The Exchanges

Q summer with notes from friends who journalists had reached out to, to try to find some dirt on me. So I think this is a culture right now versus to attack technologists, but let's jump into an analyzing them instead and hearing about them. You know, your book's called the geek way. How do you define a geek? You grew up obsessed with computers. Do you count as a geek?

A Yes, but that's being arrogant because geek is a term of praise for me. And I think more broadly in our culture, the definition of geek has morphed and it's now tossed around more as a term of praise or admiration than an insult. And it's not just somebody who likes computers way too much. These days, I think a geek is anyone with two characteristics. Number one, they get obsessed with something and they're tenacious and they can't let it go. And whether that's wine or Star Wars trivia or artificial intelligence doesn't really matter. They just get obsessed and they're, they, they want to solve the problem that, that is obsessing them. And if the solution that they come up with is unconventional, that's okay. They're not constrained by conventional opinion or their mainstream or status quo. They will go where their inquiries take them, even if it's to an unusual place. So these days my shorthand for a geek is a, is an obsessive maverick.

AI assessment note: “Yes, but that's being arrogant because geek is a term of praise for me.”

Q It's a good self awareness insight. You know, I want to ask about, you know, tech today. Obviously a lot of what we've, you've described is how we created Silicon Valley. When you look at the big tech companies today, do you worry some of them are at risk of losing the geek way? Is it still there?

A I absolutely do, mainly because the people I talked to worried about it, and not, not just because of whatever the current crop of companies is, but because these tendencies that we've been talking about push, lead you away from the geek way. Overconfidence will make you invest way too much money in, I don't know, like the metaverse, for example, or the fire phone, or your pet project. Overconfident, uh, successful leaders will have a very strong tendency To take their organizations in bad directions, which can be very, very expensive. We haven't trained that away. And people like Reed Hastings have worked super hard to make companies like Netflix a place where the organization serves as a check on the leader's overconfidence. I think that's imperfect. I think it's very, very hard to sustain. It's very hard to keep the bureaucracy from creeping in. It's very, mainly because we humans, we want the status we want, and things tend to get accumulated, to get kind of Encrusted over time that none of the geeks that I talked to and Joe, you know, that your friends and colleagues, they're not the most humble people on the planet, right? Like this is a confident group and who have achieved amazing things. Nobody that I talked to in the book when I asked your question and where I did a version of it and said, do you think that the current crop of companies at the top are permanent or do …

AI assessment note: “I absolutely do, mainly because the people I talked to worried about it”

Q stay out of their way. You know, one of the areas you talk a lot about for ownership and bureaucracy is about status and about how you talk about, you know, humankind, obviously all of us have this bias towards status. It's tied to our health. It's tied to our everything about how we see ourselves. And apparently status helps create bureaucracy. Can you talk about that a little bit?

A Yeah. You bring up this really interesting point so far. I've been dumping on the bosses, right? They're the ones who create these really elaborate processes and approval loops and all that. That's half the story. And I'm not even sure it's the bigger half of the story, because one of the things I learned when I was researching the book is how important status is for us human beings. And I was actually surprised by it. I shouldn't have been, because once you realize what, what we are, we're the most social species on the planet. We are the most social creatures on the planet. Of course, status is important to us. Social status is super tied up with our evolutionary, our fitness, our, our success. It matters to us like crazy. And one way you get status inside this thing called the company where you spend so many of your waking hours is to be in the loop. And so subconsciously, almost all the time, we humans, we want to be part of the process. We want to be in the loop. We want to be consulted. Either in a hard way or a soft way. We want to gatekeep. It's part of who we are. And what the geeks have done is they've channeled that desire for status, and they channel it in ways that are aligned with the goals of the company. And they work super hard not to, not to allow these kind of Bureaucracies to encroach so that you can gain status in a way that's not aligned with the goals of …

AI assessment note: “one way you get status inside this thing called the company... is to be in the loop”

Q the most dysfunctional bureaucracies, if something is literally 10 times better, You eventually can shame them with persistence into getting in. You know, I want to ask a question about education as well before we stop, because I, you know, I think for parents reading this book, can you say a word about the Montessori method, its impact on cultivating the geek mindset? I thought that was an interesting point.

A Yeah, I can say two words. Thank you to my mom and dad who enrolled me in a Montessori preschool where I grew up kind of in a small town in Indiana. They had a Montessori school not too far away and I went to it and I like I used to skip into school every day as a little kid because the The rooms were these labs full of cool things to play with, but they were designed by Maria Montessori, who was this amazing educational innovator more than a century ago, who dove in. She was a huge geek. She dove in on this very hard problem of how do young children learn? How do they learn best? And she said, look, you give them things to play with and that, but the things that they're playing with are designed to convey things like numbers and letters and then reading and concepts like the difference between X, X squared and X cubed Give them a cube, right? Whoa, that's really interesting. That's a lot bigger. So I remember playing with these kinds of things as a little kid. And Montessori only went as far as the third grade. And so my parents enrolled me in the public school and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what did I do? Why am I being sent to the gulag here? Because I'm sitting in a desk in the same place all day, every day and every hour, a new subject happens, whether I want to move on. Like, are you messing with me? And, um, that I thought that the, the, um, the exercises we…

AI assessment note: “the things that they're playing with are designed to convey things like numbers”

Q I've learned from my mentors and done over the last 20 years. Before we jump into the book, you know, I want to ask, in 2020, you wrote a Wired article titled, Why Degrowth is the Worst Idea on the Planet, talking a lot about the technology world. And I'm curious, why do you think so many people distrust technology and even fear technology today? Like, what's going on there?

A Joe, I don't know. It's weird. You know, your podcast is called The American Optimist, right? And we're in this period of Pessimism about a lot of the things that I think we should be incredibly optimistic about. And it is true that every time a technology, a super powerful technology comes along and maybe I'll, I'll lapse into economist speak and call these things general purpose technologies. These are like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine and electrification. These are the things that accelerate economic progress and not coincidentally make our lives better. Every time one of these things comes along, some problems come along with it. This is not new news anymore. But we've lapsed into this mode that I find weird and troubling, where especially the more elite you are, the, you know, the fancier, fancier you are, you signal that you're elite and fancy, not by analyzing the amazing new technologies that we have now, but by problematizing them. And those are not The same exercise.

AI assessment note: “you signal that you're elite and fancy... by problematizing them”