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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
75 min read · 14,924 words- 0:00 – 4:06
Introduction
- JFJason Feifer
We really are the products of change, and we forget that. We, we're, we're actually the argument for change because the things that we grew up with were the things that people had previously opposed-
- SSSteph Smith
Welcome back to the a16z Podcast, and welcome to 2023. It's hard to believe we're here, but if the last few years have been any indication, we are in for a lot of change. And that's why for our first episode back, we brought in someone who literally studies change, and that is Jason Feifer. You might recognize Jason as the longtime editor-in-chief at Entrepreneur Magazine, the host of several popular podcasts, and the author of his recent book, Build For Tomorrow. But in today's episode, Jason is sharing his six frameworks about how people understand and adapt to change, or how sometimes they fail to adapt to change. And he does this through studying and interviewing some of the world's most influential people, both past and present. So I'm gonna give Jason the floor, but I did wanna flag that at the very end, I think we play a very fun game where I go through a bunch of current technologies that are facing some degree of pushback, and Jason shares how they might fit into his framework. So that includes things like remote work, space, autonomous vehicles, AR and VR, biohacking, and lots more. So if that sounds fun, make sure you stick around to the end. I hope you enjoy this episode, and have a great 2023. [upbeat music] The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures. [upbeat music] We have Jason Feifer on the line. Jason, thank you for being here.
- JFJason Feifer
Thank you for having me.
- SSSteph Smith
For the people listening, we had to go through a lot of roadblocks to get this recording on the books, and then now actually recorded. Um, so Jason, thank you for your patience. Why don't you just give everyone a super quick background on who Jason Feifer is and what you've done over the many years you've been involved in technology.
- JFJason Feifer
Sure. I have to say, by the way, I kind of love when things break. Like, this, this was not a bad experience for me-
- SSSteph Smith
[laughs]
- JFJason Feifer
... because the thing is that when something breaks, it gives you an opportunity to fix it or to do something nice, and then people are kind of more grateful to you than if you had just been a normal person and things worked fine. I think about that a lot at work, about how oftentimes as I advance my career, the moment that mattered the most was when there was a crisis and I was able to step into it, and then afterwards I was like, "I'm really glad that that thing went wrong so that I could be the one to step up and fix it." So anyway, that's not to say-
- SSSteph Smith
Totally, which is what you did-
- JFJason Feifer
Is it-
- SSSteph Smith
... by the way-
- JFJason Feifer
That's right, because-
- SSSteph Smith
... for people listening, like, you fixed the solution.
- JFJason Feifer
Well, I didn't fix it. You fixed it, but you, but fixing it involved inviting me, uh, into your Riverside account and then me setting up this room and hitting record. So, um, you know, I have a weird amount of power in the a16z world right now that I'm sure-
- SSSteph Smith
[laughs]
- JFJason Feifer
... will be, um-
- SSSteph Smith
Temporarily, yes
- JFJason Feifer
... withdrawn from me the second this is done.
- SSSteph Smith
[laughs]
- JFJason Feifer
Uh, so, uh, anyway, who is Jason Feifer? [laughs] I am the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and that means that I have the unbelievable pleasure of spending all my time talking with and learning from, uh, just the most innovative and smartest people in the world. I am also the author of a book called "Build For Tomorrow," which came out of a, a lot of work that I've done both with Entrepreneur and then also in this podcast that shares the same name, though it originally started as Pessimists Archive. I, I know you guys at a16z are Pessimists Archive fans, and I used to be a part of that project and, um, launched a podcast under there that I then evolved into my own thing. So anyway, what am I? I'm a guy who gets to learn from incredibly innovative people and then turn around and teach innovative people how to be more adaptable because I think that that's the most important thing in success.
- SSSteph Smith
That's
- 4:06 – 8:10
Why adaptability matters
- SSSteph Smith
amazing. And I wanna get to your book that you recently wrote and published, "Build For Tomorrow," so we will talk about that and talk about the many themes and lessons from it. Um, but I wanna hear from you, why do you think that skill is important, that skill of adaptability? Seems to be something that you've kind of geared your career around, now your recent book. Why is that important today, and, and why of all the things that you could possibly focus on or write about, why have you chosen that?
- JFJason Feifer
Well, so I chose it because when I became editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine... And to be clear, I didn't have a business background per se. I really have a media background, so I've worked at a lot of different brands, only some of which were business. But when I started at Entrepreneur, I would go out and I'd be interviewed on podcasts or I'd be speaking at events, and I got this question over and over again, and the question was: What are the qualities of the most successful people or most successful entrepreneurs? And I kept thinking, "Why am I getting this que-" It's like a weird coordinated attack that all these people are asking me the same question. And, and then I, I realized, you know, if you listen to the questions that people ask you, you discover that what they're really doing is telling you what they think your value is to them. And so I started to think, "Well, why are people asking me this specific question?" And I realized the answer is because people see me as a pattern matcher. I, I get to talk to a lot of people, and therefore my value is that I can see patterns across lots of different experiences. So I thought, "Well, if, if I am to seize the opportunity here and be really useful to people and match their expectations of me, I should have a good answer to this question." And I spent years thinking about it and talking to very smart people, and w- what I came to was that the one thing that seems to define success is that people hang on through enough failures to get there. Uh, because the journey of anybody in business, I mean, you know, this is sort of we're talking specifically to a tech audience, but it is certainly not just specific to tech. You are absolutely not going to have the right idea at the start. But by just putting something out into the world, you can start the iterative process of developing something that is something people really want and that solves real problems, hopefully in incredibly innovative ways. And that requires a level of personal adaptability because it's not just enough to keep revising the product. You yourself have to be able to rethink who you are and what your company needs from you and how to relate to the people you're trying to serve, and then to just overcome the emotional, like, battering that is things not working out. And I have spent years and years running various theories like this by just, you know, game, global game-changing folks, and they all say, "You know what? That sounds about right." And that made me feel confident [chuckles] to put it out in the world that adaptability is the most important thing.
- SSSteph Smith
I love that you said that it happens on both the micro and macro scale, and we're talking, as you said, to a tech audience, but this applies everywhere in life, right?
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah.
- SSSteph Smith
You wake up one day and you have certain plans, and then it rains, and you're like-
- JFJason Feifer
Right
- SSSteph Smith
... "Oh, I guess I have to adapt." And it's funny because even in those micro examples, there is a huge spectrum in the way that people respond, right? Some people get very upset. Some people say, "Oh, well, this is an opportunity for me to stay in and work." And then if we extend that to the macro lens, which I'm very excited to talk to you about today, this has happened throughout history, right? You see this new technology arise and you're like, "Oh man, that thing that I've worked on, that skill that I've developed for 10 years no longer matters-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... or soon will not matter." And it's, it's again, it's, it's an opportunity to understand that you do have a choice in the way that you respond and that adaptability is something that impacts us at the daily level, the weekly, yearly, decade-long level. So I'm excited to talk through that.
- 8:10 – 22:24
Framework 1: We do not believe in our own adaptability
- SSSteph Smith
And you were one of the most prepared guests I've ever had. You sent me these six different, would you say they're frameworks or theories around how people, um, maybe miss the opportunity to adapt or don't really recognize some of these larger themes that have happened throughout history in the changing order. Why don't we just start there? What, what are these six different frameworks or theories that you've developed, and how would you kind of package them?
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah. Um, so I appreciate that. Yeah, I, I sent you a very, very long document that I like-
- SSSteph Smith
[chuckles]
- JFJason Feifer
... pecked out at midnight in a hotel room. And that, that comes out of, you know, me, me seeing how people kind of convince other people to work with them, and the answer is often that they just, they come with a solution. It's like, [chuckles] you know, like, if you go to somebody with a solution, how do they turn down good solutions? Uh, it's like, you know, don't ask for an opportunity, be the opportunity. So anyway, when we were first in touch, I was like, "I'm just gonna show you-
- SSSteph Smith
[chuckles]
- JFJason Feifer
... a whole lot of stuff, uh, and hope that you will read through it." So, so look, I, I am fascinated by both how entrepreneurs solve problems today but also about how change happened throughout history. The reason I really love the history stuff is because you know how the story ended, whereas we don't know how the story ends now. Anybody who's working on anything right now, you have truly no idea what's going to happen.
- SSSteph Smith
Mm-hmm.
- JFJason Feifer
And, uh, despite your best efforts to control it, and yet when you look backwards, you can see how decisions that were made played out, and I think that those are really instructive. If we can find the patterns across all of this, what we can see is where change and adoption of change goes right and goes wrong. And so I have throughout my work on all this many years been just trying to make sense of all the data, right? I mean, w- how can I draw lines between why people threw rocks at early automobiles and, you know, why people, uh, are, are uncomfortable with Lime scooters on the streets? And I think that we can learn a lot by trying to compare all these things. And so I came up with these six frameworks which are really ways to understand why people are uncomfortable with or outright resist some kind of new innovation. And we could be talking about big global changing things like social media, but we could also be talking about individual innovations that you are just trying to introduce to a client basically. Uh, so why are people uncomfortable with these things, and then what does it take to get them to embrace or understand this newness?
- SSSteph Smith
Right. How do we get them to adapt? And something I liked from Pessimist Archive, which you've been a part of, uh, is that it really is anything from the automobile to the mirror, right?
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah.
- SSSteph Smith
There are so many things that people, um, think are very, very commonplace today but were faced with resistance when they were first introduced. Um, and we'll go through the different reasons for those, but I, I think it's important to note that this isn't just like, yeah, social media or this big airplane. It could be the mirror. It could be the teddy bear. It could be jazz music.
- JFJason Feifer
Mm-hmm.
- SSSteph Smith
There are many things that people have faced with resistance that you would not expect today, and I think the lesson that we'll get to is that, you know, we see many parallels. So why don't we dive in?
- JFJason Feifer
Great.
- SSSteph Smith
Why don't you introduce the first framework from the six?
- JFJason Feifer
Number one is we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability. Uh, if you look back through time, and this even won't be unfamiliar to listeners of the a16z podcast, 'cause I know that Mark was talking about it not that long ago, which is that you find throughout time- Incredible concern that is repetitive about new things. So, uh, the number of things that have been claimed to be addictive or it goes on forever, right? You know, you- the things that people say about social media, you heard about the radio. Um, but it also, you know, it gets kind of funny and time-specific. The spinning wheel of the bicycle in the early days of the bicycle, people thought would make people go insane. Novels were believed to make women infertile, among many other things. But what I think you're seeing, and I'll tell you this one story that, that really captures it, that we generally believe that we exist in a kind of balance, and that that balance is very easily upset by new things. And so when something new comes along, we tend to process it as a loss. We see some new way of doing something, and then we instantly identify the thing that we will no longer have access to, or that the thing that we're very comfortable with that maybe we won't be able to do in the same way, and that feels like loss. And then because we, uh, we cannot imagine what the gain will be, and maybe don't even believe that there will be gain, we start to extrapolate the loss. So we say, "Because I lost this thing, I will then lose this thing." 1877, Thomas Edison invents the phonograph, or he might not have called it the phonograph, but anyway, it was the very first record player. It was originally a cylinder, and then it became a flat record like we know today. And people were... People's minds were blown. I mean, just consider how until that moment, the only way that you could listen to music is if a human being was playing an instrument in front of you. There was just, there was no other way to do it. And then suddenly there was a machine, a machine that had captured sound and could play it back to you. People didn't believe it at first. They had to be shown that there weren't, like a live, there wasn't a live band hiding behind a wall somewhere.
- SSSteph Smith
[laughs]
- JFJason Feifer
And then once they did come to believe it, they were amazed and fascinated by it, and they wanted it in their homes. You know who really hated that? The answer is musicians. Musicians really hated that because they saw themselves being replaced. And the leader of the resistance was a guy named John Philip Sousa. So John Philip Sousa, you may not know his name today, but you certainly do know his music 'cause he wrote all the military marches that we're still very familiar with. Da, da, da-da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So John Philip Sousa. So Jo- he wrote this article. He was the champion, the champion against recorded music. He was leading the resistance for his fellow musicians, and he wrote this piece called "The Menace of Mechanical Music" in 1906, I think. You can go look it up. And it is this string of article, a string of, of, of arguments against recorded music, and my favorite of which goes like this. So he says that if you introduce recorded music to the home, all right? Uh, if the recorded or the phonograph or record player enters the home, it will replace all forms of live music. All live music now gone. Because, you know, why would anybody perform live when there's a machine that could do it for them? And then the mothers will no longer sing to their children. Again, why would a mother sing to her children when a machine could do that? And then because children grow up to imitate their mothers, John Philip Sousa says, the children will now grow up to imitate the machines, and thus we will raise a generation of machine babies. Now, that of course didn't happen, but you can see the logic. You can see where he's going, that there's some kind of very specific balance here, that we are performing live in the home, which inspires mothers just, mothers to sing to their children, which, which inspires children to grow up to imitate the mothers and therefore kind of find their humanity. And that one little change to that very important chain breaks everything. But of course, that's not what happens. What instead happens is that we find gain in, in totally unexpected ways. You think about what happened with John Philip Sousa and recorded music, and as it turns out, recorded music enabled musicians to reach people that they couldn't physically reach. John Philip Sousa lived in a completely geographically based world, where the only way that he could, he could have people hear his music and make money off of that is if he traveled to them. But now he had the ability to scale.
- SSSteph Smith
I like the analogy of something breaking, 'cause that really does seem to be the emotion that arises when people visualize certain new technologies, where it's really like there is a current world order, and something about this is going to break. Maybe all of it. Some- sometimes-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... it, it gets that far. And it reminds me actually of the Douglas Adams quote that Mark-- You mentioned Mark's interview. He brought up there, which is really this idea that when you're brought into the world, you think that everything is normal and ordinary and just a part of the way the world works. Um, and you basically live that way until you're, I think the, the quote says around you're, around 15. And then between 15 and 35, everything's new and exciting and rev- revolutionary, and actually probably something that you can build a career around and that you can be a part of. And then anything after 35 is just fundamentally against the natural order, and then that's where you see, you know, a, a parallel from, um, the music example you gave. You see AI coming into play right now, a lot of, uh, dispute between artists and the people creating the AIs and the p- the other people building technology on top. And so yeah, I think one of the reasons it's so interesting to learn these stories from history is because you can apply them or you can see the parallels today. But I think that's a great example of just that idea of breaking society. Meanwhile, the society that we live in today broke the society from 100 years ago, which broke the society 100 years before that. There's no, like-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... true way that humans are supposed to live.
- JFJason Feifer
That's right. We really are the products of change, and we forget that. We, we're, we're actually the argument for change because the things that we grew up with were the things that people had previously opposed. The belief in, in a kind of easily breakable humanity, I think, is also a belief in fixed opportunity. Uh- E- economists have this, this, uh, theory that I love, which is called the, um, uh, the lump of labor fallacy. Are you familiar with it?
- SSSteph Smith
I am not.
- JFJason Feifer
So the, the fallacy is that there's a lump of labor. So the idea is that, that there are a fixed number of jobs and a f- and a, a roughly fixed number of people to do those jobs.
- SSSteph Smith
Mm-hmm.
- JFJason Feifer
And anything that creates an imbalance in one way or the other will create kind of unfixable disharmony, right? So th-this is, this is what would drive, for example, a lot of fear that, uh, new immigrants to a country will take the jobs from the people who already live in that country, and therefore there will be a lot of unemployment from the people who used to have the jobs, right? But that, that, that's not what happens, of course, because when immigrants come in, they are also consumers themselves, and so they create more jobs. Uh, right, so, so the, the-- there isn't a lump of labor. It's, it's totally flexible. Similarly, there's always been the belief, as John Philip Sousa had, that new technology will reduce the work available to the same labor pool. So, you know, he's, he's believing that recorded music will replace l- live music in many instances, and therefore there will just be musicians out of work. And to be, to be fair to him, that was true for a, for a while because musicians used to, for example, they would, uh, perform live the scores for all movies. You went, you went to see a movie, and the movie was silent, and there was a live band playing the score for the movie, and then that, that wasn't necessary anymore. And it was a, it was a difficult transition. Every time that there is a shift, we adapt to it, and it creates new opportunities. It isn't to say that it's easy. It's not. It will be disruptive, and there will be losers in that disruption. But I think what we need to do as a whole, as a society, is be alert to how and where those new opportunities come from and then how we can start to help people realize those new opportunities and then kind of create new value out of them ourselves.
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah, I think something that, uh, people fight against sometimes is the amount of abstraction that exists in our lives, and that is really a macro theme. If you think about many hundreds of years ago, humans, as you said, they were focused on, like, how do I have enough food to live? How do I make sure that I'm not getting diseases and dying at age 20?
- JFJason Feifer
Mm-hmm.
- 22:24 – 28:26
Framework 2: We don’t know what new things are for
- SSSteph Smith
bookend that and move on to number two. What is the second framework that you've developed?
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah. So the second one is that we don't often know what things are for, and if we don't know what something is for, then we will either be alarmed by it because it seems like it's, uh, you know, to go back to what we were just talking about, kind of breaking something that we were familiar with, or we just think that it's, it's frivolous. So oftentimes I'll go and I'll speak to crowds, and I'll talk about change and adaptation and technology, and then somebody will raise their hand and they'll say, "But you make a print magazine. Why are you still doing that?" And the answer is, "Well, look, I think that it's important to ask, if I'm in the content business, and I am, what is content for? What's it for?" Decades ago, content was for monetization. So, uh, you could sell ads against your content. You could sell subscriptions to your content. Now, you can, you can do that, but it doesn't make you nearly as much money, and I'm not just talking about Entrepreneur. I'm talking about the entire media ecosystem. So I look at content, I think, "Well, what is this for?" Content is for relationships. That's what it's for. Why does Red Bull pour a ton of money into content? If you like extreme sports, then, uh, Red Bull's your place. They got a magazine for you. They got videos. They got events. Do they make money off of that? I have no idea. Probably not. They probably lose money off of it. You know where they make money? Energy drinks. And the reason that people buy the energy drinks is because they feel really good about Red Bull because they developed a relationship with Red Bull because of the content. Content builds relationships, and then you can monetize the relationship with products or services that people trust you to provide because of the content. That is why we do it, because a print magazine is an unbelievable way for people to feel really good about Entrepreneur media. We do still make money on the print magazine, to be clear. It doesn't lose money, just doesn't make the kind of money that it probably did 30 years ago. But that's how I think we need to think about the entire media ecosystem. What products or services can we build that people will trust us because of the content? Stop thinking about the content as monetization. What is it for? It's for relationships. So anyway, I think that people f- fundamentally misunderstand oftentimes what the new thing that they're looking at is for, and as a result, they think that it is either bad or frivolous, and therefore they make incorrect conclusions-
- SSSteph Smith
I think they also maybe struggle to see what it can be for eventually, right?
- JFJason Feifer
Mm.
- SSSteph Smith
When you're met with a new technology, it's not the perfected version of that technology. And there's so many examples of this where, um, there was an 1865 newspaper editor that I found that said, "Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires, and that were it w- possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." And I could see how when that technology is either inexistent or nascent, you're like, "What on earth would I use this for?" But with millions if not billions of people who are using a technology, there is so much creativity that goes into building out the use cases, and sometimes it does take some time.
- JFJason Feifer
That is also very similar to something that Henry David Thoreau wrote, uh, in Walden, which is, "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." And you know, the funny thing is that Maine and Texas possibly back then didn't have anything-
- SSSteph Smith
[chuckles]
- JFJason Feifer
... to communicate. But as soon as you give them an ability to communicate, they will find something to talk about. They will find commerce. They will find information to exchange. That's the thing. Things aren't fixed. Once you introduce something new, people find ways to use it.
- SSSteph Smith
That's right. Ken Olsen was also famously quoted as saying there's, "There is no reason for an individual to have a computer in his home." And to your point, at that time, there may have not been, because there weren't connections between computers. There weren't certain jobs, certain information that this person had access to that would make that valuable. But with time, with more people who are integrated into that technology, with the evolution of that technology, the increased speed, the increased access, things change. And I think, I think it is important to focus on what something is used for and remember that your first encounter with a technology likely won't be the version that you encounter as it grows and progresses. And just a final note there, I think it's very common for us as humans to-- We basically encounter things and skeuomorphically apply something that already exists. So I mean, email is the perfect example of this, where literally it was like there's mail, and then we're just gonna call it email.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah.
- SSSteph Smith
But now it's a fundamentally different thing, and I think you see the same thing where people jump on Zoom calls and they're like, "Let's have a happy hour," and they just apply what we do in the, quote-unquote, "physical world." Um, but these things will evolve on their own into completely new things, and I think that's also important to keep in mind. Very hard to predict, but just it's worth having that lens of this will change.
- JFJason Feifer
So if you're an i- if you're on the innovator side of that, what we need to be doing is asking what, what is this for? Maybe of a nascent technology or something that we're developing, and then running, um, w- you know, is it running experiments, uh, seeing hypotheses through. Because ultimately, the reason why we're able to get to, you know, what you're describing there, Steph, with a, a, a nascent technology that maybe is really frankly for nothing right now but becomes something that's transformative, is because someone or a series of people had an idea of where this thing should go. And of course, you know, when you look back in time, it's not like these things are preordained. Oftentimes people had lots of different ideas and directions for, you know, for, for, for technologies. There were all sorts of funny designs for the bicycle that turned out to not be the final one that we have now. But what people were doing was, was carrying a hypothesis out into the world and seeing how people react to it, and then reacting to that. That's ultimately how innovation happens. And so the winners, the people with the competitive advantages, are the ones who are constantly asking, "What is this for?" And then are willing to see if they're right, and if not, be adaptable enough to take the data that they're learning and build it back into something better.
- 28:26 – 37:36
Framework 3: Innovators don’t build a bridge
- SSSteph Smith
Completely. I think that's a perfect segue into framework number three, which is that innovators don't always build a bridge. Can you speak more to that?
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah. [chuckles] Right. So here's, here's the challenge that innovators often have. It is that they are so familiar with the value of the thing that they have created that they do not realize that other people do not see that value, or do not understand it, or don't understand how it fits into their lives. I mean, look, I, I think that Silicon Valley is guilty of this all the time, of introducing very revolutionary ideas without doing the groundwork of connecting this new idea to something that people are already comfortable and familiar with. So, uh, to play that out, I'll take you back on another historical story. So in the, uh, in the 1800s, the car was introduced. People didn't call it the car. They called it the horseless carriage, and that of course is if they were being generous. If they were not being generous, they would call it the devil wagon, 'cause they totally, um, thought these things were the devil wagon, and they would throw rocks at them. And if you drove down the street in one of these early cars, somebody would literally yell, "Get a horse at-- Get a horse!" They would yell, "Get a horse at you." And, um, and when people tell the story now of how cars became the dominant mode of transportation, what they tell is the story of Henry Ford, that Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing and therefore made cars cheaper and more accessible to the masses. And though that is true, it skips over an important point and an important part of the story that I heard from a car historian- Um, and it was something that Henry Ford was the beneficiary of. Goes like this. So in the earlier days of the car, people are calling it the devil wagon, they're throwing rocks at it. And, um, and the auto industry is trying to understand what on earth is wrong, and they start to look at the way in which they're advertising the car. And they, they realize that they are advertising the car as a replacement to the horse. They're saying, "Get rid of Dobbin," Dobbin being the generic name of, you know, a, a, a horse, uh, like Spot for a dog. "Get rid of Dobbin, and get this car. Uh, this car is so much better than your stupid horse." But here's the thing, people hated that. They found that offensive, and they should have, because they loved their horse. Their horse was a member of the family, and as far back as they knew, every generation of their family had a horse. And now here come these people saying, "I have a totally better way for you to be, and your old way is stupid." People hate that, because people hate new things. What they like is better versions of old things. So what we need to do as innovators is we need to build what I like to call the bridge of familiarity, and that bridge goes not from us, the people with a great new thing, to the people who we want to have that great new thing. That is not the direction to build the bridge. You build the bridge the other way around. You start with where they are, and you build towards you. So back then, the shift that the auto industry made was that they stopped talking about the car as a replacement to the horse, and they started talking about the car as a better horse. So they started popularizing terms like horsepower and naming cars after horses, which we still do today with the Bronco and Mustang. "Oh, it's kind of like my horse, and I can, I can sort of respect it like and use it like my horse. Well, that, that makes a lot more sense to me than someone just coming along and telling me to get rid of my horse." This is what we always need to keep in mind. And what I find-- I was just talking about a guy who, um... And he had a, um, a product that was called-- He w- they were calling it Chicken Chips. Chicken Chips.
- SSSteph Smith
Chicken Chips.
- JFJason Feifer
Chips. Like out of ba- like out of a bag, like potato chips, but, but chicken chips. Now, um, does that sound appealing to you?
- SSSteph Smith
[laughs] No. I was gonna say, I'm not sure where you're going with this, but I would definitely not grab that off a shelf.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah. And, and, and that's the thing. It did really well in taste tests. People really liked the product. Nobody was buying it, because chicken chips sounds disgusting. So after a, uh, after a bunch of kind of consumer insights research, they changed from talking, from calling it chicken chips to protein chips. Why? Because people are already familiar with protein bars and protein packs and protein shakes, so the idea of it being protein first now signals to an existing audience. And where's the protein coming from? Well, you can find out that it's coming from chicken. Um, and that little shift completely unlocked sales for this company.
- SSSteph Smith
I love that you brought up a current application of this, because that was going to be my question. There are so many cases where there is pushback, and in many cases rightfully so, whether it's Web3, whether it's autonomous vehicles, whether it's, uh, different versions of space. Uh, there's a lot of pushback in some of these new, emerging, perhaps exciting industries. And I think you're right that there is that familiarity gap, where people are just like, "Why, why do I care if people are going to Mars? Like, I have problems on Earth." Or like-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... "Why do I care if something is decentralized? Like, tell me why that matters." Um, and so I think it's important, uh, to use those, those frames of just like, why does this matter? That simple question. Why does this matter to someone today? And even, like you said, using like simplistic terminology can completely shift. And, and I think another area that this reminds me of is, as I mentioned, AI is, you know, we went through AI summer. Things are still trucking ahead very quickly, but it's like how can you reframe something to not sound so scary, right? Like someone-
- JFJason Feifer
Mm-hmm
- SSSteph Smith
... who's a designer is like, "Oh, this artificial intelligence bot is creating art based on my artwork. That sounds really bad." And in some cases-
- JFJason Feifer
Right
- SSSteph Smith
... I can see how th-there is a negative consequence. But yeah, just thinking through how this can be framed as something new. And I, I will a- just add one more thing there, which is your, um, your examples of cars and applying, uh, horses to them reminded me of a conversation I had recently, which is someone basically saying, "I wanna get an electric vehicle, but man, I just love hearing the sound of my car." They just love that familiarity.
- JFJason Feifer
Mm-hmm.
- SSSteph Smith
And I was like, huh, I wonder... I, I mean, I could see an electric vehicle company one day maybe just like adding in that sound for familiarity. It's not creating the same emissions, but again, giving someone that bridge that you talked about, that familiarity bridge-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... of what they like and what they love and what they're familiar with, and then just giving them almost like a little step towards the next thing.
- JFJason Feifer
Totally. Elevators used to be, um, obviously hand operated, and then by the time we got to the 1950s, d- automatic elevator technology existed, but people didn't wanna get in them because they were used to having a, a human being, um, operating it. And y- thi- consider it. There's literally no other example in the world, or at least that the average person will use, in which you walk into a completely enclosed space with no windows and no human operator, and it moves you.
- SSSteph Smith
[laughs]
- JFJason Feifer
There's, there's nothing else like it. And, uh, and so people weren't getting into these things. Now, there were also all these kind of interesting fear-mongering, um, campaigns happening from elevator operator unions that were also contributing to it. But anyway, you know, one of the ways that- One of the ways that the elevator industry, um, found could get people inside the doors was by recognizing that what people needed wasn't necessarily a actual human. What they needed was the feeling that there was a human involved, and that there was a human t- touch, there was a human that would be there to their aid if something went wrong. And simply adding in a soothing female voice that said things like, "Going up, going down, floor one, floor two," that that by itself-
- SSSteph Smith
Wow
- JFJason Feifer
... helped a lot of people feel comfortable getting into the elevator. So that reminds me a lot of your example with the, you know, with the, the electric car making that noise. I mean, we do things like that all the time. Potato chips are engineered not just for flavor, but for crunch, and there's a reason for that. It's because things ... People are looking for those kinds of things as signals of quality. So you have to understand where people are and then start to build from there.
- SSSteph Smith
I love that example because it is one of those things that I have just taken for granted in elevators. I have never thought about the fact that there would be an elevator without some of those things, and now there are.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah.
- SSSteph Smith
But I never noticed how that might influence people today because we're so used to elevators and just accepting the fact that they're part of our everyday lives. But there was a time where I guess that really mattered. That's so fascinating.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah.
- SSSteph Smith
Let's
- 37:36 – 44:38
Framework 4: We mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem
- SSSteph Smith
move on to number four. What's-
- JFJason Feifer
Sure
- SSSteph Smith
... framework number four?
- JFJason Feifer
Right. So framework number four is we mistake a 1% pro- problem for a 100% problem. So I'll tell you another story from history, which is, um, which is that the waltz, when it was first introduced centuries ago, was ... People talked about the waltz in, uh, society Europe the way that people talked about Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs a few years ago, right? Like, it was this incredibly scandalous, awful, destroying the youth kind of thing. Society had all sorts of reasons why they hated the waltz. It was, it was, uh, you know, it was sexual. It involved too much, too much physical contact among young people. Um, but doctors were saying that the waltz was physically harmful, that dancing the waltz would take years off of their, peoples' lives. Now, this is something that comes up all the time. I'd, I'd, you know, mentioned it a little earlier. You know, there were doctors who said that the bicycle made people insane and that novels made women infertile. But I, I talked to a historian of the waltz, and h- he made this really interesting point, which was that in that case, the doctors were actually right. The waltz was actually very bad for people's health. But the thing was that they thought it was the dance that was harmful, the spinning, the contact. It wasn't the dance. It was literally everything around the dance. So how did people dance the waltz in the, in, like, the early 1800s? Well, here's what they did. First of all, they were in buildings that were enclosed, s- uh, didn't have modern ventilation. They were being lit generally by, um, you know, sort of oil candles. So you have the lighting is pouring noxious fumes into a unventilate- ve- unventilated space. Then they were all dancing on top of these particular, uh, these particular, um, kind of rugs, and the rugs would kick up all this dust and other particles that people would then be breathing in. And of course, they're wearing these incredibly tight, like, corset-like, you know, clothing. So you better believe that that was a pretty unhealthy environment to dance in. The waltz wasn't the problem. All these other things were the problem. Now, the reason I tell you this story is because we often mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem. People thought that the waltz was the problem. The waltz wasn't the problem. The circumstances of the waltz were the problem. This really goes to, in a way, that 1% again, where, which is to say people see the 99%. They see the hardware. They see the processing of credit cards, but they miss that 1%. And sometimes they miss that 1% and they think that the 1% problem represents a, uh, a 100% problem in the case of, like, Lime scooters. These are all terrible and dangerous, and let's get them off the street. Where sometimes that 1% is actually the thing that makes it work that you only understand and that your competitors don't. The more that we can focus in on that 1% and make sure that we're maximizing it, the more in which we are able to create things of value and also protect things of value.
- SSSteph Smith
I think that reminds me of something I love about digital products in particular, and it's that you get data on all of this, right? So if you were to compare the Lime example to bicycles, well, you could go and have a bunch of bicycles sold, and then people distributed throughout the country are crashing and getting hurt or using them for purposes they shouldn't be. But really, it's, it's extremely hard to get that information and to really act on what that 1% problem is. Because those distributions are not foreign in many aspects of life, right? Y- people have heard of the Pareto principle, 20/80. There often is something smaller that is accounting for a larger issue, and that's what's so beautiful about these digital products is you can get that information to really tease out, yeah, how do we improve this product? How do we fix something that might be a 1% problem that people are viewing as a 100% problem? And I think you're also right that it's just so hard, and we've kind of spoken to this throughout the conversation, just so hard to understand how technologies manifest. And often I, I find that people's reservations or fears early on about those problems just don't end up being the very real problems that exist later. So just a quick example that many people would be familiar with is just the phone. A lot of people worried about the radiation from phones early on, and that was, like, the big thing. Like, can we have phones near us? It's g- you know, it's gonna impact our health in these ways. And no one back then could ever have imagined the very real consequences of phones today. And I'm not saying that phones are net negative, but, you know, n- who could have imagined that these phones that we were worried about in terms of radiation would be the talk of the day in terms of, you know, like Upending democracy or, like, that these social networks would be, you know, kids spending too much time on this. I'm not taking a side on either of those topics, but more so just saying, like, no one could have ever predicted that those would be the, quote-unquote, "issues of the day" with that piece of technology.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah. I-- Totally right, and, uh, just a really useful quick framework to try to think through those exact kind of things is, you know, people often ask the question, is this perfect? Or, like, sort of that's at the heart of the, the 99% there problem is people are seeing an imperfection, and then they-- therefore they say, "Well, this whole thing, it has, uh, is, is damaging or dam- dangerous and has to be removed." Um, but, you know, the problem with asking is this perfect is that the answer is the same every single time. The answer is no. It's not perfect. It's never perfect. Nothing's perfect. So the better question to ask is, is this new problem better than my old problem? Because once we start tracking progress through problems, one, we just create the space for problems which are inevitable, and therefore, when a problem arises, it doesn't shock us. But also that it keeps us focused on the task at hand, which is not to create some kind of perfect balance like, you know, we were talking earlier about people w- believing that we're all in some kind of perfect harmony that gets easily disrupted. But rather that we are a nonstop rolling series of problems, and everything that we ever create just creates other problems. And so the question that we must evaluate is, do we have better problems? I would say that for all the problems, and certainly there are many of them, of a, let's say, just interconnected world, that the amount of prosperity, uh, um, and, um, and access to information just to, just for two things to start, the things that come out of that, which is all sorts of problems, I mean, really, you know, large and small. Uh, but I think that we have better problems now than we did back then when we, when we didn't have those same levels of prosperity and access to information.
- SSSteph Smith
Well, you'll have a plus one there from me. I know not everyone agrees with that, but-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... let's move
- 44:38 – 51:22
Framework 5: We imbue innovations with personal anxieties
- SSSteph Smith
on to number five, which I think relates to what you're speaking to, which is that people not only resurrect or dig up problems with these new technologies, but they also tend to map them to other problems within society, which may be removed or overlapping to the new technology.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah. So you're right. So, right, that we imbue our innovations with our own cultural or personal anxieties. So [chuckles] I'll tell you about the, um... You know, we've been talking about kind of technology, uh, in a more traditional sense, but, um, you know, here's something that was innovative all the same, which is the teddy bear. So the teddy bear was invented in Germany right around the turn of the century, and then it made its way over to America around 1906. 1907, it became popular enough to trigger its own moral panic. There was a national moral crisis over the teddy bear in 1907. It started in Michigan with a, uh, priest, uh, named Michael G. Esper, who had given this sermon about how damaging teddy bears are and how dangerous they are.
- SSSteph Smith
It sounds so ridiculous for there to be-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... a moral panic around teddy bears, and it always just reminds me of the fact that people probably will look back 100 years from now, and there will be something like the teddy bear. I don't know-
- JFJason Feifer
Totally
- SSSteph Smith
... what it'll be, but it always just reminds me that, like, this is-
- JFJason Feifer
Oh, it's totally true
- SSSteph Smith
... just so ridiculous today, and something parallel will happen tomorrow.
- JFJason Feifer
Right. It started with a reverend named Michael G. Esper in a little church in St. Joseph, Michigan. And, uh, one day, he gave this fiery sermon about teddy bears. He said, [chuckles] this is an actual quote from the sermon, "When your little girl asked for a doll, and you gave her a teddy bear, your action was fraught with a consequence that is only excusable on the grounds of your ignorance."
- SSSteph Smith
[chuckles]
- JFJason Feifer
He called the bears bundles of horribleness. He said that they are the most harmful and repulsive nature fakes ever perpetrated. Now, what, what is going on? Wh- how could somebody be this worked up about a teddy bear? And he, here, here's what's... Well, well, first of all, I should say that it wasn't just, um, you know, kind of one crank in, in Michigan. Um, what happened was that he gave that sermon. That sermon was then reprinted in newspapers around the country, the kind of 1907 version of going viral, and then it triggered, uh, all sort of... It triggered other churches, um, uh, kind of giving their own sermons. It triggered schools banning teddy bears. Uh, a national crisis/conversation took place as a result. Um, here is what he was concerned about. He was concerned if girls play with a teddy bear instead of a doll, you heard that from the quote, then they are going to do lasting damage, not just to themselves, but to the family. Why? Because girls, of course, have one purpose in life in 1907, and that is to grow up and become mothers. And when they play with a doll, they develop a maternal instinct, and that enables them to then grow up and be mothers. But if they set aside the doll and play with a teddy bear instead, they will not develop a maternal instinct. They do not develop a maternal instinct. They will not grow up to be mothers, and thus we will have, uh, you know, the end of the human race. That was, that was his real concern. Now, well, now, you know, you, you listen to that and you think, "Well, that's a real logical leap." Like what, what could possibly be going on here? And the answer is that if you look at what was happening in the culture of the time, women were becoming educated in a way that they had never been before, and they were also entering the workforce in a way that they had never been before, and that was very alarming to the traditionalists of 1907, and they were distilling all of that anxiety down into the teddy bear. Oftentimes, I think what we see here is we see our own concerns about either shifts in culture or sometimes our own fading relevance, and we, we therefore Treat something new as if it can only be bad because it is upsetting the delicate control that we like to have on things. I mean, I, I will tell you as a, as a, uh, as a longstanding member of the traditional media, uh, right? Um, we, we don't, you know, you don't get a, a, a membership card, uh, to traditional media. But, um, but I started my, my career in community newspapers, and then I've, I've worked in national magazines ever since. Um, I... You know, I'm often deeply frustrated by the way in which I see traditional media cover technology. Um, I- a- and, you know, the, the kind of alarmist look for the worst possible outcome and then report it as if it is, uh, as if it is, uh, you know, a fact or at least certain outcome. Um, I mean, just one example was that a completely absurd New York Times story from earlier this year in which they found out that LinkedIn was doing some, like, basic A/B testing, and then they ran this story about how LinkedIn was actually conducting a gigantic, uh, um, hidden secret experiment on, on whether or not people get jobs. I mean, it's just like-
- SSSteph Smith
Oh, boy
- JFJason Feifer
... guys, do you not know that A/B testing is, like, a really basic thing that actually improves-
- SSSteph Smith
And that your firms do it as well?
- JFJason Feifer
Yes. That The New York Times does it as well. I mean, this was just really nuts. But anyway, why... What's driving this? I, I'll tell you. I think that it... And I don't think that people are doing it consciously. But I think that generally speaking, um, people in traditional media are very, very afraid that, um, the, the, the systems that, um, kind of drove the relevance of the organizations that they work in, and therefore the structures that people work in, um, are gonna get upended.
- SSSteph Smith
I completely agree, and I think in some cases it's not just anxiety. It, it's really protecting an investment of some sort, and that could be an investment in a skill, like a journalism degree.
- JFJason Feifer
Mm-hmm.
- SSSteph Smith
That could be an investment in a taxi medallion-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... that no longer is relevant or is less relevant or less, you know, worth less literally than it was prior. And so, yeah, I think it's important for people to keep that in mind on both sides. I like that you pointed out it's not just important for the person who might be anxious or scared or protecting what they've invested in. It's also important for the people who are developing these technologies to understand that technologies, especially if they're game-changing, will upend power. They will upend structures that already exist. And there's beauty to that, but it's also very scary for someone on the other side. And so figuring out how to bring that technology into the masses in a way that's understandable, in a way that's clear, in a way that's perhaps, if possible, less scary, um, is important. So
- 51:22 – 1:03:45
Framework 6: We oversimplify problems
- SSSteph Smith
why don't we-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... dovetail that into the final framework, um-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... which I think is related.
- JFJason Feifer
We oversimplify problems, and when we oversimplify problems, we inhibit our ability to come up with meaningful solutions because you cannot create a meaningful solution to something if you do not really understand the underlying problem. So my story for this is, again, a more of a recent one. After the 2016 presidential election, y- you know, there was all this, um, concern about how Russia had interfered, and pundits and politicians all had this word for it, which was unprecedented. I mean, you know, you would just... Doesn't matter what cable network you turn on, you would hear them talk about un- uh, this was an unprecedented attack on democracy, et cetera, et cetera. And, um, they all, they all blamed, in one way or another, social media and particularly at the time Facebook, um, and to a lesser degree Twitter on, on the problem. And, um, I, you know, I, I had, I, I had started to wonder as I was hearing people talk about this being unprecedented if it was unprecedented, 'cause it just seemed, it seemed maybe, um... it seemed maybe too simplistic to say that Russia interfering with American elections was unprecedented. And so I, uh, I found this, this guy who, uh, named David Shimer, a historian and foreign policy analyst who had just written this book called Rigged about the hundred years of Russian, um, uh, interference in American elections, and, uh, and called him up, uh, to ask him about it. And he said, I, I am just gonna read you what he said to me 'cause I just thought it was really powerful. He said, "If you treat something as unprecedented, what you're saying is there's no history behind it. What you're saying is it's never happened before, and that it makes it n- and that makes it much easier to create rumors, myths, and even lies about the subject." Now, then he went on to basically explain to me how for 100 years Russia had run the same exact playbook on American elections, and that was to utilize the dominant mode of communication at the time, which could either be newspapers or radio or television or social media, to exacerbate existing tensions in American culture. And that was, that was the playbook. Now, of course, in 2016, social media played a, a, a larger role in American life than it ever did before, and it, you know, I mean, it was, it hasn't been around that long. But what Russia did with social media was not really any different than anything that else it had ever done. And the... I asked, I asked David, "Okay, that's a really interesting academic point, but what are we supposed to do with that?" And he said, "Well, look at, you know, as a starting point, it's this. Right now the conversation is entirely about social media." And that's not to say that social media is blameless. Uh, you know, Facebook for one could have certainly h- had a smarter approach to this problem, a more proactive approach to this problem. But if we simplify the problem of Russian interference in American elections down to it's a social media problem- Well then, look, you could throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail and you could shut Facebook down today, and you wouldn't solve that problem because that problem is bigger than social media. So if everybody is focused on only one part of a problem, then you are not solving the problem. And we need to have smarter conversations about exactly what is underpinning the problems and the challenges that we face, either culturally or at an individual company, and then start to really develop meaningful, comprehensive solutions.
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah, I think you're right about that. I also wonder sometimes whether, as I mentioned before, we're, we're becoming so abstracted from the things in our lives, how that plays into all of this. And what I mean by that is, you know, social media is one example that you give, but you could also give like self-driving cars as another example, or some of the other things that we engage in that we just don't understand. Even you-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... and I on this call, I cannot explain to you the technology behind this call. Like the really nitty-gritty, like what bits are moving where and why-
- JFJason Feifer
Mm
- SSSteph Smith
... and, and how this is so much faster than 20 years ago. I can kind of speak a little bit to it. Um, and, and we're involved in technology. We interview people who create these technologies. And then I just think back to people who, you know, they... [chuckles] I mean, the New York Times example that you gave earlier, where someone doesn't know that A/B testing is happening. Well, there are people who are even f- further from the technology than that, right? Who just don't understand the world that they are now placed in. And so I do wonder, um, I think you're correct that people simplify these problems because that's the only tool they have. They don't know the nitty-gritty about how these algorithms are working. They maybe don't have the historical perspective to understand, like the scholar you spoke to, about all of the different, you know, pieces or ways that Russia was involved in the past. And so I don't know if I have a solution. Do you have any thoughts there? Like, we are becoming more abstracted, and then simultaneously these technologies are becoming more complex, and so it's hard for people not to simplify, if that makes sense.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah. Well, I think that's absolutely right. People, people will and must simplify. And I think on an individual basis, there's just kind of little that you can do about that. It'll be a kind of chaos of noise and out of which will come use cases that make sense to people, right? I mean, I, I think about AI right now and the way in which people are using these new tools to, to do every random thing from crea-- I mean, [chuckles] I was like laughing today at, at, uh, this, these AI images somebody had, had created of, um, Avengers characters if they were in a Wes Anderson movie. Like, it look-- It's so funny. What, what... And then you're seeing-- Then you were gonna start to imagine all the ways in which this could be used for, for bad or for good, and people will try all sorts of things, and it'll be noisy and chaotic. And, and, and I think when you put something out into the world, in a way, there's kind of nothing that you can, you can do about that. Um, outside of if you are an innovator, then if you're a, a, a sort of an entrepreneur, then find the use case that is going to solve people's problems and really focus on it, and then tell a story that is so compelling that it breaks through that noise, or it helps clarify to people why this is useful to them. You know, of all that we've talked about so many things today that, that, um, that were incredibly disruptive and that were feared and resisted. You would think that electricity would be this thing that people, people just, I mean, you know, "Here's this thing that's gonna invade my home and animate my objects," and what a terrible, terrible thing. Um, but the thing was that at the very beginning, electricity for the average resident of a home had only one use case, only one, and that was safer lighting. People were lighting their homes by, by gas, and they understood that that was incredibly dangerous, 'cause if the flame goes out and the gas keeps coming in, you could get poisoned to death. Electricity was an ability to re, to remove that danger in your lives by bringing in safer lighting. For that reason, people welcomed it in their homes, largely. There wasn't the kind of mass panic over electricity. There wasn't. Then once we had that, we could start to build and create new uses for it. There was a new familiarity of this thing in our home, and now, of course, we wanted to see what else it could do. And, you know, I think that in a way, what is that? That's, that's problem-solving. That's storytelling. That's also being aware of and building into the very foundation of the thing that you're building, if you're a company, if you're creating something new, of what people need and where the shifts are in their needs. I was talking to this disruption expert, his name is Hamza Mudassir, and he was telling me, um, about this really interesting theory of what killed Kodak. And, uh, you know, the story, of course, is that the digital camera killed Kodak. And there's, there's good reason for that. You know, the Kodak very famously, they developed the digital ca-- They were part of developing the digital camera. They basically put it on the shelf. Um, they saw it as irrelevant or, or competitive and whatever they thought. And, uh, then of course, somebody else, many other people came along and, and created a digital camera and, and the business was gone. But he says, "No, no, no, that, that's, that's not what killed Kodak. What killed Kodak wasn't the digital camera. It was Facebook." Why? Because when the digital camera first came out, people saw it as a novelty, but they didn't see it as a replacement to the camera film Yeah, you know, the photos were grainy, and even if they were good, what were you going to do with them? People were used to printing ca- printing photos out and putting them on their refrigerator or putting them in albums, and you had really nothing to do with the digital camera. But then Facebook comes along, and Facebook is really the first major use case for sharing and storing digital photos. Now people know what to do with these things, and as a result, they know what to do with their digital cameras. And as a result, they like their digital camera more than they like their camera, their, their film camera, and that's what killed Kodak. Now, what's the moral of that story? The moral of that story is that Kodak was so busy thinking of itself as a camera film company that it thought all of its competitors were companies that made camera film, and therefore, the way to compete against those companies was to make camera film better, faster, and cheaper. But as a result of that, they didn't see disruption coming from a completely different space. But they could have if they didn't think of themselves as a camera film company, and they thought of themselves as a memories company. And if they did that, then what they would be obsessed with was their consumer and w- how their consumer shares memories and captures memories and what they want to do next. And they would have seen Friendster, and they would have seen MySpace, and they would have anticipated that eventually somebody's gonna come along and make a much better version of those two platforms that were pretty buggy and, and, and, and eventually, um, people are gonna wanna share memories in different ways. The... I guess the reason I'm telling you that story is that we need to build into the way in which we operate the assumption that there will be problems and that there will be change. Change not just that we are introducing into the world, but change that we are navigating ourselves, that change will constantly come for the thing that we make, even if what we made changed things for others. And if we are aware of and alert to that change is always going to come to us, we will start to build structures and approach the world in a way in which we are anticipating that change or at least operating in the belief that the thing that we do today is not the thing that's gonna happen tomorrow. That's really the only way to solve these problems. That's how to make things seem complex, is by never allowing us to simplify, to oversimplify, but to realize that everything that we do is just part of a complex structure and that whatever balance we find, if we find it at all, is going to be very temporary.
- SSSteph Smith
You're so right to say that balance is temporary. We always find these, like, temporary states of the world, but that is just subject to change, and I think the six different frameworks that you've provided today are really helpful as we've talked about for someone who is the innovator or someone who is part of this wider world that is being innovated on.
- 1:03:45 – 1:04:55
Framework summary
- SSSteph Smith
So why don't we just quickly wrap up by you sharing the six different frameworks?
- JFJason Feifer
Number one, we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability. Number two, we often don't know what new things are for. Number three, innovators aren't building a bridge to the people that they're trying to reach. Number four, we mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem. Number five, we imbue our innovations with our own cultural and personal anxieties. And number six, we oversimplify problems. Now, you know, it's funny stuff. We've been calling these frameworks the whole time. As I read them back, I realize that really what we're talking about here is major problems. But of course, as, i-if we think about what's driving those problems, then we drive solutions, and that's really where the frameworks come from. So if we are grappling with why is something not working or why are people not understanding or valuing this new thing that we have spent so long creating with such care, then I think thinking through those problems will help us identify maybe where we have gone wrong and where the beginnings of solutions are for people and ourselves.
- SSSteph Smith
I couldn't agree more, and I know we only have a
- 1:04:55 – 1:19:19
Game: Jason assesses current technologies!
- SSSteph Smith
few more minutes, but I wanna play a quick game just to make this, as you're saying, this relevant, this tangible for people today.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah.
- SSSteph Smith
So we're not gonna be able to get through all of these, but I have... There's gonna be two parts to this very quick game.
- JFJason Feifer
Okay.
- SSSteph Smith
The first part is looking at a couple pieces of technology, and we're using that broad sense of technology, um, where I'm gonna read you a headline from the past for a particular piece of technology, and you're gonna tell me which different problem or framework as we were using before applied. So-
- JFJason Feifer
Love it
- SSSteph Smith
... let's just, let's go with the mirror, which I mentioned before.
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah.
- SSSteph Smith
So we have the mirror here. Okay. The quick headline is, "Little Aids for Vain Women." And then there is a much longer paragraph which basically talks about how a woman no longer has to go into a store or go back home in order to fix up her makeup or see her face. Um, she now has it on her. She can now see herself at any point in the day. "Little Aids for Vain Women." Where do you think this fits in?
- JFJason Feifer
[laughs] Okay. Uh, so that's definitely number two, which is that we don't often know what new things are for because they're describing something very similar to how we talk about selfies today, right? Which is that, um, um, these mirrors are, are exacerbating and playing into people's vanity and, I mean, they [laughs] those, those, those old articles about the mirror would talk about women who, um, who will, like, literally not pull their faces up from the mirror. Th-th-there, there were concerns that women would be wandering out into streets and get hit by cars because they're looking at their mirror, uh, the whole time. Um, and of course, now we talk about that with our cell phones and, um, and with, with selfies. But what people didn't understand was that, you know, the mirror wasn't going to override our basic humanity. Um, the mirror was going to be a wonderful new tool that people used in certain circumstances and that frankly everybody would be happy to have one.
- SSSteph Smith
Exactly. I also think it plays into, I think, is it number four or five, where basically I think people were just a little worried that women would have a new tool To use in ways that they, they didn't like. But with that said, let's move on to something else we've talked about, the camera.
- JFJason Feifer
Mm-hmm.
- SSSteph Smith
All right. This actually relates to the prior point, so maybe actually we'll move on to the next one. But basically, this headline says, "People Who Photograph, Their Vanity," and it goes on to talk about how, "But now, a stroll down Broadway reveals hundreds of unknown faces, taken in the imperial style of photo so much in vogue." So basically now not only could rich, wealthy, famous people be photographed or painted, but now everyone could.
- JFJason Feifer
Yes. So this is... I'm slotting this into number five, which is we imbue our innovations with our own cultural and personal anxieties. Possibly what s- those writers of the time were reacting to was, um, you know, a- when, when America was a, was a, a far more dominantly religious country, there was a belief that, uh, va- you know, vanity is a sin. It's, you know, it's one of the sins. And, um, and people were really taught that any focus on themselves... I mean, you know, this is... We're, we're kind of rewinding back to a, to, like, a 1700s, 1800s, um, um, timeframe, that any focus on themselves was vain and, uh, you know, therefore, uh, an insult to others and an insult to God. When the camera came out, people were actually often very concerned about photographing themselves and sending the photo to others because it was, it was such a sign of vanity. And so there were these really interesting, like, Emily Post style, um, etiquette guides explaining that, you know, you taking a photo of yourself and sending it to someone else is not vanity, it is a gift. Because, you know, the camera's coming out at a time in which people are moving, but in which... moving around the country, but in which transportation options are, are, are not that great. And it's possible that a family member of yours would move away, and then you would never see them again, and the best that you ever had was these little photographs. That was the way in which you could look into your brother's or sister's or aunt's or whoever's eyes and, um, and that was a gift. That wasn't vanity. And that was a real tension around the camera, and I think it's a tension that we're seeing play out now in the way in which we, we share things from our own lives today.
- SSSteph Smith
I agree. There's a level of judgment in both. All right.
- JFJason Feifer
Yes.
- SSSteph Smith
Final one in part one of this game is the airplane. All right.
- JFJason Feifer
Okay.
- SSSteph Smith
So I like this one 'cause it's a little different, and the headline says, "No Chance for the Airplane." Um, and interestingly enough, this one also relates to, uh, women. It says, "It can never have the support of the feminine sex, and that alone is all that is needed to relegate it to an inescapable and dingy obscurity." And this is one of many headlines that took many different forms. I think I read another headline that said it would take over a million years for the airplane to be successful.
- JFJason Feifer
[laughs]
- SSSteph Smith
Only to which I believe the Wright brothers took flight two months later. So what do you think? What do you think about the pushback against the airplane?
- JFJason Feifer
Oh, that's a really interesting one. Okay, I'm gonna slot this one into... This is a complicated one, but I'm gonna slot it into we don't often know what new things are for. And the reason I'm going there is because this is really about the dawn of the technology, and it took some time not just obviously to perfect the technology, but then to develop it out into a way in which it was really commercially viable. So at the time, I could imagine that people would look at the airplane and they would wonder, "Well, even if you get this right, what am I gonna do with it?" [laughs] Right?
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah.
- JFJason Feifer
Uh, it's sort of in the way that like right now-
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah
- JFJason Feifer
... um, y- you know, uh, Richard Branson can send people into space. But there isn't really a point to it at, at this point, right? It's just a kind of joyride for wealthy people. Uh, but it's very possible that at some point in the future, there will be a, a true purpose for going into space. I k- kind of can't anticipate what it would be, but, uh, for the average person, that is. For the average, like, random person to go into space. Um, but, uh, you know, in the same way that when the car was introduced, people often didn't know what to do with it because the, uh, the very idea of a commute didn't really exist. People didn't... They weren't commuting long distances. So they were mostly joyriding with these things, and a lot of people were saying, "Well, this is obnoxious. I don't need this, like, thing to joyride." So I think that people just didn't know what it was for because they couldn't imagine how it could develop into something that served a purpose, and in a world that was so connected that there would be reasons to be flying around all over the place.
- SSSteph Smith
I think you're right. I think that was one of those, you know, exponential technologies where if you're early on in that curve, it's just so hard to see how this could progress. Um-
- JFJason Feifer
Yeah
- SSSteph Smith
... okay, second part of this game-
- JFJason Feifer
Okay. Oh, I like this
Episode duration: 1:19:29
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Transcript of episode omK2nK16qoI
