Hello my friends and welcome to the 26th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I'm your host Steve Patterson and I heard a rumor that there are 52 weeks in a year. I don't know if it's true, but if it is true that means that episode 26 that must mean we're at the six month mark half a year of this podcast and I'm very happy to report it's been a success. It's constantly growing in popularity and I want to give my sincerest thanks to everybody who has been supporting the show either just by telling friends about it or sharing it on Facebook or leaving a rating in a review or if you're a Patreon supporter. We're up to 48 patrons now on Patreon who are contributing every time the show is released. I deeply appreciate it and trust me there's some really awesome stuff coming down the pipeline. Not least of which I have a series of interviews at Harvard coming up later this month that you guys are really going to enjoy. So what to talk about for the six month anniversary of Patterson in Pursuit naturally? We have to talk about academia. You'll notice that virtually all of the interviews I've conducted so far have been with professional academics. There's a reason for that. I'm not going to share the entirety of the reason just yet but I'll give you a little snippet of this episode. As somebody who is passionately interested in the world of ideas and passionately seeking truth and I have been for many years now, I get asked all the time, Steve why are you not in academia? That's the place where the smart intellectuals go into academia. So I'd like to spend this episode talking about academia and the future of big ideas. But before I do I want to share with you probably the most relevant sponsorship in all podcasting history. The sponsor for this show this week is a company called Praxis. I've been talking about it for the last month and a half and they specialize in taking young people who are either not yet in college or in college and unsatisfied perhaps with a college experience, taking them out of higher ed putting them into the real world with a six month paid apprenticeship in addition to three months of a professional boot camp. This is a company that is in the process of exploding in popularity and there's a really good reason for that. There are so many people like me, like my wife, like many of my friends who have some kind of college experience that they are wholly unsatisfied with either because it's not prepping them for the real world or because they're interested in ideas and they don't find big ideas in academia and those people are starving for some kind of competent organization to train them for the real world and to give them a kind of stimulating community that they're looking for. Those people are lining up to apply for praxis. And on the other side you have tons and tons of corporations that are hungry and desperate for competent young people and they're finding that the competent young people aren't necessarily those who come out of college with a 4.0 GPA because unfortunately those people don't understand how the world works and more likely than not they have an inaccurate world view. These companies are ravenous for enthusiastic competent people to work for them. Praxis brings both of these people together. It's a match made in heaven for both the employer and the employee. So that sounds like something that you want to be a part of or you just want to learn more about. Head over to discoverpraxis.com. On their homepage they have a button that says schedule a call. Click it, set up an appointment, talk to them and see if it's right for you. And just like the praxis community is interested in real world competence, I am passionately interested in intellectual competence. As I know you the listeners are as well. So wouldn't it make sense for somebody that's young and interested in the world of ideas to go into the establishment that's been around for a thousand years that's supposed to focus on big ideas that allows people to be purely nerdy and associate with one another to try to mutually discover the truth? Wouldn't it make sense for somebody to go into that establishment and to try to succeed there? Well I'm sad to report no not in today's world, not with today's academia. I sincerely believe that the world of ideas is going to bypass academia. At least this modern version of academia. There's a lot of reasons why that's the case. And ultimately that's the reason I'm not in academia is because I'm interested in big ideas. I don't want to be mired down in a lot of the really aggressively anti-intellectual parts of the academic system. Now before anybody throws a hissy fit I am not saying that there's no hope for any intellectuals in academia.  There are certainly exceptions. This is true in any establishment. There are actually probably some good people in government. There are probably some good people in the established church. There are probably some intellectuals in academia. I won't dispute that. But what I am saying is that the fundamental system is so flawed it is beyond repair. So let me explain. The first problem that I have with academia has to do with the process of communal learning itself. One of the really sinister and accidental byproducts of having any type of formal education is the people that are presenting the expert opinion whether it's on philosophy or it's on economics or politics whatever it is. Whoever is teaching the topic naturally inescapably is going to have some type of framework that they're working within. So they have some type of boundaries of what's considered acceptable and unacceptable opinion. So the example that I love to give has to do with political theory and specifically taxation in virtually all political discourse whether it's political philosophy or even in economics or political theory, political science. When you're talking about taxation there's almost always some kind of framework where you have the progressive left on one end that might make an argument like oh in some circumstances we need 80% taxation to take the wealthy people's money to distribute to the poor people. And on the other end you have people say no, no, no the highest tax bracket should be no more than 15% or no more than 10%. We should have a flat tax of 10%, 12%, whatever. And then obviously you have a bunch of points in between and that's usually where the dialogue is it 12% or is it 80% or whatever. The conversation that needs to be had is the more fundamental one. Should we have taxation in the first place? This is something that you're not allowed to say, oh what are you crazy? What are you talking about anarchism? So those people that want to challenge or examine the fundamental assertions in any given field they're naturally going to be on the outside, right? You have a bunch of professional opinion that all kind of congregates in the center and that's supposed to say oh well because you have a bunch of professionals that agree on the basics, those basics must be accurate. Well I completely reject this. Now I didn't, I used to think that was a very reasonable proposition but actually after investigating field after field myself I'm finding oh well that center, that core idea that all the professionals agree on is most likely wrong. This is definitely the case when you're talking about politics. It's definitely the case when you talk about economics. Definitely the case when you're talking about physics. You're talking about the Copenhagen interpretation or people's brutalizations of the Copenhagen interpretation. It's true when you're talking about mathematics, people's misunderstandings I think of the metaphysical status of numbers and of their mistaken conceptions I think of infinity, foundationally mistaken. And the same is even true when you're talking about a non-academic discipline like the martial arts, something I've been training in for over 10 years now.   They could not defend themselves from an actually skilled fighter who knows what the heck he's talking about. I'm talking about the phonies that are the average karate teachers, taekwondo teachers, aikido teachers, kung fu teachers. Nearly all the disciplines unless they're grounded in some kind of Brazilian jujitsu or judo or maybe some competent boxing that has ground fighting. Unless they're actually grounded in these schools their ideas are just hot air.  And when I talk to people about academia I bring up the martial arts example I'll time in other examples because maybe I'll get into it later but there's some really really fascinating parallels with the system of academia, the system of government, the system of the church and even the system of the martial arts. So that's the first issue I have is just the very nature of formalized education is that the experts that are teaching some particular thing are inevitably going to have a framework of acceptable opinion. Because I'm interested in the foundations and in my own investigation of the foundations I think the framework is wrong. That naturally means that I'm not going to agree with the academicians and the professional academicians are going to agree with me. I'm naturally going to be seen by virtually all the professionals as a crank because I absolutely reject those ideas that the experts have agreed on. So the second reason that I'm not the biggest fan of academia is related to the first and it has to do with another system that is in the academic system that's the publishing slash peer review system. Now peer review is the sacred cow in academia, right? It's this ultimate litmus test that oh well if these ideas aren't peer reviewed therefore they can't be taken seriously. And if they are peer reviewed well then they have to be taken seriously because the experts have reviewed them and said they fit our criteria for being published in this respectable journal. Now I have a few big problems with this. One is theoretical, the other is empirical. First of all theoretically speaking if it's true what I'm claiming about the majority of experts being foundationally wrong about their own field then actually the system of peer review doesn't make a lot of sense. If what you're trying to do is get at the truth and the people that you're saying are the gatekeepers all share fundamental assumptions and they're judging other claims to knowledge based on the adherence to those shared assumptions well that's not a very good way of getting at the truth. In other words if I'm talking to a bunch of theologians and all the panel of theologians agree that God exists let's say and let's say my claim is that God doesn't exist. Well naturally my claim is going to violate the fundamental assumption of the entire panel of theological experts who have been thinking about these things for 30 years and there's a long established tradition in the history of theology that God does exist etc etc. So naturally an atheist's work would be frowned upon by the theologians. So unless you flatter and pander to the ideological and intellectual framework that is already presented by the people that are doing the peer review you don't have a very good shot of getting published. Maybe that system would work if you had genuinely profoundly deeply thinking philosophers and intellectuals who were all making up the system but unfortunately that's not the case. In fact if I may be so bold I think the opposite is the case. I think you have a great number of fools that vastly outweigh the competent ones in academia and you have some group of fools judging the work of another group of fools and somehow by this magic process truth is supposed to emerge. Now this is a theoretical claim about the structure of some particular system but also this is becoming more and more clear with the empirical circumstance of the matter so there's a bunch of really interesting work that's coming out about how flawed the peer review process is in practice. About people essentially hacking the system and all the crappy research that has somehow gotten through the system even though it is peer reviewed. You have professional scandals, you have really intellectual scandals if people aren't familiar do yourself a favor and Google the SoCal Affair S-O-K-A-L Affair. This was a deliberate hoax to mock the pseudo-intellectuals in the postmodern community a guy got complete nonsense published in one of their journals and then exposed it as a complete fraud. This happened a few decades ago but it's happened a few times since even in areas like the hard sciences. So in areas like string theory for example or in biology there's a current scandal underway right now that's called a replication crisis Google that if you guys aren't familiar with it where it's coming out that more than 50% all the way up to like 80% of studies that are published in peer review journals try to be replicated and they actually can't even be replicated sometimes even by the very people that published the study in the first place following their own techniques they can't replicate the results. Now if that's happening that implies that the system is flawed one of these magical theoretical cornerstones of reproducibility is something that isn't happening in the modern academic system it ain't happening. So then why should we continue to have faith that somehow a flawed process that's resulting in nonsense being published and inaccuracies being published and non reproducible results being published why should we somehow have faith that this is going to get at the truth just by the good intentions or the sheer IQ power of those who participate in the system I don't buy it. On a very related note if I may get even more bold I think that the modern system of academia is something like a high functioning groupthink machine that actively purges people that disagree with orthodoxy. Now I say that both in my evaluation of professionals ideas for example the left wing bias with academic professors is something staggering 10 to 1 liberals to conservatives and conservative by academic standard is still very much liberal or it can be even worse ratios than that I think I remember something like 25 to 1 or 40 to 1 or something maybe in English departments where it's virtually dominated by extreme lefties. Academia is a very effective system for marginalizing and deplatforming people who have ideas that are outside of the mainstream. Now this is certainly true when talking with professors this correlates with my experience in academia and the conversations I've had with hundreds of different people from hundreds of different universities about interactions they've had with their professors but holy mackerel does it correlate with my experience with students. Yes I am talking about the shrill social justice warriors that are infecting American university campuses and screaming down anybody that disagrees with their particular ideas of how the world works and how white men are the cause of all of society's problems. I thought it was bad when I was in academia this was I don't know six years ago now I graduated six years ago but somehow it's managed to get like 10 times worse where these people are literally parodies of themselves they cannot they cannot handle ideas that they disagree with like they have to set up safe spaces to protect themselves from the scary ideas that they think are so wrong and so aggressive it's immoral just to think them much less discuss them aloud. The social justice warriors at these university campuses are anti-intellectuals there's no way around it they are anti-intellectuals meaning there is something called intellectualism and you could say is something along the lines of using reason logic and evidence to try to discover truth make your case persuade people to your point of view and argue about the nature of the world. These people radically stand opposed to reason logic and evidence it is all about being shrill and loud. Now for a while I didn't exactly know why or how these people existed but I think I'm coming to something of an understanding now. Interestingly enough I think it's political. I think what's going on whether or not all these people understand it in fact I don't think they do but I think this is an old tactic from the Marxist leftists that what the Marxists do is they don't immediately grapple with ideas the content of ideas they grapple with labels so for example if I'm making a claim about the world they don't look at my claim about the world they look at oh this is a white middle-class man making a claim about the world and similarly if they're black sociology professors making a claim about the world as well this is a black sociological professors claim about the world right they see the label first they see the socio-economic status of the communicator of an idea as being somehow more fundamental than what the idea is that is being communicated now this is very explicitly anti-intellectual but it's very powerful it's a very powerful political and manipulative tool to get people very enraged about some particular ideology which is very much insulated from any kind of criticism because if you have criticism let's say of the black lives matter movement they say oh the criticism you're a racist you're a bad person you're just a white man that's saying that you're part of this socio-economic class that is saying those things therefore your ideas are wrong and in fact you're probably aggressing against me you privileged man right so if we had to come up with a definition for what anti-intellectualism is look no further than the social justice warriors at American campuses now here is a terrifying thought those social justice warriors who are currently screaming their heads off and sucking their thumbs in academia those are the future professors in our academic system those are the people that are working through the system to get the formal credentialing to have the next generation of students looked up to them if you think academia is bad now just wait till the social justice warriors get tenure things are going to be even uglier and somebody like me could have an anarchist a finitis gosh i'd probably end up in jail or a messain asylum if somebody found out my beliefs while i was on campus now on that note i also realized while i was in undergrad that i didn't have very many peers that were seriously interested in discussing big ideas there were a few however there were plenty plenty of students that were getting good grades and clearly going down the academic route so what does that mean well those people that really weren't interested in the big ideas but man they could get an a just by regurgitating some nonsense that their professor told them to regurgitate those again are the professors probably right now those are the people that are just getting out of grad school and have some young crop of freshmen that's listening to them teach and thinking of those people of experts and i'm thinking good heavens the professors i'm learning from right now were students at some point the students that were my peers are going to be professors at some point i certainly don't see a lot of genuine intellectuals among them what does that mean what does that imply about this actual system of academia what i think it means is those who really deeply succeed and who flourish in the system and who think that they're contributing to the world of ideas are actually not the people i necessarily want to be working with in the world of ideas right if you're an academic let's say you're a mathematician and you're completely unaware of the controversy surrounding the use of infinities around the turn of the 20th century you don't even know about schools of finiteism or intuitionism you don't understand the basics of what you're talking about however you can still have a very very successful career being an influential mathematician teaching hundreds or thousands of students about all of your ideas while being i would say mistaken about the basics but completely unaware at the very least so those mathematicians that are at the top of the game they're they're well respected mathematicians i must say i'm a bit suspicious how did they manage to make it through this particular system how did they manage to succeed through the system it's almost like a reverse signaling mechanism what are you actually communicating when you're saying i have succeeded as they quote intellectual by working my way through the academic system what are you actually signaling and i have a suspicion that what you're actually signaling is not what you intend to signal now to preempt all the loud groans from people say oh steve you're such a crank you could never make it on academia let me just give you some analogies so i grew up in a christian evangelical household which means i spent lots and lots of time arguing with and talking with a bunch of pastors and youth group leaders and my friends parents for example about christian ideas and i saw very very specific patterns in their processes of reasoning one of the patterns identified and i've talked about before is faith that ultimately oh you just got to have faith in something which i think is a catastrophe another has to do with what you could call a literalism or holy book literalism or in my case the biblical literalism that every word in the bible is literally true and there's no room for interpretation however that works but there is another one that had to do with deferring to the expertise of the pastor deferring to the expertise of the youth group leader deferring to authority i saw it all the time and it has specific qualities that i suppose i could articulate but i saw it all the time and currently see it all the time in academia the deference to authority is utterly anti-intellectual i'm not the only person to say this there's all kinds of great quotes from einstein and richard feinman people who probably genuine intellectuals who were disgusted by the groupthink hierarchical deferent anti-intellectual nature of the academic bureaucracy and establishment and i certainly have seen it as well the worst cases i've ever seen by far don't come from the english department in the marxists or economics though those are terrible by far the worst comes from the mathematicians the way that mathematicians talk about kurt girdle the way they talk about canter the way they talk about the work of very prominent mathematicians and specifically in the first part of the 20th century is as if they're they're talking about quoting holy scripture i'm not exaggerating i've listened to so many examples when i was researching this online of these mathematicians saying essentially verbatim that canter absolutely proved with certainty without a shadow of a doubt that there are different sizes of infinite sets these terms like certainty absolute certainty proven which is utterly ridiculous and false but you hear it all the time and they're so unbelievably aggressive when it comes to doubting that in fact canter proved what he claimed to prove or that girdles and completeness theorems imply what people think they imply it is like walking up to a christian evangelical pastor and saying i don't think that the bible is literally true they just completely lose their minds and think that there's something wrong with you now the other aspect of this dogmatism that i have seen in academia and in the church is something like a mockery or something like um this arrogant chuckle that people make when you when you question their foundational ideas so if you transport back in time with me 10 years right i'm talking let's say to my friends parents about christianity and you start asking foundational questions they're the snicker that they'll get oh well i mean well you are 16 i mean everybody goes through the doubting oh you'll understand i'll pray for you i go here's this book written by this guy well look are you claiming steve that for the last 2000 years all of these people were wrong and you're right are you claiming that the professional theologians that have made their careers based on studying these ideas they're brilliant best in the world are all wrong and you're right about these basic things it is now without exaggeration this is exactly what you hear coming from the academicians you say something like yeah i think cantor was wrong i think in fact he was a bit nuts that oh you think that all the professional mathematicians for the last century was wrong yeah that's precisely what i think in fact i can prove it i've got an article on my site you can read it i think i make a pretty clear place to people that are not completely brainwashed into this particular mathematical way of thinking that yes the fact infinitesites don't exist but this is not restricted to mathematics of course you see this in every area of thought when you say something like yeah i don't think taxation is justified they go oh well you think the last 2000 years of political philosophers have all been wrong and you're right like yeah that's precisely what i think now what's funny or i guess maybe sad is that the people in academia don't think that they're doing this right they see it when you're talking about the evangelicals and they'll chuckle say yeah yeah but they don't they don't realize that's precisely what they're doing they think that they're because they're in academia now they don't fall prey to this kind of group think when from the outside it's very clear that they do okay so another gigantic issue that i have with academia is packed into the concept of formal credentialing specifically credentialing as it relates to intellectual content i'm not talking about going and getting a certification that says you can competently weld you can confidently screw pipes together like yeah okay i grant certification that's nice i'm talking about certification talking about oh well i'm a professional philosopher you can't engage in philosophy unless you have the certification now there are a few really big issues i have with this most sinister in fact is not just the confusion about thinking that somehow you have to have credentialing in order to think about philosophy which is literally no different than saying oh as a 16 year old investigating the christianity that your parents taught you you can't think about those things unless you go to seminary i mean it's completely ridiculous or oh your ideas aren't going to be sophisticated or accurate unless you have a phd and talking about you know christian theology the much more sinister phenomena that happens with credentialing has to do not with people that are grappling with the ideas from the outside but it has to do with the people that are credentialed this is honestly one of the more fundamental underlying problems i think that plagues the academic system and it spills out of academia into culture at large with i think some gigantically negative consequences those who have formal credentialing for the most part view themselves as experts as a function of them having the credentials so there was a really good quote when i was talking with brian kaplan on the show and i asked him do you need formal credentialing in order to understand some particular subject matter become an expert on it and he said no definitely not and if my understanding of the world came from what i was taught in school it would be such thin gruel that i essentially wouldn't know what i'm talking about i think that's a great way of putting that that what you're actually taught in school to get a phd is such thin gruel but those who get credentialed for the most part don't realize it this comes back to the framework that i was talking about earlier they people think when they get the credential that now they know what they're talking about because they've been taught all acceptable opinion while you have on the left and you have on the right you have the 15 percent tax bracket you have the 80 percent tax bracket if you master all of those all of those steps from 15 to 85 boom now you are the expert opinion you know what you're talking about never having entertained or conceived or grappled with the idea of whether or not we should have taxes in first place the same is true as i've said a million times even more emphatically so in mathematics people that learn how modern mathematics works will incorporate the existence of infinity and virtually all of their work and when you bring up something like finiteism like well there are no inferences their heads explode because they've never even thought of it and this is the killer part folks then they think oh if i haven't heard of this particular idea it must be a bad idea because i'm the expert i went to school i got the credentialing and i didn't hear it now that is a tragic line of reasoning this is why there's so much group think in academia because the academics themselves think that they're actually educated as a function of going through the system now all this might be fine okay and some theoretical world if it were the case that the academics actually learned the basics and actually grapple with all the competing schools of thought and went down to the fundamentals and grounded themselves in philosophy fine maybe we could accept the line of reasoning that says something like if i haven't heard of it it's probably not a good idea but that's not the world we live in we do live in a world with myopic experts those who are completely clueless of alternative theories and alternative world views that when you talk to mathematicians about the metaphysics of mathematics and they say things that they think are just certainly true about oh well of course numbers exist separate of our conception there are in some other platonic realm that may or may not have correlate to this particular world as if this is just obviously self-evidently true and they've never considered the idea that what numbers are as concepts tells you that the system is flawed that you can talk to somebody like a dr bruce kane who i spoke with at stanford about anarchism and in a matter of about 15 minutes he goes from fairly polite to really aggressive and mocking because he's obviously never dealt with the ideas that i was bringing up tells you that that system is not working if the ideas that i'm presenting that i've written about that are on my youtube channel that are on this podcast if they are so bad then there has to be some kind of clear thing that i'm missing some kind of clear refutation please put me on the right track i want to be closer to truth however that this has not been done or even been close to being done and what is almost universally received is just mockery and laughter and oh of course well that's not what i learned in school so therefore you must be a crank tells you exactly what it told me about the christian evangelical community that those establishments the credentialing establishments what separates a good theologian from a bad theologian a good pastor from bad pastor are wrong they're flawed and in both cases aggressively anti-intellectual how about what about the science argument steve don't you know that science isn't perfect and it's just a all human establishments are flawed and science is in the process of constantly correcting itself okay there is some theoretical idea out there that i was taught as everybody was taught about the magic of science and i'm sad to say that science as it's been theoretically presented to students and people who are interested in ideas does not exist currently what science in practice is is a gigantic bureaucracy that is primarily concerned with getting funding for itself if you are unaware of the process of how grants get awarded specifically from the government i suggest educating yourself on the topic because what you'll find is that a huge huge amount of work new work that is undertaken does not actually need to have correct conclusions when the papers are published it doesn't actually matter if after the fact people find out that the study is wrong because what's important is that the funding was secured in the first place what is legitimately exciting is that there are some people that are starting to blow the whistle on the say hey look here's a bunch of really crappy research they can't be replicated we have no reason to believe that it's true but it got millions and millions of dollars in grant funding maybe there's a problem here that community is growing if you google there's a phrase to something like i left academia because you put that in quotes in google and see what comes up because there's a growing community of the genuine intellectuals that are interested in the truth they're interested in accurate reasoning and they're finding holy mackerel the system of academia science a peer review this is largely flawed now the question naturally arises what's the alternative this is something that i and some others are actively working on one alternative is very clear and that's the sponsor of the show praxis if you're interested in actually going into the real world and bypassing this very corrupt and sad system that is academia check out praxis i think you guys will like it however it's an interesting question if this analysis is correct which i definitely think it is and the current system of academia is on the way out what is going to replace it i'm not exactly sure but i am encouraged because when i was in california i spoke with some individuals who were kind of in the tech community and the wealthy big big ideas community and though we disagreed on a lot of things what was common knowledge just everybody knew that this was true in this community is that academia is broken that the young intellectuals the real competent people are going to be dropping out the future does not belong to the phd crescent credentialed person from some ivy league school it doesn't and they saw that these are people that are definitely going to make a big impact in the world they have lots of vision and finance to do it and it was common knowledge that yeah this this old archaic academic system at least in the u.s is broken now that's very encouraging to me i think as the system kind of unwinds and as people especially in the general public see just how worthless the degree is how meaningless it is and in fact how it's kind of a reverse signaling mechanism that oh man you put yourself through four years of torture and wound up fifty thousand dollars in debt knowing less about the world when you started what does that say about you as this continues to snowball i think you're going to see a significant reduction in the amount of professional intellectuals that are out there and and that would be a very very good thing just like i think the less snake oil salesmen are out there the better the less faith healers that are out there is probably for the better the less bureaucrats that are existences probably for the better i genuinely think that the less professional academics are out there the better now for what it's worth i do want to leave on a positive note obviously have a great deal more to say on this topic and i'm trying to actively build a career contributing to the world of ideas in a very profound and meaningful way with the upcoming book i'm going to release called square one the foundations of knowledge this is a book on logic and epistemology but i think it is massively important and i wish somebody else had written it but since they didn't i have had to but based on some of the feedback that i've gotten from people both in person and online i know i'm not alone i know there's a great many people out there who are genuinely interested in the pursuit of truth they're genuinely interested in big ideas and they're genuinely competent and able to grapple with ideas that maybe their professors can't those people at some point are going to have a system they're going to have an outlet they're going to have a community i want to be part of it and if i can help bring that into existence that's what i'm going to do so that sounds like you you resonate with that and you know what i'm talking about get in touch let's build this community that we would like to see and if you have any disposable income you can also contribute to the show patreon.com slash steve patterson if you'd like to see more work specifically like this be created you want another voice to keep talking about these ideas then please consider becoming a patron to the show you can contribute just one or two bucks whenever i post a new show or an article and as the numbers grow those little contributions will add up to something big so i hope you guys have enjoyed this i'd love to hear your feedback if you resonate with this please share your stories people need to know the truth of academia they need to know people's stories and just how anti-intellectual the community is both from the professors and the students and just how useless to a large degree professional credentialing is the truth needs to get out there so please be a part of it so that's all i've got for you this episode i hope you guys have enjoyed it and i'll talk to you soon


Hi everyone, I'm Jyoti. I work as a product TPM and Facebook in the Enterprise Engineering team and today I'm here to share with you all the different types of TPM roles that are there at Facebook technical program management across Facebook is Existing since quite some time in different teams and there are multiple different series Which will tell you about what is technical program management at Facebook? What are the different kind of interview panels that need to happen if you'll need some kind of background? Definitely look at you know the Thirao's video series and this is an extension to that She's gone ahead and shared series about what does technical program management mean at Facebook What does the interview process look like and this is an extension to that in terms of the different types of TPM holes at Facebook Just to give you an overview being a TPM at Facebook means driving impact and delivering measurable results When we say delivering impact it needs to be measured and at Facebook We are a highly data-driven company so across different products and infrastructure teams We want to make sure that whatever TPMs are trying to drive is measurable in terms of the metrics And is continuously delivering high impact to those teams These could be different teams from hardware network deployment product releases performance and TPMs are known to strive for flawless execution against company white codes TPMs also cross-functionally are aligned with Facebook's core values. I've just listed them here for your visibility again Being bold focusing on impact the most important one Moving fast Facebook is a huge organization and it wouldn't be possible to deliver all that it does without moving fast Be open and build a social value specifically building connections around the globe That is the mission that Facebook is striving for and we are trying to build social value through all our efforts across products Or in proteins that we're trying to work here We dive deep into the different types of TPMs and like I mentioned there are two different series of what who are TPMs What is the interview process if you're interested definitely take a look at the tiras linkedin videos through product school And we'll dive into the type of TPMs at Facebook. There are primarily three main types of TPMs a product TPM Infrastructure TPMs and Facebook reality labs TPM team We refer to them as FRL. So if you're looking at anywhere, you know about FRL TPMs, that's what it stands for the Facebook reality labs We'll delve into each one of these more into detail and answer some questions towards the end The first one is product TPMs. So the first basic question. What do product TPMs do? There are primarily three different axes on which they specifically Support based on different business needs like you've seen leadership program management and technical expertise These are the three axes which define all the work that product TPMs do They need to basically able to use their technical strengths to work with the leadership Internally within the team as well as up outside of the team in terms of external leadership to understand What is the strategy for the product? What is the strategy that the team is trying to work towards? What are the goals? And in addition to that there is a lot of program management skills that are needed These could be across multiple teams multiple products and This is a combination of leadership and program management Which is highly required and a prerequisite for all the product TPMs across at Facebook In addition to the two axes that I mentioned leadership and program management We need to have technical expertise TPMs are expected to dive deep into the system design and architecture And become a subject matter expert to help scale the product usage They need to interact closely with the engineering team to understand the problems that they are trying to face The bottlenecks that they are experiencing and propose New solutions to those bottlenecks and help them scale further To be able to achieve the goals in a very short frame of time And what are the different types of teams you know that need to engage with product TPMs? Perhaps that might be a question which might come to your mind So whenever any team is in need of an owner To drive you know a technical product platform or a long-term technical except an initiative That is when the teams reach out to product TPMs team To request the help of a product TPM They work very closely with PMS EMS to go ahead and deliver high-scale impact to highly complex technical projects We'll dive into different product areas Just to give you a few examples and a flavor of what do product TPMs do at Facebook The first one is a sample of product platform and infrastructure You're I'll take I've taken an example of the metrics platform Which is a unified platform for building and managing any paid or organic metrics to ensure customers have consistent accurate and reliable metrics A metrics platform in addition to a product TPM had many engineers PMS EMS And many other disciplines you know on the team But a product TPM owned the platform with the engineering team and ensured that all the metrics across the company are consistent And discrepancies are detected quickly before customers find them as a result of the involvement of a product TPM The metrics platform Is now scaling across multiple external scaling products including instagram and has been used For customers to make sure that the complete platform is used across products thereby increasing the operations and efficiency Another example of the product areas where a product TPM is helpful across product initiatives One of the access that if you recollect I had shared is the xfn initiatives across functional initiatives And these are cross product initiatives Which means that TPMs as a product TPM they need to work across different product teams to understand What are the priorities they need to work with the business teams to understand? What are their priorities and cross align them and define the common goals for both across the product teams as well One of the example that I've taken here is the buyer and seller care team Which is basically the critical component of any commerce platform We need to make sure that it includes the protection for the buyers and the sellers And as well as strong customer support is provided to the buyers and the sellers A product TPM led the strategy and drove execution to scale the purchase protection to instagram shopping responsiveness Which not only just increased the merchants response to the support system But it increased the engagement of these merchants by 86 percent which was up 50 percent from the previous half So you see that when product TPMs are involved in a team they amplify The impact for the product teams and this is one example of a cross product initiative led by a product TPM The third one under product TPM is specialized technical product areas So there are multiple product areas like machine learning ranking and apis which require deep understanding of the technology and the industry One such example is the search internationalization, which is a complex problem to solve The product TPM identified high impact problems as part of the search internationalization team The product TPM needed to be aware of the different ML models that are part of the search internationalization internationalization team The product TPM Was part of the search internationalization team and which is a complex problem to solve The product TPM identified high impact problems inspired by cross team collaboration This needed the product TPM to be passionate and aware about the different geographies the different languages What are the different results and the issues associated with the different geographic regions? And the language mechanisms that are available and how they can be improvised over a period of time launching different experimentation models with the engineers and driving success over a period of time The product TPM successfully What over all these obstacles and has gone ahead and improved this which is being used across the different products at facebook How are basically product TPM set up for success? Perhaps that is one question which is very generic But yet at facebook being part of a product TPM team. We need to be really specific about measuring our success In addition to basically empowering the planning and road mapping for product areas TPMs are encouraged to participate in relevant meetings to gain the context Not only they are expected to drive product reviews check-ins and planning meetings for ownership areas But they're expected to work together At the same time divide up ownership areas for PMs TPMs and AMs and just for clarity PMs are product managers and AMs are engineering managers These are two different disciplines in facebook and TPMs work very closely with both of them to make sure that they can amplify the impact It's also really important to have clear communication and ownership areas and to be identified as the primary POC On the team. So everyone knows that when they need to leverage a TPM whenever in terms of prices or for regular planning and execution strategy So the success of the TPM is definitely measured in terms of the goals that are Drived by the complete product team and at the same time measured throughout the half There are certain myths about product TPMs and I've just listed a few of them here TPMs are project managers Definitely in terms of managing projects a TPMs need to wear the hat of a project manager But TPMs are also technical leaders and they help define and build the products that require technical knowledge and heavy cross-team collaboration Another myth, TPMs only scale AMs and PMs While TPMs do work very closely with PMs and AMs, but they scale and amplify the impact of the product And they identify risks opportunities for growth through internal and external partnerships Sometimes it's heard I have heard many a times that TPMs are crisis managers whenever a product or a platform is in trouble Raise a hand and call a product PPM and things will be working flawlessly While that is true to an extent But that's because TPMs have leadership and program management strengths and they are best positioned to go deep into technical product areas as subject matter experts So they definitely do crisis management in addition to amplifying the impact of the product teams One of the other myths and one of the final ones that i'm aware of is that TPMs are release managers Not just a release manager, but they strive solid execution by knowing the product and solutions enough to prioritize road maps and identify partner dependencies So though release management is part of the hat which the TPMs were During product execution But that is just one of the flavors of the multiple other areas that TPMs work with the technical teams to amplify the impact This is all that we have covered about product TPMs. We move on to the next section, which is infrastructure TPMs So infrastructure TPMs, they are infra TPMs for short in Facebook. So whenever you hear someone, hey, I'm a infra TPM Or there's an infrared PM opening. This is more about infrastructure TPMs What do infra TPMs do? They maintain and advance Facebook's intra teams in strategic ways Managing engineering productivity and this is more towards the back end and supporting the network of the complete Facebook infrared team What do we mean by infra? This is about the data centers capacity planning the resiliency The reliability of the network to ensure that all the products which are being used across the globe by billions of users by Facebook They basically are able to use the products in a smooth way and there is a network and a backbone team Which is enabling that and infra TPMs are part of those teams They are part of the cloud infra problems and solutions Some of the engagement models that infra TPMs work on are listed out here Primarily, we'll go through each one of them. The first one is defining XFN collaborations and defining the metrics and roadmaps across different teams So this is cross functional collaboration is needed to understand how basically Intra TPMs can impact the metrics across different XFN teams The second one is product or platform subject matter expertise There is a product and platform direction which needs to be strategized across and product And infra TPMs play a heavy role in doing that They define the metrics and roadmaps and they help prioritize across the different infra teams What are the different features that will increase the productivity and the operations across so on and so forth There's domain subject matter experts where they understand the technical depths of systems and solutions And they understand how the system is being used to assess the needs and the development on a gradual basis Because the products are evolving on a continuous basis a number of users are increasing on a regular cadence These are ongoing requirements which need to be fulfilled The engagement model also involves organizing the chaos across and getting into the technical depth of domains Because facebook encourages everyone to move fast There is a lot of organization which needs to happen in a short frame of time and in a lightweight model So the engagement model definitely encourages to identify the gaps across the systems that are there in a short frame of time and fix that That is the final one basically through your deep technical depth in more than one domain So this building of multiple skills across multiple domains and cross functional collaboration The final one is implementing all the planning organizing fixing is great But it is incomplete without the implementation phase and there are a lot of components that get into the implementation phase We have to execute communicate report track the metrics coordinate the acceptance meetings scoping the requirements Managing the tasks building a plan so that all of this can be visible to everybody upstream as well as within the team Making sure that the goals are defined which can be measured. That's really important at facebook measurable goals Identifying the risks laying out the dependencies and making sure that the team has the resources that it needs On time to be able to deliver the impact and the goals that have been defined for the half and throughout the house The infrared tpm team is comprised primarily of seven different sub teams They are just listed them here. There's a production network tpm foundation solutions and connectivity tpm Which is also called as fsc tpm's the core systems tpm data tpm Infra product tpm and this includes privacy security infra as well ai tpm's dev infra and core data tpm Though this session might not delve into the details for each one of them But I just wanted to make sure that you are aware of the different sub teams that are available in infra in case you're interested In any specific one. There are different Openings for these and then you can definitely be aware that which specific areas are of interest I'll touch into a flavor of each one of them just to give you a high level view of what these tpm's do The production network tpm's own end to end xfn network programs for the operability reliability efficiency and scalability facebook maintains its own data centers and there is a lot of host networking networking security and hardware planning And making sure that the reliability is in place the metrics are driven delivery engineering is taken care of And there is in front network engineering Like you see there is a traffic infrastructure Which needs to be constantly monitored on a regular cadence any issues which arise would need to be resolved And that needs a deep understanding of the complete production network production network tpm's are highly skilled at this And ensure that the backbone For the network on which facebook products are running are running seamlessly and maintained The next one is the foundation solutions and connectivity tpm's This is primarily divided into three pillars one of them is capacity planning The other one is connectivity programs And the other one is hardware which looks into the compute storage networking and power We have core systems tpm within the infra teams And they are responsible for ensuring and building that standardized tools and patterns for developing For the developer streams are improving their productivity and operations on the regular cadence They help engineering create and deploy services easily and efficiently By doing that they are really making sure that the engineers focused on building the products versus Making sure that anything that is related to services or the back end or reliability those kind of tools are Supplied by the core systems tpm teams This is an interesting angle the infra product tpm. So we looked at product tpm's and we are looking at infra tpm's What do infra product tpm's do great? That's a great question And let me just clarify that for you Infra product tpm's partner with product and infra teams to drive and manage product facing systems Like mentioned earlier, they drive impact and identify focus areas the current focus areas include augmented reality virtual reality events and launches WhatsApp messenger real-time infrastructure privacy security and integrity infra This is a blend of two because as a product tpm, you're interacting with product teams as an infra tpm It's more towards the backbone and the network infra product tpm's they partner with product and infra teams Just want to make sure I drive that point out here Next we come to facebook reality lab tpm's. This is the third type of tpm's at facebook Let's look at what are the different divisions and product groups So to be able to understand the facebook reality labs team what I've gone ahead and done is shared the different divisions and product groups Let's go through the divisions to understand. What is it that facebook reality lab tpm's do The first one is research So pioness research into new technologies to solve difficult technical challenges for augmented reality virtual reality products There are different product groups which are aligned to this specific division For example, we have the brain computer interface team the codec avatars team And the social presence team So if you're following basically facebook or recently in the news you've seen that there's a metaverse discussion going along There is an avatars team which goes ahead and builds avatars and this specific team or the division is focused towards those product groups building new avatars and Coming up with different social presence in that direction The second division is devices Now these teams focus on all products and influence our hardware devices from initial concept through mass production So the different product groups are hardware engineering and operations and product tpm's Intra tpm's are not part of this group. There is a different frl tpm's group, which is part of this group The next one is oculus and I will take that in addition with portal I will couple that because again they both are hardware devices So oculus is specifically a virtual reality transforming the way people play work and communicate More evenly around the world There are different product groups like the virtual reality platform social experiences work experiences on the oculus How to improvise that and the frl tpm's as part of these product groups Are working with the pms and ems in this team to make sure that The roadmaps are planned accordingly to deliver the goals for the oculus roadmap Likewise for portal, which is last on this list here. It's a wise enabled product And for some of you who might have used it you might be familiar with it, but for some of you will not It's very similar when we say it can be like hey portal, you know, and then the device wakes up So these are wise enabled products for the home that provide customers with hands-free video calling and content sharing So definitely check it out. It's a really cool device. I have been using it since quite some time and I really find it helpful The frl tpm's within the portal team They orchestrate the planning execution and delivery of portal products And again, like all the three different accesses are required leadership except in collaboration and technical skills We come to augmented reality ar which is the world and with augmented reality devices give users Superpowers the different product groups within this area are variables spark and ctrl control groups We have xr, which is a platform within frl division And building the common platform and shared technologies that powers the ar we are in portal devices there are different product groups within this division and That's assistant xr os and xr tech So all these different divisions Have different product groups and frl tpm's are growing As part of this team tremendously and there is a growth pattern seen in this team as well So this is a flavor of the different divisions and product groups within frl tpm group This is the final lot in addition to product tpm's in frl tpm's and frl tpm's there is a group of enterprise engineering tpm's These tpm's work on different programs that are cross functional complex and result in high impact These are primarily internal products And they are masters at facilitating Ensuring that they partner with business and service owners to implement new functionality And they work with multiple themes to determine what is needed and have a flawless execution The current focus areas for enterprise engineering include enterprise engineering security and privacy Enterprise engineering infrastructure enterprise products people engineering Mna which is mergers and acquisitions and enterprise engineering reliability This is not a different type of tpm But this is a group of tpm's to be aware of in case you're interested in specifically being part of the enterprise engineering team at facebook Thank you. So like we've summarized the different type of tpm roles at facebook Feel free to reach out to me on linkedin. I've shared my profile out here And in case of any specific questions, I'll be happy to answer them We should hear all the very best in your tpm journey At facebook and do check out the different series that facebook and product school are building across for tpm education at facebook Thank you