Most of it's not useful. Most of

01:36:55.600 it's just toxic. And, you know, it too is contagious. I mean, I just notice how I am around my family.

01:37:02.180 And when I have an unwitnessed background level of anxiety pushing forward all of my communication,

01:37:11.740 I'm just, you know, I'm not good company in those moments. I'm spreading my stress to the

01:37:16.820 people who most need to be reassured by, you know, who I am in each moment. Not to mention,

01:37:24.560 I'm also suffering in those moments. So for me, meditation is a, it's not even so much a

01:37:31.260 formal practice. I mean, the formal practice is how you learn the skill, but crucially, it's,

01:37:37.840 it's a, a learned skill to be able to notice the difference between being lost in thought

01:37:46.400 and recognizing thoughts themselves as they arise in the mind as just objects of consciousness.

01:37:54.420 And that really is a, a quantum difference. I mean, it's a binary difference. I mean,

01:37:59.460 either you can do that or you can't. And being able to do that allows you to unhook from the

01:38:08.020 emotional consequences of any given pattern of thought. So if you're thinking terrifying thoughts

01:38:14.180 about where all this could be headed, you know, professionally, politically, with respect to your,

01:38:19.400 you know, your own health or the health of the people you love, a lot of us are meditating on risk

01:38:24.960 a lot of the time right now, which is to say we're, we're, our attention is embedded in this very real

01:38:30.800 threat to virtually everything we care about. And we're on Twitter and we're reading the newspaper

01:38:36.820 and we're watching the news and we're having conversations with, with other worried people.

01:38:42.040 And so there's a kind of social contagion here, which, you know, in part is necessary because we

01:38:47.460 need to be motivated to a common purpose. But hour by hour in your life, honestly, 95% of the anxiety

01:38:57.180 any of us will feel today isn't helpful. And an ability to notice thoughts arise, you know, notice,

01:39:06.080 notice the voice in your mind or the imagery that is capturing your attention, that's sneaking up

01:39:12.860 behind you in each moment and, and seeming to become you, right? The thought, oh my God,

01:39:19.040 what's going to happen to the Dow, right? If you're, you know, watching the implications of the stock

01:39:23.560 market or, you know, worrying about your mom or whatever it is, I mean that like, it's not to say

01:39:28.140 you shouldn't care about your mom, but every moment of thinking about your mom without knowing

01:39:36.240 you're thinking about your mom, simply just being identified with that stream of thought is a moment

01:39:41.280 where you're producing anxiety to no good purpose. And it's becoming the, the mood music to everything

01:39:47.940 you subsequently do. So an ability to unhook from that and truly reset is a kind of superpower.

01:39:55.340 And it does, I mean, some people can acquire it fairly quickly, but it really does only come

01:40:01.440 with training. I mean, it is a skill. So it's like, you're not going to accidentally learn to play the

01:40:05.700 piano. You're not even going to accidentally learn how to do a pushup correctly, right? I mean,

01:40:11.800 like you do have to be taught these things. So yeah, I mean, there's everything useful I have to say

01:40:16.880 on the topic. I do put into my app and, you know, once again, remind everyone, I keep doing this and

01:40:22.720 people occasionally prove to me that it's still possible not to notice this, but for anyone for

01:40:30.080 whom the price of a subscription to, you know, this podcast or, or my app is a problem, you know,

01:40:38.220 and you're the best judge of that, you know, you need only send us an email and you get everything

01:40:42.340 for free. And many, many people send that email, right? And there's no, there's no means testing.

01:40:48.100 There's no further questions about it. It's just, you send us an email that you need a free membership

01:40:52.320 on the WakingUp app or a subscription to SamHarris.org for this podcast. I mean, despite the

01:40:57.920 fact that I'm putting many of these podcasts as I will with this episode outside the paywall,

01:41:02.120 because, you know, I consider them PSAs.

01:41:04.620 Thank you for that, by the way. It's been super helpful.

01:41:06.320 We're talking about stuff that everyone should hear, but anyone who has to think about increments

01:41:12.000 of money that make it a hard decision about whether or not to subscribe to my app or podcast,

01:41:18.680 you know, if $10 a month or $6 a month, or if these are increments that you have to sweat,

01:41:25.500 you're precisely the person for whom this policy was created. Because I absolutely do not want to

01:41:32.200 become a source of economic stress for anyone at any time, frankly, but, you know, much less do I

01:41:38.440 want it at times like these. So I know many people who are subscribers or who have free accounts

01:41:44.660 continually hear other people complain about the fact that I have any of my stuff behind a paywall.

01:41:49.800 And then that opens the door to a larger debate about just how to monetize digital content and,

01:41:55.640 you know, what ads have done to our economy and democracy. And I've taken very strong positions on all

01:42:00.880 it, but I just encourage people who hear people complain about this, remind them that they can

01:42:07.140 always have this stuff for free if they just send an email and that's the best I can do given my

01:42:12.580 business model. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. Well, so, and you, Matt, you too can send that email and

01:42:19.840 there'll be no means testing over there in Houston. Yeah. Thank you. I do find that that mindfulness of

01:42:25.120 that meditation is even more important when things are tough. You know, I've gone through personal

01:42:29.280 hardships or friends dying or, wow, it can really make a life-changing difference. So count this as

01:42:34.080 my personal endorsement that everyone should explore it, whether it's Sam's app or something else.

01:42:39.380 There's also just a fundamental insight here. It's a conceptual insight that everyone should have

01:42:45.280 and everyone can experience viscerally, which is all you have is your mind, right? I mean, obviously,

01:42:53.960 I'm not saying the mind is divorceable from the body, but I mean, all you have, the only tools you

01:42:59.660 have in each moment in relationship, in responding to stress, I mean, all you've got is the cognitive and

01:43:09.380 emotional tools you've built for yourself, you know, over the course of a life. And many of us have

01:43:14.600 built these tools or failed to build them inadvertently. We're not aware of having made our minds

01:43:21.560 by virtue of what we've paid attention to moment to moment. I mean, we have been practicing something,

01:43:27.700 however haphazardly, every moment of our lives. I mean, we've been, you know, ramifying our desires

01:43:34.220 and our fears and our concerns. We've acquired skills and, you know, and abandoned them. And,

01:43:41.760 you know, it's worth realizing that you can be deliberate about this and really change your mind

01:43:48.940 fundamentally fairly quickly. There are many levels to this in terms of just learning new

01:43:53.640 concepts and frames with which to view experience. But mindfulness really is, I do consider it a

01:44:00.740 necessary piece here. And yeah, again, it's a practice. So yeah, you sort of become what you

01:44:07.920 do with your attention. So I do recommend it. Since there might be a lot of engineers or business

01:44:13.840 people listening because of the topic, I will plug one book that I found help a lot of particularly

01:44:18.880 engineers connect with this where more traditional meditations books didn't work. It's actually from

01:44:24.440 a guy who was at Google. It's called Search Inside Yourself. And he uses a lot of metaphors of like

01:44:29.500 background processes, interops, technical metaphors, essentially, to be an introduction to meditation.

01:44:34.060 So it can be a helpful frame for people to explore if they haven't resonated with like many of

01:44:39.320 the other traditional meditation intros. Great. Well, listen, Matt, thank you for your time. It's

01:44:44.520 been great to get you on the podcast. Likewise. Really enjoyed it. And take care. Stay safe.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - March 25, 2020

#194 — The New Future of Work

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript