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Education is what people do to you, and learning is what you do to yourself.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today I m here with producer Jason DeFilippo.
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We re talking to Jason s friend, our new friend, Joey Ito.
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This is one sharp cat.
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That s the understatement of the year.
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Author of Whiplash, How to Survive Our Faster Future.
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He s the head of the MIT Media Lab.
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He s on all kinds of boards, including Sony.
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Creative Commons, I mean, this guy is prolific to say the least.
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We re gonna be talking about some of his 10 principles of innovation from the book Whiplash, networking skills that Joey uses to create super deep and diverse networks with amazingly unique people, and what World of Warcraft has to do with motivating groups and accomplishing big goals.
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He s one of the smartest guys anywhere, so enjoy this episode with Joey Ito, author of Whiplash.
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By the way, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes of the show and the Art of Charm toolbox.
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That s where we discuss concepts like reading body language, having charismatic nonverbal communication, the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking and influence strategies, mentorship, persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at the Art of Charm.
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check that out at theartofcharm.com slash toolbox.
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And also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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Alright, here s Joey Ito.
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Joey, thanks for joining us, man.
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I know you re a busy guy these days, especially.
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Thank you for having me.
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I m excited.
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I ve gotta say, though, you re the director of the MIT Media Lab, and the first thing I looked at was, wow, he must have just a ton of education.
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And then I find that you don t have a college degree, but you re running this prestigious innovation lab at MIT.
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What happened here?
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So I probably am the least educated person that I know here at MIT right now.
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But I think what s weird about the Media Lab is that we use the word anti-disciplinary, which doesn t mean that we hate disciplines, but that we are sort of trying to explore that space that isn t in traditional disciplines like mathematics or computer science.
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And in traditional disciplines, you sort of, I mean, the cliche is you learn more and more about less and less because you re really trying to go very deep.
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But what happens in academia and also even in business is you end up with these spaces either between disciplines or sort of that aren t yet disciplines.
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And it s pretty hard to get a degree in a space that doesn t have an academic journal and a department.
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And when the Media Lab was set up 31 years ago, it was sort of designed to try to find those professors and find those areas that didn t neatly fit in traditional academic disciplines.
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The cool thing, but also the difficulty, is that we ve got 26 groups in all kinds of fields, everything from music to design fiction to synthetic molecular biology to mechanical engineering.
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And so the problem is if you re from academia, you typically tend to have a field of expertise.
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And it s hard for you to literally be interested in everything.
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And the problem is the director of the Media Lab needs to be kind of interested in everything.
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And so my somewhat unusual background, which was I just sort of did whatever I wanted and didn t fit inside of discipline, turns out to be an okay profile for somebody to run this place.
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So I think they were searching for a long time.
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They went through hundreds of candidates that were very much more qualified than me.
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The problem is that if you re qualified, it usually means, especially if you re from academia,
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qualified in one or two fields rather than in nothing, which is sort of, we re the department of none of the above, is kind of what we jokingly call our academic department.
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That s great.
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I had to make my own concentration in college, even undergrad, because I was like, all right, I m really interested in languages, but I m mostly interested in how languages affect culture, but not just in how they affect culture, but in how the language that affects the culture then affects the way those countries do business.
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and econ professors and language professors and even the business school were like, you could probably maybe write a paper on that for some other totally unrelated class and maybe they d give you extra credit.
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And I thought, no, I wanna study that.
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I don t want extra credit for that while I m learning how to make spreadsheets, right?
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And that was really tough for me.
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And I think, so what you re doing here is obviously super important and much more high level, I would imagine, than what I was doing at undergrad in the University of Michigan.
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I think that s what s kind of interesting is sort of the definition of high level versus not.
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I mean, I think that we have a research group here called Lifelong Kindergarten, and it s sort of the idea that kindergarten is actually a great way to learn, which is learning through doing, learning through play.
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And we believe that, you know, that kindergarten experience is the experience that you should have your whole life.
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And the minute you start giving people textbooks and you start giving people these tests, you re sort of starting to take them away from what we call constructionist or constructivist learning.
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which is learning through doing.
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I think that, you know, we have a two-year master s program and like a four-year PhD program, but our two-year master s program, I sort of jokingly say, but it s sort of half true, is two years to try to deprogram you from all the education that you have about how you need to think about the world and to try to turn you into somebody who s more practical.
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And obviously, undergraduate degrees have value, but they have more value if you re specializing.
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They re not great
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necessarily for giving you a broader education, especially if you re taking a technical degree like engineering.
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Well, you dropped out of college three times, never graduated, but you have honorary doctorates from the New School and Tufts, so you re kind of the most persistent dropout that I ve ever heard of slash encountered.
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I mean, why try three times if college wasn t for you in the first place?
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Well, so the first one was just straight out of high school.
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I went to Tufts and thought I wanted to become an engineer.
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This is 1984.
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So this is when my interest was computer networks, music, and communities.
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And so there was really no way to get that from engineering.
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And then I dropped out and started working in a lab where they were doing physics.
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And somebody said, well, University of Chicago, physics will be more interesting and more artistic and more fun.
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But then I realized that as I started working in clubs in Chicago as a DJ, that the community stuff that I was learning as a DJ was much more practical and interesting than sort of these textbook-oriented physics things that I was doing at university.
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So I dropped out again, and I worked as a professional disc jockey at Smart Bar in Cambridge Metro and Limelight.
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And I learned a lot, and I think I learned more about communities and about sort of authenticity and communications being a DJ than I did
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from anything I did in school.
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And that actually is what I use now as my primary contribution to places like the Media Lab, which is about how do you sort of manage a creative community through things like music and the environment and the culture.
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And being a DJ is really about how do you tweak people s behavior through culture.
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And then the third one was, I was an entrepreneur for a long time and I thought I would apply my entrepreneurial experience to try to get a doctorate in business.
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And then maybe I d learn something about business.
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And then sort of, I was trying to figure out how to do that when I got the offer to come to the Media Lab.
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You ve done the DJ thing, been a Hollywood producer, now you re on the board of the New York Times Company, Sony Corporation.
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Remind me to ask you about this minidisc player issue I ve been having lately.
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And you ve also got, you ve been the CEO of the Creative Commons, and I m looking at a picture of you right now feeding a shark.
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Your finger is in the mouth.
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of the shark, which seems, you know, really dangerous, actually.
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And you ve also been a venture capitalist with early-stage investments in Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, among others.
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And... Ooh, Technorati!
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Yeah, there you go, Jason.
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I wanna see how all these things tie together, because in many ways, there s somebody listening right now who s saying, I ve done all these cool things, but how do you keep just from being a dilettante, you know, in these areas?
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So first of all, I think different people have different ways of learning.
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And my sister and I had probably very similar mentoring from our parents and similar opportunities.
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But she went and got straight A s, Harvard, magna cum laude, two PhDs.
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She was just great at formal education.
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I got kicked out of kindergarten, dropped out of college, got C s, and had a real hard time.
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And my sister oddly got her PhD in education and anthropology, and as she sort of was becoming a researcher, she looked over at me and said, hey, my goofy brother never got educated, but he seems to be doing okay.
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So she started studying what she calls interest-driven learners, which is kind of this informal learner type.
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And again, I think there s a whole sort of continuum, but if somebody tells you that plate s hot, don t touch it, somebody who s good at learning in theory would say, oh, okay, that s probably true, and wouldn t touch the plate.
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I, on the other hand, would touch the plate.
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I would learn by touching it, and then I would, in my view, I have a fact now instead of a theory, where somebody who s told that and doesn t touch it
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has a theory.
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Those people can learn very quickly through books and through classrooms, whereas I kind of have to fumble around actually making a movie to try to understand movies and actually being a DJ, actually feeding a shark.
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So a lot of my learning is through the experience.
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I think the problem and the tricky part is, can you take those experiences and turn them into a somewhat coherent worldview?
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It takes longer.
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So I wouldn t recommend this method if you re good at traditional education because
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not having a degree and s you do expend a lot of e always the easiest.
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You h
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and sort of, you know, grit.
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If you ve got more passion and grit and not enough patience around sort of theory, it might work for you, but again, I think it was hard, so like my job, and it s a little bit tricky, because my job now at MIT is to convince kids to finish their degree.
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I m always careful to say it s not because I didn t get a degree that I was able to do what I have done.
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It s sort of despite the fact that I didn t get a degree.
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So I don t think that jumping around is necessarily the best way to learn.
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But for me, it was the only way that I could do it.
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I was really lucky because of the internet.
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Because what the internet allowed me to do when I was in high school and stuff, I could just email.
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Back in 1984, if you said, hey, I m a high school kid in Japan.
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I just read your book, Professional So-and-So.
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Can we talk?
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They would say, oh, wow, cool, a kid from Japan.
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They d talk to me.
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And so I was able to just sort of approach people and just talk to them.
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But now you might not get an answer from every professor, but now you ve got YouTube and Khan Academy and all these different places that you could actually learn or even in communities like World of Warcraft or these sort of fan fiction communities and stuff like that.
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So I think the ability to learn informally is immense.
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So while I think the credentials and the degrees help if you can do it,
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I think also the ability to run around and sort of put together a program on your own is still possible.
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Now, the most important thing, I think, whether you re a parent or whether you re a kid, is if you have the passion.
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So like whether it s diving with sharks or being a DJ, I just get really excited about that stuff.
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And that just allows me to go out and learn what I need to learn.
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and figure it out.
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And like I m now nerding out on podcasting and I go to Jason, he teaches me all this stuff.
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And if you don t have that, then it s really hard, right?
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And the problem with school and the reason we talk about deprogramming is if your instinct with everything is, is it going to be on the test?
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Is it going to get me a degree?
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You start to not really have passion and it becomes sort of anxiety, pleasing and fear driven learning mode.
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And then what happens is when school disappears,
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you really don t know what to do.
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So I think figuring out how to retain your passion, and then if you re a parent, nurture, however weird the hobby is, nurture your kids  ability to follow their interests.
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I think that s super important.
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So Joey, I ve known you for about 15 years now, and so I ve watched you on this path of all of these explorations that you ve done, and you did mention Warcraft briefly there.
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I don t see it in your bio as much as I think it should be, for sure, because you were my guild master for a couple years there, but I watched you dive into Warcraft for
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what was it, like three, four years and just go as deep as you could possibly go.
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And you learned so much about management during that time and how to just run people.
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How do you think your Warcraft experience kind of helped you with your job at MIT now?
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So I do have it in my bio sometimes, but after our mutual friend, Harang, you served my guild leadership, I ve taken it off as an active role.
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But there s actually a bunch of work that John Seely Brown and a few others have done, and there s even a Harvard Business Review articles about the World of Warcraft and management.
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Because World of Warcraft is really, there s a couple pieces that are really important.
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I think one is you have a bunch of people who are paying to show up, right?
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You re not paying them, they re paying to show up.
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and then they show up and then you have to coordinate them to do a whole bunch of things whether it s you know running a raid or going after and collecting materials to make stuff for the tank who s going to be fighting in this next raid and that coordination is also pretty interesting because people show up they kind of have to figure out based on who s online and the resources they have one of the you know 10 different things they could be doing so there s a coordination thing
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But in terms of motivating hundreds of people to work together and do pretty crappy work just for the sake of the Guild and pay money for it is a lot like running a open source or free software project where people are volunteering their time for a mission or even the Media Lab where you have a whole bunch of people who don t necessarily have to be here.
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They could all get jobs somewhere else, but somehow you re creating an environment where people are trying to be productive but also having fun.
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And I think the key thing is, as we talked about earlier about passion, how do you get people to be passionate?
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How do you get people to be playful and creative?
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There s a great paper called Coase s Penguin by Ben Claire about how in open source projects, you sort of give yourself tasks.
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So normal hierarchical management, some boss tells you what to do, right?
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But in an open source project or in World of Warcraft, a lot of what you do is say, okay, what do I want to do?
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What am I good at?
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What should I do?
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And this is really the allocation of resources by the people who work there rather than some boss.
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So the management in World of Warcraft and also being a DJ in a nightclub are really similar because you re tweaking the management through the culture and how engaging an environment is.
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And it s exactly what I do at the MeLab.
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I was saying to Jason earlier this week when I was reading Whiplash, I was like, I m finding this guy kind of all over the place and not that easy to quantify.
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And it s important to note that while you do get a lot of different things done in different areas, you do go deep enough to really contribute.
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For example, with the scuba.
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You re not just like, oh, go dive once.
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You became an instructor.
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You liked music, you became a DJ.
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You liked movies, you went to work on a movie set.
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It s not like becoming a world-class academic in some field, but it s definitely at a level where you can understand the nuances and then begin to play with it, as opposed to just, yeah, I read a book about this.
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which is what I think most of us do.
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Yeah, I think my sister has a book that she edited or wrote called Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out.
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And she talks about how she thinks education is really a social phenomenon.
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And I think, so what happens is like, whether it s World of Warcraft or scuba diving, you have your friends are doing it, you look over their shoulder, and you start doing it too.
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And that s sort of messing around.
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And then when you decide you want to geek out on it and put 10,000 hours into World of Warcraft or become a scuba instructor, that s geeking out.
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And I think geeking out is actually the process in which you start to learn all of these separate skills, right?
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So if you just take big projects like CERN, which is this place where they smash atoms together to try to get higher energy physics.
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It s so big and you need so much stuff that you invent the web sort of as a byproduct of trying to get physicists to talk to each other.
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And similarly, if you go far enough, whether you re making podcasts or whether you re scuba diving, you have to learn all these things.
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So to become a scuba instructor, you ve got to learn logistics and business and physics and chemistry and CPR and medicine.
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And it s the same.
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So I think almost anything, if you pick it and you go deep,
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you start to get lots and lots of learning going on and I think that that s sort of my thing is that I ll go pretty far into it until I start to feel like the learning is slowing down and then that s when I switch and so I think that s sort of part of it is like I love the doing of things but it s really the sort of addiction to continuously learning new things and also learning things in different ways because there s a lot of
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you know, evidence that shows that diversity is really important.
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And so if you have 10 scientists from the same school all working on the same problem, they re less likely to solve it than if you have 10 people from completely different backgrounds and cultures tackling the same problem.
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And so you re sort of trying to do it on yourself by sort of jumping across all these fields, but then looking at what are the learnings that are consistent across those.
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You mentioned in an article, or at least it was mentioned in an article, I think in Wired, that your whole life has been about connecting things that aren t connected.
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For example, you moved to the Middle East because you realized, well, Middle East isn t really connected to a lot of my networks.
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Why is this important to you?
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I think you learn the most when you re not comfortable or when you re outside of your comfort zone.
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And when I grew up, I grew up going back and forth between Japan and the US.
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And in Japan, they made fun of me because my Japanese was weird.
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And when I lived in the US, they made fun of me because I was a foreigner.
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And
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I was never really comfortable and I was always like on the edge of those two cultures, but I realized that I learned a lot sort of going back and forth between the two.
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And so I sort of became comfortable with being uncomfortable to the point where now when I start to get comfortable, and that s usually when I switch, if I start getting comfortable, I feel like I m not learning anything and that I might be in a bubble.
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And I have this sort of fear of being in some bubble.
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The Middle East really was, when I went there for the first time, it totally freaked me out.
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I didn t understand it at all.
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It looked like total chaos, but somehow the thing worked.
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I realized I didn t have any job or anything to do, so I got a place in Dubai.
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I was going around the world twice a month back then, and so I would stop in Dubai and try to figure out people to interact with and things to learn.
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Now, I ve got friends there, and I ve got a network there, and it s pretty interesting because every news story or every thing, I can look at it from both sides.
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It s amazing how everything looks completely the opposite, but then when you take those two together, the understanding is much deeper.
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Basically, I think it is just this addiction to always being slightly uncomfortable.
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Your role at MIT, and as this sort of globetrotting, entrepreneurial tech guy, if I can put it that way, really does put you in the center of change on a daily basis, which I would assume keeps you kind of bleeding edge.
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Is that the idea behind all of the travel and all of the different experiences and joining all these disparate networks together?
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Yeah, so the Media Lab s role is really trying to do those things that other people wouldn t otherwise do.
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We talked about anti-disciplinary, but we have a very unique funding model, which is we have 80 to 90 companies that fund us through a consortium.
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And the money is mostly discretionary.
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So we can sort of do whatever we want.
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We often say we re looking for answers
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to questions you don t know how to ask.
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And a lot of our patents and our projects are things way before they re commercial.
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And so, you know, like the early sort of VR type things we invented with Aspen MovieMap and the first car navigation system was demoed at MIT, the GPS.
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We couldn t even get a patent for it because the lawyers at MIT said that, you know, no one would ever use something that was as distracting as somebody trying to give you directions, you know.
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But a lot of, you know, whether it s touchscreen or a lot of early holography or e-ink, a lot of these ideas get developed here.
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Our goal is really to sort of show the future to our corporate members and the world and really invest in those areas that, you know, wouldn t otherwise be funded.
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So, in academia, you get funding from the government to do specific things that look somewhat feasible.
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And companies usually will fund you to sort of, you know, make this pointing thing pointier or something like that.
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But it s pretty hard to get funding to just explore.
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And that s kind of the privilege that we have.
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So, we try to use that privilege by not doing anything that anybody else is already doing.
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And so, you know, for instance, like in the 80s, we did a lot of wearable computing and a lot of that was invented here.
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Now all of the people who were working on that, the students and others, are the heads of the wearable computing groups at all the big companies.
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And now we re doing things like implantable circuits and connecting robotic limbs to our nervous system and things like that.
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So we re always trying to do things that companies wouldn t do.
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Sure, the new book, of course, is called Whiplash, How to Survive Our Faster Future.
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The book is about innovation, and not just at the Media Lab, but there s nine principles.
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Actually, there s 10, because you innovated and came up with another one after the book, I guess, went to print.
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So, truly walking the walk there.
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Managing rapid change, illustrated with examples from fields like synthetic biology, digital currency, artificial intelligence, citizen science.
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I d like to go over some of those later in the show, but why do people need to know these principles outside of the lab?
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Why is this stuff important in the wild?
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So I think why they re important is I think the internet, first of all, created this massive change of complexity and speed.
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But also, now we have artificial intelligence coming, we have cryptocurrencies coming.
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And all these trends make things harder and harder to plan, and harder and harder to sort of follow simple rules.
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So whether economists in the old days, it was sort of like a science, you could sort of predict the future.
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But now it s getting harder and harder to predict things because things are moving so quickly and things are sort of in this kind of chaotic, complex system.
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And so I think that traditionally jobs used to be you d go to school, you d learn your thing, and then once you became a professional you sort of repeat that same thing over and over again, whether you were a banker or whether you were a farmer.
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But today most jobs require you to constantly be changing your own job as well as sort of being aware of what s going on.
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And I think these principles, whether you re a student or whether you re a banker, are a way of looking at the world in a sort of real-time and dynamic way, rather than this sort of well-organized sort of Newtonian way.
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And I think that some fields are a little bit more shielded from this phenomenon than others.
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It affects everybody.
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And one of the reasons I wrote the book was I found that there were a lot of books that described this phenomenon and said, holy cow, the world is changing, or everything is this way, everything is that way.
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But most books didn t really tell you what to do about it.
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And so the principles are really kind of an attempt through stories and through sort of tips to sort of help people figure out, okay, you ve convinced me that the world is completely different now, but these principles actually help you think about, like we were talking earlier about sort of education and learning.
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I think that these are ways that you should just start approaching life from when you re a kid to all the way to how a company ought to think about itself.
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SPEAKER_01
You mentioned that humans are often missing the greatness of their own discoveries.
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And the example in the book is that somebody invented the phonograph and thought like, oh yeah, businessmen might want to use this to sort of dictate letters or something like that.
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And nobody thought, well, maybe we should put music on one of these things.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s right.
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I think the book opens with the Lumere brothers also with motion pictures and how it took a decade before we sort of thought it was okay to cut to a close up and things like that.
2
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And so it takes a long time for technologies to sort of figure out what they are.
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SPEAKER_02
It is kind of funny doing a podcast over Skype.
2
SPEAKER_02
Because one of the great other examples is when television started, you just had radio guys sort of sitting around with video, but that was it, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
It was just radio with pictures.
2
SPEAKER_02
Part of that message is really that, you know, a lot of these technologies are pretty new still.
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And the real impact, I think it s called Amir s Law, which is that you underestimate the short-term impact, but
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Or you overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact, which is another interesting phenomenon.
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So I still think that a lot of the stuff that we see, the effects of the internet as well, positive and negative, a lot of it s still to come.
2
SPEAKER_02
And the really interesting applications, even let s say with cryptocurrency, is probably not going to be Bitcoin, but all the stuff that comes after it.
2
SPEAKER_02
So the book, through the stories, was trying to get people to start thinking that way about the technologies that are emerging now.
2
SPEAKER_01
Why do we often misinterpret the technological tea leaves?
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SPEAKER_01
It seems like tech is always kind of outstripping our ability to understand it.
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SPEAKER_01
How come it s taking so long?
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SPEAKER_01
Is that just human nature?
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What s happening here?
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Yeah, partially it s just our brains.
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We come up with models of how we think the world works, and it s like a fish in water metaphor.
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Fish doesn t understand the water.
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For instance, let s take money.
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We ve grown up thinking that this is the way money works, and you talk to a lot of economists who say, hey, this is how the economy works, but they forget that it s a pretty new phenomenon.
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and that it doesn t necessarily mean that it s going to persist this way, but we re just sort of defined by our experience, right?
2
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And so like we don t have pyramids around anymore, but back when people were building pyramids, they probably figured everybody be building pyramids forever and they just don t make sense anymore.
2
SPEAKER_02
So there s a lot of things in society right now that may not make sense in a few decades, but
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we just can t really imagine.
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It s very difficult to imagine the world being fundamentally different.
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And I think what s interesting is that even if you get a new technology, until somebody starts to imagine how you might do it differently, or the technology starts to nudge an industry in a new way, technology by itself doesn t necessarily change things that much.
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I think it s how society uses it.
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One interesting thing that we think a lot about at the Media Lab is a lot of it has to do also with how the technology is introduced into society.
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For instance, with electricity, one of the biggest first applications of electricity was lighting up Paris, the city of lights.
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SPEAKER_02
That was a really beautiful image.
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Electricity started out on a pretty good foot.
2
SPEAKER_02
GMOs sucked because it was a use of genetic modification where it was a big company taking advantage of disadvantaged farmers.
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SPEAKER_02
That seemed creepy and we weren t really sure what was going into the genetic modifications.
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SPEAKER_02
In fact, genetic modifications
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might turn out to be a great thing.
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We re working right now on genetically engineering mice, because mice are the carriers for Lyme s disease, to create a thing called CRISPR gene drive, where we can release mice into the wild, and all of their offspring will inherit a trait, which is that they don t carry Lyme s disease, and you could eliminate Lyme s disease.
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We re now working with Nantucket, this is Kevin Esfeldt in our lab, and he s trying to get consensus of all the people who would be affected, and trying to build a process where the people drive this technology.
2
SPEAKER_02
Nantucket s not known for being super open to these sorts of things, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
They don t like GMOs, but so far we ve had a unanimous support in the town hall meetings about let s move forward with this experiment.
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And what s interesting is it s solving a real problem
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the people who are affected are in charge of the process, and we re being very open and collaborative about how we re designing this whole thing.
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And I think this may turn out to be a good project.
2
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Now, if that had been the first deployment of genetically modified things in nature, it might have turned out better.
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So what we re trying to do whenever we see a new technology is to figure out how we can involve people and how we can design the deployments in a way that have a more positive impact than a negative one.
2
SPEAKER_00
So with all of this new technology, there s a lot of talk about people losing jobs and everybody being automated out of existence.
2
SPEAKER_00
What I want to know is where do you stand on universal basic income and all of the talk around that nowadays?
2
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Because it seems like a lot of people are losing their jobs and there are a lot of countries that are experimenting with universal basic income, which is basically you get a check every month to use on food and rent, and then the rest of your time you can make money and give back to society.
2
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What do you think about that?
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Yeah, so I think there s a couple different pieces.
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So I do think that there will be some jobs that will be eliminated.
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I do think that history shows that technology tends to create new jobs as well.
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So I m kind of in the camp that will probably have some pain as we lose some jobs that can t be
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retrained and people that can t be retrained, but that overall in the long run, I think that there ll be stuff to do.
2
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I think, though, that just doing work in order to sort of increase productivity, that s going to change.
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I mean, I think we re getting to the point where we have enough food on the earth.
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It s just not distributed properly.
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And we don t necessarily need to be more productive.
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We just need to be happy.
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We need to fight less.
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There s a bunch of more social stuff that needs to happen.
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I think that there s a lot of stuff that s measured by economists.
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for measuring GDP.
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Everybody measures the success of a country by GDP, but there s been things like happiness indexes and stuff like that, which are kind of tricky.
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SPEAKER_03
But like for instance, parenting isn t calculated into GDP, right?
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I think parenting is super important.
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If you re parenting, you re not contributing to the productivity of a country.
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But I feel like today with all of our problems, and there s a great set of experiments called the social gating theory, which is basically if kids who have a lot of attention and touch and social interaction early on in the first 100 days, they end up with a very different brain than kids who are institutionalized and isolated.
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that it turns out that touching and interacting with people is really important for early brain development.
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But if you re busy and you don t have time to spend with your kids because you re trying to earn an income, that child is going to have a lot more difficulty than a child whose parents are at home.
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So I think universal basic income could be a great thing.
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I think one of the problems is that work is not about
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just making money.
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I mean, work is about making money for people who are poor, and that s important to do.
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But if you can afford to pay, I think what s interesting is that work is about purpose, it s about structure, it s about validation.
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There s a bunch of things that happen through work that are important.
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And when you look at, and this is interesting, when you go to places like Dubai and other places where they have enough money so that you don t really have to work, some people, not all of them, but a lot of people you can see
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don t get as much of a sense of purpose than, say, people in Beirut who have survived civil war.
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They grow up with purpose like crazy, and you find them being much more entrepreneurial.
3
SPEAKER_03
So I think the biggest question about universal basic income isn t so much
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whether we should do it or not is how can we create structures around podcasting, arts, it could be theology, it could be academics.
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SPEAKER_03
There s so many things that could provide people with meaning and purpose that just don t make financial sense for you to do right now because it s difficult.
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SPEAKER_03
Those sorts of things I think will increase in value.
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SPEAKER_03
And so part of it is going to be how do you change society so that being a parent or being an academic or being an artist is as socially valuable as being an investment banker?
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Because I hear a lot of people say things like, how can he be smart?
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He s not rich.
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that we would measure your success in life just by money, I think that needs to shift.
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And what we need to make sure is that if we do something like universal basic income, we don t treat the people who are in that category as some sort of losers, but they go follow some other path that adds to society.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right, yeah, that does make sense, because otherwise you re gonna end up with a class situation again, which has a lot of the same problems that we have now, only they ll be provided for in some other way, but it doesn t necessarily make things better, right?
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And if people don t feel like they can add value and have no purpose, we re gonna end up with all kinds of other emotional health problems, and I would wager we d still have crime and other things, because people are gonna feel like they have nothing going for them.
3
SPEAKER_03
In the best case, it would turn into something that looks a little bit like Wayne s World, you know?
3
SPEAKER_02
Right, right.
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You have such a wide array of experience in so many fields.
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It gives you a pattern that I think a lot of other people don t have.
3
SPEAKER_02
You ve mentioned in other work that being unique and having friends who are unique is a really important thing.
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We teach a lot of networking and relationship development here on the Art of Charm and at our Art of Charm programs and things like that.
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How is it that you re going about this?
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It seems like it s gotta be a pretty deliberate process for you to, not only to be unique, but to make friends and connections that are really unique and diverse.
3
SPEAKER_03
I definitely think that networking is one of the most important things you can do.
3
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It s hard for introverts, but it s important.
3
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And networking, I think, gets a bad rap because a lot of networking is done in a
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sort of salesy way, which is like you find the most important person in the room, and then you try to become friends with them, and people are just looking at money and influence as the vector.
3
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But if you switch it around and you try to say, okay, I m always gonna try to meet somebody who s completely different from everybody else I know, getting back to the sort of, the differences, trying to, the diversity is being important.
3
SPEAKER_03
Then the way that you sort of go about it is, you know, you try to find the strangest person in the room, or the person you re most, least likely to ever meet, and try to connect with them.
3
SPEAKER_03
And when you re trying to connect with somebody who s not really in your world at all, it s pretty interesting and exciting, because what you re trying to do is to try to find common ground.
3
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And this is sort of a key thing I think is important is, you know, if you re trying to meet somebody who s completely different than you, like, for instance, me trying to talk to an Arab sheik, what you re trying to do is find that one thing that you can see that makes sense to you or is exciting to you.
3
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And what you find is if somebody notices something that you have that they re excited about, they ll usually get excited about you,
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If you do it too deliberately, it will be sort of fake.
3
SPEAKER_03
But if you get into the habit of putting aside things that might freak you out, like the way they look or the fact that they re in the military and you don t like war, but if you sort of look for that thing that you might like and you start from there, you can often start to develop a whole new way of looking at that whole category of person.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I think it s, to me, it s just fascinating meeting people who are completely unlike me.
3
SPEAKER_03
And again, I think some people, it will come easier for them.
3
SPEAKER_03
But the neat thing is, thinking about it practically, there s a great paper by a guy named Granitever called The Strength of Weak Ties.
3
SPEAKER_03
And it shows that when you re looking for jobs, you re much more likely to find a job through somebody who is not in your close network.
3
SPEAKER_03
So strong ties are people like your family and friends, and weak ties are people who are in different networks, like in different departments or in different cities.
3
SPEAKER_03
And he shows statistically, you re much more likely to get jobs from people who are outside of your immediate network.
3
SPEAKER_03
And so what happens is, if you start to develop friends in all these different networks, you re much more likely to be able to add value, too, because you could say, oh, you know, suddenly you need to contact somebody in the movie business, or you suddenly need to contact somebody in some other field.
3
SPEAKER_03
If you know somebody in that field, or you know somebody who knows somebody, you become sort of a network hub.
3
SPEAKER_03
Whether it s something for yourself or something for a student or something, those networks are extremely valuable, especially
3
SPEAKER_03
if they persist over time, right?
3
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Because then you start to build a level of trust.
3
SPEAKER_03
So like, you know, Jason s an expert on all this audio stuff.
3
SPEAKER_03
And so when I dropped into Chicago and I needed to do something at the Metro, he made a, you know, sound kit drop bag for me and sort of off I was.
3
SPEAKER_03
But, you know, if I was sort of, if I hadn t had this connection, that would never have been possible.
3
SPEAKER_03
And so those networks are exciting.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I think the problem is most people when they go,
3
SPEAKER_03
networking, they re really looking for more and more of the same category of person, which tends to either be very good-looking people or very rich people.
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we do tend to gravitate towards, oh, I m here to meet people who can help me with things.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that s a really cool affirmation of a lot of the things that we teach at the Art of Charm on the show and in our social capital type of programs, because we do talk about the breadth of the network and we talk about the strength in varied connections.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the truth is, one of the main points of networking that I discuss a lot when I speak about this is also that most of your opportunities are over the horizon, so you can t see them.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so if you just go into situations thinking, alright, I m here to meet technological innovators or people who are working on apps because I work at this innovation hub and that s what we re looking for right now.
3
SPEAKER_02
You won t find the opportunities that come from meeting a ballet choreographer and pairing that with some other diverse connection that you have with somebody who s making music out of electrical components that have never been used to make music before.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s a collaboration
4
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and that s innovation in itself, and you re following this sort of value of undirected discovery, as you put it, the need to accept risk and experimentation and the willingness to fail and start again and et cetera, and maintaining that culture of creative disobedience.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can t do that if you ve got the same people in the same room day after day.
4
SPEAKER_01
You ve argued this well in your book, that planning is costlier than improv, that diverse aptitudes trump expertise, and that human systems are most resilient at their most diverse.
4
SPEAKER_02
The Kelly brothers wrote this great book called Creative Confidence, which is this idea that schools and people tend to stamp out the confidence you have in your own creativity.
4
SPEAKER_02
You know, as a kid, oh, what an ugly picture.
4
SPEAKER_02
Oh, no, somebody s probably already thought of that.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I think one of the key things here is like it s so much easier to find the one thing that you re good at and just repeat that for the rest of your life.
4
SPEAKER_02
to be able to say, hey, maybe I ll have a cool idea if I could just bring these two people together.
4
SPEAKER_02
Or I have an intuition that Jason s an interesting guy.
4
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I m going to go invest time in building a relationship.
4
SPEAKER_02
There are actually risks, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
Because you re assuming that you re going to figure out that connection when that opportunity arises.
4
SPEAKER_02
you know, our educational system s really poor at giving you that confidence.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I feel like, you know, it sounds like your podcast, but also the way you think about things, is to try to give that confidence back to people so that they take those risks and they take those challenges.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I think it s sort of cliche to say, you know, failing is good and risk-taking is good.
4
SPEAKER_02
But the key to that, I think, is building up that confidence.
4
SPEAKER_02
And also, you have to also have a little bit of, you know, you use the word charm, but kind of like a playfulness because
4
SPEAKER_02
you know people won t talk to you just because my pet peeve and I read about this somewhere and I can t remember who said it first but I m going to get a t-shirt that says don t pick my brain because like the last thing you want is somebody emails you say hey can I drop by and pick your brain and you re like screw you my brain s not here just for you to pick it s a two-way thing right and I think what s important is you kind of have to have the confidence you ve got to be interesting otherwise I m not going to talk to you either and I think part of
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SPEAKER_02
thing that you need to build up, whether it s your network or whether it s the sort of random things that you think about, unless you re interesting, people aren t going to be sharing interesting things with you, too.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so I think that that s a key part of networking.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so, you know, a lot of traditional power broker networking is just literally, you know, I m going to meet this person because they re powerful and they re going to be with me because I m powerful.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s a pretty linear and also very risky way of networking, because the minute you have power, you lose your power or you lose your friends, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
But if the main thing is that you re an interesting person, and you ve got interesting things to say, and you ve got an interesting network, you really can t lose that.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s a pretty solid asset, because even if you wipe out, they can t take away your humor, and they can t take away your friends.
4
SPEAKER_00
The first party that you had back in, what was it, March of 2003, back in Silicon Valley, where you got all these people together, and you said something very, very funny to me, which I never forgot.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s like, I m inviting you to all my parties because the people that you bring are more interesting than you are.
4
SPEAKER_02
I don t remember.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s kind of rude.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it was.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re kind of a jerk.
4
SPEAKER_00
I brought Chris Pirillo and a couple of people with me.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you re like, oh, your friends are way more interesting than you are.
4
SPEAKER_00
Bring as many people as you want.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re always coming to my parties.
4
SPEAKER_00
But that party was such a connecting moment for everybody that was there.
4
SPEAKER_00
Everybody I met at that party, I m still in touch with.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like if I ll see like Evan Williams.
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I saw him in a bathroom at SFO like maybe 10 years later.
4
SPEAKER_00
And he s like, oh, hey, Jason, you know, and just all the other people in that room.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s like you being the hub of all those connections when you put those people together and you have that trust that your friends will, you know, kind of jive, it really works.
4
SPEAKER_02
There s an interesting lesson also just broadly on that is that if you remember, that was right after the bubble popped and NASDAQ was back down to where it was before the internet bubble.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so all the carpetbaggers and all the sort of Silicon Valley buzz was gone, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
And it was just us guys and girls who were just doing it because we loved it, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
And so what I find is also really important is if you go where all the action is, you re going to be late.
4
SPEAKER_02
you kind of have to go to where the passion is before it s a thing.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then when you connect with people when they re just starting out or when they ve just gone through a tough time, those are the relationships that last.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so for me, again, this gets back to networking and how you pick the relationships that you invest in.
4
SPEAKER_02
I think it s much more interesting to sort of connect with people when they re not all famous and they re not all connected.
4
SPEAKER_02
And that requires you to follow your intuition.
4
SPEAKER_02
But the people that you were connected to and the people that we were trying to get at that party were all people that
4
SPEAKER_02
weren t chosen because they were powerful, we re picking them because they were funny or they re interesting or weird.
4
SPEAKER_02
And those people, you know, at some random probability are much more likely to become interesting than if you re sort of chasing all these famous people who really don t need new friends, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, yeah, this makes sense.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of the other things that you mention is distance from the field, which is essentially, outsiders solving problems tends to be in many ways easier because experts are blind in a way.
4
SPEAKER_01
The less exposed a given solver is to the discipline in which the problem resides, the more likely he or she is to solve it.
4
SPEAKER_01
That I read in the book.
4
SPEAKER_01
Can you break that down a little bit?
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I think that s really interesting because, first of all, it s counterintuitive, and secondly, I d love to know how this works.
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I think broadly, what you do when you re trying to solve problems is you have a couple of different tools in your brain, and you re using those tools to solve these problems.
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By definition, if you re in a field where everybody s sharing the same tools, a lot of people are going to use the same tools against the same problem, and then people get stuck.
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And what you do when you get stuck is that the solution may be a pretty obvious thing for somebody else, but you re stuck at it.
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I mean, it s kind of like pair programming.
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A lot of really interesting things about pair programming is pair programming is when you have two programmers looking at the same screen, working on the same code.
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Why it works so well is that sometimes you ll get stuck because of a punctuation error or because you don t know something that somebody else knows.
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But having somebody look over your shoulder, and Jason would know this better than I do, but like 90% of programming is
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getting unstuck from some stupid mistake that you ve made, right?
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Oh, it s banging your head on the keyboard until the answer comes to you.
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So yeah, pair programming is great.
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So it s kind of another pair of eyes, but you scale it up to like a whole industry.
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So you might have a the whole medical industry trying to solve a problem, but to an electrical engineer, it s an obvious
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answer, right?
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And so there s that kind of from the field perspective, but also there s an even more basic thing, which is kind of the wiring in your brain and the way that you ve been brought up affects the way that you tackle problems and you think of things.
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And so there s a lot of work by academics that sort of show this in models as well, but just like a Japanese person attacking a problem is going to attack it in a very different way than somebody who s gone to an Ivy League school.
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And so even just, you know, racial and gender diversity, you attack things in completely different ways.
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know, I think it s a fairly known thing.
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And I think the problem is it s much more comfortable, this gets back into the comfort zone thing.
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It s much more comfortable to be hanging out around with a bunch of dudes, you know, because it s, you know, working on a problem, but incremental value of having another dude from the same school,
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is pretty low, but throwing in somebody who has a completely different set of experiences is very high.
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So the interesting thing about this diversity part is that there s the social justice part, which is that certain categories of people just don t get their fair chance, but it also has this very practical part, which is you re much more likely to solve these problems.
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I d love to talk about some of these principles of innovation and what better place to start than the one that didn t make it into the book.
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Yes, that s learning over education.
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That was originally in my nine, and my co-author who wrote crowdsourcing, I think, wanted to talk about crowdsourcing, so he created the diversity over ability one, but we made the argument that learning over education was in all of the
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principles, but in fact, it s my favorite one, and I m biased because I m uneducated, but I ve learned.
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I mean, I think education is what people do to you, and learning is what you do to yourself.
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And to me, the educational system is really a system that s been created to sort of generate a certain category of person.
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We talked earlier about jobs.
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I think especially as we start to imagine computers, AI, robots, and machines getting better and better at both physical and mental repetitive tasks, a lot of what you learn in an educational system is to be obedient, to be reliable, to pass tests.
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And a lot of the tests, skills, and knowledge are things that computers will get better and better at doing.
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And I think what we re going to need humans to do more and more is creative.
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And at the Media Lab, we talk about creative learning as having four Ps, which is projects, peers, passion, play.
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So projects, it turns out there s about 10 years of pedagogy that shows that learning in textbooks out of context is really hard to apply in the real world.
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And in fact, whether you re making a podcast or scuba diving, doing something and learning while you re doing it is a really important way to get an intuitive understanding of what you re learning.
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And then peers, learning from your friends and me learning from Jason or me teaching somebody about something that I learned from Jason is much more likely to stick and to be interesting than learning from a teacher or learning from a textbook.
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Peers is really important.
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Passion, you know, this gets back to the earlier conversation about sort of following your passion in order to learn.
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I mean, passion is super important, especially if you re being a self-directed independent learner.
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And then play, play is interesting.
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There s a lot of evidence that shows that if you re trying to do a linear task faster, so brute forcing, fear and financial rewards can make
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to go faster, but if you re trying to do a creative project or think of something creative, it turns out play is more important than pressure.
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And so play is really important for creative thinking.
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Now you think about the educational system, it s textbooks, you better not be cheating, so no peer stuff.
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And passion, we don t really know how to measure it, so it doesn t really matter.
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And play is just during recess, right?
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So on the one hand, creative learning, I think, is, again, in the age of the machine, that s going to be our main role, I think, is the sort of messy, funky, creative sort of stuff, emotional stuff.
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And the computers will be that organized thing.
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And our educational system, I feel like,
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is trying to create robots for factories and armies.
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And this is a really important thing after the Industrial Revolution, but it already is getting phased out.
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And so to me, it s not only is it something I personally feel was important for me, but I think it s kind of an imperative for society right now to be focused more on creative learning than on sort of the delivery of knowledge and skills, which
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You know, again, it s not fair to the educators out there.
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I mean, I think teachers in schools, some of them do a great job.
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And again, a lot of these principles are about sort of saying something that sounds a little bit controversial to give you the punch to sort of pay attention.
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And then you sort of follow up with the story.
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But that s that principle.
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What about pull over push?
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The idea that instead of sort of stockpiling things you might need later, you pull them in as you need them.
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And I talk about some variant of this when it comes to reading, where it s like, don t just read stuff in case you might need it later, or learn stuff in case you might need it later.
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There s value in getting diverse experience, however,
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when you need something is usually the best time to dive deep and grab it.
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I think that you can find the roots to it in the early Japanese manufacturing, which was called just-in-time manufacturing, where they didn t create huge inventories of stuff.
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They would get the suppliers to deliver stuff just as
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they needed it and they would just ship the cars and that lowered the risk of ending up with a bunch of crap that you didn t need anymore because you stopped building that car.
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In a business perspective, it s kind of like all the stuff on your balance sheet, whether it s printing presses or lines of code, sort of reduce your agility because you think of them as assets so you can t flush them.
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and they make it harder to pivot.
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It s also a lot about innovation on the edges.
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We were talking about World of Warcraft earlier.
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I know the Blizzard guys would always hire out of the players that played their game, players would make these add-ons that they d incorporate into the game.
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There was this very permeable membrane
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between the community and the product.
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And the players really felt like they were part of the team working on the thing.
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And so that s kind of innovation on the edges.
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And then exactly what you said, which is stockpiling knowledge, because you might use this programming language in 10 years.
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There s probably going to be a better programming language in 10 years when you need it.
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And so really, it s about, it gets back to the learning over education one, which is if you learn how to learn, then learning in real time.
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And it s also much more interesting to be learning something you re going to use, rather than learning something because you might need it, right?
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So I used to do that all the time with programming books.
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I would buy all of the languages that everybody was talking about.
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I m like, oh, everybody s talking about Python.
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I better learn Python just in case one day I might need it.
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I have written absolutely, in my lifetime, zero lines of Python code, but I ve read every book.
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One day when the zombie apocalypse comes and I need to write a Python script to keep him out of my house, I m set.
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Right, except you won t know how to apply any of it and you ll have to review the books, right?
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Exactly.
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Yeah, without any sort of target for the practice, it ends up, at least for me, just going in one end and out the other.
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But obviously to do this effectively, you need to build a lot of diverse networks.
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You need different groups of friends, you need different business partners or different businesses who can contribute different skills, different resources to these endeavors.
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How do you balance creating those networks and creating those resources and making those resources available versus consuming them when you don t yet need them?
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Yeah, I think if you do it well, every time you pull on those networks, you should be generating them as well.
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So any good project is fun for everybody involved.
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Not all projects work out that way.
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But if they work well, it should be fun for everybody.
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And they should all say, wow, that was so much fun.
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The next time you call, I ll be even more excited about joining.
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If you do it properly, every single time you pull on a network, it gets stronger and it gets bigger.
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For instance, this project that we talk about in the book, SafeCast, which is a radiation measurements project that we started after the earthquake in Japan, we were trying to figure out
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how to get the measurements, how to then post them online and share them.
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And we found a bunch of people online.
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You know, one of Jason s old friends, Sean Bonner, was there.
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We found another person who had done Three Mile Islands monitoring.
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We found, you know, people who are building websites.
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And we were able to pull all these people together and create this team that s still together.
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We ve got over 60 million data points now.
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It s probably one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world.
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But we built our own Geiger counters, we designed them, we ve been driving around and measuring them and making apps and stuff like that.
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But what s neat is it s kind of a fun project.
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It s got a lot of mission in that it really helped people in Japan feel, understand what was actually going on.
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And then everybody who participates sort of learn something and it s kind of this weird network now.
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And now we re starting to figure out how to apply it to things like air quality monitoring, things like that.
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But what was neat about the project is that we started like the day after the earthquake, and we knew nothing.
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And now, you know, we run circles around the government and all the NGOs that had planned and prepared and had all this funding because, like, they hadn t anticipated anything.
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All the Geiger counters weren t designed for the cesium actually in the air.
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It was designed for sort of measuring things through walls, you know, and everything failed, right?
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Whereas because we designed it, one,
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We were designing it based on what was actually happening, not what we thought might happen.
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And then two, you know, it turned out that Ray Ozzie had just, you know, retired from Microsoft and he had a lot of free time.
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I mean, he s spending tons of time working with us on stuff, but he happened to be free, right?
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So a lot of it is also, you know, you catch people when they re sort of
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able to jump in, but you re not calling on people who are too busy or not there.
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And so it s a pretty interesting thing.
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And I think the internet has really allowed us to reach out and connect through networks.
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And if somebody is doing a competing project, you just bring them in rather than find out about them 10 years later and then compete with them.
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And so even though we use the internet to do this, a lot of the stuff that we do is in the real world, whether it s workshops or bringing a bunch of volunteers on board and stuff like that.
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So I think the internet is a great way to coordinate these resources.
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I think the main thing, though, is it gets back to, is there some cool idea that everybody can rally around that s fun?
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And if you can do that, whether it s scuba diving or measuring radiation, I think then it just sort of is a generative process that isn t really tapping resources, but actually creating them.
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Wow, yeah, that s a great answer.
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Yeah, everything you do can create these resources, and then yes, you can pull on them when you need them.
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So the difference is creating resources versus just kind of hoarding knowledge or skills or hoarding those resources in the first place.
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It s kind of the difference between stockpiling and consumption.
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Having a lot of friends, especially your type of friends with very different backgrounds and experiences,
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It also lets you cultivate serendipity, which is different than luck.
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You ve mentioned this before.
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How is serendipity different than luck?
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What do you mean by this?
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So they re similar.
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So luck is kind of the outcome, but the serendipity is really about having your peripheral vision open for those opportunities that you might not be planning.
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So there was a great New York Times article, I m trying to remember what it was, but it basically said half of all inventions are not what people were looking for when they started.
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They were sort of invented by accident.
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And the difference between actually finding that accidental answer or not is whether you re paying attention to things that aren t expected or whether you just think that s noise and you cut them out.
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And it s the same with networking with people.
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I think what you want to do is if Jason does something that I wasn t asking him to do or wasn t prepared for him to do, do I start to say, oh, how does that now fit in and how could that be interesting?
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Or do I just say, Jason, I don t understand what you re talking about?
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And the problem is that we grow up being taught that focus is so important, whether you re an entrepreneur or whether you re a student.
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But the problem is focus is sort of the opposite of peripheral vision, right?
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And so there s this great story about how if you ve ever talked to a mushroom hunter, if you ve ever done mushroom hunting,
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When you do mushroom hunting, it s about this weird pattern recognition where you actually don t focus on anything, you go out of focus, then suddenly all the mushrooms in the forest floor start to pop up and you can see them all.
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And then when you focus, you can actually find mushrooms when you re focused.
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But when you re driving home, you need to be focused on the road and you can t be looking at the daffodils, right?
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So what s interesting is to be able to go back and forth between focus when you re executing
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and peripheral vision when you re looking for serendipity, and I think the successful people do both, and I think that generates your luck, and that generates your serendipity.
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There s a great study where they ask you to count the number of pictures in a newspaper, and then in big font, it says there are some number, like 23 photos in this newspaper, but most people just sit there, count all the photos, and they don t read the thing, and then a few people will say, oh, and they read the thing, and they go,
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So it s kind of like when you re focused, even some obvious things are completely missed.
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And I think that the key is to be looking for those things, and that gives you a serendipity engine.
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Do you start with a goal to maybe start a certain type of community and then map out the types of people that you need to know?
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I mean, it seems like you re not the type of guy
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bumble through it and meet everybody everywhere and dot, dot, dot, luck happens.
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Are you planning this out?
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I m more on the bumbling side than some people.
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I think some people plan and do it okay as well, but I always am very honest with myself what I m excited about and I only
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I try to prune those things that I m not excited about because a lot of it has to do with how much energy you have to follow every thought or to put the energy into the conversation you re having.
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And to me, the worst waste is if you spend your whole day on stuff that s not exciting to you.
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And so to me, on the other hand, excitement is contagious too, right?
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So if I get excited about something and I get Jason excited about it, he s gonna go run off and think about it for the week.
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And then he may come back to me with an answer to, and this gets to the diversity around,
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He may come back with an answer to something that had me stuck.
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And so a lot of this, I think, is really a very emotional thing where I go from idea to idea.
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I try to connect them all together.
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I prune the stuff that s not exciting.
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And I may have 10 different things going on, but each of those things I prioritize based on how excited I am about it.
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And I think everybody has different categories of things that they re excited about, and they feed off of each other.
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That s what s sort of key about running this Media Lab place is to try to get everybody to where everybody s working on the thing that they re the most excited about.
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Then you get this kind of weird sort of like aura of people just following their passion.
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So when companies come and visit the Media Lab, every single student they talk to
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and it gets them all charged up.
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And that, to me, is better than planning.
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SPEAKER_00
Having said that, getting back to the peripheral vision and then focus, you do the peripheral vision and the brainstorming to get excited, but then that is followed by hours of actually trying to then deploy and implement the thing, which often is a lot of hard work.
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SPEAKER_00
But the inspiration is the thing that gives you the energy to stay up all night finishing the code and delivering the thing.
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And so I think that s maybe the combo.
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SPEAKER_00
But to your answer, yeah, I kind of bumble around.
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No, I ll back that up.
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I ve known you long enough.
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You re definitely a bumbler.
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And it just reminded me of back in the old days, your old IRC channel, going back to almost the serendipity thing where you d throw something out and then a bunch of us, your friends, would sit around and brainstorm and come up with solutions in completely different fields.
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And we would just sit there and, you know, chat with each other and type all night.
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SPEAKER_02
And it sounds like the Media Lab is now your new IRC channel where you ve got like the same kind of diversity with different types of skill sets trying to do the same kind of thing.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it is all about communities.
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And when the web first started, I started a mailing list called net surf, where people would go and they would like share links and stuff like that.
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But eventually it became a community.
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And then a bunch of people came and started like trolling the thing.
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And I tried to kick them out or to deal with them.
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But they were like, you know,
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this may be running on your machine, but it s not your fucking community.
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And I was like, oh, well, but you re like in my living room.
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SPEAKER_00
They re like, no, you re not.
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We had this weird thing where I lost control of the community.
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Not that I needed control, but I couldn t police it anymore.
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So when we started with IRC, which is Internet Relay Chat, I made sure that I called the channel Joey Ito, because then there would be no argument about whose house this was.
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Zero ambiguity.
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Yeah.
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But what was weird was I was in the channel one day, back then there were like a lot of people, and everybody was like, yeah, so what is Joey Ito thing?
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SPEAKER_00
And I was like, well, I think they re, no, not you, the channel.
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SPEAKER_00
And they re like, oh, they ve taken away my name now.
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SPEAKER_00
And it reminds me of like Sean Fanning losing Napster, because the company got taken away from him, and that was his name.
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SPEAKER_00
But you re right.
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I mean, I think what s interesting is as you start managing these communities,
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Like I say run the lab, I don t run the lab.
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SPEAKER_00
I m in charge of the music that we play.
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SPEAKER_00
I m in charge of where the furniture is.
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SPEAKER_00
I m still a DJ.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, nobody asks me permission.
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SPEAKER_00
They do whatever they want to do.
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SPEAKER_00
And so I have this very subtle influence over the place, but I m not in charge.
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SPEAKER_00
Just like I wasn t in charge of the IRC channel or my mailing list or the Warcraft Guild.
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SPEAKER_01
It s funny though, it says something about community, right?
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SPEAKER_01
It says something like, well look, the community in the end, you can t dictate what they re gonna do, especially online.
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SPEAKER_01
You literally, all of your identity is stripped away in that way for the benefit of the greater good.
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SPEAKER_01
I wouldn t say stripped away, but given to the community for the greater good.
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SPEAKER_01
They re gonna do with it what they damn well please, and you better not give them your name, right?
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SPEAKER_02
It s almost like the Derek Sivers video, The First Follower, where the guy who actually starts the movement is kicked out after the first follower brings in the rest of the crew.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you remember this politician Howard Dean?
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SPEAKER_00
He s kind of like the first sort of internet politician.
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SPEAKER_00
And I remember a bunch of us sort of internet types got on his advisory network and it was Joe Trippi.
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It was kind of a lot of fun.
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SPEAKER_00
And then I remember there was an interview for Wired that I did, and I remember saying this, and I still feel like it s related to this, which was, like I never met Howard Dean, but it was really fun hanging out.
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I think that Howard Dean was more of a place than a person.
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It was a place where we all hung out and it was a thing.
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And I think that that s what s cool about online communities, but sort of communities in general, is that it really is this sort of this platform on top of which all these people play.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think the people who are smart about whether you re a politician or whether you re sort of supposed to be running a nightclub is to get your head around and your heart around the idea that you re really just a place and that you re trying to create an environment that s interesting rather than sort of sitting in the middle of the room with a megaphone telling people what to do.
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SPEAKER_01
Howard Dean was the pyah guy, right?
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SPEAKER_01
That was that guy?
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SPEAKER_01
That ruined his career, that one little voice crack on the internet, man.
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SPEAKER_01
Dang, you gotta be careful.
6
SPEAKER_01
Speaking of risky moves, one of the principles, risk over safety, is also really interesting because people are inherently risk-averse.
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SPEAKER_01
What story comes to mind that s gonna help us understand why risk over safety is a way to pull forward?
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SPEAKER_00
I always remember this conversation I had with a Japanese government guy who was in charge of investing in government funds and companies.
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SPEAKER_00
I asked, what kind of companies are investing?
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SPEAKER_00
Is this the ones that don t have risk?
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SPEAKER_00
I m like, which ones?
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SPEAKER_00
The big ones.
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SPEAKER_00
I was like, no, there s always risk.
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SPEAKER_00
and it s either whether you understand the risk or not, and in fact, if it looks like there s no risk, usually in stock, you say the information is in the price, right?
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You know, for instance, if Jason s starting and doing a startup, and nobody knows him, and nobody knows the field, everybody s gonna undervalue Jason, and I may be, as an investor, saying, you know, I know Jason, he s gonna be good, and this area s probably pretty interesting.
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It s tons of risk, but I know how to price it.
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And I will be able to say, oh, you know what?
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At this price, no one else will give Jason money, but I will.
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But it s still cheaper than the value of this particular thing that I m buying, right?
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Later, when Jason is a huge success and he s in the newspaper, everybody s going to start buying the stock.
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And then it s going to be overvalued because everybody s going to think there s no more risk.
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And that s what I m selling.
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So good investors buy low and sell high.
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And it s about everything has risk.
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And it s about whether you can assess that risk or not.
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And being able to assess risk is a lot of knowing people.
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It s about knowing the field.
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But there s also an intuitive understanding of how to value and how to take risk.
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And again, you take the risk.
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And if Jason, if I know that he just has these two or three weaknesses, I can also mitigate the risk by trying to help Jason in those areas that he needs help.
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And so
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They feel this more because I m Japanese.
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I think Japanese always buy high and sell low.
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They buy Rockefeller Center at the height of the market and sell it at the bottom of the market.
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Or they join companies when they re doing really well and don t leave until they re doing poorly.
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Japanese CEOs hate to leave companies when they re doing well.
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In the U.S., you ve got both types.
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You ve got people who love joining companies when they re in the gutter and then turn it around and leave when the company s at the top.
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The risk over safety is basically saying there s always risk.
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What s cool about the Internet is it s lowered the cost of risk.
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Google, Yahoo, Facebook all were able to build their products before they raised any money.
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which is a new phenomenon.
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It was because of the open source stack.
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It s because the distribution and collaboration costs were nearly zero.
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So the cost of risk is lower.
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So you can create a little bit more of a portfolio.
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You don t have to spend 10 years building Yahoo and spending $100 million.
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You can try it out in a dorm room and see if it works or not.
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So that also allows anybody to take risk rather than waiting for big chunks of money and old age.
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And for full disclosure, Joey was my first investor in my first company, so I guess I should put that out there.
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Speaking of risk, how did that shake out?
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Well, we re still talking, you know, 15 years later, so I guess it worked out pretty well for him.
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True story, yes.
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He got a free shower last time he was in town.
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Oh, I don t even want to know what you mean by that.
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All right.
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Systems over objects, tell us about this.
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This is, again, something that was super interesting that I think a lot of people feel intuitively or think is counterintuitive, but is super, super useful.
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Yeah, you know, I think, first of all, the world is a bunch of systems and they re pretty complex.
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But a lot of our education and our jobs focus on objects.
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So objects would be, you know, a particular thing like a piece of software or a pen.
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And usually as a designer or usually as a job, you focus on that one interaction, you re flipping the burgers and giving it to the one customer or designing some software.
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And
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In the old days, when the systems moved sort of slowly, everybody could sort of focus on the particular object and the system would sort of adapt and deal with it.
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But now that the systems are moving so much faster and are so complex, and they also are, in systems theory, you call it they re self-adaptive.
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So when you hit a system, the immune system will heal and the environment will try to fix itself.
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One example is I remember when I invested in Twitter, which did a little bit better than Jason s company.
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And they actually said this about Jason s company too, was it s not a company, it s not a product, it s a feature.
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But what s interesting about the internet, and there s a great book by David Weinberger called Small Pieces Loosely Joined, which is sort of his metaphor of the internet, which is not like one monolithic service or one huge portal.
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It s that there are lots of little services that connect to each other,
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And the internet being a complex self-adaptive system, something like Twitter can say, OK, we re going to link to YouTube.
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We re going to connect to this.
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We re going to connect to blogs.
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And it was sort of the ability for Twitter to be connected to all these things and be very adaptable because it was a simple, straightforward feature rather than something that looked like a big, humongous portal.
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That s actually a feature, not a bug.
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And so thinking about the system and being aware that you re in the system, but also focusing on
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how you connect to that system is sort of probably a better approach to life than thinking about building an entire house.
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And one other metaphor that I love, we weren t the first ones to say it, but one of my faculty members, Kevin Slavin, and I were talking about designing in complex systems, and he said, you know, we were stuck in traffic, and he said, you know,
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It s like you re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.
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And this is what we call participant design, which is you are part of a big complex system and you can t understand all of it.
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And so how do you design your participation in the system with the stuff that you do?
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It s by being aware of everything that s going on and figuring out your relationship with other things is just as important as that one thing that you re trying to design.
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I would like to point out, though, that Ben Trott is the one who he s a founder of Moveable Type.
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He s the one that said that my service was a feature, not a product.
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So how s his product doing now?
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Boom.
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Ching.
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Drop the mic.
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Next topic.
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Is the systems over objects principle in some ways kind of like trying to keep the butterfly effect in mind?
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For those of you out there listening, a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it can cause a hurricane somewhere down the line.
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Is it the idea that these seemingly tiny actions can cause or otherwise determine much bigger results, or am I just missing the point here?
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No, it s definitely related to that, which is that the thing that you do may be affecting systems that you re probably not aware of.
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Like your podcast, you know, it could be affecting a whole bunch of people s lives.
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And if you were thinking in systems over objects, you would be paying attention and feeling somewhat responsible for the things that were occurring as a result of your podcast, right?
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So the example I often give is like having a kid.
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When you have a kid, you can influence a lot of what the kid does, but you can t control what the kid does because the kid is a complex system that s going to learn and it s going to get influenced by you, but it s going to get all these other inputs.
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Just like legally, you re not responsible.
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ultimately for how your kid turns out, you are emotionally responsible for how your kid turns out.
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Similarly, I feel like if Jason s creating some software, you re creating a podcast, you can t control it, but you should be ultimately aware of and responsible for and maybe cause to iterate on what you re doing based on how these systems work.
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Somebody writes you a letter and says, hey, this really changed
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the world in a good way or in a bad way, those sorts of things as a designer of a thing.
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In a way, it s the butterfly effect, but it s also, in science, what I ve realized after I got to MIT is every field has a particular setting on their microscope.
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Chemists like to look at a certain layer, and biologists look at another layer.
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They only look at and think about things at the microscope setting that they re at.
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One of our faculty members,
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Neri Oxman teaches this class with another faculty member called Design Across Scales, where they talk about microbial scale, object scale, human scale, architectural scale, astrophysical scale, and how you design across all of those scales.
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That s, I think, important.
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Again, just to use a podcast, I know Jason obsesses about the sound quality in the mics.
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You re thinking about the books and the conversations, but then there s the whole system of the world that you re affecting.
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Thinking about and being responsible for every scale, I think, is another key part of this.
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Joey, this has been amazing.
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Where can we find you besides everywhere slash Dubai?
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You know, I have my own little podcast that hopefully some of you will listen to.
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It s a lot more rough than yours, and I m sort of learning a lot from Jason on the mechanics of this.
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I have a blog, and then the Media Lab has a new website, so please come visit.
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Joey, thank you so much.
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Great big thank you to Joy.
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The book title is Whiplash, How to Survive Our Faster Future.
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Naturally, that ll be linked up in the show notes for this episode as well.
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There s a practical that we didn t have time to give that Joy gave us for the Art of Charm family.
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Pick three of these innovation principles that you think would be the hardest for you to imagine embracing.
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and think about how you might use each one of them to change something you have done or will do soon.
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In other words, try to run through these almost like an operating system or a filter for opportunities or ideas that you might be doing now or will do in the future, and you ll find different ways to look at the problems, solve the problems, and even might create something new entirely as a result of that.
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It sounds like a very simple practical, but this book will make you think about it.
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This book is not one of those light reading type of deals, man.
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You can t just have it on at the gym and be like, yeah, I get it.
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There s some thinking involved with this.
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I love this book because this is my old life, dealing with this stuff, and it was just so much fun to get to talk to Joey today.
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My favorite that people should get into, instead of learning over education, which is awesome, do resilience over strength.
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I think that is a really good one to really cultivate, and especially if you ve read Nassim Taleb s book, Anti-Fragile.
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That s a really good starting point.
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Of course, if you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Joey on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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Remember, tap your phone screen or tap the screen of whatever device you re using and the show notes should pop up directly on your phone there or if you re listening on the web.
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Why are you listening on the web?
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But anyway, you know, thanks.
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I also post tons of stuff on Twitter that never makes it to the show.
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There s a lot of articles, there s a lot of insights and other ways to engage with me and producer Jason.
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I m at The Art of Charm on Twitter.
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And I m at JPDeaf on Twitter.
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Our live programs are boot camps where we teach a lot of the networking skills that we mentioned earlier in the show.
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You can find that info at bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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You can join thousands of other guys who ve been through the program.
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They ll become your network for life all around the world.
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We ve gotten people jobs, people are traveling, people are moving to different countries.
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The live program is super rewarding.
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I mean, just talk about leaving your comfort zone.
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That s the whole idea behind this.
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And I also want to encourage you to join our AOC Challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge,
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or you can text the word charmed, if you re here in the States, C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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That challenge is about improving your networking skills and your connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop those deep and diverse networks that we were talking about here on the show, and we ll email you our fundamentals toolbox.
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That s something we mentioned in the beginning of the show that includes a lot of practical stuff on reading body language, having charismatic nonverbal communication, the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking and influence strategies,
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Persuasion tactics, frankly, there s a whole lot, and that s what we teach here at The Art of Charm.
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This is our core curriculum, so get that.
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And I also do regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It will make you a better networker, it will make you a better connector, and it ll damn well make you a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the US to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of AOC was produced and co-hosted today by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor, and the show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or just share it on the web.
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Word of mouth is everything.
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So stay charming, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.