Humans + AI

“It is important that you are bold and visionary enough, not just to formulate to-dos for the next six weeks or so, but to really identify the transformational visionary goal that we want to achieve.” – Jens Monsees About Jens Monsees Jens is Chief Executive Officer of Infomedia, a leading global provider of data and software for the automotive ecosystem used by over 250,000 industry professionals. He was previously CEO of WPP A/NZ and Chief Digital Officer of BMW Group. LinkedIn: Jens Monsees Website: Infomedia Twitter: @jens_monsees What you will learn Leveraging data for personalized and relevant customer conversations (03:26) Importance of collecting and processing relevant data for making informed decisions (5:07) Role of emotions in the car buying decision process (06:52) Three dimensions that a CEO needs to consider when developing organizational strategies (09:52) Strategies to consolidate information and prevent silos (17:49) Qualities of a an effective and efficient leader (19:01) Emotional quotient’s as a factor in decision making (20:12) Importance of reflecting and remaining open to new perspectives (23:01) Comparing generations about purpose and focus (24:00) Importance of breaking out of peer groups and gaining different perspectives (26:12) Book recommendations for practical perspectives (31:15) Episode resources ChatGPT Books Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari Transcript Ross Dawson: Jens, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Jens Monsees: Yes, Ross, good to see you. Ross: Infomedia is a company that deals with information in automotive, and there’s a lot of information, and there’s a lot of interesting decisions. Two of the ones which stand out to me are the car buying decision, and it’s one of the big decisions in people’s lives, they’ve got lots of information, lots of people giving them data, and they’ve got to make a decision from all that information; and one of the other really interesting rising ones is the connected car, where it looks like we’re going to get more and more information inside the car. I’d love to hear what your insights are on how we can better serve individuals in buying cars or inside cars, or in the automotive experience, and maybe even what, as consumers, can we do to be able to better interface with the information. Jens: Yes, it’s a very good question, Ross. I think we have to understand, nowadays, we are not into one-to-many communication anymore like we were 20 years ago in mass communications. Everything is now individualized. Everything, every communication is data-informed. That’s why Infomedia is so strong, because we know, from 1 billion cars on the road, when were they serviced, what parts are in there, what are the owners doing, when do they need a new car, when they have to come to service, and now with the connected car, as you mentioned, we would also then know what is wrong with the car, are the brake pads down, do they have a flat tire, what is the battery status, and all of these information we can use to have a meaningful and relevant conversation. Not just saying, oh it’s wintertime, come on and change to winter tires. That’s one-to-many. But we could say, look, your brake pads are down, and you need to come in the next two months; actually, we see with your connected car, you’re driving every morning to work on this route. Our next dealership is 10 minutes away. We already have the new parts here, so you don’t have to wait. We also see that Julie’s contract is almost over so we don’t order you an Uber this time, we order you a test drive for the test car, our newest hottest model, and then you can drive to work with that car, and then in the evening, you come back and all your service is done. This is what I think we can leverage data for. I’m really a numbers and data-driven person. And then the decision process of the car owners, the decision process in the dealerships, what is the next one that I put on the hoist, is my queue in order, do I have the right technicians at the right resources, and then from an OEM perspective, also, from an analytics point of view, how are my dealerships performing, do they have a high loyalty degree or a low one, do we have customer satisfaction, do we have a high convenience so we have a good customer experience, all together is basically based on collecting, processing relevant, and that’s the point, relevant data, don’t do like big data, boil the ocean, and you are more confused on a higher level, relevant information and then relevant communication to your customers, and that is what Infomedia is providing globally to the dealerships and to the OEs. Ross: Let’s think about it from an individual perspective, I have a car, and I might be considering buying a new car because I have a connected car, the manufacturer is able to provide me with information that supports me staying with the same manufacturer, but then I can look at advertisements, I can search the web, there’s a whole array of different information that is available to me in buying a car and, as you suggest, when I service, how I service and so on. From a consumer perspective, what are ways that we can best access the scope of information that allows us to make the best decisions? Jens: Yes, I think every human decision is still based to a very high degree on emotions. That’s why we are also sometimes making crazy decisions and sometimes we are looking for premium cars, for big horsepowers, or for a show-off model in a way, so as consumers, we need to search for ourselves what is important to us and be honest with ourselves. I always start every decision process with—What are my goals? What do I try to achieve? Do I want to have a show-off? Is design important for me? Is quality important to me? Is CO2 important to me? Do I want to have an electric vehicle? What is the distance that I’m driving in my commute but also on the weekend? How many people do I want to transport? Are they big? Are they small? Do I go skiing? Do I go surfing? I think many people in their decision-making process are not clear with their goals. It’s actually the start of everything like, what do I really want here? Then you can check certain dimensions, and you can say, oh, this model is fulfilling 80% of what I want and this other model is fulfilling 90% of what I want. What we still observe with every human is that when the goals are not clear what you’re really after, then you might go to a dealership and come out with a very emotional decision. You have a car, and then you have fun for two days, and then you say, Oh, my God, what have I done? Because I’m not clear about the goals that I actually wanted to achieve. Ross: Yes. As I was writing my book “Thriving on Overload”, you start with purpose. What is it that you want to achieve? Or is there one in my life? Then you can start to look for the information that serves you so you can assess that appropriately. We might want to come back to that. But other very relevant types of decisions that are made are those by corporates, yourself as a CEO of a large organization. We’d like to hear about, just as a high level initially, what is your process for looking across the information, across the technology worlds, information worlds, data worlds, automotive worlds, competitors, and so on, across the planet. How do you find all the information that’s relevant to your thinking and your decision-making and pull that together into your understanding of the landscape? Jens: Yes, I would say there are three dimensions that we need to look at. I would be a very stupid CEO if I think I know exactly what the strategy should look like for the next five years. When I normally come into a new organization or a new business, then I call my 10-20 strongest leaders, and I try to listen, and I try to structure my questions in the right way. I would then like to have diversity; I hear from the Americas, I hear from Asia, I hear from product, I hear from engineering, I hear from HR, from people and culture, from finance. Then you get different points of view. If you have a very strong culture, and you created that level of trust, and people talk freely, and they are also not afraid of any conflicts, and conflicts in a way, I see it like this, you see it like that, I think that’s very vital. Then you can debate and you can go deeper with your team and have that discussion. Then you construct basically with your team the strategy for the next three to five years. It is important that you are bold and visionary enough, and not just formulate to-dos for the next six weeks or so but really what is the transformational visionary goal we want to achieve, and to formulate this in a very diversified and broad team approach. I’m a strong believer that when you have that north star, it always gives you direction then in day-to-day work, Okay, this is a vision, that is the strategy we have aligned, is that next step or that next decision aligned with the north star and the overall strategic direction, that’s one. The second is a lot of discipline. As a CEO, I see one-third that I spend my time is with the team. One-third of my time is spent with clients and listening to clients. I just had two client meetings yesterday, asking them, how does it go, what do you like about our products, where we need to improve, what are the challenges that you are facing, and what opportunities do you see? Then the third part is the investors, so what do they expect, are we aligned on what the company can deliver in terms of gross profit, new channels, and new geo regions to conquer, and do you have the funding then available as well? I think the first thing is having a north star, a long-term vision. The second thing is being very disciplined. I plan the year and, maybe that sounds very German, but I really know where I want to be. I know, two times in Japan, two times in the US, two to three times in Europe. You have a plan, and then you also flex on that plan. These are all the board meetings that are coming. At this board meeting, I can take that step or milestone in our strategy. And then you also want to be disciplined in the evenings when you are not in the office and when you’re not with clients, and you read. I still have a lot of newsletters, and news flashers in my Google profile. I look at LinkedIn. I know what the German newspapers, the Australian newspapers, and the American media are saying about the automotive market, I look at the big car shows, I read the financials, the Financial Review is good, and The Australian is good; you need to be disciplined and you need to also be targeted in your own information gathering. As a CEO or decision maker, you tend obviously to direct in a certain direction but you need to listen, you need to say what can I do better, what did you see, what is working, and what is not working, and always have that dialogue with your team, I think that’s very important. We just implemented here a feedback culture in Infomedia. You get so much back from your team, knowing what you have to work on, and it’s a constant learning process. Even as a 53-year-old CEO, you cannot say, oh, no, I know it all, I know I do like I always did, we should not fall into this trap, we should always challenge ourselves and say, really? Is that still the right way of dealing with these things or do I have to change myself again? For example, we are now doing a lot of tests on AI, on chatGPT on how we can do our coding and our internal information gathering more efficiently and more effectively. It’s a new challenge. I’m learning a lot again. Ross: It keeps life interesting. Jens: Yes. I don’t know if everything is good or bad, but it’s for sure a fascinating new way of working and another dimension. I think that especially AI for the next five years will disrupt and improve several of our business models in the macroeconomic environment. Ross: Fabulous. I want to dig into a few things there. One of the interesting things there was you laid out some of your information sources and the fact you block out the time to be able to make sure that you’re keeping across that, obviously fundamental, you talked about the questions, so asking the questions of your team, of your clients, being able to surface issues, and then from all of those, seeing if everyone agrees, then you’ve probably headed in the right direction, but where there is a difference of opinion that you have an issue to debate, so you can then dig into that and see where does the evidence lie or what’s the foundation for moving forward. But I think one of the things often missing from these discussions is that, okay, you have the strategy, but in between surfacing those ideas and the strategy is a mental model or framework or a way of describing, saying, this is the landscape or these are our assumptions or this is where the way that we see the world fitting and this is the way that we can agree that we understand the same way. Is there any way either in your mind or with your team that you are laying out the landscape on which the strategy is built? Jens: Yes. For example, we are having now, every three months, a discussion on our product roadmaps. The vital thing is now it’s not just the product managers talking about their product roadmaps, it’s the three regions that actually are in daily client contact, giving feedback to these roadmaps and giving market insights, observations, and again, data about there’s a big opportunity, or this is a nice idea but you can never commercialize it, or this cost you 10 million of R&D funding to get it over the line. I think in a leadership, in a vital leadership way, you need to put these points of conjunction and consolidation into the year and into the team, otherwise, you have different silos, different camps that are not understanding each other or not working together effectively and efficiently. The other thing is, also as a leader, you have to allow yourself to sometimes be wrong. We are putting out a bold vision, and then we are working on it, and then maybe we see, in reality, this is working, and this is not so we have to also flex, we need to constantly reflect is that still the right thing? Ross: Are there practices you have for sensitizing yourself to those signals, or saying that this, for example, would be an indicator that we might need to change things? Are there any specific practices to help you surface and be more aware of the things that suggested change, of course, might be useful? Jens: Yes, there’s an internal one. I showed that I’m very confident and I lead the team, but I’m constantly reflecting. Every evening, every ride to work, or when I have some time, I’m reflecting. Really Jens? Is that still the right thing? What are your assumptions based on? Are there any new data points that we have to look at and flex on the strategy? There’s also then an EQ element of emotional factors that are coming into consideration. It’s not only all rational, and especially our own emotions are sometimes playing games with us so we should always come back to reflecting. I have very good friends, I have a very strong board, where I can have a walk here at fresh water or lake and look, I have this decision to make or this challenge, or this problem, or this opportunity, my assumptions are A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and, then tell me where I’m wrong, asking really where I’m wrong and being challenged, that gives me a totally different point of view. I do this a lot with my partner, with my wife as well. She is giving me a different point of view, and it’s helpful as long as you take it in and you’re not immediately deflecting and just defending your idea. That is where leaders never should get into arrogance or a routine, you always have to stay curious. What do you think? What do you suggest? What is your point of view? I think that these are the questions to ask. Then you also have to have discipline, you have to challenge yourself, learn something new, learn a different point of view, and hopefully, then you’re open enough and you stay open for a long time. Even when you are 70 or 80, you still can learn and this is one of my philosophies or principle, lifelong learning, putting yourself in different situations, and then you see how it goes. Ross: Now that’s fabulous. I think one of the things I see not nearly enough of is stating assumptions, simply that practice of saying all right, this is what I think and this is the assumption that underlies that and that simple practice of simply being able to say this, alright, what underlies this is this assumption and this assumption, this assumption, and that’s when you can then go to somebody. Because you’re stating them are not assumptions as opposed to saying this is set in stone, and this is what underlies it, that gives you then the flexibility to listen, to bounce it off, and to develop it. I think that’s fantastic, and something I don’t see as much of in major decision-making as there should be. Jens: It’s hard because as older you get the more experience you have, and you learned over your life, over your career, these decisions or this behavior was helping me in the past, but it’s not always a given that this behavior and this pattern that you applied will help you for the future. I think that is a big learning that you always have to reflect and flex in new situations. Sometimes I also feel in some of the big leaders of politics, of companies, that they had like 30, sometimes 40 years to get to the top of an organization, and they came there by applying certain methods that were right at the time, but who is telling us now for the future, that these are the right decision-making processes still? I would say that Generation X was very much focused on commercial outcomes, on wealths and company growth, and we did amazing, but we probably didn’t engage enough in environment protection, distribution of wealth also to poorer countries, mitigating conflicts, we are now having huge situations, and Europe was at a war with huge inflation because we were living over the edge, that means we were consuming more than actually we were producing, and we need to also reflect on these kind of things, did we always have the right focus and the right purpose in our leadership roles. I think, there, we definitely need to get better. My secret sauce is a lot of talking to younger people in the organization, to my kids, to the friends of my kids, what do you think, what do you see, and they give you a totally different point of view of many things. If you’re open enough to listen to them, and not just coming with your experience in your life, then you can still flex and take different points of view than you would have in the past. That’s where I think we are missing out big time in today’s world. Ross: Yes, it is probably the nature of the big decisions that are made today are made by groups, essentially, small groups of not-so-young people, and often the decision-making processes sound good, but the reality is, there’s just a conversation out of which a decision comes. Bringing in as much diversity as you can bring into that, whatever that method is, is going to lead to better outcomes. Jens: Yes, I think one thing is very important here. It is very hard. You are in a certain peer group and your peer group has normally very similar opinions and patterns of thinking as you have, and to break out of these peer groups and to travel to have a different point of view, to meet other people that you normally don’t meet and/or the algorithms that are currently feeding you with always the same information because you clicked on something. We know that the whole media business is a business, it is not just information that is neutral and unbiased, they’re very biased, because with every click, with every eyeball, I get more revenue. Often I also put the cookies off and force myself into the other camp. What are all these people thinking that are electing Trump? What are they thinking? Can I try to understand their point of view? There might be some good things in that that we would never discover if we would not go into the other camp. That should normally happen also with Ukraine or Russia. It’s really interesting how sometimes media is very one-sided, and we fall into the trap of listening long enough to the same stories, and then we believe in them, and we are building certain patterns, and it’s not always reality. If you force yourself at the moment to watch and don’t say, that’s right, but if you watch some Russian news, then you go into some Fox News, and then you go into some German news, and then you go into some Australian news, then you hear totally different realities. But then you are more informed and you can form your own point of view, and just not follow some algorithms or some patterns of your peer group. I think that’s very important as well, stepping out of your seat. In my case, and Infomedia, talk to a technician and a dealership, what are they struggling with? What are they happy with, and what not? Talk to a car owner that has to drive his car into service, normally a very painful exercise, and you can learn from it, and you can make that experience much better. That’s, I think, what real leadership is about. Ross: Absolutely, I describe it as having an information portfolio. In the same way as a financial portfolio, you need diversification. If you’re in a single asset or a single place, then you could get in big trouble whereas if you have as broad uncorrelated assets or information coming in, that’s when you can make sense of it and that’s when you can have the richest perspectives. You do have to make the assessment and judgment and make up your mind but you can’t do that unless you have sufficient diversity of input. Jens: Yes. Ross, that brings us to the very first point of our discussion, what are my goals, and you can even weigh them? Normally, when they’re big strategic decisions, I write down a list of goals. Then I say this is most important, let’s give it a 40%. This is a bit less important but still important, let’s give it a 20%. Then you see what options you have and you can overlay the options with your goals and you can say, this is a 70% fit, this is an 80% fit, or this is just a 20% fit. Some of them are hygiene, so you need to hit them and others are other dimensions of goals that may be nice to have, but not necessary. I think that that’s where it all starts by having a good goal and decision grid of what we want to achieve here. Then you are much more firm in your decision-making. That’s what I call the north star that gives you the vision and also the broader view of where you are striving for and what your purpose is. Ross: Absolutely. Are there any books or people or references which you found, that have informed your ways of thinking around this or aligned with the way you think about these issues? Jens: Yes, like I said, I’m using many news feeds from different parts of the world, from different media, and different stakeholders. That’s one point. Ross: But in terms of the process, the way you think about it, the way you act as the leader. Jens: Yes. I like very much the three books of Harari, where he’s talking about the evolution of mankind, and why everybody has a green garden. There’s so much deeper thinking into our emotional patterns, and they make you aware of how you make decisions. I think these books at a certain point, are repetitive as everything, but to get into it and reflect on yourself is good. Then there’s another book Search Inside Yourself, which I like because that’s a curiosity, of always reflecting what are your deeper beliefs, why you are thinking like this or like that, and why you always come to this conclusion and not go the other way. I think it’s about the consciousness of how you’re doing all these unconscious decisions as well, and how you interact with humans. Are you aware of what you’re radiating, and how you communicate, and how does it land into the other? I think this is very important. Then there are some German books. I won’t tell you the titles because it would not matter. But there are also in our language, they can be indefinitely or it can be very vague. I’m more on the data and definite side of things. For example, in a client discussion, you can say, I believe, there’s not much more that we can do on price, that’s very, very open. If you have a good procurement manager, you would immediately dig into it. Or you say, this is all I can do on price. It sounds like the same message, but it’s totally different. Our language and our communication needs often to be more conscious and more prepared for what we really want to say and what we really want to achieve. One of our secrets here is we always write the minutes first before we go to a meeting. The question I always ask my team when we go into something is what is victory here? What do we really want to achieve? Because it sharpens your mind and it gives you focus, and it drives better outcomes if you are clear on what you want to achieve and what your goals are. If you write it down, it’s even stronger. Then maybe the discussion with a client is totally different. Then you have to adjust your minutes that you want to send out but you sent them out before in your mind and you draft them before in your mind because then it’s guiding your thinking and it’s guiding the goals that you want to make, and I think that’s very important as well. Again, it costs a lot of discipline. But it works very well if you are knowing what you are striving for, and when you have a clear focus on purpose. Ross: Yes. The book dimension was Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan and Yuval Noah Harari’s three books, A Brief History of Humankind just for the listeners who might not have been aware of this. That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for your insights, Jens. I think there’s so much of what you do in that openness, which to ideas and perspectives and insights, which we all need to be learning in a very rapidly moving world. Thank you for your time and your insights. Jens: Yes, Ross. Thanks a lot. Yes, let’s stay curious. That’s my mind driver. Thank you. Take care. The post Jens Monsees on automotive decision-making, starting with goals, strategic listening, and openness to challenges (Ep62) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“It’s about respecting the other person’s process. When you’re talking to somebody, if you don’t respect where they came from, their process, and how they got to where they are, you’re not going to have a good conversation.’’ – Rachel Happe About Rachel Happe Rachel is the Founder of professional firm Engaged Organizations. She co-founded the Community Roundtable in 2009 and produced The State of Community Management Report for over a decade. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including Harvard Business Review. LinkedIn: Rachel Happe Website: Engaged Organizations Twitter: @rhappe Instagram: @rhappe What you will learn Significance of metacognition in communication (02:42) Developing metacognition through cultural exposure (03:40) Practicing empathy and curiosity can help people better understand others’ perspectives and improve communication (06:40) The lack of metacognition among people in positions of power and privilege (08:20) Respecting others’ processes in communication (09:41) How community’s collective beliefs and values shape one’s thinking and behavior (12:35) Difference between online social media and community (14:05) The benefits of digital communities of practice for companies (17:13) Incremental learning in communities and the benefits of transparency for organizations (21:11) Building personal knowledge networks and participating in communities (22:57) How people with ADHD love complex problems and synthesis and stress over boredom (26:54) Sensemaking and pattern recognition (29:26) Leadership vs management (31:37) Three pieces of advice on navigating a world of information overload (33:31) Transcript Ross Dawson: Rachel, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Rachel Happe: Hi, Ross, it’s great to talk to you. It’s been a while. Ross: It has been too long. You talk about metacognition, actually, a word that I love as well. I’d love to hear what does that mean? And how do you do it? Rachel: Those are two really different things. But what it is, is being aware of how you think and how it’s different from the way other people think. Ross: How do you apply that? Rachel: A lot of people don’t have a lot of metacognition. They really feel the way they think about things is the way everybody thinks about things because they’re in their own heads; so getting metacognition is a little harder than just knowing what it is. Because that means you can instinctively understand that when you use a word, the person that’s listening to you may not have the same experience of that word, or be coming from a different context or different power position or different anything. They might be coming from a different event that totally stressed them out as you’re having a conversation. There are so many things that can change how they’re thinking in the moment and overall. The way I developed metacognition was that my dad was a very intellectual minister. He didn’t talk about metacognition, but it was constantly a conversation growing up, and I wouldn’t have known the word necessarily, but again, lots of diversity, and lots of conversation about that growing up. But then, when I was in high school, I did an exchange year in Germany, my junior year, so when I was 16, I was in Germany with a host family all year. And that experience is one of the best. Being in another culture and understanding another culture is one of the best ways to understand that people just don’t think about things the same way. And if you look at the language… I used to laugh because Germans have 20 ways to say you’re an idiot. The French have 20 ways to say I love you. The Danish have 20 words for snow. That tells you something about their culture; so you get that sensibility. Then when you come back, like when I came back to the US, the US is enormous. Other people in other countries do not understand. The Europeans are like, “Oh, you’re all American”. My friends used to wear cowboy boots and raincoats, the Burberry-type raincoat. I’d be like, “that’s New York and Texas, what are you doing?” They’re like, we’re American. I’m like, nobody in America wears those two things together. That doesn’t happen. That’s an example. You come back and you realize you’re all speaking English, but you’re not talking about the same thing. There are all these different cultures here. We think we’re talking to each other and understand each other. But often, we really don’t. The only way to interrogate that is to have a conversation with somebody. Ross: The first instance is understanding that people think differently, and so that informs your communication, how it is you’re taking what they are saying, how it is you phrase or rephrase or adapt what you’re saying, or how you’re communicating to be able to reach a common point. Pulling this to the information, we’ve got a lot of information, and part of that is we’ve got written, we’ve got videos, and a very, very important part of it is in conversation. In terms of how it is we take in information better from the world, and make sense of the world better, how does metacognition help us? Rachel: It makes us more open to how someone got to the position they’re in. One of the things when I’m talking to somebody, or actually, it’s a game I play with myself too. When I hear something I don’t like, I’m like, how is that the right conclusion for the person who’s making it? How did that happen that they reached this conclusion, and I reached a very different one? That allows you to have a better conversation because you’re suspending the… I would never make that decision because it’s idiotic to what’s going on in their world that’s driving them to see the situation that way. It makes you curious. Ross: Yeah, for me, one of the implications of that is what I call Richer mental models, how do we have more richness to our models of the world and how it works and how it forms our decisions, and rather than having that singular that we can make it richer by having more facets to that, which includes being able to see how other people look at things, and in which there might be some validity. Rachel: The layer on top of that, that’s interesting. I studied politics way back. I think of everything in terms of power. People in positions of power and privilege are the least likely to have metacognition. Because they don’t have to live by anybody else’s rules so they’re a bit naive. If you’ve always gotten to walk through the world, saying declarative sentences, and have that taken as fact, why would you believe anyone thinks differently? Ross: Other than in arguing as in other people think differently, but they’re wrong and you’re right. I think that there is a very tiny minority of, as you say, those in positions of power, who do have that ability. That’s the Gregory Bateson’s multiple perspectives bring wisdom. There are some people in positions of power that have that, and hopefully, a few more than we used to have in the past.. Rachel: Listening to argument, certainly, you have that. It’s very compassionate. Ross: But I think we can, wherever, whoever we are, we can all learn about… that we can be wiser by being able to appreciate those multiple perspectives. Rachel: Also it’s not even wiser to me. It’s not. It is about learning, you learn things, but it’s about respecting the other person’s process. When you’re talking to somebody, if you don’t respect where they came from, their process, and how they got to where they are, you’re not going to have a good conversation. And so being open about that, and knowing your ignorance of that, when you first meet somebody is really helpful, because you don’t lay your expectations on them and you don’t immediately get into an argument. Ross: In my conversations and interviews for the book, Thriving on Overload, it really came out how much knowledge creation is in conversation. In fact, just right now. I’ve just had some conversations recently and yes, that’s where I have felt that I’ve learned the most. Part of it is listening to what I say as well as what the other person says. But if it wasn’t for the conversation that wouldn’t come out. Rachel: It’s because you’re meeting each other where you are. You’re asking a question, that’s where you are. I can answer that question to where you are right now. You asked me a question that’s never been asked of me before. Sometimes I think out loud, and I’m like, yes, I think that’s right. But I’ve never articulated it, because nobody’s ever asked before. That’s kind of that mechanic. Ross: Yeah, and bouncing off each other’s ideas as in oh, that’s an interesting idea. But in fact, that actually brings out my own idea. But this idea of conversational knowledge creation is almost more in conversation than anything else brings us to a community. Your whole career has been based on community. Rachel: I had a whole career before the community. Ross: Oh, right. Rachel: I was in innovation management and product management. But yes. Ross: But the fact that you got, I think that’s telling that you move from innovation, management to community because I would suggest that communities is in fact, where the most innovation happens. Rachel: They are the engines of innovation actually. Ross: So love to hear just any high-level of reflections around the community, as an engine for knowledge creation, or innovation. How we can engage, and how we should be thinking about community or communities to get better at creating our knowledge. Rachel: So I’ll link it to metacognition, which is, if you live and remain in one community, it’s very unlikely you’re going to have metacognition because they are going to create your truth. Whether it’s true or not, they’re going to create your reality, the way that collective community thinks, really shapes your thinking and your behavior. I think about it as the health of your community is your floor and ceiling, to potential, if they can’t imagine something better than exists in your community today. That’s what you’re going to aspire to. If their floor is very low, you’re not going to see anything wrong with going down that. You may see something wrong, but it won’t be completely out of bounds. Anyway, that’s fundamentally why I think communities are so important, and knowing how to strengthen communities is really important because learning happens in calm, trusting environments. This is something people get wrong all the time. Because the interface can look very similar to social media and the emotional reality is completely different. Social media is triggering, it’s anxiety-provoking, and that’s what everybody’s geared toward. In communities, things are calm, and you are calmer. Because you know people trust you, you’re not ready to be attacked or attack somebody. You’re comfortable there. You’ve got a degree of safety. There’s a good community and a bad community. That’s not the case. But assuming it’s a strong community, you’re calm, and being in that community, with that community, calms you down. You can’t learn if you’re anxious. Your brain doesn’t work. Ross: One aspect of this is communities of practice, which we both know of, since at least the 90s. We’re essentially those who practice and have expertise in a particular domain, together share and learn. There are a couple of aspects to this; one is that we can join communities of practice, be it the inside organizations or outside, or we can even form our own, and try to catalyze our own. I’d just love to hear about this idea of saying, okay, for those who have an area of expertise, how it is that they might nurture or get into communities of practice to help them. Rachel: I’ve been working with very large organizations for the last two years, building a digitally enabled community of practice network for exactly those reasons, to spread and norm what the organization knows across its employee base, and integrate communities into the flow of work. The only way you can do that is digitally. You can’t come to a conference room every time you have a question, because you may not even be in the same country. It just logistically doesn’t happen so they have to be digitally enabled. I think digital communities in a practice are the biggest opportunity companies have that they have no idea they have because people are used to email, now they have chat tools, so team chat. The team chat interface may look very similar to a community interface. They’re like, what’s the difference? I don’t know. It’s all chat. But communities of practice allow conversation around a disciplinary. The other thing that it does, and this is often bumpy, is in a lot of companies run by innovation or technology or expertise, the subject matter experts are almost seen as gods, they’re the last word on things; think of surgeons, think of PhDs, think of your architect, your software engineering architects, they’re the ones that are like the final word. However, the person that’s been at the organization doing work for a couple of years, is going to learn very little about how to do their work from those people. Not because they don’t have anything to teach, obviously, they do, but they have forgotten what it’s like to be two years into the discipline. They tend to answer questions much more esoterically than that person can handle. I run into this problem. I answer questions, and people are like, no, no, I just wanted to know how to set up a discussion or whatever it is, I just need the practical thing. The best person to teach someone is the person right ahead of them on the path. They’re very good at teaching the person right behind them. Everyone has something to learn and something to teach. But that’s not how, culturally, we view knowledge. It’s very stratified. Communities are almost like matching engines for expertise and learning because someone can ask a question, and again, using the scenario of a younger person early on their path, ask a question, the subject matter expert isn’t even going to spend any time there. It’s not an interesting question for them. They’re going to sail on by. The person who’s going to answer it is someone who’s like, I remember being frustrated by that, and how I got over that, and they’ll answer. You’ll get the perfect pairing but it’ll be emergent, not planned. That’s a hard dynamic for organizations to get used to as well. Ross: Yes. For a long time, I think of it as peer learning, where you learn with your peers, rather than from the experts. This is very much the case for the experts as in all of the Uber experts say we’re on the leading edge or want to learn with and from each other and those are their peers and there are people who are earlier in the journey, and they should be learning from each other because they’re learning. They’re able to share how their learning is what they’re learning. Rachel: The other aspect of learning, and we did it in really big chunks in the past because of physical limitations, we have to go to a school or to a room or to whatever, people learn much better incrementally in the moment they have the need, and they learn much better when they’ve asked for the information rather than being told you need to learn this. Okay, it’s not what I’m thinking about, but okay, right? It really accelerates the ability to learn. In communities, they should be transparent to the rest of the organization. If you ask enterprise search, or you ask somewhere, you ask the AI machine, you will find that expertise and so you’re not having the organization relearn and relearn and relearn the same thing, and so innovation compounds a lot faster. Ross: In the book, I talk about personal information networks, and perhaps I should have called them personal knowledge networks because it is not so much, well, this has happened, and that’s part of what a network is good for to tell you, oh, did you hear about this? But perhaps more of it is to learn together and we can share it. If you’re an individual not sitting in an organization or sitting in an organization that doesn’t do it, how would you go about building your own personal knowledge network that would support your growth? Rachel: Before I answer that, I do want to differentiate between a personal knowledge network and the community. Because one, they’re both valuable, but they’re different. One is a hub and spoke, and one is like a mixed scenario where you build truth, you build collective trust, collective truth. It’s more scalable in that way, everybody’s moving along the path together, which doesn’t mean new people don’t come in and out but it’s not centralized in quite the same way. For me, I’ve been on social technologies for a long, long time. And I’m curious, so it’s a natural fit. I’m curious about a lot of things. I think if somebody followed me on certain networks, they’d be like, what is she talking about? I am here for the community news. That’s part of who I am. But I have a lot of interests. I find innovation is at the overlap of different areas, and the overlap in the Venn diagram is where the spark happens. You need a diverse network. I follow people who I think are interesting, and I don’t follow people or accounts that just share transactionally. I don’t follow media accounts. I have lists that have media accounts. If I want to know what’s going on in the news, they’re where I go. But that’s not what I’m in a personal knowledge network to do, to just read. I do read plenty. The recommendation and sharing from my network helps point me to things that I find interesting and relevant. But I’m there for conversation as much as I am for just reading content and hearing about things and building relationships. If you were on Twitter in the early days, that’s probably your experience. If you came on in the last five years, that’s absolutely not your experience. That’s essentially, letting my curiosity lead. The other thing that I do, is unfollow people. If I’m seeing a bunch of stuff in my feed, it could be my best friend, I don’t care. On certain networks, I will stay connected to my best friends but if I’m there to learn, like my Twitter network, and I’m not finding value in somebody’s stuff, I’ll unfollow them because it’s just filling my screen with noise. That’s not interesting. It’s constantly weeding it, adding people that are sharing interesting things or somebody in my network is talking with, and weeding out what’s no longer relevant or interesting to me. Ross: That does digitally lead us to another topic, which is ADHD. In our previous conversations, you said, you discovered you have that, and as I’ve had with other guests, I’d love for you to share what you have learned which you think might be useful to other people. Rachel: A couple of things about ADHD is that boredom is stressful. If I’m bored, I’m stressed which people, I don’t think, get. I didn’t get that boredom could be stressful until I read it, and I was like, oh, yeah. It’s not thought of that way. I didn’t think of it that way. But not digging into things causes me stress, doing things repetitively, that’s not my strong suit. I love complex problems. I love synthesis. I’m voracious. I have strong interests, and I can’t pay attention to things I’m not interested in. I’ve got to be engaged in a topic. When I’m engaged, I’m very engaged. But it’s a little bimodal. I’m either bored, or I’m engaged. In the middle, it can be harder or take more energy to follow up. It’s not that I don’t ever, but it takes a little more energy to do accounting, for example. I still do accounting, but it takes a little more energy to just buckle down. A lot of people get very annoyed. I’m like a constant idea generator. It’s driven my teams in the past crazy. I know it’s not actually helpful to them because they’re trying to get work done, and I’m like, what about this? What about that? They’re like, no, no, I haven’t finished the first thing. I use my social networks a lot to just play with ideas because my mind is constantly chewing on things. That’s an outlet so that I’m not bothering people who don’t want to be bothered. It’s opt-in. If people don’t like the volume of things that I share or the range of things that I share, they don’t have to follow me. That’s one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is the things I’m really good at, like synthesis. The more I see, and the broader I pull from, the easier it is for me to see patterns. I’ve gotten to the point where I have a spidey sense about seeing something new that doesn’t fit a pattern. The analyst in me goes, that’s interesting. I’ll bookmark that, and if it happens again, that might be a trend and I go investigate a little bit. I have a very intuitive way of absorbing. It’s almost like the back of my mind is working and all of a sudden, things come together in gel, and I’m like, ah, now I know what’s going on. Ross: Yes, that’s really an apt description of the synthesis again, as I described in the book. But to your point about boredom being stressful, and you’ve put it admirably fantastically, is the antidote to boredom is not superficial, it’s going deep. I think that the real problem is that people get bored, and then they’re just skimming, skimming, skimming, skimming whereas the real antidote to the boredom is alright, here’s something I can just dive into, and it has to be something that I am passionate about. Rachel: It’s interesting. I’m not at the Community Roundtable any longer because I had a big hairy problem when I started. It was a hypothesis. I was looking at it and saying, given technology, given organizations, I was a management consultant for a while, and the power dynamics, this is going to disrupt organizational structures entirely, and nobody knows how to manage in this way. And these community managers online who don’t have any structural control over the people in their community but are accomplishing big things have the answer to that management dilemma, or that it’s really a leadership dilemma. I mean, depends on where you parse out management and leadership. I mentioned, my dad was a minister. He was a minister in the church that can hire and fire its ministers. He had a very community-centric leadership style. He couldn’t piss people off, and he couldn’t tell people what to do. He had to lead rather than manage in an old-school way. Anyway, I did over a decade of annual research, and it was qualitative initially, and then I got quantitative, and then I was able to benchmark it. I got that done. I spent a few more years there, and I just started getting really bored. I was like, I am done with this big hairy problem. I’ve satisfied the hypothesis that I started this organization for. I’m at this juncture of what’s the next big problem I solve. And I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Ross: I’ve just been through almost the same process of finding what it is I must dive into. Just to round out, what are three things from your experience that you would suggest to people to help them thrive in a world of massive information overload? Rachel: Just three things, okay. Ross: It doesn’t need to be three. Rachel: I would say, in a world of details, start with a hypothesis or intent. If you work up from the details, you’ll never get anywhere. Hypothesis and an intent can be purpose. What’s the purpose of your interrogations? What are you driving at, figure out what that is. That’s not easy. That’s one. Two, I think you can’t worry too much about making every second count. You’ve got to be willing to explore. Because the new stuff is in stuff you can’t process yet. And, it’s the trade-off between extrinsic getting something done, and intrinsic learning something. And everybody has a different level of trade-off. But if you’re trying to grow and learn, you need to spend, you need to put some time aside and just explore, without too much direction. And the third thing is paying attention to feelings and building relationships. I talk about feelings a lot because if you ask people how they feel about something, it really helps. You’re in conflict with them, you see something differently than they do. Asking how they feel about something will more quickly get you to the root cause than just ping-ponging back and forth, or listing the 10 reasons why I believe this. Say, what do you feel is the right thing to do? Why do you feel that way? Why are you frustrated? What is it about that, that makes you frustrated? And if both parties do that, you can narrow in on the nugget and stop arguing about the big thing, which is much harder to solve. That goes hand in hand with building relationships, so really being attuned to somebody else, being generous with other people, being generous with your time, people are always like Oho, I’m taking up your time and I’m like, I don’t know what’s going to happen. If this falls flat, I probably won’t talk to you again. But I’m open to seeing where it takes us. Because of that I have a huge network of people that I have very trusting relationships with, and I learn things, they tell me things that they would not tell me otherwise, which is also a way to learn. Ross: Yes, absolutely. That’s fantastic. You’re very strongly aligned around the things I go about the thriving and the synthesis, and the value in the interaction. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Rachel, it has been a real delight. Rachel: Thank you for having me. It was fun to chat with you and I think I learned something. The post Rachel Happe on metacognition, communities of practice, personal knowledge networks, and intrinsic learning (Ep61) appeared first on Humans + AI.

‘’Determining what information is important to you starts with your values.’’ – Nir Eyal About Nir Eyal On this episode we learn from Nir Eyal, who writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: has sold over a quarter of a million copies and heavily influenced the tech industry and Indistractable which has been named best business book of the year, among other accolades. Website: nirandfar.com Facebook: Nir Eyal LinkedIn: Nir Eyal Twitter: @nireyal Instagram: @neyal99 Books Indistractable: How To Control Your Attention And Choose Your Life Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products What you will learn How to turn your values into time (05:15) You absolutely can multitask as long as you multi-channel multitask (09:50) A process to make sense of all the information that you consume using Pocket, emailing yourself, and Evernote (10:25) Use tags to efficiently file ideas (15:50) Any endeavour is hard work, and you can’t wait for inspiration to strike (18:12) Once your schedule is set, follow it (20:39) The opposite of distraction is traction (21:33) Being Indistractable means understanding why you got distracted and doing something so it doesn’t distract you in the future (23:58) Call yourself Indistractible because doing so actually empowers you (24:57) The 4 steps to becoming Indistractable (26:23) Episode resources SaneBox Pocket Evernote Transcript Ross Dawson: Nir, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Nir Eyal: My pleasure. Thank you so much. Ross: I think you are a wonderful exemplar of thriving on overload. You are able to create wonderful books to gain deep insights into what’s happening in the world. How do you do it? Nir: It’s not easy. I don’t know anyone who says it’s easy, but I will say that I wouldn’t have it any other way. I think we should start, first of all, by reframing this idea that sounds pejorative, information overload as in incredible blessing. Ross: Absolutely. Nir: We have the luxury to have information overload. I would much rather live in an age today where the world’s information is at my fingertips than in past generations, where the seat of power and influence was how much information you had access to. Now, we are drowning in information, we have so much information. Now, the scarce commodity is our ability to make sense of all that information, and make sure that it doesn’t divert us and distract us into things that are not congruent with our goals and our values. But starting off, it’s a wonderful thing; that past generations, spent a lot of their time very bored, and we don’t have that problem. Ross: You’ve got to the entire thesis of what I’m doing. Nir: Is that right? Ross: Yes. This is an opportunity. Nir: Exactly, it is a huge opportunity, but opportunities also present challenges. It’s really the people who are able to rise to this occasion, people who can make the most of all this information are really the people who will succeed in the century to come. This ability to make sure that we harness our time and attention properly is a super skill. A lot of my research is around distraction, and my book “Indistractable” is all about how to control your attention and choose your life. This is definitely something that’s near and dear to my heart. Ross: I want to dig into what you do. Obviously, we’ve learned what you do quite a bit from your book, and we wanted to hear, and learn from that. But in terms of just information, I think, part of it is scope. What is the purpose? What information is going to be useful and relevant to you? How do you start off by framing that as to what information is going to be relevant to you, and how you seek it and find it, or make it come to you? Nir: Determining what information is important to you starts with your values. What are values? I define values as attributes of the person you want to become. You have to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend their time? That’s how you define your values. Now values, by the way, are very different from things you value. Money is not a value. Why? Because money can be taken away from you. Money is a thing you value, it is not your value. However, the idea of being a dependable person, being honest, being someone who lives with integrity, are the things that can’t be taken away from you; those are values. We have to start by turning our values into time. When we ask ourselves, how would the person I want to become spend their time, I like to use these three life domains starting out with you. You are at the center of these three life domains. If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of others, you can’t make the world a better place, so you have to start with you. What I recommend is that we start by asking ourselves, how would the person you want to become spend their time tomorrow? Starting with the very next day, how would a person who lives at your value spend their time in this life domain of taking care of you? If physical health is important to you, do you have time on your calendar for exercise? For rest? We all know how important sleep is. We’ve heard this research to death now. We all know about it, but how many of us have a bedtime? Very few. We yell at our kids and say, you have to have a bedtime, but we’re hypocrites because we don’t have a bedtime. Making that time for prayer, meditation, video games, whatever is important to you, has to have that time on your calendar. Namely, this time that you spend consuming information, for the vast majority of people, it seeps into whatever cracks of time we have in our day, whenever we feel bored, whenever we feel lonely, whenever work is too hard, that’s our escape. I’m doing something good for myself, I’m reading the news, I’m checking on our newsletter, I’m going through email, and we think that’s something productive, but it is a distraction if it’s not what we plan to do with our time. Remember, the opposite of distraction is not focus, the opposite of distraction is traction. Traction is any action that moves you towards your goals, towards your values. Distraction is the opposite, anything that moves you away from what you said you were going to do. That’s why it’s so imperative to start with the time that something takes. Dealing with information overload doesn’t start with, what do I want to consume? It starts with, when do I want to consume? When in my calendar, will I make time to consume this information? Now, why do I say that’s so important? Because I’m forcing a constraint. When people say what do I want to do with my time, I want to write a book, I want to have a beautiful family relationship, I want to have a big business, I want to make sure I’m up to date in all the news in the world, you can’t do it all. You only have 24 hours in a day. What you have to do is to make tradeoffs. You can only make tradeoffs when you impose constraints. By looking at your calendar and saying, okay, I want X amount of hours with my family, I need to do work for this many hours in the day, I want this much time for prayer, meditation, I want this much time for whatever else it is, how much time do I have left to do this important thing that is consuming information? Starting from that constraint, you will have to give something up. There’s no way you can do it all, you only have 24 hours, everybody does. By doing that, you will understand how much time you even have. What you might find is a lot less time than you think. Maybe if you’re lucky, you have an hour or two to consume information. That forces you to be very frugal with your time. I often say that people are stingy with their money and generous with their time, and it should be the exact opposite. We should be generous with our money, and stingy with our time because we can always make more money, we can’t make more time. You have to start by asking yourself, this is a nonrenewable resource, your time in your day has to be accounted for first. By saying to yourself, hey, look, after all my other priorities and values, I only have 45 minutes in a day to consume information; What can I consume that provides 45 minutes of information that is actually valuable enough to warrant that time allotment? That’s the first place to start, I think. Ross: For you, what time do you allocate when? Nir: I typically do it in the morning, where I have time, when I go through my email; I have time booked in my day to go through email, an hour and a half of email per day. I have a separate folder; I use a product called SaneLater, which is a wonderful product that will sort out the important from the less important information; the emails that you need to respond to versus the emails that you simply consume. For about 30 minutes of my day, I have time on my calendar when I go into this folder, and I look through these various new sources and places that I want to consume this information. I use a little trick that I talked about in my book “Indistractable”, that I do believe in multitasking. I know that this is killing a sacred cow, that everybody in the productivity spaces tells you, you can’t multitask, that’s not true; You can absolutely multitask, as long as you multi-channel multitask. What we can’t do is receive inputs of information on the same channel at the same time. You can’t listen to two podcast episodes, one in each ear, you can’t do two math problems at the same time, you can’t watch two television screens at the same time, because you’re using the same channel. But you absolutely can multi-channel multitask as long as the information is coming through different sources. What I do is I have 30 minutes on my day for deciding what’s worth consuming. I open up the New York Times, Daily News Digest, I’ve subscribed to several newsletters, I open those up, I don’t read them, I save them. Immediately, when I see an article that I want to read, I have a rule, I never read articles on my web browser. I immediately save them to this wonderful app called “Pocket”. Now Pocket will scrub out the text. Instead of all those linkbaity headlines, all the links, and all the stuff that will distract you, it just gives you the text in the app. Then I use multi-channel multitasking, as the reward for doing something I don’t really want to do. In my case, it’s exercise, to reward myself with these articles read to me. You can have this app “Pocket” read these articles to you while you’re doing something else. This is called temptation bundling, this comes from the work of Katy Milkman. She has these studies where she finds that you can actually use a reward in one area of your life to help incentivize you to do something else that you don’t really feel like doing in another area of your life. I like exercising, I don’t love it, but it’s an extra boost of motivation to be able to listen to these articles while I’m in the gym exercising, or taking a walk. That becomes how I use this multi-channel multitasking to consume this information while I’m doing something else. Ross: Are all those articles that you’re consuming in audio? Nir: Yes, pretty much 100% of them. Ross: Right. Obviously, it’s not as if you’ve got dozens of articles every day, because… Nir: No, I get through probably 30-40 articles a day during my exercise session. Ross: How long does that last? Nir: About an hour. Ross: Okay. Do you put it on faster than normal speed? Nir: Yes, definitely. I use another app called “Voice Dream”, which works with Pocket. It has these great text-to-speech voices that read about 800 words a minute. I can’t listen to 800 words a minute, but I listen to about 600 words a minute. It’s fantastic. You can get through a ton. Many articles are fluff. You’ve got the opening, you’ve got the closing, the summary. But to get the new information, you can listen to it pretty quickly. Ross: This takes us in a way to sense-making, which you talked about at the beginning. Yes, we got a wealth of information; we can carve out some time to be able to pull out what’s relevant or interesting to us. Is there a process for you to make sense of the world from all of this information? Do you take any notes? Do you do anything visually? Do you build any frameworks in your mind? Do you do it simply by writing? Blog posts or books? What is the process by which it makes sense? Nir: The first pass will be to just listen to these articles, as we just described. But if it’s something that I feel like I want to dive deeper into, if it’s a particularly good article, that maybe it’s relevant to something I’m actually working on at the moment, or something I think I might work another moment, I email that article back to myself. It goes from, let’s say, this email newsletter, I just read the headline, and I immediately send it to Pocket. I don’t read the article itself. I listen to the article later on. If I say, Wow, that was really good; maybe one out of 20 things I listen to, I’ll say, Wow, that’s really insightful. I want to remember to come back to that, I’ll email it back to myself. Then when I have time in my schedule to do that type of work, to do the work that requires me to look through these articles, and think through these and extract the value in accordance to what I’m working on, that’s when I’ll do it. I’ll open up these articles, and then if it’s something that I’m working on directly, if I’m writing an article, then that goes straight to the Google Doc, where I’m working on that article. If it’s not something that I’m working on, right this minute, but I think I might work on it at some point, I file it into Evernote. I just save it into Evernote. I’ve got 100 different book ideas and article ideas, I just tag it based on that subject. Then I’ve got this nice file in Ever note, I can just type in the topic and I’ve got 20-30, maybe 100 different articles that I’ve saved over the years around this particular topic. It makes for a very rich source of reading, to get up to speed on a topic that when I’m ready to write about it, is there. Then in terms of how do I add something new? How do I not just consume but actually create? That’s where writing comes into practice. For me, I can’t remember who said it, but I remember this quote that you can’t write clearly without thinking clearly. Writing is really my process to understand new ideas. By processing these ideas, and thinking through them, and chewing on them, and then presenting them to others, that’s how I get to the truth. Ross: I think one of the interesting nuances in what you described is choosing those tags. You’ve got like 100 tags; this could be a book idea, or this theme, or this topic, or this idea. How is it that you have developed that particular array of tags that you can attach meaning to the content you’re getting? Nir: It just comes through the years of thinking about… that’s an interesting topic. It’s unanswered questions. It’s the mysteries. What drives my writing is curiosity. I think it was Dorothy Parker, who said, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity”. It’s really about the unknown, that’s what drives me. What do I not really understand? What do I want to get clear in my own head? Those tags come from these areas of interest. I have hundreds of different tags of things that I’m still curious about, that I don’t quite understand, so I file them under those tags. Ross: Do you relate these back in any way to your values, or is this just something which has just emerged in terms of… this is interesting. Nir: Yes, usually it’s in terms of either topic areas, or sometimes like a book title. If I have a book title in my head that maybe I’ll write someday, then I’ll have to file it under that title. Sometimes it’s just vague categories, race relations, or neuroplasticity or behavioral design or there might be broader categories, and most of them I’ll probably never dive back into, but should I need them, they’re there. Ross: In “Indistractable”, you talk about moving beyond distraction to traction. In that sense of traction, I think that there are different levels of focus or different types of focus, so you can have your deep dive where you close the world off. There are others where you may be consuming information or writing, or it could be less immerse things where you may be exploring for things. Within this world of traction, do you think about different types, or levels, or kinds of focus, or traction? Nir: There are times where the topic might be easier to write about, and you feel more focused. If it’s a subject, I’ve chewed on a lot, and maybe I’ve spoken about, and digested, and shared with others, and I’ve come to some conclusions, then, of course, the writing is much easier. Other times, when it’s a brand new topic, sometimes it’s a slog. I really have to think through things, and thinking is hard. Many times we believe that we can just spout out ideas on a page, and I don’t know how to do that. Thinking is really hard work. To come up with anything interesting and novel, that you’re proud of, takes a lot of time, takes a lot of thought. That requires sitting down and doing the work. I try not to put a burden on myself to think that I have to reach this cloud-nine level of focus and flow. I’m not a big fan of flow. This concept by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I think it’s really great if you can get it, but it’s not a requirement. This concept of flow that time moves quickly, and you feel like it’s effortless, I think that’s great for some of the things that Csikszentmihalyi talks about in his book; Basketball players playing basketball, and surfers surfing… okay, great, you got into the flow because it’s fun. What happens when the task is not fun? Many times when I’m writing, it is not fun. It sucks. It’s really hard work. Yet, I want to do it because it’s a hard type of fun, but it’s certainly not the flow. I don’t try and put those requirements of “oh, I’m not focused enough”. Steven Pressfield talks about this a lot as well in his book, “The War of Art”. A professional does the work. A professional doesn’t wait for the muse to strike. A professional doesn’t wait to be in a state of flow. A professional doesn’t wait to be focused. A professional puts their butt in the chair and does the work. That’s why it’s so important to be Indistractable, because Indistractable teaches you the skills to do this at the drop of the hat, to sit down and do the work, whether you feel like it or not. That’s really where we can live the life we want. It’s not just about work. It’s not just about productive stuff. It’s about being fully present with people you love. It’s about exercising when you say you will, eating healthfully when you say you will. It’s about following through. I try not to attach any requirements that I’m at a certain level to do in order to do the work. I just do the work. Ross: Right. But if it is going to be the harder work, as in the book writing, would you put that out for a certain minimum time of day, at a particular time of day that works best for you? Nir: Yes. Right now, I do it in the afternoon. I do it right after lunch. I like to write from a coffee shop typically. I like a little bit of ambient noise while I’m writing. But I’ve played around with it. I used to write first thing in the morning. Then I moved to Singapore, and I needed to take calls in the morning, so I don’t write first thing in the morning anymore. Now I write in the afternoon. I’ve moved my schedule around. The important thing is that once my schedule is set, and it might change from day to day, once my schedule is set, I follow it. Once you’ve made that schedule, and you said this is what I want to do, now that is traction. Whatever it is you said you were going to do, that’s in your calendar, that’s traction, everything else is a distraction. Ross: There’s a distinction. People talk about focus a lot, whereas your theme is around being Indistractable. Do you draw a distinction there? What is the theme of “Indistractable” which people who haven’t read the book or already, can benefit from in understanding perhaps that distinction? Nir: Focus is something you can do with your attention but it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be… it’s not the end goal. The end goal is to do what you say you’re going to do. If you want to divert your attention, let’s say you want to watch a movie, play a video game, play with your kids, be spontaneous, awesome, you can do that. There’s nothing that says that focus is the pinnacle of our existence. It’s alright to let yourself divert your attention from one thing to another. That’s fine, but don’t regret doing it. The way we minimize regret is to decide in advance what we will do. That’s the difference between traction and distraction. Both words come from the same Latin root “Trahere”, which means to pull. You’ll notice both words end in the same six letters “ACTION”, which spells action. Traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction. Distraction is any action that pulls you further away from what you plan to do. It’s all about intent. It’s all about deciding in advance, this is what I’m going to do, even if it’s something fun, frivolous even, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with scrolling Instagram or playing a video game or being silly with your kids. That’s great. That’s wonderful. But do it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else’s. If what you want to do with your time is to be focused on your writing, wonderful. But that’s not necessarily the requirement, which is why I don’t think that the opposite of distraction is focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. Ross: “Indistractable”, I think a key part of that is identity, as in understanding and believing yourself is Indistractable, being able to get traction in whatever it is you’re doing. But there’s a whole series of tools or techniques in order to enable you to align your actions with the belief that you are Indistractable and able to be there, doing what you’re planning to do. Nir: Absolutely, yes. This is why I titled the book “Indistractable”. “Indistractable”, it’s a made-up word. I made it up so I could define it in any way I like. Being Indistractable doesn’t mean you never get distracted. Even I get distracted from time to time. Being Indistractable means you understand why you got distracted and you do something about it so you don’t get distracted by the same thing in the future. Paulo Coelho has a wonderful quote, he said, “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision”. How many people go through life constantly complaining about how they didn’t get this done? And they got distracted from that, and they had this goal and this thing on their to-do lists, and they didn’t finish it? How many times do we keep getting distracted by the same thing again and again before we say, enough, I’m going to do something about it? A distractible person chooses to be distracted because they don’t do anything about the problem. An Indistractable person says, okay, you got me once, now I’m going to do something about it. What I teach in the book “Indistractable” is this model around knowing exactly why you got distracted and using this toolkit to prevent it from happening again in the future. Once you become that person, that person who strives to do what they say they’re going to do, the person who strives to live with personal integrity, you are Indistractable. It doesn’t matter if you read the book or not, if you’re listening to my voice right now on this podcast, you can call yourself Indistractable, because doing so actually empowers you to change. We know that monikers have a huge impact on our behavior. If you look at the psychology of religion, when devout Muslims call themselves Muslims, they don’t have to use willpower to do certain behaviors. A devout Muslim doesn’t wake up in the morning and say, I wonder if I’ll have some alcohol today? No, a devout Muslim doesn’t drink alcohol. It is who they are. A vegetarian doesn’t wake up and say, I wonder if I’ll have a bacon sandwich for breakfast? No, they don’t eat meat. It is who they are. They are vegetarian. You are now Indistractable. Indistractable sounds like indestructible, it’s a superpower. It’s who you are. It’s your identity. You’re the person who strives to do as they say they’re going to do, someone who lives with personal integrity, and who is as honest with themselves as they are with others. Ross: To round out, what would be your advice beyond anything which we’ve already covered to someone who’s saying, this is a lot of information, I’m trying to work out what to do. What are the steps which I should take? How can I thrive in this world? Nir: The four steps to becoming Indistractable are pretty simple. They took me five years to uncover, but these are the four basic steps that are the four pillars, the strategies that we have to use. Strategies are why we do something, tactics are what we do. It’s much more important to understand the strategy than just the tactics. But if you follow these four steps, number one, mastering your internal triggers, understanding where distractions come from, that’s step one. Step number two is, make time for traction. What we talked about earlier, planning out your day, understanding what you define as traction so that you can know what is distraction. You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. Step number three is, hack back the external triggers. Removing all the pings, dings, and rings in your outside environment that can lead you towards distraction. Finally, prevent distraction with Packs. Packs are the last line of defense. They’re the firewall against distraction. We use them as this barrier when we fall off track. After we’ve tried the other three strategies, we use them as the last line of defense. When we use these four strategies in concert, this is how we become Indistractable. There’s a lot in the book, but really, it boils down to these four basic strategies that anyone can master. Ross: Given the world we’re into, I think that there are many people that are very distracted and could benefit a lot from being able to take your advice. In a way, that’s the future of where we are, it is to the degree to which we become a distracted race, or something else. This is a bit of a pivotal moment in human history, isn’t that? Nir: This is very autobiographical. They say, “research is mesearch”. I wrote this book for me more than anyone else; because I found I was incredibly distracted. It was because the world is such an interesting place. There are limitless videos to watch. Now with these amazing technologies, like the one we’re using right now, you can speak with people all over the world, and things you can learn, and incredible things you can see and do. But the price of progress, the price of these amazing technologies that we have at our fingertips today is you know what, you got to learn some new methods, you got to upgrade your own skillset to make sure that you can live in this modern world, and use these tools to your advantage, to use them as opposed to letting them use you. It’s not that hard. This isn’t rocket science. Simple things like planning your day, understanding your internal triggers, turning off the external triggers, simple stuff, we can all do it, if we stop complaining about it long enough to take action. Many of us, all we do is whine and moan about the crazy world these days but we don’t do anything about it. I really think the world is bifurcating into two types of people, people who let their time and attention be manipulated and controlled by others, and people who stand up and say, no, I decide how I will control my time and attention. I will control my life. I am Indistractable. Ross: Absolutely agree, Nir. It’s fantastic to get your insights on thriving on overload. I’m sure many people will benefit from them. Thanks so much. Nir: My pleasure. Thank you. The post Nir Eyal on using your values to filter, when to consume information, the best apps for content, and using audio for reading [REPOST] (Ep60) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“For me, decision-making is not just a company making decisions in a certain way but it’s also what they are enabling with the world, society, businesses, organizations, and countries, what decisions they are allowing them to make to be more resilient. “ – Roger Spitz About Roger Spitz Roger is an international bestselling author of the four book collection “The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption”, the President of Techistential, which works on Climate & Foresight Strategy, the Chair of the Disruptive Futures Institute, and a frequent keynote speaker globally. Roger was previously Global Head of Technology M&A with BNP Paribas, and has two decades of leading investment banking and venture capital businesses. Websites: Thriving on Disruption Disruptive Futures Institute   Book: The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption (4 book series) Instagram: @disrupt_futures Twitter: @disrupt_futures   What you will learn Tech Existentialism and how it’s changing the nature of decision-making (03:09) Value chain of decision-making and how it progresses from descriptive to prescriptive (03:50) Highlighting the difference between complicated and complex systems (05:45) The impact of social media and information on decision-making (06:58) Potential risks of over-reliance on machines (07:45) The cost of making wrong assumptions and what has to be done (13:13) The need to take a step back from information overload (15:11) Growing interest and demand for capacity building in areas related to foresight and resilience (19:26) Importance of having strategic and emergent agility (24:52) Introduction to Climate Intelligence and its impact on decision-making (26:41) Three important things when spotting weak signals (32:35) Transcript Ross Dawson: Roger, delighted to have you on the show. Roger Spitz: Amazing to be with you, Ross. Ross: One of our many common areas of interest is the future of strategic decision-making. Why do we need to be thinking about the future of strategic decision-making? Roger: That’s a very fine point. What’s changing? Because we’re humans. We have a brain. We make decisions. There are a lot of things that I know you’re also very tuned into. For the anecdote, before I answer thriving on disruption is meeting thriving on overload. Those two elements disruption and overload are contributing in a way to having to consider decision-making differently. We box it into a few things. Firstly, it’s simply that the exclusivity of decision-making is no longer necessarily just for humans. Insofar as computers can make decisions, whether they understand the decisions, whether they’re imitating the brain, it’s almost a separate debate, insofar as the outcomes of what they might do have implications on decisions that may not be taken by humans. So the first thing is really that; the delegated authority, which we call Tech Existentialism. What is technology and existentialism? What is that world where we no longer have that exclusivity? The second thing is the decision-making value chain itself, if you think of getting information, like the OODA loop, you get information, you get signals, that’s kind of descriptive. The computers analyze, it’s data analytics, computers have been doing this for decades, fine. And then there’s a bit more predictive. That’s algorithm-augmented, machine learning, pattern recognition, and you can process tons of drug discovery, all the things you know. You can test and process millions and billions of things and decide what could make sense for a particular drug and that which humans cannot do. So that’s predictive, it’s supporting decision-making. Now, the thing that interests me most is that value chain where decision-making is moving to prescriptive by machines. That prescriptive is really deciding the preferred option. It’s having that agency or at least authority with action triggers to make autonomous decisions. Now your focus, Thriving on Overload, how much information is to process? Do you need support for that? How good is the support you’re getting with computers? That’s two elements, the exclusivity that’s being delegated, and the moving up the value chain. We quite like to look at the framework which is obviously very helpful for sense-making and responses to different environments: Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework. Ross: Yes. Roger: He divides, for your listeners, what is complicated? And what responses were complicated? So complicated, you can rely on experts, you have known and unknowns, it’s a more linear predictable environment, and cause and effect can be anticipated. Then complex, it’s different. It’s nonlinear, so it’s less predictable or not predictable at all, like the Amazon River. If you change something, how does it affect everything else? Complicated examples are, how you send a probe to Mars and all that. You can do the calculations and get expertise on how to fix a plane on that. In this complex environment, cause and effect can’t be necessarily determined, it’s an emergent discovery mode, trial and error. Cause and Effect can’t be established necessarily, as we said, it’s nonlinear. The multiple drivers of change cannot necessarily establish it’s just A or B, etc. That’s a lot of the real world and then more and more in a world that is hyper-connected, which is technological, where things are basically very much playing off each other and can be self-reinforcing, the speed of which can be extraordinary. If you look at Silicon Valley Bank, one of the interesting aspects to it, and we can put aside the many aspects of the hundreds of case studies in the post-mortem, but one specifically, I think is interesting to our discussion, is it’s probably the first time that social media and information is the way it is, we didn’t have that in the 2008 crisis, where instantaneously, if one VC mentioned something to a customer, or startup, or whatever, that was pretty much amplified within minutes to 10s if not hundreds of millions or potentially billions of people. That instantaneity, warp speed of many, many things basically mean that the decision-making and the person in that complex environment is different. When you add all that together, my worry and my concern, in terms of what it means for the future of decision making is that machines will continue their course and will hopefully have improved ethics and safeguards and make the most of it for the augmentation, because there are benefits as well to AI. But putting that aside, my worry is that the focus is so much on the machines that we forget humanity, what we as humans need to do so that decision-making remains effective. What are humans good at in decision-making? And then we’ll kind of wrap up, I don’t want to monopolize it, I’d love to get your thoughts as well, and reactions, but kinesthetic intelligence; you use a temporal lobe, timing your senses and all that. Emotional intelligence, we have instinct, we have intuition, feeling, self-awareness, consciousness, and you don’t need algorithms, it’s not the prefrontal cortex where you have that emotional intelligence. Now, the one thing with what we’re talking about, though, is, for strategic decision making, which is our topic, complex systems in that quadrant of David Snowden’s Cynefin Framework, where there are those known, unknowns, computers aren’t that good yet at the complex because it’s nonlinear, because there’s no data, and the future is unpredictable because cause and effect does not determine it, etc. But with natural language processing and machine learning, it’s emergent, it’s quite good at being emergent because everything immediately is taken into account. The machines are learning fast and potentially encroaching, or even if they’re not, are being delegated the authority to process things and make decisions even when it should really be that the humans keep the edge. The problem is that if humans are not upgrading themselves to the reality of our nonlinear complex, unpredictable world, if we’re not changing the way leadership teams and our minds are cabled, if we’re not changing the educational systems, we’re not good at making sense of complex, we’re not good at processing and making decisions in those environments because we’re linear, we’re just not capable like that. Long story short, when I think about the future of decision-making, I think more about what humans need to do the upgrade their capabilities into the context of Tech Existentialism, where we don’t have exclusivity to decision-making, where we’re de-skilling, by delegating authority to machines, and where those machines are moving up the value chain and learning every day. Ross: Yes. Roger: Are we? Ross: Yes, it’s an extraordinary time to be looking at that. Let’s unpack that. I completely agree that this has to be about augmenting human cognition, and the augmentation of human cognition could be partly in terms of delegation where irrelevant. But it comes back to in a way, the prescriptive that you described where the analysis is provided by machines. But prescriptive isn’t delegation, it is prescribing something, but you can still choose whether or not to take that medicine. Roger: If you’re capable of making that decision. Ross: Yes. That’s the nub of that is that precisely when we start to have, for example. This is probably a sequencing issue, where you say, first of all, AI provides a recommendation, hopefully with justification or some kind of parameters on, then humans say yes or no or with modification. Now there are various other sequences, ones where humans provide analysis and then get AI to assess different scenarios or things like that. But what’s the nub? What is the best way or ways in which we can then take that prescriptive approach where you can get some rich multivariate analysis by AI, but where it still remains ultimately a human decision? Roger: I completely agree with you, prescriptive is not taking autonomously a decision, it’s providing the options to make a decision. Where I would add nuances is we’re less good at bluffing than machines are. Several things can happen with that prescriptive, which theoretically, is not the decision making but which can quickly become a proxy for decision making. Number one is are we overwhelmed by the complexity? And are we understanding what the machine has done, what the machine is prescribing, and what to do with it, and our situational awareness and understanding to make a decision? We can see it every day; when it was a pandemic, when there were a lot of recent geopolitical events, when we are in this environment, which is the reality of the world that is nonlinear, unpredictable, and complex, it’s just that the cost of making the assumptions, of relying on assumptions is going through the roof. We used to make the wrong assumptions all the time, but the cost of those assumptions was less severe. Now, the issue is, the cost of making the assumptions of the narrative are wrong, we, therefore, have to have a different mode, and acknowledging the real nature of our worlds, including in our decision-making, are we able to, are we changing the incentive, the governance structures, the educational systems to allow us sufficiently to understand what machines are doing, their limitations, whether it’s garbage coming out to understand the situations well enough? And are we delegating sometimes things we may not be better able to make decisions based on the answers than the machines but even machines themselves can make mistakes or can be wrong with the algorithms, God knows what happens then. I’m not dismissive of technology or AI. Because there are a lot of miracles that are happening through that. Often, it’s the tensions and dualities, and paradoxes. But if we move to your question about how does one manage that decision-making? And what do humans do? We can unpack that. For me, I do use technology constantly. I guess that’s what you’re driving at. There are uses where technology augments us whether it’s note-taking, or translations with machine learning, or transcriptions, or indirectly drug discovery because the farmers are using the platform today. Yes, indirectly, one benefits when you use it every day, at the personal level, at the societal level, etc. What I then try and do is really focus a lot on, and this is where I think humanity needs to do, is what we call the AAA, which is how to be more anticipatory and think about the future because we need to imagine broader scenarios and we need the time to think of things differently to unwind. We need to take a breath. There’s a lot of noise and overload as your book correctly points out. You need to isolate the time to think about different things or think differently from the linear approach. I think foresight and futures is a good way of doing that. It’s quite broad in that. You need to isolate the mind, sometimes even spending time doing other things, to just invest 10-20% of your time to connect the dots and see things differently, because that same way of looking at things and developing more expertise compared to being T shaped or benefiting from the compound role of investing in the time, you have to isolate your time, you have to isolate the breathing and the thinking differently whether it’s Eastern philosophy with Shoshin – Beginner’s Mind, whether it’s meditation, and then you need imagination, inspiration to accept that the world may not be as it is, and to be able to challenge that. But this is very different from the educational system leadership, governance structures, and incentives that we’re determined to do which give you a carrot to learn things for which they are ready-made solutions and answers. Ross: Let’s get into the real world. These are all important topics. And I think unpacking them as you have in your books, I think is really valuable. You and I both work with boards and executive teams. You get personalities, you get more or greater or lesser openness to different ideas or to new technologies. What’s the reality? Have you seen any boards or executive teams which have superior, or advanced, or better, or interesting processes of decision-making? Or have you encountered any interesting anecdotes to recount about how you have tried to get groups to adopt better decision-making processes? Roger: Yes, you’re right, there’s a lot to unpack. I like the provocation around getting real. A few things, first of all, it’s hard. You’re talking about changing mindsets, always going against how we’re cabled to think maybe more linearly. It’s hard, no doubt about that. That’s why these are complex challenges. That’s why we’ve deferred them for decades, even though we knew the consequences for some. No doubt about the challenges. The second element is that I think that at present, unfortunately, quite a lot of organizations, countries, institutions are still in Business as Usual operating mode in terms of writing on the usual assumptions and everything, treating the world as a controllable, predictable, and linear. Having said all that, I find that there are more countries that are beefing up things they’re not bad at already, in terms of being anticipatory; Singapore, Canada, and Scandinavian countries on that, and those who aren’t are starting to realize the importance of that and being more intentional around them. US, maybe to a degree, and others. Ross: Is this around policy? Roger: Yes, around policy; and organizations, likewise, around capacity building for better resilience, for foresight strategy, and I see it myself, one of the reasons I’m able to do what I do today, which five years ago would have been maybe a bit more esoteric, not that they weren’t futurists or very bright people like you have been doing this for a long time but coming out of nowhere, out of 20 years of M&A to be able to fit myself and get traction, for capacity building, for anticipatory governance, for resilience, for strategic foresight, I’m not sure that these kind of topics had more demand. You’ve always had a very small number of organizations that were cabled on that. I’m finding, there’s more interest in these and more and more, not just keynote talks, but executive programs or pathways to capacity building. It’s not easy, just because you do a good session, even if you’re effective, and people are well-intentioned, that is easy. But I’m finding a lot of interest in that. I’m even finding the same for education for that matter. I’m seeing private groups who have educators who are asking me to do sessions for them to think about how to better allow their students to be capable with these topics. If you take the leverage points and Donella Meadows when you’re dealing with education, and then policy, and then the corporates, little by little, you’re doing a lot with the value chain around the drivers for change. It does have come back to a question. Being anticipatory, which is one of our triple A’s, and strategic foresight and those capabilities, I’m seeing more and more demand for, it’s better to have the awareness and the demands than not. I think we’re less and less relying on some well-known institutions who have their DNA in terms of this way of being anticipatory. I think it’s becoming more relevant to more people. Ross: One of the challenges with foresight is anticipation. You can be in a mindset of anticipation and you can get foresight methodologies internally or get some great people externally and so on. Always originally, the whole thing was scenarios to strategy. We got some great scenarios, how do we turn those into strategy? That’s something I’m interested in. Also, the strategy is, again, around the decisions and I think there are plenty of organizations again, that go out and get some insights around the world far more than other organizations and leaders do so they’re more open and they look for things and they get help and they build foresight teams and so on, but still, how does that flow through to an actual decision? And so that’s still the snub where you’ve introduced more complexity, you evaded harder in a way because you’re bringing in more complexity. But that’s still, from that anticipatory frame or the actions you take, how does that then flow through into a decision-making process? And a decision at the end of that? Roger: That’s one of the reasons why we don’t focus. For us, the capacity building is not just foresight strategy, or capabilities, because, to your point, you need to think about the outcomes. The simple answer is incentives determine outcomes. That’s not me, it’s Munger, of course. But ultimately, there are certain things in terms of the way the leaderships are cabled, the type of things to achieve alignment, the way of achieving certain outcomes that come through incentives and other means. If an organization is serious about changing how people think and behave and is more outcome-focused, then tick the box we have a team that does with foresight or whatever. Clearly, you go to the core of it. That’s where we think about things. Anticipatory is more this kind of foresight, futures thinking, we then add anti-fragile, borrowed from Nassim Taleb, but the way we look at what is the organization. How rigid is it? How are the decisions made? How resilient to shocks is it? How does risk management work in terms of asymmetries? Are people still thinking that if it’s just 1%, it’s fine but if the 1% ends the world or your company, it’s an existential question, you need to look at the asymmetrical risk. Anti-fragility, which includes ways of having skin in the game, and it’s linked to decision-making, and it’s linked to incentives, actually has very important elements, which we unpack quite considerably in our frameworks in volume two. Even though we didn’t invent anti-fragility, I think we applied it quite well as to how it ties in with anticipatory and futures thinking. Then the third piece is, again, decision-making, scenario analysis, and all that is very important, everything is to inform decision-making today. Coming back to the emergence, if you take the complexity, everything is emergent, though today and the reality exists, so how do you constantly zoom in, and zoom out? And what strategic and emergent agility do you have to zoom in from your longer-term envisioning and all that to emergence today, and that, again, has different elements that organizations can take on in terms of decision making, decentralization, training of people, or the right incentives. There’s no quick fix. But I do personally believe that if you have certain incentives that are focused on the right outcomes, that if people are more aware of it, that you bring in talent that’s more susceptible to adopters, that you have an understanding of being anticipatory, anti-fragile, and the agility to emerge with decision making today, reconciling long-term objectives as opposed to constant firefighting, because you’re anticipating it, you’re seeing the world differently, etc., those combinations of things with agency and then alignment are more likely than not to help. But yes, it’s not easy and not everybody is prepared to go through an understanding of the different facets. Ross: Can you give an example? Let’s talk specifics. Presumably, either something you’ve seen where there’s public information, or if there’s a client where you can disguise the details, just some facet of whether it worked or hasn’t worked of how organizations or leadership teams can change, or improve. What are the specifics of how this has happened and how we’ve seen shifting in decision-making? Roger: Let’s take something concrete. I’m, for instance, on the Climate Intelligence Council of a startup called Cervest, which is an AI company, which is focused on climate intelligence. What’s climate intelligence? Climate intelligence is allowing you to make decisions today on specific assets or investments based on very long-term uncertainties. What the state of climate and the weather and resilience needed might be in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. It’s in the long term, it’s uncertain and basically, you need to make decisions today in that. It fits quite well with the different parameters. They basically have 100-plus climate scientists, they’ve developed AI software. It’s open source, and they spend a lot of time educating clients, the world in many different ways, people like me, support, and others, around what are the world views, and understanding what’s happening. They are then supporting with the disclosures, with understanding what’s happening with the regulators in terms of future disclosures that would provide feedback loops, what are good disclosures, bad disclosures, they’re helping companies themselves prepare for the accounts and all that with the required disclosures. As part of that, they are evaluating and giving a dashboard, which helps you, without predicting because we don’t have the certainty, but it helps to map out and plan the different possibilities for your assets over the next 5, 10, 15 years for the different possible climate eventualities, and see what your competitors are doing, what your assets are doing. If you’re a hotel chain with 200 hotels, you need to decide, today, you need to understand, we all understand that mitigation is not enough for climate, we need to make our asset base in our lives more resilient and adaptable. What does that mean if I have a supply chain, if I am a city and I have the infrastructure, if I’m a hotel that I have 200 hotels, if I’m about to make an acquisition, basically, that hits. I think if you take leverage points and Donella Meadows in a complex systemic world, it’s looking at all the different facets because you’re a CEO or board or whatever management team, you’re looking and you can see, okay, I can see the different exposures and different risks, I understand that it’s not 100% sure that that will happen, but a lot of information and things that can be processed and mapped out in that, I see the different scenarios, you can decide how to make yourself resilient or not resilient for the different eventualities, etc. That might sound a bit basic, it’s just investments, but actually, it’s huge, because of the resilience of the world. If there’s flooding, we’ve had big winds in San Francisco, suddenly even Salesforce tower and all these buildings that are built with the best architects and engineers in the world realized that you have glass falling through 80-story buildings or 30-story buildings because of how strong the wind is, and leaks everywhere, things collapsing, and this is California, there are places where there’s more extreme weather, so if you multiply that across the world for insurance, for decisions, for companies, it’s trillions of dollars, potentially, that are exposed, not to mention the number of lives and all that. For me, decision-making is not just a company making decisions in a certain way but it’s also what they are enabling with the world, society, businesses, organizations, and countries, what decisions they are allowing them to make to be more resilient. I think this is quite a good example. Because I’m not pushing for them. I’m rooting for them, but I’m not lobbying for them in that sense. But it really hits the different elements of long-term uncertainty, emergent decisions today that need to be concrete, building resiliency into our systems and thinking if you have the information, the mindset and you can see, you’re able to make the decisions, you’re getting the data to then decide what decisions to make. It’s not a kind of black box in terms of what information is provided, etc. I think, as an example, that I think, is not a bad example. Ross: Yes, certainly, in terms of climate, there’s a lot of uncertainty, massive impacts, and decisions now are critical. I think as you suggest, I’m in terms of having both the right sorts of information and the frameworks to assess it, I think it can be extraordinarily valuable, and the scope of information is critical. To round out, you obviously, I would say Thrive on Overload, you soak in lots of information, you make sense of it, you are a foresight practitioner amongst other things, so what are three things that you do in your practices and how you work with information that you think might be useful for other people to consider in how they interface with information. Roger: When I saw your work, I was very interested because first of all, the thriving on was something I had approached as well. But it’s probably one of the biggest challenges today irrespective of how one uses AI to support or not, just simply the noise from the rest. To your point, as you professionalize foresight and then futures, the trick is that you’re seeing even more things. Because you want to go abroad, you’re going to be on the fringe and everything you know. I would say the three things are the following for me, personally. Number one is when I’m looking to spot the weak signals is to just start allowing the themes to connect the shifting dots. Serendipity has a big role to play with that, which is why for the wonders of AI, serendipity is often where I get the greatest ideas from, I find them great, whether the outside world does is another matter. But the idea is I’m proud and happy about often come from serendipity. That’s just scanning a heck of a log and seeing things, it’s what patterns come, what clusters, not in a kind of AI, I’ve processed the million random things, but, in terms of you, Ross, or Sarah, or me, Roger, connecting the shifting dots. The next thing and that is broad, we’re going outside of our fields of expertise and everything we know, we’re going wide, deep, etc. The second thing is thinking about what are the next thought implications of that, at that point, I’m almost intentionally trying to drop the information not to be overloaded. I’m trying to intentionally isolate myself whether it’s through meditation or Beginner’s Mind, Shoshin, and Eastern philosophy, or how do I get a blank page to imagine and be inspired by the multiple possibilities and think about the next thought implications of what that means. There is no data on the future. That is important for me. That is where I think humans, to our earlier discussion, need to enhance our capabilities of imagining the next thought implications to avoid, to enhance preparation, and then avoid the surprise of things that are necessarily rushed or unprepared. The third thing is scanning continuously in a way to evaluate and compare how things are changing. Again, it’s very subjective. Sometimes it’s inspiration even, it’s not necessarily just monitoring data and creating feedback loops from what the computer says, it’s thinking about how new do things feel, how might they compound, how might they impact which then links to the next thought implication. For me, it’s connecting the shifting dots, imagining the next thought implications, and thinking about that in a dynamic world, because constantly, the world is updating itself, so our ideas and our thoughts and our perspectives of the world also need to be emergent and constantly updated. Ross: Yes, that’s great. As I was referring to before, the humanity; this is what humans are good at, the way our brains work is around the cognition. I think that’s fantastic to pull out from this is the way our minds can bring things together. Thanks so much for your time and your insights today, Roger, it’s fantastic. Just to round out, where should people go if they want to find out more about your work? Roger: Thanks a lot for that. So to follow all the content, it’s basically whether it’s LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., Disruptive Futures Institute, so follow the Disruptive Futures Institute and the handles on Twitter and Instagram @disrupt_futures, but Google us and you’ll be fine, Disruptive Future Institute. If you’re specifically interested in learning more about the books, there’s a dedicated website thrivingondisruption.com. We also have detailed articles on every single one of the volumes to know what’s in it as well as podcasts and a lot of other information. The dedicated books, thrivingondisruption.com for the guidebooks, and then just generally follow the institute, Disruptive Futures Institute. We’re trying to beef up how much is free and available for anybody. Ross: Fabulous, great resources; that’ll all be in the show notes. Thank you, Roger. Roger: My pleasure, Ross. Have a good rest of the day. Enjoy it. The post Roger Spitz on the future of strategic decision-making, thriving on disruption, resilient systems and thinking, and beginner’s mind (Ep59) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“AI will allow us to triage increasing amounts of information so that we can identify what we should dive into in more detail and extract value from.” – Sam Barton About Sam Barton Sam is a product manager, a personal knowledge management expert, host of the deep dive podcast Talk of Today, and also a product manager for two major products in Ross Dawson’s startup Informivity. Website: Sam H Barton Twitter: @Samhbarton Apple Podcast: Talk of Today Spotify: Talk of Today YouTube: Talk of Today What you will learn Utilizing technology for efficient note-taking (02:28) Personal knowledge management with Roam, Notion, Logseq, and Obsidian (03:47) Using Readwise and Todoist for workflow and note-taking (04:59) Exploring connected note-taking apps – comparing Obsidian and Notion (10:09) The power of externalizing thoughts through knowledge management tools and AI (12:46) The future of personal knowledge management (13:32) Externalizing knowledge to make it accessible and effective (15:20) The potential of digital assistants and notetakers to assist in managing information and improving productivity (15:45) How generative AI helps users dive into more beneficial information (17:24)   Features of the “Ideal Tool” that provides automatic AI summaries for sources (18:38) The need for the ability to discern authorship and authenticity (22:47) The probable emergence of personal tutors and new forms of libraries (24:13) Tool recommendations to thrive on information overload (27:20) Episode resources Roam Research Notion Logseq Obsidian Readwise Todoist   Transcript Ross Dawson: Sam, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Sam Barton: Hey, great to be here, Ross. Ross: You are passionate about trying to work well with lots of information and manage your knowledge and so on. How come? Where did all this start for you? Sam: I’ve always loved technology. I’ve always tried to keep abreast of all of the latest updates and just check out new tools and how they work. I think I stumbled into it in a way because I was using all of these different tools, and they had all of these capabilities, and as a consequence of using these tools, I started amassing a collection of notes rather easily because of the automation that some of these tools made available. Suddenly, I had lots of data to work with and I thought, this data can be put to use in a way. I was working on various different things. I always work on various different things, for better or for worse, so having a way of going through the information that I have and organizing it in such ways that it’s actually useful. I was running a podcast, I was studying, I was working, so I had lots of balls in the air and I needed to find a way to keep those balls in the air. Ross: What was the first software that you found useful on that journey? Sam: That’s a good question. Roam Research captured my imagination. It got me very excited for this world of personal knowledge management, though it wasn’t as useful as I was expecting it to be. Notion is an app that I have been using consistently for the past few years. Even though it hasn’t gripped me in the same way, as some of these other tools, I have found myself using it the most for getting work done and tracking things. In the past, and currently, I use tools like Roam, or if not Roam, now Logseq or Obsidian. We can get into those later if you want. I’ve been using those for managing notes like book notes, podcast questions, and a whole array of things. Basically, stuff that I capture online, and then Notion is where the production happens. Ross: How about in terms of the idea captures? You always come across something cool or interesting, which is stimulating, but you don’t necessarily know where or how, then where would you put it? Sam: My workflow at the moment is I take advantage of Readwise. Readwise is an app that does a variety of different things. It’s evolved recently. The big thing is it allows you to capture content in the various areas that you come across it online, on Kindle, and elsewhere. It deposits that information automatically into a note-taking app of your choice or in the Readwise app itself. I had a Twitter addiction, I deleted it recently. That was a good and bad move, I think, because I’m less plugged in. But what I would do is if I came across anything interesting, I would just send it to Readwise, and I would have it tagged with #inbox so that I would know when I go into my notetaking app, I need to process this, I need to put this in an area that makes sense. I’ve also used Todoist to play that role as well. If I come across something, I would just throw it quickly into Todoist and tag it with the relative tags: work, podcast, or whatever, and I’d get to it later. I will say that my process is not perfect and it definitely needs a bit of work. Ross: Nobody’s process is perfect. Sam: Yes, I still have lots of frustrations with mine. For one, remembering to process your inbox is a chore. Maybe it’s one of those things that you just have to do. Ross: Where’s the inbox? Sam: My inbox was Logseq. Logseq is an open-source free version of Roam Research. That was where I was initially. I’ve moved to Obsidian recently because with these connected notetaking apps, you can hashtag or link items, do a quick search, and filter for many different things, and that’s one way of organizing and getting access to content. But folders are still very useful I’ve come to discover. Being able to just put something in a folder and access it in some hierarchical manner is very useful. From what I’ve learned, or from the research that I’ve done, Obsidian is the best app that allows you to make the most of both worlds. You can organize things hierarchically in folders, but you can also, with tags, surface things when you need them. I’ve started moving to Obsidian. I do have some gripes with it but it’s high customizability and getting into the weeds and owning your data. I contrast it with Notion, where everything’s set up in a very structured way, but you don’t own your data so it’s not as future-proof. I’m currently in that space of tossing up whether or not I stick with Obsidian and just let that be my home for everything or I just bite the bullet and go with Notion because the returns initially will be greater. But in the future, having complete control over my data is the way to go. Ross: I use Obsidian, Notion, and Google Docs amongst other things. That’s always one of the issues, either you’re choosing a central platform, a single platform for everything or you’re making a decision about what goes where. At the moment, there’s a logic as in Obsidian is for me more of the idea. Here’s the idea, this little snippet, a reference or an image, or something which I can go, organize and get access to whereas Notion is where the structure happens. As you talked about Notion being that place where work gets done. I don’t think Obsidian is a work-getting-done tool. Though I’m sure some people put it to a good effect in that way. Just working out the boundaries as to if no one told us at all, then how do you continuously rebalance what goes where? Sam: It frustrates me because having everything in one place is very powerful, just being able to manage, let’s say, all of your resources, reference notes, and everything, and then just being able to seamlessly integrate that. Let’s say I’m writing an essay, a workflow for me would be to read various books or PDFs and highlight them. My workflow allows for all of those highlights to be automatically added to my second brain, so Obsidian or Logseq. A really useful workflow is just being able to take all those highlights and then just put them into my working document, so that I can write with all of the content right there. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. I end up having to get all those notes there, and then move to Notion, and then port everything over there and try reworking it. The reason why that’s a problem. It doesn’t sound like a problem. That’s normal and that’s how it normally happens. But the benefit of these connected notetaking apps is that you can see the providence. Where did that note or insight come from? If I’ve got a highlight, this highlight came from this book in this section, and it’s really easy to reference and look at later. In the future, I could say, where are all the places that I have referenced this highlight in all my work? And maybe there are 10 places. Now that’s very useful because you have the graph of knowledge that expands across time and becomes more useful. There’s this positive feedback loop between data. But when you just move it over to the workspace, you lose all of that. I would really like Obsidian to play that role for me. I see it as a niche hacker-ish tool. It’s a tool for hackers, and people who like to tweak things, and it’s not user-friendly enough for the sorts of things that I would like to do with it, given the amount of time that I have, but I do think that it’s in the right direction. Ross: I recently gave a keynote to 250 innovation professionals and I asked at one point, ‘Who’s heard of Rome Research or Obsidian?’, and one person put their hand up. She’s an avid user. It’s interesting that these are, as I’ve referred to them before, geek tools, and that’s the challenge, is that they are great for geeks, but we need tools that are more accessible to others that don’t necessarily like going into the weeds like that. But pulling back, we’ve used the phrase ‘personal knowledge management.’ For me, these note-taking tools, I think of them as knowledge development tools. As in, how do they help us be more knowledgeable, to build our mental models, to understand better? I’d love to just pull back from the specific tools around thinking how is it that you, as your knowledge, your insight, your perspectives, what is the big frame for you in being able to support that, being more knowledgeable, essentially?” Sam: Yeah, it’s a great question. I don’t have a very good answer for it because my brain still acts as the main brain. Ross: Yes, as it should be. Sam: Though I do have a strong desire to externalize a lot of it so that it’s accessible not only to me; but, especially today with the rise of generative AI tools, the more I can get out of my head and digitized, the more effective my thoughts will be, if that makes sense. Because I’ve taken things that are in here, like things that I’ve found myself, and put them into a knowledge management tool, and then I can work with the AI to explore all of these ideas and refine them and do all that stuff. The frame that I have around this at the moment is we’re just at the beginning. We’re still at step one. Maybe like pen and paper was 0.1, Microsoft Word was 0.2. We’re still at the very beginnings of personal knowledge management and working with external technologies to really amplify. Amplify might not be the right word but to immerse ourselves in this information and work with it in a more collaboratively way so it’s not just my brain throwing things, and arguments happening in my brain, but I’m having a conversation with the knowledge that I have come across, but also have synthesized and put together in my own words. I don’t know if that’s an answer to your question, but that’s how I am thinking about it at the moment. Ross: No, I think that’s a really important point as the times when I’ve gained the most insight is being in conversations. Sometimes things I said, not what the other person said, were what we both said. I say things like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m interested in what I just said,’ or then indeed you’re having a conversation with someone else, and they’re saying something else, and you get a refinement or addition. When you’re sitting and reading and making notes and pulling things together, yes, that’s valuable. But in a way, most of the really big insights happen in a conversational frame. As you say, now that we have AI that can potentially play that role well, that could be an extraordinary tool for knowledge development. Sam: Yes, just on that point, something that I’ve been thinking about; I’m very talkative, and I love talking to people. One of the reasons I started the podcast was like, “Oh, well, maybe I can make a living just chatting with people.” That sounds spectacular, chatting about ideas. I’m not very good at sitting down and writing notes and doing all sorts of things but I love chatting about things like this. With the rise of generative AI and transcriptions and all that, we could actually have conversations like this, the transcript gets automatically dumped wherever, and maybe in a year or so, the notes that we would have taken manually will just get pulled out by AI and tagged and all sorts of wonderful things would happen to them so that I don’t need to do anything. It reminds me of back in the day, in ancient Greek philosophy days, 2,000 years ago, none of the philosophers, the big dogs, weren’t writing things down. They would have students who would recall things and take notes and everything. They said oh, no, writings, we’re not about that, we’re just going to be talking about it. They didn’t have the patience to write things down. I’m not comparing myself to them, maybe just in terms of my laziness. But now we will have these digital students, or digital notetakers, and digital assistants, who’ll really help us with all that now. I’m here for it. Ross: Yes. How else have you found the generative AI tools to be useful in your knowledge? The tools are very pragmatic in terms of being able to use them for all kinds of work, but how have you found them useful in terms of thinking better? Sam: It’s a good question. I would say that they haven’t been as useful yet, though there’s a lot of promise. There are some ways in which I’ve used generative AI to understand things like just copy some text and get the AI to explain it to me in a different way, reframe it, or maybe combine ideas in a certain way. That’s been the most useful way so far. Knowledge is tough, but inputs are easy; if that makes sense. Inputs precede knowledge. But what the AI will do, the benefits that we’ll see is these generative AI will allow us to triage increasing amounts of information so that we can identify what we should dive into in more detail and extract value from. So right now, if I come across something that I want to read later, I would tag it, throw it into my inbox, and maybe read it later. To read it later, I actually have to read it. But now I can click summarize and maybe get a rough summary of it, and have an idea. A tool that I would love to exist right now is something where I could put in all the sources that I would like to keep up to date with, and every time they create something new, let’s say, it’s a blog, every time there’s a new blog or a new podcast, or if it’s a Twitter personality, their Twitter threads, or whatever, if I had an automatic AI summary generated, and I had a feed of summaries that I could then say, ‘Oh, actually, that’s very interesting. I’m going to go and dive further into that,’. Basically, increasing the, I wouldn’t say signal to noise, but just extracting the key insights from each piece of information so that I can process more and dive deeper into things that are worth going, diving more deeply into, because there’s so much information being created today, and it’s a bit overwhelming. Ross: Essentially saying, you work out what the sources that you think are promising, and then you get the system to provide summaries or just key points and things you’re interested in from each of those so that you can go and follow each of those if you think it’s worth delving deeper into. Sam: Yes, exactly. One tool that’s doing this better than anything else at the moment is Readwise. Readwise does have a reader app. You can send PDFs, online articles, anything you come across online, Twitter threads, YouTube videos, and podcasts now, and you can read it, view it, and consumes it in the Readwise app. They’ve got something called the Ghostreader. You can just click a button and it generates a summary. That’s a step in the right direction. I just want an interface on top of that, with the summaries already generated so that I can filter information more effectively and dive deeper into things I think are worth exploring. Ross: Yes, I see that tool to be extremely valuable. But I also wonder it still just provides the text and text summaries. There’s still this brain, the wetware of our minds. Obviously, there are some images and other types of content, but a lot of this is text, and maybe summarize text, we can delve deeper, but there is still this step between how it is the different pieces and elements that we come across, and be able to build a lattice of knowledge from that. It’s a step beyond, again, where we can find the best things, but also then find how it is we pull these together into our lattices of knowledge. Sam: That just harkens back to the discussion of Obsidian versus Notion, owning your data versus not owning your data because if you have all these summaries, and you have all this information that’s tailored to your desires, to your interests, to your needs, then you can see them all connected together and interact with them in this spatial way. I’m just thinking of the graphs that Obsidian puts out or the Obsidian, Roam, and Logseq, so you can just see all of your different notes connected and how they’re connected. I think that’s a very useful development. But right now, there’s just too much friction involved with that, but probably not for too long; maybe by next week, seeing the pace of this generative AI explosion, we’ll probably be there in not too long. Ross: Just looking at that broader space, the intersection of personal knowledge management or our ability to make sense of information and build our knowledge with AI, is there anything else, in particular, you’ve found exciting, which you have seen already or where you see the potential of that coming? Where’s the edge of where you see possibilities now and coming up soon? Sam: I’ve got two answers to this question. The first thing that springs to mind is actually a negative. We now have the capacity to generate very convincing content at scale, and we have no way of discerning facts from fiction. COVID has made this very apparent. Now it’s already happening, but over the next five years or so, we’re going to see deep fakes, generated audio and video, have quite a big impact on people’s worldviews, and collective truth will just become a myth, at least in the near term. What I’m excited in this space is the development of decentralized identity tools, a weld coin is a good example. They’ve been in development for a while but they have led to building a decentralized, privacy-preserving identity solution so that people can prove their humanity. What we need ASAP is the ability to discern; if I’m reading someone on Twitter, if I’m seeing a post from someone on Twitter, I know that they’re a person and I know through some cryptographic key that they’ve signed authorship through some cryptographic signature, they were indeed the origins of that post. That’s something that I’m excited about. Well, excited is not the right word, I see that that’s something at the front of my mind. Ross: It is what you’re excited about? Sam: Yes. It’s communities of people who have shared interests coming together to create libraries on certain topics. An example that springs to mind is the whole John Vervaeke space, the Meaning crisis, philosophy, and civilization. There’s a lot of conversation happening in a distributed way on Twitter and YouTube about our collective stage, the challenges that we face, and what sorts of changes, in the way that we operate individually and collectively, maybe we need to undertake to be able to deal with the challenges that we face. There’s no Wikipedia page for it. There’s no ongoing collection of information that I can go into and just review that’s been updated in real time so that I can keep abreast of the developments there. These tools, with some curators, we’ll see new forms of libraries appear with people who are paid librarians, who are AI wizards, who will update these knowledge resources, these libraries in real-time using artificial intelligence. There’ll be digital gardens that tend to themselves in a way and emerge. That’s something very wonderful and exciting. The other thing is personal tutors. That’s the other thing, just being able to have a tutor on anything and it being tailored to myself. I can’t wait for that. Ross: Just on the point around the curated gardens of knowledge, I think the last episode with Ida Josefina, with their product Sane, which is not yet publicly launched, but looks very much to the intent of what you are describing and it looks very promising and interesting. That human curation element is very interesting, sane.io, I believe. Pulling back, you have been very effective. One thing about you, Sam, is you keep on trying lots of tools all the time and learning what is best, which is not just what the software is, but how you use that. There are plenty of other people that don’t either have the time or spend the time to go and explore and try things and see how they work. I’d love to pull back to just get your recommendations for anybody that’s immersed in a world of information and looking to build their knowledge effectively. Not just talking about software, but just more generally, what are your recommendations? What are the things you would advise to someone to thrive in a world of overload, to amplify their cognition? Sam: Yes, the first one is Readwise, particularly if you read eBooks, because you can just easily capture highlights seamlessly, and they just get saved. My recommendations are largely based on minimum effort. Ross: That’s a good principle. Sam: I would say, a recording app. You can choose whichever one you want. Otter.ai is one example or the Google Recorder, basically, an app that allows you to, whenever you have a thought, just click a button and capture the thought in real-time. Just speak and have a transcription generated so that you can leverage that later. The reason why that’s useful, particularly today, is if you have an idea, and you get it out, and it’s machine-readable, so you get the transcript; with generative AI, you can turn that into whatever. You could turn it into a blog post, meeting notes, or an outline for a book, you’re just limited by your capacity to work with these tools. It’s all about capturing useful information, so Readwise, a recording app; I would say a tool that integrates. Let’s say capturing is finished, the last set of tools I recommend relating to curation. I have used Notion extensively and it’s continuing to get better and better, particularly with the integration of AI. I would recommend using a tool that allows you to integrate generative AI into your workflows seamlessly. Because we now live in an age where you can be 10 times more effective than your peers, if you’re a knowledge worker, this isn’t just being a programmer, it’s not about just being a 10x programmer now. If you know your way around tools, around this generative AI space, you can literally be 10 times more productive than your peers or 100 times if you’re incredibly strategic and creative. I would say find a tool, I think Notion is one of the best examples of that at the moment that you can just use to do what you do normally but throw some AI in there as well. Coda is another one to I would say. I would love to know Coda in more detail. But I’ve spent enough time with Notion that I might just wait for them to catch up. But if you’re just starting out, I would look into both. Consider what your needs are, and then make a decision. Just look at a YouTube video Coda versus Notion and make the decision. Those would be my top things. Ross: Just beyond technology, any attitudes, habits, behaviors, or anything else which you think is important? Sam: Yes, openness. So, if you can cultivate an open mind and a propensity to try new things. We are in the most atypical time in human history, possibly. We are going through a massive change literally as the days go by things are changing and it’s not just generative AI, we’re all very excited by that, but we have this confluence of technologies coming together that are all accelerating at a relatively exponential rate and they all feedback on each other. This is a positive feedback loop. That’s why I call it the Law of Accelerating Returns, returns to something. Things are going to be changing very quickly, they are, and they are going to continue to change. To be able to engage with this turbulent world effectively and not going to not get overwhelmed, we need to try to not be rigid. We need to try to be as flexible as possible but within reason. That’s my advice, just be open to new things. Ross: Open but not too open. Sam: Yes. Ross: One of the problems with openness is that you can be open to all sorts of incorrect information, for example, but that’s in Thriving on Overload. That was one of the key points I made that openness is not just extraordinarily valuable. It is something that we can cultivate in ourselves, and it pays off in spades in a fast-moving world. Sam: Yes, definitely. Ross: Anywhere where people can go to find out more about what you do? Sam: Yes. I only really use Twitter these days. I’m @Samhbarton on Twitter, and my website is the same thing: samhbarton.com. Ross: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time and your insights, Sam. Sam: Alright, thanks for having me, Ross. The post Sam Barton on using PKM tools well, AI knowledge graphs, digital gardens, and decentralized identity for truth (Ep58) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Jump in there really be an active participant in the industry, because it’s also about that. How are you becoming a voice, an active participant in the idea sharing and everything that’s being built?“ – Cathy Hackl About Cathy Hackl On this episode we learn from Cathy Hackl, a leading tech futurist and globally recognized business leader specializing in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), & spatial computing. She is the CEO of Futures Intelligence Group, a futures research & consulting firm that works with clients in tech, fashion, media, government, and defense. BigThink named Cathy “one of the top 10 most influential women in tech in 2020”. Business Website: Futures Intelligence Group Personal Website: www.cathyhackl.com LinkedIn: Cathy Hackl Facebook: Cathy Hackl Instagram: Cathy Hackl Twitter: @CathyHackl Books The Augmented Workforce: How AI, AR and 5G Will Impact Every Dollar You Make Marketing New Realities: An Introduction to Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality Marketing, Branding & Communications What you will learn Cathy is a voracious consumer of information and loves conversations (03:08) But all that information is constantly refined (06:35) It starts with keywords (08:51) And being selective (10:01) Tagging is it, especially high level topics (10:50) She has developed her thought process over time (13:02) Asking the right questions… (16:08) …then hypnagoia (19:00) Blocking time on her calendar and turning off distractions (21:40) How Cathy became the metaverse expert (24:17) When is the right time to share an idea (32:51) Episode resources Feedly Leo Medium Diigo Google Docs Transcript Ross Dawson: Cathy, it is awesome to have you on the Thriving on Overload show. Cathy Hackl: Awesome. Happy to be here. Ross: Cathy, you keep across the edge of emerging technologies. There’s a lot of information to keep across, a lot of new things. How do you do it? Cathy: It’s interesting because when I was looking at some of the questions that you sent over for this, I started to really try to think about, “How do I organize this? How am I doing this?” I’m a voracious consumer of information like a lot of folks are in our industry. How do you organize everything? How do you make sense of all of it? How do I do it? I would say I wake up, I read a huge amount of news—mostly focused on technology, because that is kind of where I spend most of my time. I consider myself a tech futurist. I’m very much focused on the technology, having been working in this space inside these companies for several years now. Definitely, start reading a lot of different information. If there’s something really interesting, I’ll flag it with different services that I use. Sometimes I’ll forward it to one of my assistants and ask them to put it in different programs. We have Google Docs right now—to be honest, as simple as that—on metaverse things. I’m very focused on the metaverse. Back in January, you didn’t have that many metaverse headlines. Now, it’s like every single headline in tech is a metaverse headline or something like that. We used to have a Google Doc where we used to keep those a little bit. Now, it’s getting a little bit more complicated. We use tools like Diigo, for example, to keep things organized. I have a very well-organized Feedly to also keep tabs of things and keep organized, kind of know what are the sources I want to get information from. I mean, lots of scanning, lots of reading lots. I will say a lot of information that I do get, I also get from conversations, especially right now with the metaverse becoming such a hot topic and lots of people wanting to talk to me about it. Sometimes it might be as simple as like, “I’m launching the X project.” Before, I might have been like, “I don’t have time.” But now, I want to hear what they’re doing. What is it that they’re doing in the space? Sometimes those conversations, not always, they don’t lead to anything. But sometimes I’ll find out something I didn’t know, or I’ll know this is interesting. This brand’s thinking of doing this. That’s gonna be happening, what does that mean? What is that a signal of? It’s a bit of a process. Especially in my field because it’s evolving so fast, it’s hard to keep up. What was new yesterday might be old by today in the technology space, because it’s moving so fast. Another thing I do is I publish a weekly column in Forbes called Metaverse Weekly. That forces me as well to always keep on top and try to make sure that I have the freshest news and the most relevant news and those sorts of things. Sometimes I do get that information via a PR pitch; it’s not my preferred way. So, it’s a combination of all these different sources of information. I don’t have one place I go, it’s a multitude of places and sources. Ross: You say in the morning you scan and you look around. You mentioned you use Feedly. Essentially, you’re choosing feeds to go into your Feedly, and that’s been curated over some time I guess? Do you continue to refine or add? Cathy: I continue to refine all the time. They’ve got some interesting AI tools called Leo that you can use to help you as well, make it more tailored. But I don’t only do that. I use my Feedly, but I also go into Google News. I go into Apple News. I like to see how the different algorithms and everything presents the news to me. Of the different things, there might be something I missed. When I go, for example, into Apple News or Google News, I tend to always go to the technology tab because you know they’ve got headlines. I tend to always go to business or tech. But I force myself to go to international or go to other ones, even though that’s not necessarily my main interest. But I’m forcing myself to go to these other tabs because there might be something I’m missing here. There might be something happening in X country that I was not aware of that could impact X. So, forcing myself like that. I’m very lucky that I have a team. I also have my team finding news and curating those. I have them send me a small metaverse review of the of the Daily News, things that could be of interest to me. They’ll send me something on a daily basis. It will be like a headline, small summary, and then the link if I want to read more. So, I also have that added bonus of having a team that also helps me with this. Ross: When you’re scanning and you see all of these articles, some of them you say, “I want to bookmark that, I want to put it in a list.” What is it that makes it something which is worth seeing? What switches the trigger to say, “This goes in my database” or “I got to pay attention to this?” Cathy: It starts with keywords, especially with the metaverse. It started with the keyword “metaverse.” Now that there’s a lot more metaverse content, we have to be a little bit more selective. What is the actual topic here? Who’s actually interviewed? Who’s actually saying this? There’s an article a couple weeks ago when you had Mark Zuckerberg say that Facebook was going to go from being a social media company to a metaverse company. You pay attention to that, right? That’s something you save. Satya Nadella in an earnings call saying the metaverse is one of our goals, you save that article because that is a significant statement by significant figure. I think it started off with a keyword, just anything metaverse, because we didn’t have that much metaverse coverage. Now that there’s a lot more, it’s being a little bit more selective. Who’s interviewed? What’s really the topic? I love going, for example to Medium, to find maybe some new voices. But it doesn’t mean that every single article on Medium that uses the term metaverse is relevant to me or that is a well- thought out article. Be very selective on the sources. Who wrote this? It’s interesting because I’ve seen the evolution with the metaverse on who is writing about it, who’s writing about it now, what is the context. Are they just using it for clicks in the headline nowadays? It evolved. Whereas before, you might have metaverse in your in your headline and it wasn’t necessarily something that people would click on. Now, a lot of people are putting it in the headline because people will click on it. It’s been interesting to see this evolution on how I’ve been tracking metaverse as a general mega trend. Ross: When you put in Diigo or Google Doc or whatever, what happens to that then? Is that for later reference? Do you have some tags to that? You’re accumulating all of this, when do you refer back to that, or how does that help you build that bigger picture? Cathy: When we’re doing Metaverse Weekly, sometimes we’ll tag Metaverse Weekly, so we know we got to pull this in, and at least I know some of the stories that I’ve organized for Metaverse Weekly in Forbes. I’m writing a book. I got an international book deal. Ross: Congratulations. Cathy: I’m very happy about that. It’s on the metaverse. Ross: Surprise, surprise. Cathy: Of course. I’m saving things there as well, tagging it in the book, whatever we’re putting there. Definitely tagging with different things, and it’s going depend on what I’m doing. I’m working, for example, on an article on defense in the metaverse, working with it with Lieutenant Colonel Jake Sotiriadis who’s widely known in strategic foresight. I’m keeping tabs on that so that when he and I have to actually sit down and write the article, I can just pull that information. Sometimes those links just live there. Sometimes I won’t do anything with them, sometime I will. You just really never know in the tech space, to be honest. Something could happen tomorrow where I might have tagged something, synthetic humanoid robot, for example. Then Elon Musk’s goes on stage and talks about his Tesla AI, and everyone’s like, “What is this synthetic humanoid robot?” Sometimes they’ll live there, nothing will happen. But sometimes something will just happen in technology, and of a sudden I have all this research already done on some of these things. Ross: You build up your own tag taxonomy or structure? Do you virtually tag a book or just high-level topics? Cathy: High-level topics. But they’re high level topics to me, right? Synthetic humanoid robots is a topic for me because I’ve been writing about it for a while. That seems pretty specific for someone else, it’s not just robots. Ross: What always intrigues me about this is we got this wealth of information. You’re obviously understanding the space, as well as anyone else in the world. Does that all just happen in the gray matter in your brain? Do you do some mapping to draw correlations? Do you draw out themes, or does it all just happen as you’re writing your weekly articles and your books? What is that process of taking all of those sources, those inputs, “I already know that, that’s new, that’s another angle?” How does that add to the comprehension that you have? Cathy: I think it’s something that you build through the years, to be honest. I started off my career as a journalist, right? When you’re a journalist, you got to keep your sources straight. You got to keep all that information. I think it comes from having been a journalist and having kept things organized in my mind, as you write the story and as you report on the story, especially if it’s something that takes you months to report on. It’s interesting, it definitely brings some of that things I learned from journalism into the space. I would say it’s something that you’ve built through the years when you start to see some of the things. For me, it’s a little bit strange because I do get a chance to try a lot of things that a lot of people don’t get to try or get to see, a lot of things that people have never seen or will see in a couple years. I can’t necessarily store that somewhere because there’s NDAs and stuff, so I can’t just be storing it. But I’ll keep it in my head. Eventually, if I see something else I’m like, “That’s how that’s going work,” or “That’s related to that specific thing that I saw the other day.” I think it’s a lot of mental models in some way. Sometimes it’s something that I’ve seen, that I’ve written an NDA and I can’t really go write about it or share it. I just kind of start it, I guess, in my mind. That has happened, I would say, in a lot of some of the things that I’ve been able to demo and see. Eventually I’ll see something, a startup or something, and I’ll be like, “That startup is related to this other thing to this.” I think it’s a lot of mental maps for me. I’m probably very different than some of the people you interviewed because my work is a little bit different. Sometimes I can’t even put it down on paper. There’s way too many in the AI side, and I just have to store it here. I would say it’s about mental mapping, for me. A lot of it comes from the conversations I have, the questions I ask when I’m demoing a new piece of tech or things like that. It might be different to some of the folks that you speak to, because I do have to keep some of these things stored in my mind without being able to publicly speak about some of the things—or even writing things down. Ross: In the questions you ask or the conversations you have, I suppose part of those questions then are trying to uncover what is new, which is different, whether it fits or not with your existing models? Cathy: Most of the things I’m trying are different and are new. Whatever question I ask is going to be new. Even though I’m not necessarily the most technical person, sometimes there will be technical questions, because I do have a grasp of some of the technical things that go into building some of these devices of the future. Sometimes I’ll try something that is so new that I’m just quiet, I’m just in awe. I’m like, “How did you build this?” My question won’t be as informed or technical. Sometimes when it’s something that is exciting but it’s something that isn’t as new—new to me—I’ll have more technical questions. I’ll pull them and be like, “I had demoed X other device, how is this different?” I can pull those questions. But sometimes when something is so, so new and you don’t have a frame of reference for this something new, you’re just trying to make sense of what this is. Some of the questions might be more elemental, not as informed. But I love what I do because it’s so exciting and it’s so fresh. Sometimes it doesn’t always happen. But sometimes I’ll demo something and I’ll just be like, “What was that,” just trying to, in my mind, to make sense of it, let alone the rest of the population. Once again, to that point, I feel like my experience is going to be very different than a lot of other folks. I’m very hands on, very tech focused, and I get to demo some of these things years before anyone does. Ross: Anyone that’s familiar with your LinkedIn feed, for example, and imagining some of the things which you can’t share—which are even beyond that—they’ll know you’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff. Cathy: If someone were to hack my brain, I think they’d have a lot of information. So, don’t do it people, please don’t. Ross: The problem, I suppose, is the synthesis. Is there a state of mind? Do you find that sometimes when you get these “ahas” you sort of get this into perspectives and to framing things? Is there anything which makes that more likely to happen? Can you design those times when you get those insights? Cathy: I tend to have really some of those moments. I think there were a couple of times that I know I have those moments. Something I learned from Amy Webb is brown noise. She uses it a lot to concentrate. I’ve started to use it, and that really, really helps me get to that next level and really focus, when I need to be very focused and very productive. That’s one little thing. I’ll have those moments, right? It’s kind of a state of flow where your mind is just in it, and eventually this connects and this connects. So, I have that. Other times—and this happens to me all the time, my husband hates it—is right when I’m about to fall asleep, I’m trying to calm my mind—which is not calm—it will come to me. It will just come to me and I’ll make a connection of it, this and this, and then grab my phone and write something, grab a piece of paper or something, He hates it. Everyone’s trying to go to sleep at home and I’m like, “No, but I have an idea and I need to do this.” I’ll have those moments that happens sometimes, and it’s usually at that time. I’m trying to calm my brain. I’m trying to disconnect from the world. All of a sudden, boom, it’s there and connection is made; I totally understand, and I see something I didn’t see before. If it’s me wanting to have that time to really kind of start to make some of these connections, it’s focused time, brown noise—really very focused and studious. Sometimes it’s just that, I’m at a point where I’m relaxing, I’m getting rid of all the craziness of the day. I’ve got three kids, it’s one of those things, I’m getting rid of the craziness of the day. All of a sudden, boom, there it is. Sometimes it’s deliberate, the brown noise time. But sometimes it’s just like this moment where, boom, it just happens. Ross: It’s called hypnagogia, the time between sleep and waking. Thomas Edison, amongst others, used to use that and have some notes ready, so that when he when he was falling asleep he could jot down his latest invention. Cathy: I’m not necessarily inventing things, but it comes to me at times. Ross: It’s inside. Cathy: “I get it, I totally see it now.” Ross: You talked about these focus times, there are times when you block out. How do you block that out? When do you block that out? The brown noises are usually interesting, how do you how do you organize your focus time? Cathy: I’ll put blocks in my calendar on a weekly basis, it doesn’t mean they happen. Ross: The world happens. Cathy: Kids happen, pets happen, lots of other stuff happens during those block times sometimes, pediatricians or whatever it is. I have blocks, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they happen. I have two blocks on my calendar, and it bothers me every single time I look at them. I’m like, “Am I really sticking to this block? I don’t know like. Friday afternoons I’m trying to block off to do those sorts of things, it just ends up being something like, “Mommy, take me to the pool.” So, I’m trying. Sometimes, even though they’re blocked on my calendar, it might be something that just happens. I’ve got an hour in between calls, let me do some of that now. I’m not maybe as structured or as rigid as some folks with their calendar, in that sense. I have blocks for it, it doesn’t always happen though. Sometimes it will just be I’ve got an hour, like I said, between calls, let me focus and really get this project done or this research done. Ross: Do you turn off social e-mail distractions during that time, or do you have any other rituals which gets you into that space? Cathy: I would say my LinkedIn, I close my LinkedIn. If I’m on my desktop or laptop, I have to close my LinkedIn. That’s my most active network, so I don’t want it pinging me every five seconds. DMs, I get way too many dams. LinkedIn, I have to immediately close it. I know that it’s just going to start pinging and pinging. I’m not as bothered by Slack or other stuff. But when it’s LinkedIn, I have to close it. So, I would say that’s one of the things I definitely do. I always keep my phone around. It’s never something where I don’t look at my phone, just because I do have three children. That, for me, is just not an option, and one of them has got some food allergies and stuff. For me, it’s just not an option to turn off my phone. I’ll have it on the side and I won’t look at it, or I’ll cover it up. But I’ll make sure I have it where I can actually hear it ring, or whatever it is that that needs to happen. But I would say my biggest distraction when I’m doing something like this is LinkedIn, for sure. Ross: Changing tack a little bit, I think one of the most important things is to find your area of expertise. You can be the world-class expert and know what it is you’re doing. I’d love to hear the story of how you’ve ended up in your area of expertise at the moment. What was that journey? How did you find your calling as it were and what you’re an expert on? Cathy: I kind of have to trace everything, and it all kind of comes together at some point. The way I explain it to people, the reason I got into the immersive technologies and the metaverse and all the things I’m working on, I would have to trace it back to 2004. I was working at CNN, and part of my job there was to look at all the raw footage that was coming in from the war in Iraq. As you can imagine, not pleasant things. It wasn’t the only thing I did, but it was one of the things I did. I always joke in some way and say I was a Facebook moderator before there were Facebook moderators. When you have a type of role where you have to see this type of content and that’s your job, you have to turn your humanity dial or humanity switch off a little bit or turn it to the side, just to kind of get through the day and go home and have regular life. It was about seven years ago, I went to a conference, and I got invited to put a virtual reality headset on. I put the VR headset on, and I was put into this 6 x 9 very tiny, virtual solitary confinement cell and VR where prisoners in solitary confinement spent 90% of their time. Within a couple of minutes, I just felt something. It was claustrophobia, but it was also something else. I took the headset off and I said, “This is the future of storytelling.” I just saw the future—or whatever that was—and that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life. For me, it was very clear moment. At that moment, it’s like the switch got turned back on. That’s the only way I can describe the feeling. I felt something different. I felt something that made me feel human again. I don’t know what the right term would be, but it was that moment. After that, I was very intentional with my pivot. Everyone thought I was crazy. My friends and my husband were like, “What are you doing? What is this VR thing?” Fast forward, 2021, I’m very lucky to have worked with some of the top companies. I’m considered one of the people that is very much, I guess, an expert in the field. I’m very much at the center of the conversation and everything that’s happening in this immersive and now metaverse space. I would say it was a very clear moment for me when I knew that’s where I was heading. That’s where I’m going to go. That’s exactly what I want to do. It’s evolved and changed. But, for me, it was a very clear moment. Ross: You saw it and you recognized it. How did you go about it? Presumably, you weren’t the expert when you put on that VR headset. You took it off and you said, “I’m going to become that.” What was that journey? What did you do to follow that path? Cathy: I did several things. One of them was voraciously consume absolutely everything there was that I could find that relate to VR and AR. Another thing I did is try to figure out, who are the key players here? Who are the people I need to be paying attention to? Figuring out, what are they saying? How are they saying it? What are they working on? Who are they working with? Going through that and figuring out who are the people that I needed to keep tabs on. Eventually, I’m very lucky some of them became my mentors. As a woman, as a Latina woman, in tech, I was also very lucky to be able to see two other very strong Latina women leading the way. That, to me, was very helpful in saying there’s a place for me here. I can do this. If you can see it, you can be it. I think that was a big motivator for me as well, when I saw them. I used to admire them from afar, they were my north stars. Now, they’re both my friends. It’s been an evolution. But I think I got educated, I made connections. I said I’m going to work in this industry, got my first break, and then made everything I could out of it. It’s been great. I worked at HTC Vive, worked at Magic Leap, worked at Amazon Web Services. I mean, I’ve got a pretty solid career track there. For me, it really started with that pivotal moment. How can I educate myself and learn as much as I can, and then go into these companies and really be a part of it? It’s interesting, as a tech futurist and very much focused on what I do, I’m a little bit different because I’ve actually been inside these companies. I don’t necessarily just read articles, I know these people, I’ve worked on some of these projects. There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve worked behind the scenes on that people don’t necessarily realize. But I know it’s one of my projects or something I had a part in. It’s been quite a journey and exciting one. I’ve been very lucky, I have to say. Ross: You made it happen. Cathy: If you can see it, you can be it. There you go. Ross: What advice would you give to anybody that’s wanting to follow a similar path to you to become the expert? Essentially, in a space of emerging technologies, to keep current, keep ahead, to make sense of it, and become at the center of that, what would your advice be? Cathy: If you know enough about the technology, if you’re interested in something, for me, it’s about getting to the right place at the right time. It’s almost about recognizing a rocket when you see one. I’m sure many people saw some of the same things I did, but they didn’t see it. They didn’t see the rocket. I saw the rocket and I jumped on it. I’m taking this trip to wherever this is leading, and it’s paid off really well. So, I think it’s about being able to recognize some of those rockets, the new things that are coming. If people are really excited about a new technology, get in there, jump in there really be an active participant in the industry. It’s also about that, how are you becoming a voice, an active participant, in the idea sharing and everything that’s being built? The metaverse, for example, as a greater vision doesn’t currently exist, we’re building it. But now is the time to start voicing what you believe this metaverse should be, how you think it should be built. That was a time to be a participant and have your voice out there. We’re all slowly building it. I would say those are some of the things. Making connections, making lots of connections in the industry. Who are the people that you should be paying attention to? Being open to being educated and being open to being teachable, I think that’s very important, especially in my in my space. Another thing I think, specifically, for people that are interested in becoming tech futurist is you can’t know everything about technology and you cannot be an expert in all the technologies. That is way beyond anyone’s capability really. Not even Elon Musk attempts to do that. He has his arms in a lot of different things, but not everything in tech. Sometimes being a generalist in some other areas might be beneficial. But I think in tech, you have to be kind of focused. And you have to realize, what is it exactly that I’m focused on here? There are some folks that are very focused on artificial intelligence, folks that are very focused on more on the bio science side. It’s trying to figure out exactly what you’re going to focus on. Ross: You’re obviously wonderful at sharing. One is to actually share ideas. There is the of having the ideas or having the fresh ideas. At what point do you, I suppose, gain the confidence to feel, “I’ve got a fresh idea and want to share it?” Do you do it right away, just sort of throw it out? Do you do sort of develop enough confidence in your own ideas before you start opining on the industry? Cathy: It’s a slippery slope. The only reason I say that is because I am a woman, and I am a woman in tech. I think it’s a little bit different. I do pause before I tweet, because I know that maybe a guy can tweet what I’m saying and they wouldn’t get the some of the pushback or things that I might get. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I do see it sometimes. As a woman in tech, sometimes I do take a step back and say, “Should I tweet this?” I remember sharing an article with a friend. I said, “Hey, do you think this is going to make anyone angry?” He’s like, “Why do you care? Someone’s going to get angry somewhere.” It’s true, but I think sometimes as a woman, I think it’s a different game—especially if you’re a woman in technology, in a very male-driven industry. Ross: To have something solid to share in that case. I think that’s that value. Cathy: Yes, value. But still, I think that there’s a lot to unpack there. Ross: I think that’s a whole other conversation. Cathy: That’s a whole other podcast, issue, book, anything. Ross: Cathy, it’s been such a delight to talk to you. I so admire what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Fantastic to get your insights, and I’m sure many other people will really appreciate it. Thanks so much for your time, Cathy. Cathy: Thank you, Ross. Appreciate it. The post Cathy Hackl on finding the key players to listen to, building mental maps, how to see connections, and becoming a voice in your industry [REPOST] (Ep57)  appeared first on Humans + AI.

“When we’re not self-expressing, and when we’re not sharing, it’s a tool problem, not a human problem, because I do think that all of us have something to say and something to self-express.” – Ida Josefiina About Ida Josefiina Ida Josefiina is a self-described infopunk and the co-founder and CEO of the information social playground Sane. She also hosts the Reverb by Sane podcast. LinkedIn: Ida Josefiina Website: Sane What you will learn The alternative way of seeking knowledge (03:25) Importance of reflecting on existence and thinking about thinking (04:47) Meditative thinking and focused reading for learning and personal growth (06:57) Importance of existential risk on the journey toward collective intelligence (09:23) Introduction of Sane, as a platform that promotes collective intelligence (11:03) Sane and its features (14:14) Differences between The Brain and Sane (15:52) What shapes of knowledge means (19:51) The difference between knowledge and information (20:55) Sane’s mission of democratizing access to ideas and knowledge (22:49) Decentralization of tech platforms through collective media (25:41) Reflecting on existence as a way to gain motivation for participating in society (27:13) Book recommendations (28:30) Episode resources Sane TheBrain Figma Miro Transcript Ross Dawson: Ida, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Ida Josefiina: Thanks so much for having me on, Ross. Happy to be here. Ross: You have described yourself as an info punk. Tell me, what’s an info punk? Ida: Well, an info punk is… actually, I have to give my co-founder Tina credit for that term. She’s the one who came up with it originally. But I guess the term came up when we were thinking a lot about the type of persona or a way of identifying yourself when you’re interested in thinking about thinking and challenging some traditional information dynamics or architecture and embracing a more alternative approach to seeking knowledge and being in the pursuit of ideas. For me, my background is I’ve never gone to university, so I haven’t had the most traditional educational upbringing in that sense, so I relate to that. The sentiment of an info punk, which is a little bit of a rebel, but very much in the pursuit of ideas and knowledge. Ross: So alternative ways of seeking knowledge. What are some of those alternatives? Ida: Honestly, it’s whatever you feel like. I’m not prescriptive about it at all. It just boils down to being curious and being connected with the world, whatever that means to you. Ross: Following your own instincts? Ida: Absolutely. Ross: As opposed to any prescribed courses for information seeking, and so on. Ida: Exactly. I think that has a lot to do with just being open-minded, and trying to maintain that open-mindedness, which is so much harder than it sounds, and to constantly keep thinking that the world is much bigger than you imagined it to be and there’s so much to discover and explore, etc. So, yes, it just boils down to curiosity; and beyond that, it’s a pretty personal thing. Ross: No doubt you found in your journeys some interesting ways to seek to find knowledge and information. I hope to get those a little bit. We talked about this thinking about thinking. Thinking tools are part of the vernacular now. We’d just love to hear some of your thoughts about how you think about thinking, and what are some of the frameworks we can apply to how it is we think usefully. Ida: I’ve always been passionate about trying to find ways in which other people, all kinds of people have some access points or more channels or opportunities to think about thinking because they think thinking about thinking has also to do with reflecting on existence. I think reflecting on existence is so important and so interesting because it makes us somehow very cognizant about how special it is to be alive. When we’re very cognizant of that, it somehow feels, at least to me, quite empowering and something to be very grateful for, and it moves me at least. Thinking about thinking thing is like… I’ve gone through several different pathways of trying to find mechanisms or ways in which I could pass on these cool, interesting ideas that I’ve somehow discovered or someone’s passed down to me, that has moved me to think about thinking and reflecting on existence. I honestly just don’t think that we have enough of that available for a large group or population of people; they seem to be somehow siloed away, whether it’s in academia or in tools that are quite inaccessible, or out of reach for a lot of people. I think breaking down some of those balls and figuring out different kinds of mechanisms and ways for people to have access to that is really interesting. Ross: Yes. Recently, I came across some research showing that there are different brain areas involved with metacognition. There are specific parts of the brain that we use for thinking about thinking as opposed to just normal thinking. This also just relates to Socrates who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. That’s part of it. You’re thinking about who you are, what it is to be alive, and what it is to think, and that’s something that we don’t have enough of. Ida: I completely agree. When I had COVID for the first time more than a year ago, and it was in that brain fog of COVID, maybe four or five days in that I was sitting in front of my bookshelf, and I was just staring at all the books, and my mind was working super slowly. I took a book. Instead of reading the book, I decided to just read a page and thought about that for a really long time. I was like meditating on the words rather than reading. It’s the same action as reading because I’m consuming something literary with my mind. But it was different because I let every word sink in. I thought about how I felt. I thought about different things that related to that. I’ve been thinking a lot about the term meditative thinking, and what that also means. If you can practice a different type of thinking by thinking differently. The word “thinking” is going to be mentioned in this podcast probably like 563,000 times. That was an interesting experience. I feel I learned more from studying that one page than I would have by reading 50 pages at that moment in time. Ross: What that evokes for me is almost the tangibility of words. I mean, a word has a meaning but if you’re spending that time with it as opposed to skimming across million words, a word has something you can touch and feel. Ida: Yes, exactly. It’s because you can start thinking about how certain phrases or decisions on how someone has decided to structure language, what it makes you think about, and what they could have meant by it. I feel like there’s a whole world to discover on a single page in a book. It’s very interesting. Ross: Yes, we have the slow food. Instead of fast food, you got slow food, maybe we should go to slow reading as opposed to speed reading. Ida: Yes. Ross: You have a company, a very interesting company called Sane. I’d love to hear about the journey. Because it sounds like it has been already a journey and continuing. Perhaps you can start from the beginning; how it started and how that’s evolving? Ida: The whole journey, if I would summarize, it started when I was 15, and we moved to Finnish Lapland, where I’m originally from California. It was just quite hard for me because I grew up for six years before that in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, and we moved to Lapland, which was quite different. Long story short, I became super existential, I just started thinking a lot about things like, why am I here? This is insane. What is life? Where is everything going? Through that, I discovered the concept or the field of study of existential risks, and I’ve just never stopped thinking about that. I’ve done a lot of different kinds of things since then. I started my career first working in politics, and then a bit later in tech, and bounced around a lot, moved to China, in different parts of Europe, etc., and then ended up back in Silicon Valley working at a data aggregation software company. I started thinking a lot about the role of data and information in existential threats and the future of humanity, and through that just basically came to the conclusion that collective intelligence or thinking about the foundational problem, above all the other problems, is the most important thing that we should be thinking about because, without that, it’s going to be very difficult for us to solve any individual existential risks such as climate change, or AI alignment, or whatever it may be. Ross: You said “without that”, what’s that? Ida: Without finding a better way that we can, as a society, work together, think together, collaborate together, so that we don’t keep coming up with new existential risks, that we heal the foundational layer because it’s quite telling that before 1953, I’m not sure if we had any existential risk. Then we did the first atomic bomb test with Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, not knowing 100% for sure that we wouldn’t ignite the entire atmosphere in fire. I think it’s just pretty telling that we’re living in this very much in this age of heightened risk, etc. I’m not entirely optimistic that even if we solve one of these big threats we’re facing that it’s going to put us into any safer situation when it comes to our future. I’m obsessed with working on what I think is the foundational layer, which is collective intelligence. I see the internet as a massive opportunity, in making a very big difference and significant progress in working on this problem. That’s why, essentially, we’re building Sane, and our mission at Sane is to build the future of how we discover, create, and share ideas and knowledge online. Ross: That’s awesome. Collective intelligence has been a central theme in almost all my work. The one thing I’d say there is around shared mental models and aligned mental models. I think even in small groups, that can be hard. That becomes harder as you move across cultures and countries and political parties, and so on. But I absolutely agree with you, until we can get aligned to whatever degree or shift towards more common ways of thinking, then yes, the risks are going to be massive. Ida: Yes. Somehow the way that I’ve started thinking about it, or I guess just my approach to trying to solve the problem is going more toward the indirect ways of contributing to collective intelligence, which I think has a lot to do with just curiosity and creating opportunities and space for people to play with ideas and to fall down interesting rabbit holes, and to feel like they have avenues for self-expression, and that they have something to say that matters. Somehow since the inception of social media, I think it’s the first time in which we don’t really have those spaces because all of these different platforms have become very weird in many ways. I do feel like when we’re not self-expressing, and when we’re not sharing, it’s a tool problem, not a human problem, because I do think that all of us have something to say and something to self-express. Ross: What is Sane? What is it as a part of someone goes in, goes on? Or how does it look? What do they see? What do they experience? Ida: Yes, we are in private alpha right now, so people can’t really go and have a look yet, but they can sign up to request early access. But essentially, it’s a social platform, a social knowledge-sharing platform on a spatial interface. People go in Sane to build what we call spaces. In these spaces, you can create these minimalist knowledge graphs to showcase any type of idea or knowledge. One very simple use case of that could be that I could create an About Me space on Sane. It would be like hey, I’m Ida, and a text note like, I really care about the future and I consider myself to be existentially hopeful. I can connect a PDF that talks about existential hope there. I can add a picture of my grandmother’s house in Lapland, where I grew up, and say, this is where I grew up, spent my summers and I started thinking about X and Y. I can combine different images, video, text, audio, PDFs, etc., and visually organize them to show not just what I think but how I think. It’s quite an efficient, and I think, quite dynamic and forgiving way of organizing and creating and curating ideas rather than having to do it in a linear chronological format, where you have to structure ideas in a very specific way. Ross: What are some of the contrasts with The Brain? Ida: What do you mean? Ross: The software product? The Brain? Are you familiar with that? Ida: Yes, I guess The Brain is like knowledge… First of all, I’ve never used The Brain so I can’t speak in detail about it. But from what I’ve just seen, it’s just like this infinite knowledge graph of everything, and on Sane, it’s more like you’re building quite a minimalist space to showcase some kind of idea. You can create as many spaces as you want. One is maybe I have my About Me space, and maybe I have a space that’s my random collection of research on thinking about thinking and it’s more like a way of blogging that has to do more with curation rather than just creation, and being able to mix media as the central media. It definitely meets the principles and ideas of knowledge management, but with the intention of it being social and as a way of sharing information, collaborating with others, and ultimately publishing. Ross: You call it spatial, does that mean that it goes beyond two dimensions as an interface? Ida: Not yet. Ross: But you’re going to get there? Ida: I don’t know. It’s something that I’m definitely interested in, just as an idea, but we’re not there yet in terms of a roadmap. Ross: I’m very, very keen. I actually had a company, a 3D information interface company quite some time ago. Ida: Oh, wow. Ross: The very short story there is still astoundingly, in 2023, we’re at just the beginning of exploring the use cases for 3D information, visualization, and interfaces. I thought we would be further along by now. I think part of it is that what seems cool and interesting is not necessarily as functional and as usable as you might think. But there are still some strong use cases. I’ll certainly be trying to play some more in that space. Ida: I’m still not entirely sure if we’re ready to put on the headsets. That’s something where my resistance comes in with thinking about really doing something in augmented reality. But that being said, if we can get around that or find a more comfortable way of existing in 3D spaces, I’m really interested in that. But I think we’re still a little bit away from that. I think that there’s a lot of building and thinking that we can do in between the 2D and 3D worlds. I think we’re just getting used to like working with spatial interfaces in a 2D environment, thinking about the Figma, Miro, and Sanes of the world, where you are not in this linear chronological model, but you’re in a space, a spatial interface, but it’s not just 3D yet. Ross: You’ve used the phrase “the shapes of knowledge”. I’d love to hear what you mean by that. What does that mean when you say shapes of knowledge? Ida: To be honest, I’m bad at giving definitions for any specific term. Ross: What comes into your mind? What’s in your head when you say that? Ida: I guess I see this room with different ideas that turn into maybe like a house with different rooms with different ideas and all the rooms feel a little bit different from one another, and they have a certain shape to them because the idea has a certain feeling and sentiment, and then you find all of these different objects that relate with that idea, or in this metaphor, the room, that belong in that room. A friend of mine was asking me if I am a visual thinker, and I said, I don’t really know, I think through feeling and then the feelings turn into something visual as a translation, but it’s not maybe the primary first thing. The shapes of knowledge are maybe just that as well, it feels more like an exploration of different rooms that have different objects that relate to those rooms that then turn into these, in this metaphor, the shapes of knowledge. I think that there’s something in the word knowledge as well, that’s different than information. We’ve been talking about how we can think about data that turns into information when there’s an added layer in that, information turns into knowledge and knowledge turns into wisdom because you add these components of sensitivity and complexity to it that ultimately turn that data into wisdom when you’ve processed it correctly. I think about that when it comes to knowledge and wisdom, that it’s more than just the data or information, it has this sentiment and context and added layer of human complexity to it. Ross: It’s almost akin to anesthesia, as you say the feeling for… what I was saying before around tangibility of words or concepts or semantics. Ida: Yes, exactly. Ross: But if you’re talking about rooms, though, that is a spatial metaphor. You are imagining moving through space to look at that. We were just chatting before we started recording about how Sane is evolving, and part of it was around that a lot of the thinking tools which are out there at the moment are not for the masses. I’d just love to hear your reflections on how that’s influencing the way Sane is evolving, where thinking tools are today, and where they might need to go more generally. Ida: Yes, like what I was saying earlier, I just feel really passionate about people that might not so easily always have access to certain cool things. I feel like when I come across certain ideas or concepts, I’m really into thinking about the hard problem of consciousness, for example. When I discovered that as a concept, as an idea, I just was so pissed off that I didn’t know about it before. Because I didn’t go to university, and I feel like I didn’t have certain pathways, that I could have more easily found out some of these ideas that just transformed the way that I relate or think with the world. I just want more people to be able to play with ideas and have access to them. I just think that that doesn’t happen by creating these tools for thinkers or thinkers creating more tools for thinkers. That’s great but it’s not the thing that I want to do or I care about. I care about finding ways that we can take some of these mechanisms that are available to a certain subset of people, and make them accessible and feel magical and easy to approach so that a lot more people could have these same feelings, realizations, or capabilities, or playing with ideas and knowledge. That’s really the direction that Sane is heading to. I think blogging is a great example of that. It allowed a lot of people to play with it. When I talk about ideas and knowledge, I don’t mean something strictly academic, or intellectually important. I mean, honestly, anything, it’s just like a way of relating with ideas. I think blogging was such a great example of that. When I was 11 or 12, I was really into blogging, and I would just write these stupid blog posts about absolutely nothing like eating ice cream or something like that. But it made me feel good and made me feel like I had something to say, something to communicate. With Sane, we’re thinking a lot about blogging, and how we can reinvent it and bring it to a modern age, and even further democratized access to those who feel like they can blog. Blogging doesn’t just have to be about writing linear long format text, it could be about curation, about connection, about playing with things like how one idea relates with another, maybe with some very intellectual basis for why that is, or maybe not, maybe it’s just intuition. I think that there’s a lot to explore within this realm of possibilities. That’s what we’re doing with Sane. Ross: More generally, in the thinking tools, space, or software, or tools, is there anything else that you think is interesting in terms of either products or developments or things which are shifting, which people should be aware of? Ida: I think that there are a lot of people, a lot of founders who are building in this space that I’m really happy for. I think that the future is going to look a lot less like very big tech, where it’s a concentration of just a couple of platforms that we’re all operating on. It’s going to be a lot more distributed. We worked with this concept called collective media. We launched this initiative with a group of other founders, there are about 14 other founders and companies who are all working within defining the future of social, so we’ve been calling it collective media, and it really stands for having alternative avenues for creating space for play and exploration and doing that with other people on the internet. I feel quite lucky to be sharing this time and space with other people who are building with similar principles in mind. Ross: I think you’ve pretty fairly expressed in our conversation what an info punk is and your very individual perspective on information, information navigation, and how it is we can align ideas. I’d love to just get some suggestions, recommendations, and thoughts for anyone who’s listening around some habits, some practices, and some things they can try that they might find useful or enlightening as they navigate a world of unlimited information out there. Ida: I’m really not good at giving tips for habits or things that people should do, because I don’t do anything myself that I probably should. But I think what I would say is that go read writings, books, and ideas that have to do with reflecting on existence. I think that that is so incredibly important. If anything, it’ll probably just make you feel grateful for being here in this period of space and time coexisting with the people that you’re coexisting with. For me, at least, it’s been such a factor of motivation and desire to participate in this society as it is today. That’s something that I would recommend people to do. There’s a great amount of literature that thinks about existence and consciousness and what it means to be and feel. What I mentioned earlier, the hard problem of consciousness, I just loved studying that. If you just Google hard problem of consciousness and read about the literature there, there’s the first paper about what it means to be a bat, that’s a great way to get started on just thinking about all these crazy existential things. Ross: Can you just suggest a few books that you’ve found useful or enjoyable in that space? Ida: I mean, go read the paper about what it means to be a bat. I would like this other paper called Sharing the World with Digital Minds by Nick Bostrom. Just because that was also a crazy, mind-bending experience, that’s imagining something so insane, and somehow beautiful and extraordinary. Then if you’re interested in thinking about existential risks and the potential of the future of humanity, I would also recommend reading The Precipice by Toby Ord. The concept of existential hope, for example, is something that he’s written about. He has a paper on that, that just defines the terms. I think those are pretty lovely ones to get started with. Ross: I’ve been listening to your podcast, which I’ve been greatly enjoying, and can’t remember, Anders Sandberg, I think it was. Ida: Yes. Ross: He was talking about the Grand Future, was it? Ida: Yes. Grand Futures. Ross: It sounds like existential hope on a bigger scale than you can possibly imagine. Ida: Exactly. I think he’s writing a book about that now, that should be published in some time, not too distant future. I’m really excited about that one. Ross: Yes. Any things you’d like to share, advice, thoughts, or requests? Ida: Yes, I would love it if you guys can all head to sane.fyi and check out what we’re doing over there, request access to our early beta, we’re going to be launching more toward the public-ish in June of this year. I’m excited about getting all kinds of freaky and faux punks on the platform creating spaces about anything and everything interesting. If that’s something that would interest you, happy to also already onboard people now and start creating spaces for those that might be interested, so just visit sane.fyi. Also. I’m available at ida@sane.fyi over email if anyone has any questions, ideas, or thoughts, always happy to spur. Ross: There are probably a few info punks listening. Ida: I’m sure. Ross: Thank you so much for your time. It has been really enjoyable. This exploration, these ideas, and bouncing things around, I’d love to keep in touch and to see what you’re doing with Sane, because I’m very aligned with the mission, and I want to do all I can do to support it. Ida: Yes, thank you so much, Ross. I really appreciate your time and having me on. A great conversation. The post Ida Josefiina on infopunk, infinite knowledge graphs, spatial interfaces, and the shapes of knowledge (Ep56) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“This is all about Humans plus AI. We can do more together than we can do apart.” – Ross Dawson About Ross Dawson Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, keynote speaker, entrepreneur, and authority on business strategy. He is Founding Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies group of companies, and the bestselling author of five books, most recently Thriving on Overload: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information. Strong global demand has seen him deliver keynote speeches to business and government leaders in over 30 countries, while frequent media appearances include CNN, Bloomberg TV, SkyNews, ABC TV, Today and Sunrise shows, The New York Times, and many others. Website: Ross Dawson LinkedIn: Ross Dawson, Futurist Keynote Speaker Twitter: @rossdawson Facebook: Ross Dawson YouTube: Ross Dawson Books  Thriving on Overload Other books What you will learn The synergy between humans and AI (03:15) Coping with information overload on the subject of AI (05:18) The importance of framing and building frameworks for understanding the relationship between humans and AI (06:19) How AI augments human capabilities by filtering information and helping develop mental models (08:30) How AI can help with synthesis and higher-order thinking (11:58) Importance of continuous learning in a changing world (15:46) Achieving new levels of success in organizations with AI (16:44) Adopting a mindset of learning and growth with AI (17:21) Introduction of humansplustechnology.com resource (19:12) Episode resources Thriving on Overload (Book) humansplustechnology.com Humans + AI Resources Humans + AI Cohort Course Bing ChatGPT Claude Transcript Ross Dawson: This is a bit of a different episode. It’s an interview with me. I’m Ross Dawson, futurist, entrepreneur, and author, most recently of Thriving on Overload. You can find me at rossdawson.com, or on Twitter @RossDawson. I’m sharing mostly on LinkedIn these days. But today I am speaking with my colleague, Ruby. Ruby Herrera: Yes. Hey, Ross. I am Ruby Herrera, and I’m an entrepreneur myself. I’ve been working with Ross for about a year now. I’ve gotten to witness firsthand and be involved in this whole journey that Thriving on Overload has been through this far. I’m really excited to get to chat with you today, Ross, about the evolution of the podcast and the future plans for the brand. Take us back; You wrote Thriving on Overload, you built a brand around it, including the course and the podcast, and people who follow your work and your LinkedIn might have seen that you’re delving into the world of Humans + AI. Tell us about what you’re doing right now. What work are you doing with Humans + AI? Ross: This is an extraordinary time in human history. I think many other people see the same thing. AI has been developing for quite a while, from the late 50s, and gradually developing. In the last six, or nine months, we’ve had a bit of a leap, where people can appreciate quite how powerful the AI is. My frame around this, or around all technology is how does it help us? How does it augment us? How does it make us better? How does it enable us to achieve more? It’s exactly the same thing with AI. This is all about Humans + AI, where we can do more together than we could do apart. AI is pretty limited by itself. Humans are pretty amazing, but they can be amplified by AI. The real focus is how specifically can we use AI to be more, to achieve more, to do more. I’ve been sharing and building some frameworks, and thinking, and ideas around Humans + AI over at humansplustechnology.com. I’ve been launching some other resources and delving deep into them. Also, I’ve created a course. This time, we’re doing a cohort course. Thriving on Overload course is an online course where people go through the process of creating their own information plan. Whereas for Humans + AI, I thought it’d be useful to do a cohort course where everybody is there together, and we’re doing it live. Part of it is that I don’t necessarily have all the answers, we’re all learning together. I can be a guide, having thought deeply about it, and having some frameworks for it. But as a cohort course, we can work together to be able to learn and to be as effective as possible in increasing our productivity with AI. It’s an extraordinarily exciting time. It feels like the world has come towards me, and a lot of the things that I’ve always believed were possible. A lot of this year, certainly and beyond, I will be focusing on this theme of Humans + AI. Ruby: Something really interesting that you mentioned is this is such a developing and quickly accelerating space. We’re all learning how to use these tools as they develop. You mentioned that you’re also learning, so I’m just curious what are you doing day to day to help you learn more about this space, and to position yourself as an expert in this environment? Ross: The amount of information coming out right now about AI is pretty intense. I’m not able to keep up, nobody’s able to keep up. What I’ve been applying are the lessons that I shared in Thriving on Overload. Part of it is what I write about in the chapter on filtering, which is getting the right set of sources. Those who are compiling and distilling the best information and newsletters are going to find the right communities, find the right people to share on social media, to be able to be selective around the sources so that I’m able to hone in on what is most useful and interesting and valid information that is created out there; to be able to apply my attention, as I write about in chapter four, and to be able to get blocks of time to really dig into, to explore, to try things, and to experiment. But the single most valuable part has been the framing. That’s what I write about in chapter two on Thriving on Overload. It’s building frameworks. That’s really the heart of what I’ve been doing, and creating, and sharing, is these frameworks for different aspects of Humans + AI, the language that we use, the different elements that humans and AI can play together. I’ll be sharing some more about the decision structures, and so on. I’m building my own frameworks as much as anything for myself, in being able to frame what is happening, the relationships between what’s happening, and of course, to share that with the world, but also along the journey using AI to develop my thinking. Part of it’s in research, and it’s been interesting when you go to most of the current generative AI and ask them for what’s the best research, they hallucinate, and makeup research that never existed, but still give you some interesting ideas sometimes. But the most useful is being where I create the beginnings of a framework and I bounce it off the AI to say, can you create some suggestions and variations and differences around that? That helped me refine my thinking, to find better language, to be able to build that. It’s a bit of an interactive process with the AI of developing the framework where yes, I’m doing the hard work of really making sense of it but AI has been really useful in being able to help me build these mental models or frameworks of the Humans + AI space. Ruby: Yes, that’s so interesting, you’re using the AI to help you learn how to better use the AI. That’s pretty cool. You’ve touched on it just a little bit, but I really would love to dive into it a bit more. To some listeners, this might seem like a bit of an abrupt shift of focus. Just tell us about how this really ties into what you’ve been doing with Thriving on Overload. How this ties into what you’ve been talking about on the podcast in the past? Ross: Yes, it is only just over six months since Thriving on Overload came out. Now I’m spending a lot of time on Humans + AI. But for me, they fit together completely, it is almost two facets of the same topic. Thriving on Overload is around human cognition. As humans, we take in information, we make sense of that, and we do useful and valuable things, we make decisions, we see opportunities, and we guide our lives. This is challenging because our cognition is finite, our brains are limited, and we live in a world of unlimited information. The quest for Thriving on Overload is how do we get better at cognition when we are overloaded, when there is an unlimited amount of information, where we can take in what information makes the most sense to be able to create the ways of thinking that are useful to us, to act more usefully. Now, Humans + AI builds on that and amplifies that by saying, how do we take individual human thinking and cognition, and make that better with technology. Part of that is very directly in some ways of filtering information to be able to make sense of that. Part of it is just as I described, being able to suggest to us mental models or ways of thinking to be able to augment us. Part of it is simply applying that in our workflow of what we do every day so that humans can do what they’re best at and the AI can do what it’s best at. But part of that journey is saying, if humans and AI are each doing their role, then we need to be as good as possible at what we do. That’s the Thriving of Overload, it’s being better at the unique human capabilities we have to take in information and make sense of that world. I think Thriving on Overload and Humans + AI fit together in a way, the Humans + AI without this idea of Thriving on Overload wouldn’t be complete. Because you just can use lots and lots of AI but we need to be better ourselves at what it is we are best at, at that sense-making, at being able to refine our capabilities. In a way, this is a perfect complement of these ideas of Thriving on Overload and amplifying human cognition. Humans + AI is taking that further into a broader space of not just individual humans, but groups of humans and how that’s complemented by technology. Ruby: That makes a lot of sense. Here’s to get your thoughts on what are some ways listeners can begin to think about using AI to help them thrive? Ross: That’s what I want to explore from now. Anyway, I’ve been delving, thought deeply, of course, around Thriving on Overload, wrote the book, and built my ideas further since then, now delving into Humans + AI. Now it is the journey to what I’m sharing, what I’m creating, and the podcast of how these fit together. I’ve touched on some of those ideas around this idea of how can we best use AI for filtering, how can we use AI for the framing and the thinking. In the book, I wrote that synthesis is a unique human capability that keeps us out of machines. Now, it’s really interesting that in this generative AI, arguably, it does have the capacity for synthesis, what it is doing is trolling all of the body of work of humans, and making some connections in that, some of which are not obvious to us and some of which are novel to us. I think that’s really interesting. We’re still the higher order. Part of what AI is doing is pushing us to the higher-order value. In a way that’s to say making us more human, making us go to where it is we are most distinct. There are actually ways in which AI can help us with synthesis to be able to surface, hey, this is a connection which AI perceives, is this a useful perception or not? Humans have the broader context. What does this mean? How does this make sense? What does this impact on who I am as a human? How does this impact society? How does this change organizations? AI is a million miles away from being able to understand, have that level of synthesis. It’s fascinating that AI now actually is able to help us with elements of the synthesis as input. That’s incredibly exciting, where we can start to get AI to feed into how we are pulling together ideas. That’s no longer the sole domain of humans, it’s still what we do best by far, at a level far beyond what machines can do, but we can start to have AI if we use it well to be a tool for us to synthesize, to move to higher order thinking, to make sense, to view things as systems. Again, the AI can’t do that but it can assist it. Those are a few of the exciting points in how the AI can help us in our journey for thriving in a world of overload. Ruby: Yes, and I think that’s an interesting point you made. A common misconception about this topic is that AI is going to take over our jobs and replace us but the really idea here is that we’re able to integrate this to amplify our work and accelerate the way we do things and our productivity. That’s a pretty exciting concept that you’re developing. Just curious to know about how people can identify ways to bring AI into their current workflows. You’ve shared a quote before, people who are not leveraging AI in their day-to-day work will be unemployed, and people who are using AI in their workflows are going to succeed. Just curious to know a little bit more about that quote of yours and how you see this developing in the workplace. Ross: Part of it is the responsibility of individuals. Part of it is the responsibility of organizations. For anything, not just AI, but other technologies or change, we all have a responsibility for ourselves to learn. This is a changing world, if we don’t keep on learning, we do get left behind, that’s just a reality. This is a very pointed thing where there’s a very strong development of things that do change what it is we can do and how we can work. We do have a responsibility to ourselves and our loved ones, to learn and say, alright, this is something which I might or might not find challenging, difficult, or confronting, but we still need to engage with it. I’m not going to reject this, I’m not going to move away from this, alright, this is something I need to understand more about. That’s part of your life. Your work is to learn about how can you achieve what you want to achieve, whatever that might be, saving the world or getting more promotions or whatever it is you might want. It’s an opportunity, and something that we need to do is to learn. Organizations need to be very conscious and think very deeply about how they bring this in. For me, the starting point has to be, this is about Humans + AI, this is not about replacing people, forget replacing people, this is not an intention, forget it. Say, all right, look at the wonderful people we’ve got, how can we use them as best as possible, and their roles might change, we might need to educate them, we might need to give them different roles, we might need to find different ways of tapping their potential. For both individuals and organizations, the first thing is really the mindset of all this changing, we have to learn how to do it. We have to focus on how it is people can do more and be more. This is a journey. It’s every day, there are pretty extraordinary announcements. The course I’m running on AI-powered productivity starts in nine days, and between now and then, there are going to be some big announcements, which are going to change the nature of what’s happening. During that course and beyond, things are going to be changing. We need to be learning the principles. The specifics are interesting and useful. Okay, he has a great tool, let me try to use that. In a way, rather than being overwhelmed by trying to keep on top of everything, it’s almost like, alright, let’s just try one thing. For example, I’d say try one of the generative AI-Language Tools, Bing, or ChatGPT, or Claude from anthropic, and each day, put in a couple of queries, try to ask it some questions, see if it, gives it something that you’re doing, and see if it can offer any suggestions. That’s just part of that journey. If you’re not playing with it, you can’t learn what it can do. Ruby: Yes, that makes a ton of sense. You mentioned that you are working on frameworks. You have this course coming up, I just would love to know, what can we expect from you moving forward. What kind of content are you going to be putting out there? Where can we find the resources that you’re creating? And most importantly, what can we expect for the future of the podcast? Ross: The landing page for resources is humansplustechnology.com. At the moment, it just provides some links to the few things which I’m doing in the space at the moment. That will probably build up over time. That’s just an easy reference point, so humansplustechnology.com. What I’m thinking about deeply at the moment is, should the podcast change its name? Because now I am focused on Thriving on Overload, that’s why the podcast has been, and now I am broadening my work to include Humans + AI. As I said, these topics fit completely together. But I feel that this frame of the name Thriving on Overload is restricting because there are some guests or some conversations or some topics, which won’t necessarily fit into this frame of Thriving on Overload. It feels a bit restrictive at the moment. I’ve been playing with some different names for Thriving on Overloading podcast. Top of the list at the moment is Amplifying Cognition. Cognition is how we make sense of the world, how we take information, make sense and create things of value, and that’s done both through the techniques of Thriving and Overload, but also through amplifying ourselves with AI. There are some other names I’ve been playing with. One is Amplifying Humans, which is a bit broader, but maybe too broad. Cognitive Evolution, this idea which I raised in the last chapter of Thriving on Overload, which is saying, this is all about the evolution of our cognition, how do we make it better and develop it. I think that’s a strong frame for it, except it maybe sounds a bit academic almost. There are other names Amplifying Intelligence or Augmenting Productivity or things like that, which are related but along the same line, so I’d love any listeners if they have any thoughts on that to let me know. I suppose they’ll say, no, don’t change it from Thriving on Overload, or love the idea of Amplifying Cognition or whatever. It’s a big decision to change the name of the podcast that’s been running for a year and a half and have got some wonderful guests. We’ve had some very good listeners. It’s growing. I want to be cautious about suddenly changing the name and the purview of the podcast, but I think, probably, it will need to shift, and probably to this idea of Amplifying Cognition. What do you think? Ruby: That’s a great question. I’ve been a part of the Thriving on Overload world and brand for a year now. I’m kind of torn. I have that relationship with Thriving on Overload and know that everything underneath that topic umbrella will exist in the podcast, in the course, in the book. But at the same time, I do think it’s limiting, because a lot of the topics that you’d like to explore and begin to be an expert around, don’t fit under that umbrella. I do think it’s about finding the right name, that will help the current listeners continue to be engaged with what you’re putting out there but also allow you to explore this new territory as well and continue to be an expert in that space. It sounds like nothing’s set in stone yet. But I’m excited to see how this continues to evolve. It’s great that you’re including the listeners and the community in this decision that you’re making. Change can be scary, or confronting, but you always say, if you’re not changing, or you’re not embracing that change, you’re not growing, you’re not helping create a better future if you’re not open to that. It’s very in line with the Ross Dawson mentality and really exciting stuff. Ross: I think the key point is that it has to be clear that whatever it becomes is still Thriving on Overload plus more. It’s not leaving it behind. It’s not becoming somebody that it wasn’t; just adding to what it was already. Whatever it becomes, whether it’s Amplifying Cognition, whatever, it’s still Thriving on Overload, but with other things as well. We’ll still have some very similar conversations that we already had around the way people’s information habits, how it is that they thrive in a world of overload, but also adding to that many of the incredible possibilities from how technology can augment us. So yes, this episode is about inviting feedback and thoughts from anybody about where we’re going with this. Ruby: Exciting stuff. Ross: Right, wonderful to have a conversation with you, Ruby. Ruby: Wonderful to chat with you, Ross. Thanks for sharing all of these new exciting ideas and the evolution of Thriving on Overload, really excited to see what’s next. The post Ross Dawson on Humans + AI, amplifying cognition, thinking tools, and the future of Thriving on Overload podcast (Ep55) appeared first on Humans + AI.

‘’We shape reality by what we notice and choose to pay attention to.’’ – Tim O’Reilly About Tim O’Reilly On this episode we learn from Tim O’Reilly, definitely one of the most influential people in the development of the Internet as we know it. He is the founder and CEO of technology publishing giant O’Reilly Media, and has played a seminal role in movements including open source software, Web 2.0, maker culture, and government 2.0, and is author of the excellent book WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. Website: Tim O’Reilly Facebook: Tim O’Reilly LinkedIn: Tim O’Reilly Twitter: @timoreilly Slideshares: Tim O’Reilly Books  WTF? What’s The Future and Why It’s Up To Us Welcome to the 21st Century What you will learn If information comes by, it must be important (01:51) Vectors and Bayesian probability in mental models (04:29) Creativity is noticing what other people don’t  (06:48) If your dog could talk, it would show you a whole new world (08:56) Only when you have all the pieces can you put the puzzle together… (09:35) …what is the art behind it… (16:47) …and does framework help you find the pieces (19:56) Selfish individuals versus altruistic groups (20:36) Crypto is not decentralized (22:28) Tim finds out somebody else built his idea (27:48) Tim compares himself to Cookie Monster! (28:57) You will succeed when receptivity and striving are in balance (31:03) It’s all about tackling the hard things (33:03) Episode resources Lao Tzu The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu Wallace Stevens Eric Raymond Christine Peterson John Maynard Keynes The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke Transcript Ross Dawson: Tim, it is a great delight to have you on the show. Tim O’Reilly: Thanks for having me. Ross: You have lived a life immersed in information and helped others in many ways to point them to, and digest that information. How do you think about that idea? How do you approach unlimited information and being able to make that into something valuable? Tim: Well, to understand how I think about it, it helps probably to say that I don’t have an approach where I really try to keep track of information, or gather information. It means certainly some ways I do, but my working principle was expressed very well by Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, when he said, “Good news will stay, and bad news will refuse to leave”. In a certain way, my approach is that things come by, and if they keep coming by, they’re probably important, and if they don’t, then maybe they weren’t. But there’s a bigger piece of it, and this is maybe explainable by reference to something like Google Maps, where people follow the map, and they stop noticing where they turn, versus people, who, in the old days, had to learn and observe the world around them to the level of where you think about the South Sea Islanders, who could navigate by watching the ocean currents, and the stars. They were their own GPS, and they were continually taking in information, and noticing how it was different from what they expected or the same as they expected. I work a lot like that. I have a mental model that I try to build of the world, and that model is inductive. Basically, I’m taking things in and I go, Oh, this is different, this doesn’t fit. A lot of the work that I’ve done over the years has simply been trying to construct a map by looking around. You pay attention to things and the things that start… with a soft focus. This is an idea, I think from hunting and things like that, you watch with a soft focus. Of course, I’m not a hunter, but I once read a book called “The Tracker”, and I took a workshop with one of the founders of this tracking movement. You’re just receptive and you’re open, and then certain things just pop out at you as anomalies. That’s what’s interesting. Ross: That is the same as my thesis around how it is that we build these models of the world. I think, when people talk about mental models, they often talk about discrete heuristics, in a sense, whereas, a mental model is really, I think, more holistic. It is a mental model of the entire world or the entire world of business, and how that works. How do you frame this mental model that you have built in, are building? Tim: Well, first of all, I do have a set of frames for it. One, I wrote a little bit about this in a recent piece. I also wrote about it in my book “WTF”, all thinking in vectors. This idea, that there are forces that are moving things along, and a vector has both a direction and a quantity, so what you’re looking for in a certain way is acceleration in a particular direction. You’re looking for how those directions collide with other vectors, and what the resulting outcomes might be. In this piece, “Welcome to the 21st century”, I wrote about one of the big impacts of the pandemic might well be that we never go back to the office and sure enough, that’s turning out to be a possible future. That’s the other thing, I have a mental model that comes from scenario planning about imagining very different futures. Then when they start to come true, you go, Oh, okay, that one was more right than the other one. You start to solidify. Again, it’s very Bayesian. It’s simply, you have a set… I think part of it would be to say it’s a Bayesian system in which you have multiple overlapping sets of priors that you’re willing to accept, loosely. Then they collapse differentially. I think that’s the thing I don’t think people think enough about in Bayesian probability systems. It’s not just one set of priors. It’s a set of overlapping sets of priors, that could collapse in different directions. Ross: Ones where you’re, of course, continually chained to the things which don’t fit and could help you modify those frameworks. Tim: Yeah, I do think a big part of it is building your own map, and there’s a creativity to that. So much of the model of creativity and our culture is, it’s making stuff up. I think creativity is noticing things that other people don’t notice because it’s ultimately a kind of scientific process. Just think about something that we think of as traditionally creative, like music, somebody, they’re making something up because they saw a possibility that wasn’t there before. They didn’t just make it up for the hell of it, they made it up because they were seeing what the new possibilities were in… maybe it’s in an instrument, maybe it’s in a cultural milieu, but basically we shape reality by what we notice and choose to pay attention to. I’ve always been a huge fan of the poetry of Wallace Stevens because that’s what he’s all about. There’s this underlying reality, and yet, we shape it. He described reality as the quest for supreme fiction, something that we could all agree on. But the contention between people is for visions of the future, and you certainly see that in the political realm, but you also see it in, say, paradigm shifts in technology or physics. Somebody basically convinces other people that this is the right way to think about the world. Ross: Yeah. I think that way of “we make the world by how we perceive it”. Tim: That’s right. We have this bit of an illusion in the West, that somehow our quest is towards the one true reality. When I go, Yeah, but tell that to my dog. We’re out there looking at things, and it’s like, what are you people looking at? This is a really good smell here, you’re not paying any attention whatsoever? I think that’s one of the things, of course, in science fiction; It’s like, how do we know that there aren’t completely different and equally valid, and maybe even more productive ways of looking at the world? Ross: Absolutely. In “WTF”, you mentioned, compiling the pieces of the puzzle, before you put the map together. How do you find those pieces of the puzzle? Or identify them or recognize that they are pieces of the puzzle? Tim: Let me back up and give you a little bit of color on that analogy. The point is if you imagine doing a puzzle, and all the pieces aren’t there, you can’t actually finish it. Very often, when you’re dealing with something new, the pieces literally aren’t there. I thought of that very vividly around my work with open source software, because I was thinking a lot about the fact… the first thing you think back is, Okay, what did I notice that other people weren’t noticing? I noticed that the Free Software Foundation didn’t talk about a lot of the software that I was selling really popular books about, they were also free software. They talked about Linux, they talked about the GNU utilities, they don’t really talk about Perl, they don’t talk at all about DNS and BIND, and all these tools out of the Berkeley Software Distribution, because they had a map that was all about the license, and it was particularly our license. I’m going, Wait a minute, they don’t include the worldwide web, which was put into the public domain, something is wrong with this picture, they don’t include Sendmail, they don’t recall the DNS, they don’t include all the TCP/IP protocol suite and implementations of that, so it goes, something is clearly wrong with this picture. I thought, well, I’m going to bring all these people together to talk about what’s wrong with the picture. At that meeting, Eric Raymond says, Oh Christine Peterson came up with a new term three weeks ago, and she was open source, and we debated it. I was like, I identified a gap. I didn’t know that there would be a new name for it that was going to show up, but it showed up just on time. If I had done my meeting… and I kept going, why am I in… there’s an intuitive part to this, there was a part of me, like, why am I delaying having this meeting? Am I just being a slacker? Then you look at how it worked out, the timing was perfect. Another one that was a little bit like that was when I started thinking about the licensing wasn’t the key to open source, it was really collaborative software development, it was a way the internet was enabling new kinds of collaboration, including software collaboration, and distributed computing, and things like SETI@home with distributed computation, and Napster with file sharing, they all started talking to me about, there is a new paradigm emerging. I kept following, tugging on that thread, and trying to integrate into some new map that would make sense to me. I eventually came up with this notion that we’re building an internet operating system and it’s going to be based on data. As a result of that, I launch the Web 2.0 events, but then I launched one called Where 2.0, and I was like, guess what, location is going to be one of the big subsystems of this internet operating system. It was great. We’ve been promoting the event, and a month before we went live, Google approached me and said, Hey, we’re doing this new thing, any chance that we could introduce it at your conference? That was Google Maps. I saw that there was a logic to this thing. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t have some inner intelligence on what Google was doing. I wasn’t really paying attention to the news, they just showed up because I’d actually built… this is what I mean by the pieces of the puzzle suddenly showing up and you go, Oh, there’s the piece that was missing, and you dock it in place, and everything starts to make sense. Ross: The word “framework”, I think, is really relevant, because that’s exactly as, for example, the frame of a painting, what goes in and what goes out. The framework is the frame, where you can see what are the pieces, which fit within that frame. In that case, I don’t know whether it is you personally or it came up with the term Web 2.0… Tim: No I didn’t actually. Ross: But then there is this name, or is this something where you can have a label or something where you can then communicate about what that frame is? Tim: Yeah, that’s right. I think that’s absolutely right. The name often… it doesn’t match. Web 2.0 had a lot of baggage. Here, I’m talking about the internet operating system, and it was just too geeky. Then Dale had already come up with the name Web 2.0 in a brainstorm meeting with Craig Klein. They were trying to come up with a way that our two companies could do an event together, and we were thinking, what could we learn from them, somebody else was doing events. Dale was like, well, it was really around the second company of the World Wide Web after the .com bust was what Web 2.0 stood for. Dale had developed a series of things that it was about. Then I just really fleshed it out with a bunch of the ideas that had previously been calling the internet operating system, and the name took off. There was also an aspirational piece that I think was very interesting about that because Dale and Craig came up with that in 2003… I had been doing this internet operating system stuff since 2001, had this P2P conference, and then that emerged into this thing we call E-tech, the emerging technologies conference, which is really exploring this idea of how the network was changing the way we would all interact. I guess it wasn’t that we had thought everything through but we had a model into which the future shows up and it starts to make more sense. Again, another analogy I use is a little bit like a hologram. You have the big picture there, but it’s fuzzy. The more data points come in, the clearer it gets. Ross: You may have already answered this, but if you’ve got the pieces of the puzzle, and you start to see those map out, and then you can see the framework is there, then what is the art of putting the pieces of the puzzle together to form something, which is a whole? Tim: I think the one piece of the art is patience. Lao Tzu, the author of the “Tao Te Ching” says, he’s talking about the qualities of the wise man, and he has a bunch of them, I say, winter fare on an icy stream, I forget what they all are, but then the last one is… but also this, royal does a torrent. Why royal does a torrent? Because sometimes there’s nothing to do but wait until the stream clears. I think that waiting quality has been a big part of what I’ve done, where I haven’t rushed to try to make a story where there isn’t one. That progress for me from open source to Web 2.0 was a seven or eight-year process. If you look at the history of the talks I was giving, I was feeling my way towards this new paradigm. Then how did I get from there to the Gov 2.0 stuff, I started thinking about the lessons for the government from technology platforms. It was a set of conversations with people and somebody would show up with a piece of the puzzle and I’d go, yes! I still remember the conversation where I got off on government as a platform, but then continuing down that path that led me to all the work that I’m doing right now about marketplaces and anti-trust. I kinda threw this idea of algorithmic regulation, which is something else that I came up with. Again, not all of these things catch, but the point isn’t… because I’ve had some things that have really taken off, everything sets the objective. It isn’t really, the objective is, just for me, to make sense of the world. Ross: Absolutely. I think that’s the same in my own way, I create frameworks myself, and I happen to share them, and sometimes people happen to like them. But that’s the secondary aspect. Tim: Yeah. Ross: Coming back a step. Is this some kind of framing purpose that helps you find these pieces of these puzzles, these maps which unfold? Have you framed some way in which there’s an intent or around what it is within your purview of what you are considering? Tim: Well, I guess there are definitely some big picture things, and they are more values than anything else. Again, I’ve just recently got some interesting new language for this, from evolutionary biology. David Sloan Wilson has been doing a lot of work on what he calls multi-level selection, which he sums up, I guess, it was he and Edward O. Wilson, who was one of his teachers, they’re not related, even though they both have the same last name, Wilson, which is, selfish individuals can outcompete altruistic individuals, but altruistic groups outcompete selfish groups. There’s a lot of fabulous research on these alternating levels of what he calls multi-level selection, where there are certain behaviors that are at the individual level and others that are at the group level. That notion of the alternation of individual and group actually goes all the way back to some early learning I did in the 70s, in a context that I don’t want to unpack here, but that was very fertile ground for me, but I’ve always thought about cooperation, and what encourages cooperation. We have a metaphor in our society that says it’s about winning, that this capitalism is all about competition, and winner takes all. I guess I have a set of values that I, in some ways, I guess, I’m always trying to explore and justify why that isn’t true, which is why I was attracted, say, to open-source software. I was like, you say, it’s all about competition, but guess what, look over here, Microsoft was so competitive, they killed all the innovation, and all these people went off, and they just started fighting around with the internet and open source, because hey, they could, they could cooperate, there was this new model. But even looking back, again, I guess, in some ways, one of the big shaping maps of my technology career was watching the alternation, where IBM was dominant. I came in, actually in the tail end of the minicomputer era, not in the PC era, and I watched the PC blow up, because there’s this democratization of access, then I watch Microsoft win, and replay that the tragedy. Then an explosion of innovation and decentralization gives us the internet, open source, and then you watch Google and Amazon and the like, replay the centralization, and bit by bit abuse of power model, and I go, well, I’ve seen it now three times. I go, so value is going to go somewhere else because I guess, one of the basic… I have this big picture idea that if you take too much of the value, the system breaks down, and people find new niches. That’s actually a fundamentally ecological concept. Again, there’s a lot of analogies that are not exact but help shape your thinking and your map. Ross: The more analogies you have access to, the more you’re able to perceive things, which can be useful for framing things? Tim: Right. Oh, this is like that; Oh, that means that this is probably interesting. It can lead you astray. For example, because of my centralization versus decentralization narrative, I’ve probably been more skeptical of cryptocurrencies than I should be. Because everybody was like, Oh, this is all about decentralization, I go, Yeah, it re-centralized faster than any technology in history and it fits exactly the pattern where… Here’s IBM, that’s got their centralized power of the computer industry by control over hardware. They don’t realize that this changes, when they have commodity hardware, they release the specs for the IBM PC, they don’t think it really matters, software is just something that goes with the hardware, but Microsoft basically makes a new explosion, a new power center, that center on software, they’re all about control of software API’s, they become dominant, they don’t realize this new thing, where software becomes commoditized by open source in the internet, then it’s all about data. Now we’re in this paradigm shift around AI, we don’t quite know what that means. I see some things that I think are really interesting, where the models that are being released, often by the big companies, I think are going to undermine them in the same way that the PC undermined IBM, and the internet undermined… so I’m aware of that. Everybody was saying no, the next thing is crypto. Maybe, but what I saw was centralization. Once again, the centralization is not in the original model. The centralization came through energy, not through… so that’s interesting, because of course, that starts to intersect with the whole world problem, the energy is going to be one of the critical pathways that differentiate whether we survive or not. There are some arguments that maybe crypto will accelerate that because people will go oh, well, this is a great way to make lots of money, but we need to have super cheap power in order to do it, but we’re not there yet. But you go, Oh, there’s something interesting though, this repeating pattern, maybe crypto is the way forward, but maybe because it centralized so quickly, that won’t happen. Ross: Part of it is that the technologies are decentralized, but the economic manifestations of them are centralized. Tim: Yeah, that’s always the point. The internet was also fundamentally decentralized, but the economic models became centralization. This goes back to this multi-level selection played out in culture, which is that we are seeing this dance between competition and cooperation. Ross: Which I think is something which can help frame those models and whatever frameworks. Some of the powers of thriving and overload or filtering and focus, I get the sense that… at the beginning, you alluded to essentially allowing the wash to come over you and what comes, what you see, the things that you see are the ones which are the things which are relevant, I mean, are there any… Tim: Yeah, I think that’s right. Ross: But are there any particular tools, approaches, routines? Tim: Well, first off, I will say that there is a real downside to my approach. Because I’m not very goal-directed or my goal is to make interesting things happen for other people, I miss a lot. I have this one very funny experience where there was a startup I heard about, that had been funded by a friend of mine, and I went, holy cow, that’s super interesting. I reached out to the guy who’d given them funding, and I said, Can you introduce me? And he introduced me to the founder and the guy was like, Tim, it was your idea that we built, we came to see you and we had a bad idea, and you didn’t like it, and you told us what we should be doing, and we went and did it. I go, Well, how do I manage to not then have them come back and tell me, we’re doing your thing. I would have invested in it, it would have been a good exit. But I just don’t think that way a lot. I sometimes laugh about myself, I’m a little bit like this episode, I saw when my kids were little of Sesame Street in which the Cookie Monster won some game show and he’s now at the section where he gets to choose his prize, and behind door number one is a million dollars, behind door number two is a Chateau in France, or something like that, behind door number three is a cookie, and we all know what he chooses. For me, the cookie is just interesting people doing interesting work that seems to make the world go better. That’s why I tend to surround myself with people who pick up on things that I find interesting, and then pursue them methodically because I don’t. Ross: Yes. Coming back to when I was asking about purpose, I mean, in a way, you’ve framed it just now, and the side effects of that purpose are wonderful. Tim: Yeah, I just love to have… at my events, I like to connect other people. The things that I get so excited about is hearing that, Oh, you guys met and cooked up something amazing. Again, we did put something, for example, a planet, the satellites, it was sort of formed as a result of our science fruit camp and that led… we did actually invest in it through our venture fund, but it wasn’t because of me, I was just like, hey, let me put these interesting people together. These guys from NASA are making shoe box satellites, that’s super cool. Let’s invite them to this event. There’s a lot of things like that. That’s, as John Maynard Keynes used to say, my jam. Ross: Yeah. That, as you well understand, is how the future is created. Tim: Yeah. Ross: Any final words of advice for anyone who is struggling with far too much information and trying to make sense of it? Tim: Well, again, maybe I’m spoiled because, of course, I’ve been quite successful, and I’m not there like an early-career person who’s trying to make their mark in the world. But I think we try too hard. Again, lots of my mentor says let life ripen and then fall, will is not the way at all. This is the wonderful Witter Bynner translation from the 50s or 60s, I’m not sure exactly when it was. But we need to have an attitude of receptivity for any of this stuff to work. That’s not terribly compatible with a certain kind of striving. Now, again, striving really works. I mean, there are people who are way more successful than I am, who are hyper-competitive, and they’re trying to make some particular thing happen, so there’s more than one way to do it. As Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl programming languages used to say, I can’t tell you that, my way is the best way, I can tell you that it’s been good for me, and it helps me align my work life and my personal life. Again, you’re trying to make something happen, but you’re also trying to listen a lot, and it’s finding the balance between the two. I guess the other thing that’s been very shaping for me, is this wonderful poem of Rilke, called “The Man Watching”, in which she says, this is my rough translation of somebody else’s English translation from German, but saying that, Jacob, in the Old Testament wrestling with the angel, and Rilke says, what we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small, what we want is to be defeated by successively greater beings. I think there’s certainly a point where everybody thinks that it’s about success, and if you have the perspective that we’re all ultimately defeated, again, Rilke’s phrase, we come away stronger from the fight, you’re going to tackle hard things, and it’s not about winning. Rilke says winning does not tempt that man or that woman. It’s just like, you are about engaging with the world in a way that’s productive in the process, not necessarily in the outcome. Because ultimately, we don’t win. We can just leave things a little better than we found them. Ross: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely relevant for everyone in these times because there’s no such thing as a win, in a way, as you say that. Tim: Yeah, and that helps you select what to pay attention to, because you can start to say, Oh, my… if your fundamental goal is to make other people better off, then you value things like cooperation, you value things like making connections that allow people to do things that you wouldn’t be able to do by yourself, you realize that, Oh, you value telling a story that lets other people make sense out and see opportunities that you couldn’t pursue. That’s why at O’Reilly, one of our slogans has been “create more value than you capture”. We put together information that helps other people to do things, and that’s the heart of our O’Reilly online learning platform today still. It’s just like, how do we teach people to follow what they want to do? And it’s not directive, it’s enabling. Ross: Absolutely. Tim, it has been a delight and an honor to have you sharing your insights. Thank you so much. Tim: You’re very welcome. I enjoyed talking with you, too. The post Tim O’Reilly on noticing things other people don’t notice, the value of soft focus, framing open source and Web 2.0, and patience in building narratives [REPOST] (Ep54) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Depending on the environment I’m in, whether I’m sitting at my desk here, and I’ve got my two screens in front of me or whether I’m walking the dog on the field, and I’ve got like no internet connection, I don’t want there to be a friction point in any environment that I’m in. I select tools that help me do that.” – Danny Hatcher About Danny Hatcher Danny is a YouTuber, Blogger, Author, and Podcaster helping people be more intentional and organized with their time, and sharing useful insights from the latest in educational science. Website: Danny Hatcher YouTube: Danny Hatcher Podcast: Personal Knowledge Management Podcast Discord: Educational Science LinkedIn: Danny Hatcher Twitter: Danny Hatcher Facebook: Danny Hatcher Instagram: Danny Hatcher What you will learn A comprehensive understanding of sports coaching beyond the stereotypical image of a coach with a whistle (02:18) Introduction to two different perspectives in the educational science field when it comes to learning, memory, and understanding (04:17) Understanding cognition and learning as part of a dynamical system, and the role of technology in building an extended cognitive environment (06:09) Emphasis on the importance of visual perception and attention in understanding ecological dynamics in learning and skill acquisition (07:52) Rereading books for deeper understanding (10:20) Choosing a productivity tool that offers a seamless and effortless user experience in various settings (11:37) Using a mind map called a Canvas in Obsidian for mapping out ideas and note-taking (13:35) Using folders, tags, and links in Obsidian for note-taking and organization (15:59) Obsidian being the top choice when it comes to retrieving information due to its powerful search functionality and intuitive linking system (20:08) Differences between Notion and Obsidian (25:17) The need for a collaborative effort between developers and users with AI integration to enhance the existing tools (30:00) Following one’s curiosity to enjoy the learning process (33:00) Resources Notion Zotero ChatGPT Obsidian Roam Research Canvas Microsoft Word  Google Docs Tana Nimbus Note Milanote Transcript Ross Dawson: Danny, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Danny Hatcher: Thank you for having me. I’m excited. Ross: You are an expert in, let’s call it information productivity, using tools, expanding your knowledge, and being able to be effective. I’d love to just hear the story of the journey. How did you come to be where you are? Danny: Yes. For a bit of background, my undergraduate degree is in sports coaching. Some people may assume that’s a guy with a whistle on the sideline but that’s far from the truth. Most of my research is in pedagogy, andragogy, epistemology, philosophy, and then all of the other related learning fields inside of a sport, which, are biomechanics, anatomy, and physiology, so it covers essentially every element of human learning, and human development, which has a lot of information, a lot of knowledge. When I was coming toward the end of my undergraduate degree, I found a tool called Notion. It was in beta right at the very start, it didn’t have any databases, which is what most people are familiar with now. I was a very early adapter. As I went through my master’s degree in strength and conditioning, I carried on using it. It was useful in picking out information. But I was struggling to connect some ideas and link things and I was losing information. I fell into a trap of having to create all of the databases and all the pages and do loads of stuff with Notion. I ended up doing more with Notion than with information. I was building out templates and building out databases, and I forgot what I was actually meant to be working on. I did a switch from Notion to what I now use, which is Obsidian. My research is in a similar field, I still look at educational science, but it’s much easier and quicker to manage information with the system that I currently have now, which is what I share online, which is on youtube; mainly on youtube. Then I do have a podcast where I talk in-depth about some of the other related concepts, which I’m sure we’ll allude to today. Ross: Fantastic. Part of it is building your knowledge, part of it is also building your method knowledge as it were, the ability to be more effective at having been able to create and build that. Danny: Yes. The educational science field is, I wouldn’t say split, but there are two perspectives or paradigms of thought when it comes to learning, memory, and understanding; one being cognitive psychology, which is very popular that encompasses neuroscience, neuropsychology, and all of the, what I would class as, traditional, general population knowledge where people see learning, I have a shorter working memory or my short term memory is bad, that is cognitive psychology. Then the view, the perspective that I personally favor and lean towards is ecological dynamics, which is from ecological psychology. That takes a different route. It ends at the same point but takes a different perspective. That mainly comes from skill acquisition and motor learning, so learning physical skills; and that’s where a lot of the research is at the moment. My personal approach to using ecological dynamics has changed the way that I use my tools, use Obsidian as my note-taker, as it were. Then I use Zotero, which is a reference manager to bring in all of the..I don’t want to say information because, in ecological dynamics, information isn’t the same as when we’re talking about cognitive psychology information. Information for me is patterns that I’m seeing in an environment, not just a word, it’s the pattern between the word and the environment, or the environment and the organism, in my case, me. Zotero is my content manager, not necessarily my information manager. Hopefully, that makes sense. Ross: The ecological you refer to, I think, we could reframe that as the environment and so the idea of the extended mind, where the mind or the learning is then beyond what’s inside our skulls. Danny: Yes, extended into the environment, I wouldn’t say learning is extended, as in into the environment, I would say the environment is part of cognition, depending on the mark of the cognitive that you choose to use with extended cognition, whether it is everything inside of my brain is cognition, or it’s everything inside of my body, so embodied cognition. I’m counting with my fingers, is that cognition, or is that not quite cognition? And then you have the fully leaning one way where everything is cognition, everything in your environment is which I don’t think that’s true, because then I could say the wall in front of me is part of cognition, which I don’t think it’s logical or rational to think about. There’s got to be a barrier or a line to say, this is part of my cognition. Inside ecological dynamics, there are parts that build up systems, which is the dynamical systems element. I am a part, my phone is a part, and my computer is a part inside of this system of learning. When my phone is on, it’s part of the system, when it’s off, it’s not part of the system, which is why it’s dynamic. What I do is create an environment using the tech on my computers, so Obsidian is part of our learning environment, Zotero as well. Then with all the tools, now you’ve got AI coming into being, and you’ve got ChatGPT. When I’m using those, they are part of the extended cognitive environment that I’m working in to help me understand the information that I’m seeing from social media, academic articles, blogs, journals, podcasts, videos, and all the content sources. Ross: This way of thinking, was that informed by the fact that you’ve come from a sports background? Or is that not related? Danny: I think it’s heavily impacted by my sports background, because ecological dynamics is, as I mentioned earlier, only prevalent inside of skill acquisition research. When you try and find ecological dynamics on the internet, you have to look for ecological dynamics in skill acquisition, otherwise, it will come up with ecology and ecosystems of animals and nature; it’s related, don’t get me wrong, it’s still related because it’s part of dynamic ecosystems. But the ecological dynamics inside of learning is mainly skill acquisition because it comes down to visual perception, what is perception? How does the information… so indirect or direct information? How is that perceived? And then how do we, trying to avoid jargon here, but how do we attune our attention to certain information that we are perceiving from the environment? I’m using my prior knowledge, which is cognitive psychology, I’m using my memory, instead of using all of the prior knowledge to create a prediction of what can happen, I’m using prospective control. I’m looking at all the information I have inside of the environment, and that’s enough because it’s direct information. I’m still using information that’s not in that exact moment in time because we do have stuff stored. When I’m learning inside of an environment, I’m using the information and perceiving the information straightaway. Then I’m creating the environment, and information or ideas are emerging from the environment I’ve created. When I’m consuming content online, for example, that’s part of the environment, I’ll pick out, I’ll attune my attention to something that’s notable. That achievement, the metastable attenuation, bringing the jargon, but essentially, the focus that I have, on certain terms will change with my expertise, my bias, and my focus at that point in time. When I’m reading something for the first time, and maybe I’m familiar with it, I’m not that attuned to the information inside of that article. I’ll take out information, and put it in Obsidian. The second time I read it, I may have higher expertise in that field, in that environment, in that idea, I’ve consolidated some thoughts, so now my attention, my attunement of information is slightly different. Now I’m noticing things that I didn’t notice the first time around, which is why I don’t read that many books, I reread books because they’re teaching me something different each time I look at them because my own understanding of whatever the concept they’re talking about has shifted in one way or another. Ross: This goes to what I frame as knowledge development, the process of knowledge, it accretes, grows, and builds on itself. Sometimes there’s a substitution as replacing existing frameworks, or mental models, but often it is building on or getting greater refinement or doing that. It gets us to this part of your expertise. How it is that we can best capture those elements on which we can build or which can inform us or can make us develop our skills, develop our capabilities? Let’s just start at a conceptual level and then perhaps dig into the tools at the moment. What do you look for in your tools for thinking, and how do you implement it? How do they fit within your cognitional perception or daily life? What is their role? How did they become part of you? Danny: The easiest way for me to explain this is I want it to be as simple as possible. I don’t want to have to worry about what buttons to push, where to store things, how to save anything, or worry about how the tech is working, I just want to add it, which, simply put, is by pushing a plus button of some sort, typing in whatever it is that I need to type in or speaking, however you capture the information, and then it is stored somewhere that I can find quickly. That’s all I want tech to do is just store it somewhere; capture it easily, store it somewhere that I don’t have to think about, I can just carry on with whatever the train of thought is that I have. Depending on the environment I’m in, whether I’m sitting at my desk here, and I’ve got my two screens in front of me or whether I’m walking the dog on the field, and I’ve got like no internet connection, I don’t want there to be a friction point in any environment that I’m in. I select tools that help me do that. Ross: So there’s the capturing, and I think one of the things which you emphasize in your work that I’ve seen is the networks as in what are the connections between the ideas. So…part of it is being able to capture that, then it’s being able to build that connected structure of these ideas as seamlessly as possible, in the way it’s useful to you. Danny: I think this is the misconception with those familiar with Obsidian and Roam Research with the graph view and how the connectedness is beneficial and useful. I see that graph behind you, it’s great for an overview. But oftentimes, when you’re working and you have expertise in a field, there are so many connections, it’s very difficult to see what’s going on. I personally don’t use the graph view tool inside of Obsidian. I am using a more recent addition to Obsidian called a Canvas, which is essentially just a mind map. But that is specific in the environment I’m working in. If I’m working on an essay, then I will mind-map stuff out. When I’m capturing information, I’m not thinking about what this can relate to or what this can link to, I’m just consuming the information and going on wherever my mind goes at the time. If I’m listening to a podcast, and I have a question about it, I write the question about the comment that was made inside of the podcast, inside of what I call a source note, a capture note, literature note, you can call it what you want. But it’s just a place to put the information that I can go back to. The reason it’s a source is because it has got a link back to wherever it came from, whether that be an article or video podcast. That stays a source note, it stays just by itself individualized. I don’t want to edit the source note because I want it to be specific to just that environment, just that thing, so if I do go back to it, I can see where it was, like a checkpoint, as it were. The connections come with sources and then bringing that information into something tangible and useful, which to me is a research note; the logical step as a researcher source and then research. Ross: A couple of the ways that you have addressed in your work around the connections or the relationships is in tagging. Folders or hierarchies are fixed and structured, and unwieldy tags can be a superior way to be able to have multiple ways of relating or clustering different concepts or notes. How do you use tags or other tools to be able to group things together in a meaningful way? Danny: I see folders and tags as very structural, they’re less dynamic in the way that you can use them. Because when you tag something, you don’t know exactly why. If for example, I click on a tag and I get 10 notes, I don’t know exactly why note one is related to note three. It is just implicit because it’s in the tag. I would need to open note one and note three and try and work out why it’s linked. Whereas if I create the link inside of the text, and for example, have a sentence saying ecological dynamics is different from information processing, and I have ecological dynamics as a link and information processing as a link. When I say link, it’s essentially a hyperlink when you click on something, but inside of an application like Obsidian, it takes you to another file inside of the app, that is explicit, I know exactly why ecological dynamics and information processing are linked. You can do the same with a shopping list. Why is an apple on the shopping list? Oh, I don’t have it for today and you can link it to the days when I didn’t have apples in the house at that point in time. It can be expanded in lots of ways. The way I see tags and folders are structures and organization structures. If you do need to find something, you know roughly where it’s going to be. But because of Obsidian, I very rarely use either of those formatted structures because search is so powerful. I can search any word that’s in a file, I can search any word in the entire folder system of Obsidian because Obsidian is local. It’s like a folder on your computer. I can search for any word inside any file inside that folder. I don’t need to go into folders and look down the tree, I just search for the word, and it will tell me where it is. Or I can search for a file very quickly which in Obsidian is called the Quick Switcher. If I have a file, for example, on fake news, I can just type in fake news, and then it will show me exactly what that file is. If I was to search for anything, it’s very, very quick. Tags and folders, I use folders for categories of information. I have a research folder for all my research notes, and a source folder for my source notes, but I never open them, I never go into them. They’re just there so they’re stored in some structural way. I only use tags because of a feature, a plug-in inside of Obsidian that allows me to add what’s called metadata or information specific to that type of note. A source I know is going to have a URL, it’s going to have a link back to wherever the source was. But my research note won’t have a URL, because my research note is going to have a variety of sources all over the place. Essentially, the links are the sources. A tag gives me that information. The tag source says, Okay, you need a URL for this, you need the authors for this, and you need a title for this. But if it’s tagged with research, I don’t want any of that. I want what’s the priority of this research file. What’s the stage of this research file? So I use tags as types of notes to add specific parts of information on that type of note for me that’s beneficial in my research work. Ross: You mentioned earlier that you started off with Notion as a tool and discovered the potential of being able to capture information in useful ways. You then started using Obsidian. Then at a certain point, I gather you stopped using Notion, with Obsidian being where everything happens. I’d love to hear about that journey, particularly the transition point when you felt that Obsidian could do it all for you. Danny: Yes, I must admit, to start with, I was all in on Notion. I’d used it for three years by that point. I was completely sold as Notion is the best thing ever. I was deliberately avoiding the issues that I had inside of Notion, which were the databases. Yes, they’re very powerful. But I lost things. I forgot things. The linking was a little bit clunky. I just didn’t accept that that was a problem. When I first saw Obsidian, I saw a lot of code. I saw a lot of marked-downs, hashes, and symbols. I was like, I’m not a developer. I’m sports. I can’t do this tech stuff. They’re talking about code blocks in javascript stuff and I was like, no, not for me. Then I saw the graph view. I thought that looks cool. Let’s have a play. I had a play. I didn’t like it much. But what I did like was the speed. That immediately got me because Obsidian is local, and it’s extremely quick. It’s like Microsoft Word versus Google Docs. Google Docs is online. If your internet’s a bit slow, or you don’t have internet, Google Docs is slow or unavailable. It’s the same with Notion whereas Obsidian, it’s fast, like, always fast. I have a vault folder in Obsidian that has over 100,000 files in and it’s just as quick as my active vault with about 5000 files. The 100,000 files, well, it was a test file to purely test how Obsidian manages with all the plugins and stuff, but it’s just fast and quick. I thought, okay, I can deal with this, I can manage this. Obsidian to start with was just like Microsoft Word but gave me the folders, and the folder searches inside the app. That’s how I used it to start with. I just type stuff into a file, just like a Word doc. Then when I wanted to switch files, I just went to the folder system and switch to the file rather than having like seven or eight windows of Word up on my computer trying to navigate which one it was when I was writing essays at uni because you can’t write inside of Notion for an essay because of citation and bibliography formatting, which you can do in Obsidian, which I do. Having experienced the speed, and then the ease of just switching between files, I thought, you know what, I’ll explore this a bit more; two years later and I’m very familiar with the tool now with many of its capabilities. Ross: Indeed. Most of the things have courses to help people to get started, to build, and to use it well. Danny: Just as a point, I think something with Obsidian that a lot of people will see, not just Obsidian but a lot of other tech tools, are people using massively complicated spaces because they’ve got all these queries, plugins, community plugins, buttons, and different looks and it’s very hard to see. That doesn’t look like mine because they’ve got a different CSS theme and some different snippets and they’re using some code. You don’t need any of that to use Obsidian. It is, quite simply, files on your system that you type in. If you come up with a problem, something Obsidian has, Notion doesn’t have, from what I’ve experienced, is there’s a massive community in Obsidian that will just solve your problem. If you can’t do this, use maybe this plugin, or maybe combine these two things together, and you’ll find the answer. I’m yet to find something that you can’t do in Obsidian. But then the question becomes should you do it in Obsidian? Ross: Notion is essentially a database. It’s a relational database with a lot of lovely stuff on top of it. That’s quite a different frame to Obsidian, which, as you say, is files, texts, links, and connections. Were there any database-style things that you were using on Notion that you’ve been able to put on Obsidian? Or just you weren’t using those tools well, or doing something else for those kinds of data? Danny: The easy answer is no, no, I don’t use them but you can. If you want a table, you can use a table, if you want a Kanban, you can use a Kanban, you want a gallery, use a gallery. What I found in Notion with the databases, though, was I had loads of databases, loads of link databases, loads of views; I’ve got a gallery, a calendar, and a table all for the same information but I never really used them. All I’ve used was the list. I’ve done this, I’ve done this, I’ve done this, or I need to look at this then I go to the Notion page and then just write. Even though the databases were nice, I never really used the views to do anything apart from just show me information, which in Obsidian, I can do through search, I don’t need a database view. With the canvas plugin, and core plugin inside of Obsidian, which is a mind map, I now don’t need any database star view, because I can have them all in one. For those that can’t quite visualize this, essentially, it’s a mind map with a table view on one spot, I drag my mouse to another spot, and now I’ve got a gallery view or a Kanban view. Or I could make a Kanban view inside of the Mind Map and it adds the information to the carts. I get all of the database store views with added flexibility with the canvas. But then I get all of the complexity that I want if I want it with Obsidian, which you can have in a Notion database, but you’re slightly restricted. A technical example inside of Notion is, you may be familiar, you can have a roll-up. A roll-up brings in information from a relation property. But you need the relation property to start with. You then start building out all these properties. You can have a database in Notion with 20-30 properties. But inside of Obsidian, you can do the exact same thing with 4 or 5. Because it’s text-based and it doesn’t require all of the linking between databases to work because Obsidian is just files. That’s something fundamental to Obsidian that makes it fast but makes it very, very easy to customize, edit, and change so the databases aren’t needed. But a lot of people coming from Notion to Obsidian I can understand why they’d be more familiar with that. Yes, you can do it. But I don’t. Ross: Yes. Certainly, the introduction of Canvas to Obsidian has significantly expanded its usefulness and usability to a lot of people. That’s a whole space where you can play visually, whatever dimensions you want, it adds a lot. Again, this is something that is not there in Notion native but it provides another frame or perspective, which is valuable. One of the things, a lot of people use Notion as a multi-user system, so it’s for companies that can do workflows or social media calendars, or a million other things. I’ve experienced Obsidian very much as a single user. Is that something to consider as Notion? Yes, I don’t think that Notion and Obsidian are that directly comparable but the multiuser thing is one frame on it. Danny: There are pros and cons. Notions, shareability, yes, it’s easier with Notion hands down. But the privileges that you get with Notion are restricted because you have to give access to your databases. Then you have to work out what database do I give them. What page can I give them? It becomes a bit of a Tetris game of fitting all the pieces together so everyone has the right privileges, and working out what workspace to use. There is a bit of trust you have to have with that. Obsidian, you can share because they are just files, it’s just like sharing a file on any cloud service. You’ve got Google Docs, you’ve got Dropbox, and all those sorts of things. I personally use collaborative sync, which is using Obsidian sync. But it allows you to add if the other person or other people have sync on their account. They just have a vault on their computer, so a vault folder on a computer that synced, which, for those familiar with Obsidian, is just like the normal sync, where you can sync up your computer with your laptop, with your phone, except the other person’s account is treated as another device. If you have a folder, a vault folder for work, then you can sync it with another person. That’s how I work collaboratively with Obsidian. The only negative is that because it is synced and it takes a second, maybe two, you can’t do live collaboration as easily out of the box. You can do it but it does require some technical understanding using something like VS code or using the live share plugin which gets technical. If you’re working in a big team, with lots of people editing the same file at the same time, Notion. If you’re a big team, but everyone has their own space, their own thing, you can still use Obsidian. Would I recommend it? Probably not. I think it depends very much on what you’re doing. But for researchers, I think it’s invaluable because you can connect Zotero, which has shared libraries with Obsidian, so you can share your research in Zotero, then share the notes inside of Obsidian and then work together on a manuscript on something rather than having to go backward or forward with Word doc drafts, which is a pain. Ross: Indeed. We’ve had a massive explosion in thinking tools over the last four years, a bit more maybe, we have the Notion, Roam, Obsidian, a whole array of other tools coming out at the moment. What would you like to see in the next year or two, either with the development of Obsidian or other tools? What’s missing now that you think would really add to what we have in terms of thinking tools? Danny: I think AI has to play a part because of the way AI is moving forward. The way I see the tools for thought space at the moment is not what I want to see more of but actually what I want to see less of because there are so many tools trying to do the same thing. I wish they would just communicate and work together a bit more. You mentioned Roam, you’ve mentioned Obsidian, but you’ve got things like Tana, Nimbus Note, Milanote, and all of those other tools that are out there trying to do the same thing. As a youtube creator, I get emails from lots of developers saying we’ve created this new tool. I always respond to them and say, why would I use yours over Obsidian? And I have not found a response yet where they say Oh, well, we can do this that Obsidian can’t. My question is okay, why are you creating a new tool when you could develop and enhance the ones that already work, that we already have? What I would want to see is more of a community effort to build out the tools that we have, rather than building more tools to pick from. Ross: I think it’s a great point, though, I’m not sure that the world’s gonna listen. Danny: No, everyone wants their big app to be the one to go to. Ross: Yes. Danny: I don’t want to say don’t develop your own app, because obviously, you need to develop the skills as part of learning. There is certainly an issue with adding to the community because of the community plugins in Obsidian, I don’t want to say it’s a meme, but it’s certainly an issue inside of Obsidian where you onboard someone and you say, Okay, have a look at the community plugins, there are almost 1000 now to look through. A lot of them do the same thing. There’s the same problem inside the plugin community. Then you have the same issue with searching online information, Oh, do I want this plugin? Do I need that plugin? Which one do I use? Which ones don’t I use? Fear of missing out? Do I need to use this one? Everyone else is using that one. I don’t want loads of people to suddenly create loads of plugins and a lot of them do not have much value that then the value is in the eye of the beholder. It may be valuable for 10 people, whereas something like a data view may be valuable for 500,000 people. I would want people to develop, but be cognizant that not everyone can use every plugin at once. But yes, it’s a difficult question inside of the tech industry, and matching, the developers want to add stuff. The consumers want to just do the work. Ross: Yes. To round out, talking beyond tools specific, just more generally, people who are living in the world of lots of information, they want to develop their knowledge, and keep on top of everything, what’s any high-level advice you would give for people who are on that journey saying, alright, well, what is it that I should do? How do I become more effective at this? Danny: My go-to, the thing that’s coming to mind first is enjoy the process. When I say that, I don’t mean enjoy the process, as in Oh, yes, I’m watching loads of TikTok videos, I’m enjoying this. I mean, enjoy thinking about something. Everyone, naturally when you’re born, is curious, and you want to learn, children want to learn. That’s why they’re asking why and poking things and making mistakes and failing all the time. Then they go to school, and the education system has some quirks. I just leave it like that. But when you’re enjoying the learning, you follow your curiosity, you follow those questions. That’s what I would urge you to do. If you do get distracted, you’re like, oh, actually, that’s a really interesting question. Find a place to write down the question or write down your thoughts or just record an audio clip on your phone or wherever and just have fun exploring the information and asking questions, because inevitably, you’ll gain expertise just by exploring what you’re interested in. Ross: I think that’s fabulous advice. I think the human brain is extraordinary. It’s the most amazing thing we know of in the universe. I think we can easily enjoy using it more just by digging into the things that we find and discover and imagine along the way. Thank you so much for your time, Dan. It has been a fantastic conversation. Danny: Yes, thanks for having me. The post Danny Hatcher on skill acquisition, ecological dynamics, from Notion to Obsidian, and exploring interests (Ep53) appeared first on Humans + AI.