Greetings Future Fossils, this is Michael Garfield, welcoming you to episode 169. I have a podcast that explores our place in time, which by the way, I think I need to make more explicit in these intros means helping you navigate a world that is in the words of JBS Haldain, not only clearer than we suppose, but clearer than we can suppose. But rather than start this safari with some convoluted rant, as I so often do, in the spirit of this episode, I want to pair things down to a fighting trim and let this conversation speak for itself. So here's a short bio of today's guest, Lydie Klatz, which I cut down from two of his different biographies.
Lydie Klatz is the Copenhagen associate professor of the University of Virginia, where he is appointed in the Schools of Engineering Architecture and Business. His wide-ranging research is filling in unexplored gaps between design and behavioral science. Klatz has earned a highly selective career award from the National Science Foundation, was awarded over $10 million in competitive research funding, has published more than 80 original research articles, and was promoted ahead of schedule. Lydie has taught thousands of students, including 21 PhD advisees, who is designing and teaching shapes the world.
In less than a decade, he has built research to practice community around his scholarship, Klatz chaired a year-long expert panel on design behavior for sustainability convened by the journal Nature Sustainability. At the University of Virginia, he founded and directs the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, which brings together scholars, funders, media, and practitioners to advance behavioral science for design. In addition to his book, Subtract the Untapped Science of Less, which we will discuss today, he is also the author of an academic book Sustainability Through Soccer, an unexpected approach to saving our world. Before becoming a professor, Lydie designed schools in New Jersey and played professional soccer.
Does this sound like the kind of person from whom you should be learning how to do less? Well, it's not actually about doing less, so much as it is about knowing where to carve out the negative space, what not to say, when to go slower. And speaking of going slower, I don't really optimize this show for revenue. I want to explore the edges, and that means putting myself and my family in a position that is historically, chronically, and fundamentally hard to fund.
So in order to maintain the integrity of future fossils as a place where truly original exploratory thinking happens, I rely on you to help support this show. And for this reason, I would like to thank this week's new Patreon supporters, and this week was quite the catch. So thank you, Caleb Meredith, Richard Tronson, the AGI Laboratory Administrator, David Kelly, who's worked by the way, just went up on WeFunder, artificial general intelligence ink, check the show notes, if you want to support immunizing the eschaton, as it were, Logan Mace, Melissa Burns, Bruce Garfield, my uncle. Bruce is awesome because look up his work, a real legend, Maxwell Wilson, and Philip Rice.
I joined the growing ranks of people whom I know care about making sense of this phase transition that we're living through together, and making it as graceful as we can. Everyone contributing five bucks or more a month is also privy to two extra episodes of future fossils every month, and every patron is invited to the book club. By the way, the next book club discussion will include the author, Eric Wargo, who has offered to tango with us as we discuss his very potent book, Pre-Cognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self. Hold on to your butts, that'll be July 13th, still plenty of time to sign up.
But for now, thank you, sit back, and enjoy at least half as much as I enjoyed this amazing conversation with Lydi Klots. We start by riffing on the username that he was automatically assigned by SquadCast when we recorded this session. Desisive artist is very much about the active removal and triage. That's true, it's very decisive.
My friend, the T-Fairy, who is a known psychonaut and flow artist, and wants to be one of the first flow artists in space, she got loyal astronaut. She's like committed her career to blasting people off in one way or another. That's awesome. Yeah, this is made my day worth while.
Good. Well, I'm delighted to talk to you. First of all, how do we pronounce your name? You should know, right?
You're a paleontologist. Do you know Joseph Lydi? I don't. No.
Okay. Yeah, he's, well, I only know him because that's my first name. And he's a, so he's like a famous paleontologist from Beckwood paleontologist where famous. Oh, yes, yes.
Yeah. And the name Lydi is a family name on both sides of my family and my mom's side of the family. They think there might be some connection to Joseph Lydi, but you should look him up because he's like you, he's a paleontologist, but he, like the autobiography of him called him like the last, the last man who knew everything or something like that. Like he was a real interdisciplinary guy.
Interesting. I, you know, I just interviewed for the other podcast, the one I host for the Santa Fe Institute. I had a conversation with Andrea Wolf who wrote the invention of nature about Alexander von Humboldt. Okay.
And like a big part of that conversation was about how exactly what you just said. He was the last man who knew everything. Yeah. You can see over the course of his, his 19th century career in the sciences how like he starts off working more or less in isolation, but as the knowledge required in order to perform his symphonies, grows and grows, then he ends up accumulating all of these other people.
Like at his body gets weak and he can't go out into nature anymore and do the field work, but he starts leaning on this like tentacular network of international researchers, which perhaps prematurely brings us to, I mean, we can do a clean official start, but it does bring us to this notion of like age and wisdom and subtraction. Yeah. You know, I don't know. Where do you want to start today?
I don't care. I listen to some of your other podcasts and I just, I'm just looking forward to the conversation. I think it'll be fun no matter what we talk about. So as I was, I'm just trying to think of like what was kind of most relevant for your audience, but I don't know.
I think just the big idea is relevant and then like whatever directions it goes, I'll be interested. I can't claim to, that I'll know, they'll know anything in any of those directions, but it'll be fun to talk about. Right on. So we'll start this then with a confession, which is that in order to preserve the quality of this conversation, I had to triage and I could not finish your book.
I had to make, I had to make the decision to skip sections in order to preserve the time and the focus. I ended up taking what are ultimately too many notes for us to discuss anyway. So we'll see how it goes. But I guess the place to start would be to just have you introduce yourself and to talk about who it is that you are and why you felt it your responsibility to write this book.
Yeah. I mean, responsibility is a great word because that's really how I felt about it. I mean, I'm a professor at the University of Virginia and my background is in engineering and kind of design. I've always been interested in sustainability.
So like how do we kind of design within planetary limits? And the more that I studied that area and the more that studied broadly defined, both like kind of understanding the science, but just also understanding what's practically available out there, it's like a lot of the technology already exists and a lot of what's holding us back from being truly sustainable is our mindsets and ways of thinking. And so that got me more interested into behavioral science and the ways that people make decisions and that over a long time kind of led to this study of subtraction. And yeah, and then like the more research I did on it and especially the research where we found that people systematically overlook this as an option, just I felt obligated to write the book.
I was like, I've got to figure out a way to get this out there to people who can use it. So that's what brought me to the book. So the section on the science of our subtraction neglect as you call it is the part that I decided I had to skip because it felt like this was a bit more expositional or something that you know, so I'm really curious to hear you talk about some of the findings that you and your team and other researchers have made into cognitive biases and intentional biases that make it difficult for us to even understand the subtraction as an option. Like I'll just I'll start by antiing up here that you know, one of the most important books that I've ever read, at least in terms of my own intellectual development was Lake Off and Johnson's Metaphorist we live by.
Okay. Yeah. George Lake Off and Mark Johnson. And they talk about how like just living in a gravity well, you know, you stack things and that's more and more is up.
And so we represent, you know, the cover of your book has this minus one plot here. Yeah. So you know, it's such a beautiful, elegant, subversive challenge to the way that we always represent things like the growth in GDP as the line is going up. Therefore, you know, we're making more, we're producing more therefore more is better, more is better because if you have like a big pile of grain, you're not going to starve.
Like so these things are very deeply wired in us, but like that's that's essentially the limits of my understanding. And I'd love for you to take me deeper into that what yeah, that's amazing limits to your understanding. I think that's really insightful. And I think those kinds of metaphors are incredibly powerful.
One that I don't even write about in the book, but it actually wrote about it and then took the section out because it just wasn't like really landing, right? But just this metaphor of entropy, right? And I thought you might go there, which is things are kind of bounding towards complexity. Of course, we're not bound to think like that, but we are surrounded by that.
So maybe that's part of this whole situation. You know, the really basic science that we did about this, I have to give credit to four other people, the first being my son. So it really started, you know, I'd always been interested in kind of how you just talked about it, Michael, like, why is why is everything going in this one direction? But I never really kind of crystallized it down into something that we could study using experiments until I was playing like I was with my son who was three at the time and we were building a bridge.
And the problem we had was the bridge wasn't level. And so one of the columns was shorter than the other column. And so I turned around behind me to get a block to add to the shorter column. And by the time I turned back around, he had removed a block from the longer column.
And I was like, that was just so helpful for me because right there in front of me was all this philosophical stuff boiled down into a very concrete, single decision that also like spans across a lot of different domains, which is like why when we're presenting with something very, with a situation that we want to make better, why is our first instinct to add as mine had been. And it's amazing how much that ended up matching up with what we found from the research. So the other three people I have to give credit to are Gabe Adams, Ben Converse and Andy Hales who are behavioral scientists by training. And we spent four years and probably 10,000 collective hours studying versions of this bridge problem, basically.
We didn't use the exact bridge, but we used other kinds of Legos. We used itineraries. We used writing. And the most convincing one was just like random grids on a computer screen because with Legos with writing with itineraries, you can always make the argument, well, we're just adding because that's what we've been conditioned to do.
But with the random grids on a computer screen, it was the situation where it was like something that people had never encountered before. There was no kind of value to these grids. And we set them up so that you could solve them by adding or by subtracting. And even when we set them up where subtracting was the better way to solve them, people still overlooked that option.
So we did all this research and to cut to the chasing, what we basically found is that as we're thinking about how we improve situations, we tend to think about what we can add first. And then as you know from the biases research, it's not that we can't think of subtracting. We can think of it, but we tend to add and then we move on. It's a good enough solution.
And we satisfy, you know, and we say, OK, let's add and we move on and we don't even consider the other way to make change. And so that's how I kind of got from me playing Legos with my son Ezra to understanding this as something that's fundamental in science. And that was published on the cover of Nature, which is the pinnacle of my academic career. It's a downhill from here.
And it's really taken off out there into the world and it's been fun to see people's reaction to that. I'm curious how you reflect on this in light of all of the ways that we think being evolutionary products. They were adapted to a particular system. Classic, you know, the exhibit A is we were calorie restricted just by environmental necessity.
And so all of us are addicted to candy. And it's not necessarily good for you. I wonder if a similar kind of insight can be found in the fact that we add before subtracting. Like you mentioned our ancestors creating the first cities, institutions and policies didn't have to concern themselves with existing ones, but we do.
And so there's this speaks to a really deep problem that you address later on in the book about how to apply the logic of subtraction to the anthropocene. Because you use the lower axis as an example, which I love. It's like a lower axis, this little model system. You mentioned that even the one slur doesn't just export the value.
He's there and then he stays there in the mess that he's created. And that's what we've got. And yet we're coming out of this evolutionary history in which there was always another place to migrate to. It seems as though one form of drive to the simple is to make our models of the market or of nature as simple as possible.
And therefore we end up biasing short term over long term or like here over a bigger here, you know, like the long now and the big here are lost against the short now and the small here to borrow from Brian, you know. You know, it seems as though now that we have wrapped ourselves around the planet that we are reckoning with the like can't escape part of this. I'm just curious how you might riff on that speculation. Yeah.
I mean, I think the first one, what I tried to do in the book kind of beyond the the expositional describing the experiments, which is chapter one, was talk about like why this might be happening and not just why this might be happening as a thought exercise, although that's fun for people like us, but also like why this might be happening as a way to overcome it. And certainly the evolutionary stuff, it's like, yeah, the calorie restriction. Also the one that as I did research, you know, the one that really struck me was this desire to display competence, right? You know, I'm not a biologist or evolutionary biologist.
And I didn't realize how fundamental this was that this need to show that we can interact with the world. So the example that gets thrown around a lot, including in my book is Bowerbirds Building Nest, right? And they build these NASA ceremonial things to attract mates. But the reason they're attractive to mates is because it shows that the male Bowerbird is effective, you know, this is somebody who can do stuff.
And you know, arguably that's what Ezra's doing when he's playing with Legos is he's showing that he can interact with the world. And what's nice about that as an example is it also shows us how we might subtract to do that same thing. It's not that subtracting is another way to interact with the world, but it's a little harder to show show it, right? Like when you add something, there's a pile of Legos sitting there.
It's like, okay, Ezra's competent. He added this pile of Legos. Whereas if you take something away, it's invisible. But you know, some of the memorable examples of taking away are when people take away so much that it is noticeable, right?
You know, and I think that we're starting to see those possibilities now. I mean, to go from evolutionary biology to Marie Kondo, I mean her like tidying method, the reason that's effective is because she gets you to tidy everything. And then your competence is noticeable. Like you walk into a condoized home and it's like noticeable how clean it is.
If I just subtract a couple of the toys that are thrown around in my office here, no one's even got a notice that they've been cleaned up. So I'm not displaying my competence. So I think that on the evolutionary thing, of course, we're not like bound to do what evolution is had us do in the past. I mean, we can think around it.
And but also knowing that we have this desire to display competence, we can think more about like, okay, well, how do we display competence by subtracting? I think, you know, it gets a little harder as you shift into the Anthropocene type questions, which of course are like tied into economic issues, right? And what gets rewarded in these systems. But there are examples of people who are, you know, subtracting financially to change the world for the better.
I mean, like I best thing from fossil fuels is one clear example. And it's a nice example because, you know, I would say that if you've got $10 million to invest in alternative energy versus $10 million to divest from fossil fuels, it's probably like the latter is kind of do more for the climate because you're actually like relieving the tension in the system and you're like addressing the root of the problem. And that's where like when we get to these Anthropocene questions of like this classic tension that people talk about between like, okay, we've got to keep growing and making progress. But yeah, there's real planetary limits.
Well, we can keep making progress through subtracting and stay within these planetary limits. So anyway, that's yeah. Yeah. I alluded to Daniel Kahneman and you know, his notion that as you mentioned, well, he's referencing Lewin actually, but that if you want to achieve change in behavior, there's one good way to do it in one bad way.
The good way is by diminishing restraining forces, not by increasing the driving forces. You give a great example about, and I know this from having a toddler that hiding the iPad is better than giving the toddler a cookie to try and get them to read a book instead. And you know, so this speaks to something that I wanted to throw at you because my friend Tim Clancy was on Facebook this morning trying to get people to reconcile two paradoxes. In his case, it was Zeno's paradox that the arrow never reaches the target and Heraclitus that you never stepped in the same river twice.
He's like, all right, have fun with these seemingly incompatible ontologies. But what I want to talk is you introduced me to braces paradox in the book. So like I have another paradox. I want to sort of tie in a bow with that one.
But I'd love for you to introduce us broadly to braces paradox because this is a, I mean, it's only a paradox because we have these biases in our thinking. Yeah. It was funny. My editor and I kept saying like, what?
You got to explain how this is actually a paradox. Yeah. So let me explain it. Listen, you can decide whether it's in fact a paradox or not.
It's a mathematical paradox, but it gets pulled into transportation systems a lot. That's one of the most clear kind of demonstrations of it. And so the demonstration is like, okay, you've got this city, right? And they decided they're going to remove a highway for whatever reason, like they want to remove a highway because it's blocking a waterfront, for example.
And they remove a highway and stops blocking the waterfront, which was the intended goal. And then the surprising thing happens, which is traffic gets better, not worse. And so you think that, you know, in your brain, you're thinking, well, how could traffic possibly get better when you take away capacity? But what you're assuming there is that the pre-removal situation was at an optimal equilibrium, that everybody was kind of doing the exact right thing for themselves.
But in these really complex systems like traffic networks in a city, things aren't at an optimal equilibrium. They're at a satisfied equilibrium. People figure out, okay, this is the best way to get to work. It's basically working for me.
And I'm going to just stop here. I'm not going to like keep trying to make this even better. They're at sub-optimal equilibrium. And then what happens when you take something away or when you add something is it's more like a roll of a dice, right?
So you've changed this complex system, which is the city traffic network. And even when you take something away, you basically shaken it up, gotten people out of this equilibrium, and then they kind of revise their behavior and settle into a new equilibrium. And that new equilibrium could be more traffic. It could take them longer to get to work or it could be better.
And this is something that's happened over and over in cities around the world where these highway removal projects that were intended, they're removing the highway to make a park downtown. It's not intended to relieve traffic. But this unexpected side effect that traffic doesn't necessarily get anywhere. And of course, it sometimes it does get worse.
But the raises paradox is that it's basically a roll of the dice, that changing a complex system or that adding to or subtracting from a complex system can change the overall performance in both directions for better or for worse. Does that make sense? Yeah. So I think that takes us into a key insight, which is that there's more than one kind of subtraction, right?
We're not just talking about a raw quantity, that the way that things are networked in, the way that things operate with each other, the couplings that something has with its environment determine whether it's a good idea to remove it or not, which you've been dancing around this beautiful story that you tell in the book about Kate Orff and the way that she transformed the downtown Lexington. Because I love this term that comes out of your discipline, daylighting. And how the way that we pave over these natural waterways is often ecologically devastating. And so there's a hack, which is to remove the concrete.
And it's like, we think of this as a subtraction, but really what you're doing is you're adding a healthy ecosystem back into the city. So it's important, I think, to take a stop at Kate Orff because you made a real emphasis in this book about the way that she was able to communicate her work without triggering people's sort of loss of aversion algorithm. And the valence of language is really important here. And I'd love to hear you riff on that from it.
Yeah. Yeah. Kate Orff is just a brilliant designer at Landscape Park Attack. And she did this design in Lexington, which is exactly what you said.
She went in there and they had one of these downtowns where they had built up over the river that made the downtown what it was. And you can laugh at Lexington, but this is done everywhere. If you're in New York City, there's rivers that are buried under New York City, there's rivers buried under San Francisco. But what was really cool about what she did, she has her schematic drawings and speaking of getting to the essence.
I mean, these drawings convey tens of millions of dollars worth of investment in Lexington, but she boils it down to four basic words of what's going on here in addition to the drawing. Her words are clean, carve, reveal, and connect. So clean, carve and reveal are all synonyms for subtract, but they're positively balanced synonyms for subtract. I mean, they're describing the exact same thing, but they're framing it in a positive way.
And as you said with Kahneman, his famous finding of loss aversion is that when we think of things as a loss, we weigh them more. We weigh those losses more. But the subtracting we're talking about here is not a loss. The whole premise of my book is we overlook subtraction as a way to improve things.
And so what Orth does is she steers around that argument entirely and just frames it as positive. So people don't perceive it as a loss. She points them towards the positive thing. And the designer part of me, I really think Orth is cool.
And I taught this class on positive subtraction. And I had one of the students, Natalie, who was also really interested in kind of landscape design. And so she dug into all of Orth's work. And Orth has a book that I'm forgetting the name of now, but it's a good book.
I'm like, landscape design. And Natalie looked at all the words in the book and classified them as additive or subtractive and saw how many times she flipped the balance. And basically we determined that she was doing it. And then Natalie and I had this standing bet of, is she doing this intentionally?
Is this intentional marketing? Or is it intuitive in her that she knows that subtracting is a good way to design that she doesn't even think of it as subtracting? She focuses on the positive things. So we shot her email basically asking that question.
And she wrote back this response that she's like, I think of design as what's there plus a unit of transformation. So she basically did the same exact thing in her email that she had done in her designs. And I just think that's a really important thing. Because one of the things we're trying to do here is, well, one of the things we found is that people overlook subtraction.
And certainly we know that people, if they perceive something as a loss, it's going to be more emotionally challenging to deal with. And so until you break down that perception, you might as well frame your designs as the thing that's being added. There's no reason to kind of frame it as something that could be perceived as negative. So from there, thank you.
I want to loop back into this other paradox, which I don't, like I said, it may be in the unread section of your book. But I want to speak to something that comes up a lot in this show and in the discussion groups that we host, which is Jevin's paradox. Because this law most people are familiar with, which is like, more, if you give yourself a longer deadline, you're going to procrastinate until you hit the deadline. If you feel you're, you talk about this in the book, adding an extension to your house that just ends up getting filled with toys.
And I'm experiencing this now. Somehow my wife and my daughter and I lived in a 600 square foot apartment, and now we have a house. And it started like the same stuff. And then suddenly it's like, oh, we need more furniture to fill the space.
It's this runaway thing. That's Parkinson's law. Jevin's paradox is like the economic extension of that, which is we think, oh, we're over burning wood. We've moved on to coal and fossil fuels and solar and wind.
But the fact is that we're actually burning more wood now than we were in the 19th century, because you get these efficiency gains with scaling and innovation. And then the capacity and the throughput rises to meet the efficiency gains. It's not like folded back into biodiversity or whatever. It's like folded back into the system that's like eating itself, eating the ground it's standing on.
So this is an instance where demonstrably more is worse. You get to a point and this gets back to the whole Anthropocene. I want to tie a loop to this and then bat it to you and see where you want to take it. But for years, since you brought up entropy, I thought about this whole notion of increasing order insight.
This has a weird call back to the Marie Kondo thing and the whole notion that actually as we're declaring our homes, the clutter isn't disappearing magically. It's going somewhere. That's true. She tells you to throw it out, not to give it to other people.
Yeah. It's still going somewhere. Hopefully we need those plasticating bacteria stat. I thought a lot about this in terms of the second law of thermodynamics that global entropy is increasing.
It's like, well, how do we actually know that? Has anyone actually got out there and measured the whole universe? It's a finite system. Tyson Young-Kaporta in his book, Sand Talk, which I love, it's an indigenous critique of Western science, an indigenous articulation of complex systems thinking.
Tyson has this whole thing about how the era of time is just like complete crap. Because it's all based on this notion that the universe is moving in a particular direction, which is based on the thermodynamics models that rely on a closed system. It's like, he's like, show me a closed system anywhere. You prove one, prove it to me.
And so we're taking this toy model and we're expanding it into a cosmology. So at the bound where you get both an open system, but also one in which you have to question exporting disorder somewhere else. These notions of where is the disorder going? Who's paying the cost of it?
I don't know. I was just sort of wandering randomly around idea space. But I think that the whole braces paradox less is sometimes improves the function of the system. And so, I think that the way that the Jevons paradox in that we know that more capacity just increases the rate at which acceleration is thinking and doing undermines our ecological stability.
I don't know where I was going with that. No, it's awesome. There's two threads that I want to pull on there. And yeah, you're right on too.
I was talking about that piece that I pulled out of the book on entropy. And the basic argument was that the second flow of thermodynamics works for closed systems. But what we're talking about isn't. So that's one relatively easy to close loop.
Another thing that comes to mind is with Jevons paradox is this kind of, I think that's why subtracting is so important as a tool in our toolkit for trying to make the world better places. You think about Jevons paradox and they talk about it in terms of whale oil and whatever. But then now, think about it in terms of vision, for example. People see that as this panacea that would solve climate change and all our energy worries.
And I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing, but I don't think it's not going to solve our climate issues. If I solve CO2, it's going to enable a whole bunch of the same behavior that we're currently undertaking. And so yeah, I think that's certainly the case that my interest in sustainability, the fundamental thing that's going on here is the mindset. And the answer to the scene is defined by the fact that our planet is being shaped by our mindset in so many words.
And so it's like what we need to look at is the mindset, not necessarily like the technologies and things. So totally agree on that one. What was the other thing I wanted to comment on? Well, go ahead.
I was going to say, this seems to hit the pavement and actually gain some traction in your conversation around combating racism and structural inequality. It sounds like you were writing this book or at least editing this book last year during the Black Lives Matter protests. And this whole issue of valence really comes in, I think, in conversations that I have with people. And this also applies to the ecological conversations, but it applies to social conversations around the movement to defund the police.
Because everyone is like, the first thing that everyone thinks is, I'd replace them with what? I'd defund the police, then why? It's inviting chaos. And the people who seem to have success in that conversation are the ones who are talking about the allocation of resources to nonviolent mediation and to harm reduction and these things.
You see in the ecological conversation where it's like, it's not working, folks, trying to tell people they're going to have to obliterate their way of life in order to prevent a disaster that they're not going to live to see. What works is reframing it in terms of a universal human impulse to create a better world for your children. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. It's not a question here. No, no, it's important. I was editing during that time.
And certainly I'd like to think that section would have still been in there, but without as much kind of gravity compared to the current news cycle. I think even just if I'm looking at it in the context of where you work or the social circles you operate in, right? And it's like we're trying to do so much to add diversity, add diversity, add diversity. It's like, how can we hire more diversity?
And what about subtracting the one racist guy? That would go a long way. And that's the problem, right? It's the same with the ecological things.
There's too much carbon in the atmosphere. The problem is not about clean energy. The problem is getting carbon out of the atmosphere. And the problem with racism is racism.
You've got to figure out a way to get rid of racism. And sure, adding diversity helps with that. But the root of the problem is getting rid of the racism. I mean, you saw that with, I don't know, I've seen a noticeable change in just since the election, right?
And so anyway, it's just another example of how this is an overlooked way to change things for the better. And I understand, I mean, this is more than just overlooking it when it comes to racism, because it's hard to get people to subtract their own racism. You're basically having to get them to acknowledge that they're racist. And I think that's what Abraham Kendi and those people did with a really good job of explaining that racism is this thing that I have that I can get better at.
And it's not something that makes you the absolute worst person in the world. And therefore, people are resisting even thinking that they have this racism in themselves. And it's like, anyway, I think what happened in that mindset shift that I've noticed anyway, since the Black Lives Matter movement last summer continuing on is that it became much more okay to say, hey, this is a racist system that I'm operating within, right? It's like University of Virginia is a racist system.
And it's like the first step in fixing that is acknowledging it because then we can kind of remove the racism. So I think that as we're thinking about applying subtraction to systems, right? And that's like you said, that's like the only thing that really matters for, right? Because everything's a system.
And so if we're thinking about that, then the first part is you have to really understand the system. And if you don't, in these systems where things like racism that are mostly invisible, you've got to be able to see them to be able to remove them. Yeah. It's complex, but it's potentially incredibly powerful.
And if the type of thinking shift that my book hopefully helps with can do, you know, point 1%, contribute point 1% to that overall effort, that would be amazing. So to that point, you know, you just brought up something really important, which you talk about here, which is that the first step of addressing systemic inequality is acknowledging that there's a system in the first place. You talk about like red line districts and how it requires serious investigative journalism to even know that they exist if you happen not to be living in one, you know? And this speaks to cross behemes with the other podcast.
When I had Rajiv Setty, who is an economist who studies police violence at Columbia University, I had him on complexity podcast way, way, way back at the beginning. And he was talking about stereotypes and like we think of stereotypes as like this, your racist or sexist, but actually reforming conceptual categories all the time because you don't have the time, you don't have the attention to check every chair before you sit on it. And so consequently, I find myself always sitting in the hammock that breaks hilariously. You know, like there's something, you know, it's like my life seems like a lesson is constantly drawing me to the periphery and to double checking my assumptions.
So like you talk a lot about Herbert Simon in this book and one of my favorite quotes from Herbert Simon is about information consuming attention and how like the richer, this is a clear example of how more is not necessarily better. You know, over the course of your life in mine, the public virtue has been more information. And yet here, you know, here we are over completely overwhelmed by information. I talked about this with Hunter Mott's way back, like I think episode 38, 39 of Future Fossils talking about like just how it forms an epistemic crisis because none of us actually have like, even if you're an expert in a given field, chances are you're not capable of keeping up with the literature, right?
In your field anymore. And so like there's this, there's this problem about, you know, like you said, like we're all kind of inherently, categorist in whatever way because we kind of don't have the time to sit and evaluate every single person we meet on the basis of, you know, we don't have the time to take everybody to dinner. You know, you're like, you're in these hidden run exchanges on social media. And so this is a window into the frugal brilliance of the evolutionary process, right?
Right. And how like you're not any, it was like Albert Einstein says, as simple as possible, but no simpler, right? You know, like you're, you're really, every one of us is as dumb as we can be. And as smart as we must be.
Right. And yeah, so I mean, but that's, but that creates this sort of additional layer of complexity and challenge in thinking about how we navigate these things because the fact is, as the world gets faster and faster in certain ways, it becomes easier to see these systems in other ways, it becomes harder, you know, because we're stretched so thin. So like what are your thoughts on that? Yeah.
And so that makes a disability to distill even more essential. And I mean, I don't think, you know, information is no more the problem in the information age than iron was in the iron age, right? It's just this thing that we're living with. One of the things I learned in doing research for the book was that this is something people have been talking about forever.
I mean, there's this awesome historian Ann Blair at Harvard who studied the history of, and she's like, I don't know who the philosopher was. One of these philosophers talked about like too many books was going to make the mind weary, right? Because you weren't going to have to, you weren't going to have to memorize stuff anymore. Yeah.
And so it's kind of like, make us lazy. And then Simon's quote, it was like our, this desire to accumulate wisdom is completely maladapted to Xerox machines. I think it's like, you know, he's talking about it way back when there's no like internet the way we have it. So I think it's, you know, it's something we've always had to deal with.
And like you said, it's just more essential now to be able to like subtract down to the essence. Yeah. I don't know what the solution is, right? I mean, I think you're exactly right that to be a, you know, we started this conversation with Von Humboldt, right?
The last man who knew everything and that's like the premise, right? It's like you could, you can't know everything anymore. But I don't know, there's, there's more good information out there. And I think if you're intentional about it, you can go around and pick and choose at the, at the high levels of things.
And knowledge, right? So you get to talk to all these experts and dig in deep and then you get to decide what are the one or two things that you want to put in your mental models of the world. And I think that's like a really amazing way to, I mean, you probably know more than Von Humboldt did, right? I'll be the one who makes that assertion because you can't.
But I think, so by taking advantage of these, these opportunities that exist to us today, right? You're able to get beyond where he was by being a little bit more intentional about like spanning across disciplines and not getting pulled into the weeds. But it's hard. It's different than just minimalism, right?
It's different than just being stupid or lazy and not, not acquiring any information. This is a matter of like, okay, considering all this information and deciding which is the stuff that you want to keep in your mental models. And that's where subtraction comes in because you have to think about this stuff. And then you have to do this really hard step, both, you know, it's counterintuitive, plus it's just difficult and you have to say, look, I know this thing and now I'm not going to consider it anymore and now I'm going to elevate something else above it.
And that's a really, a really hard thing to do. So to that point, you reintroduced me to Edward Tuff. Yeah. And information design.
And I'm going to just give people a rundown on this guy and on his impact and legacy. Because I think this is where we actually rather than destroying our hands up and despair about these complex, you know, these like extremely wicked problems, we can say actually there are ways to improve our compression of information, you know, to identify the salient features. And what we're cutting out, you know, like the decision of how you choose what to cut out is the decision of the scientific illustrator, you know, we're not going to give somebody a photo in all of its obscene data richness, you know, we're going to give them a drawing of the head of this animal with the key identifying features, you know, really popping. So who is Edward Tuff?
What is information design? And I was going to basically help us in the world. I don't know if that's... Edward would be happy that we were telling people how his work is going to save the world.
And so yeah, he's a political scientist by training, but then he got really interested in how we communicate information and so has founded this field of information design. And he's got some really classic books in this area that every graduate student is assigned to read. And his, my favorite principle of his, and I think a lot of people would say his main principle, is to maximize the information to ink ratio. And so when you think about that in terms of creating graphics, it's just a really great simple rule for how to distill, right?
It's like if this is a piece of ink that is not providing information, like he has a 30-page diatribe on how PowerPoint is bad on the internet. It's really fun to read. Well, I'll find that in the link to it. Oh, no, it might not be exactly 30 pages, but whatever.
It's long. And it's right. I mean, like all these automatic third dimensions that PowerPoint adds for data that's two-dimensional, it's like that is ink that is not providing information. So take it out.
And it's a very simple rule. I mean, it's kind of like the information equivalent to Strunk and White's, needless words, the Strunk and White, you know, the writing version of this. And it's like, okay, just this is the classic writing advice is to get rid of the things that you don't need. So, and what's also cool about Tuffies that maximize the information to ink ratio, if you notice, it kind of moves back to the K-Dorf conversation, right, where it maximizes.
He's not, he's framing the subtraction as a positive thing. He's maximized this ratio, but really what you're doing in maximizing that ratio is subtracting a bunch of ink. And so, yeah, I think on this really visible information design scale, he's showing us an example of a rule that can be applied to very complex things to guide us to, okay, this is something you should subtract and this is something that you shouldn't subtract. So, there's another example that I actually linked to in my email signature at work that I saw on NPR a couple years ago, there's an article that I'll link to in the show notes, to save the science poster researchers want to kill it and start over.
I'm talking about Michigan State University, he's probably a PhD now, he was a PhD student at the time, Mike Morrison, he was thinking about it as what attracts somebody to read a particular poster for people who haven't been to scientific conferences, you've got this and it's like dense hall of people, all of whose presentations require a magnifying glass and it's impossible to know what it's about from more than two feet away and without the person there standing explaining it to you. So, it's like, all right, what we're going to do is basically create a billboard for our research with key findings and bullet points and there's a QR code to the paper and here's the guy standing there if you want to talk about it. It's the same thing with a data artist, Corel Benzi, where he's saying, how do you even get your research published in the first place? It has to set it apart, all of the other stuff and it helps to have key graphics and to make your work really beautiful.
So, it's funny how all of the insight that you're sharing in this book is substantiated by the way that the aesthetic dimension has come back with teeth in terms of what it takes to actually rise above the noise as scientists now have to be in some respects or work with artists simply to adequately navigate the rainforest of publications. Yeah, there's funny a couple of things to highlight here. I think the cover which I can brag on of the book because I didn't do it. I mean, it's a professional designer, it does an awesome job of this.
When you see the cover of my book in a list of like, okay, here's the 12 books Adam Grant recommends to read this summer, I immediately goes to my cover because it's so simple and it's the equivalent of this billboard that you're talking about, right? And these scientific halls, it's a hilarious situation too. One part of it that you didn't mention that I love is just awkwardness because you have to walk by when you're looking at these posters and to see the poster, you have to get close enough where you have to talk to the person. And so you get like before you know if you're actually interested in the poster, you're stuck in this conversation with the researcher.
There's no way to go like, and it's not good for anybody. The researcher's stuck talking to you, you're not interested and people who are interested are walking by. So, it would be much more effective, right? Like the example is just a big billboard.
You can walk by at a distance without having this awkward social interaction with someone who's doing research that you're not interested in and you could then approach the people that you want to talk to. Yeah, that would solve so many awkward social interactions between scientists. And yeah, it's a really hard thing to do to cut through that noise. But I mean, yeah, tough these tips can help.
It's funny though, because you know, I'm looking at the picture of this poster and I'm looking at the cover of your book. And both of them are mostly bright yellow with a dash of red, you know, like very McDonald's. And it is, you know, at some point you've got to ask the question of have we, you know, a similar thing comes in here in terms of like optimizing for efficiency where if everybody figures this out, then everyone's going to have a yellow book. You know, and then what's going to stand out is the black book covered in microscopic text.
Yeah, right. So I think that's a really good point. I mean, I think like one of the reasons that subtracting, you know, we talk a lot of these fundamental advantages that adding has, right, you can show competence, but some of the advantages that subtracting has are precisely because adding has become so dominant, right? The reason this is exactly the reason this is different is because all the other covers have complicated stuff on them.
And if everybody had this covered, then every piece of people would just be like, well, there's another yellow and red cover. And I, you know, I wasn't in love with the red because I found it looks like a KOA sign kind of round signs or it's exactly the same as the, it's the same as the caution signs too. And I was like, oh, I'm not going to be able to see the exact same color pattern. And I was like, is that played out?
But I don't know if you look at the other book covers and this is not played out yet, but yeah, certainly could get there. Well, if I, if I may, I'd like to recommend a book to you because I read the book relentlessly to everyone. Richard Doyle at Penn State University has a book called Darwin's Pharmacy, Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere. And he's an extremely clever person and wise, and he makes this point at some point.
And what he's talking about is like how symbiotic relationships occur through the folding of attention. If you think like a landscape is like, you know, like Einstein and space, like curved spacetime, right? Where like the landscape of the biosphere is non-Euclidean curvature of attention onto itself, you know, like the hummingbird recognizes the flower. And you know, obviously like what you're actually, what you're describing here in books and what Morrison was describing in post-war presentations is the biomimetic approximation of cultural products to the techniques that evolution has already sorted out for a flower capturing the attention of pollinators.
And Doyle says this in the book. He says, you know, the folds of a flower are like the folds of a skirt and that like this book, which is, you know, made out of folds, you know, it's like it's drawing, you're, it's drawing your attention to it. You know, and so I don't think it's played out. I mean, what you're saying is it's time tested, you know, yellow with a lip of a lip of your head on it.
But to that point, I want to explore kind of beyond here. I want to see like where we were kind of getting to, which is, you know, you talk about the IPCC climate reports and how these 167 page report is a synthesis of synthesis of like syntheses and it's like the distillation of thousands and thousands of research papers. And so there's a point where you get to a point where you've added so much that it's no longer useful. You're not subtracting to go back to something, you're subtracting to go forward or word into what?
And this is where, you know, the question of, I think like major evolutionary transitions like the origin of multicellularity or the emergence of syntactic language seem really relevant, you know, as like, this is why we're doing this. My life was changed in an animal communications class in college where I read this paper by Martin Noick, then at Princeton on the evolution of syntax, which he said actually he posits that there was a time when we actually had, you know, you had to remember more words to get your point across than we currently do because every word was its own complete thing. And so like you subtract from language in order to add a recombinant rule that allows you to string these words together into sentences. You know, you see the same thing going on in human society or in other social organisms, like where the shorter the memory, the more flexible that agent that, you know, human being is in a system or like this, you know, the shorter an institutional memory, the easier that organization finds it to shift to transform itself into what is demanded by society.
And so the human brain case has gotten smaller over the last 50,000 years as we've outboarded more and more into books and other information technologies. It seems like the pressure of this thing that is emerging through us, you know, civilization, that is the dominant, it has been since its origins, like the dominant causal force in human life, you know, that it's top down influence on us and our relationship to it through some sort of the models of society that we carry. This is like the sphere of thinking that for me encompasses, when I, when you say I loved this, this term on on pichutin that we play Jenga in the Anthropocene, you know, it's like we're at that point now where we realize that these are actually interdependent, interoperable components that individual nations are not standing alone unto themselves, but in some way that what they are needs to be reduced in order for them to work together. You know, like you have to, like, I don't mean to get like biblical here, but it's that sort of Gnostic, like you have to be a child to enter the kingdom of heaven kind of thing, you know, that there's like something about, as we become more and more, shout out to Chris Ryan and his book, Civilized to Death, because like there's a notion that as we become more civilized, we actually become more childlike because we're living together in these bigger and bigger institutional and societal constructs that demand more flexibility from us, like the pieces of them.
And so, you know, this, I don't know, I just like this is yet another rant that I want you to like, yeah, simplify it, bring order to. Well, first of all, I mean, I think, yeah, like you said, I'm one of these people who just kind of thinks on the scale of like my kids and their kids at the most and trying to think beyond that. But I do think about that future in that way a lot. And I do think being at this kind of tipping point, right, where it's like for a long time adding has made things better and disproportionately made things better.
And you don't have a house, it's better to have this shelter. And now we have more of these opportunities to take things away to make things better. And so I do think that like that kind of playing Jenga approach is becoming more and more appropriate. And like you said, like in the smaller world, smaller being like more interconnected, I agree, it's like more and more obvious how when you add something in one place, you end up taking something away somewhere else.
Or if on the other hand, it's like the beautiful thing about Ezra's bridge example, right, when he didn't add that block, that's a block that you can then use somewhere else, right? And you know, you can scale that out to the planetary scale. And so it's like if you're talking about non-renewable resources, that's a good thing to have is this resource still available. So I think that's interesting.
I mean, for me, the main shift that I think it could bring about is this, or hopefully is happening, right, is this kind of shifting notion of what progress is. I mean, in the book I talk about like this growth dogma that's always been there, but then the real economic growth dogma, where it's like the World Bank and the IMF are kind of asking countries to report on their GDP happened after World War II. And the goal is like, let's not have another World War. You know, the goal is not like let's try to create the system that destroys the planet.
I don't know. I mean, I think that notion of growth and progress, right? Because I think what we're mostly after is progress when we're thinking about our kids and stuff. And so like the notion that progress can come through less and it's not a matter of just kind of having more physical stuff, but it's a matter of art and pleasurable things in life.
And so I don't know. For me, that's on the human scale. But I don't know. I'd be interested in your thoughts on it, zooming out on where you think it's going like beyond a hundred years.
Is it going to turn us into all into computers or whatever? Well, I mean, it's like, again, like if we're thinking in terms of like the advent of complex organisms, there's a free living amoeba and it has to get amoebas get huge as big as a cell can get. But then that's not necessary once you're living inside a bigger thing. And you know, so there's this, you know, Pierre Teardes-Shardin, the sort of mystical Jesuit paleontologist who, you know, came up with a combination.
He was, he was a strange dude. His work was banned by the Catholic Church until his work was only published posthumously because he was talking about this evolutionary progress in which like the universe folds itself together into what he called the Omega Point. Like the point at which everything is interconnected and like the divine mind wakes up to observe itself through the cosmos. And the church was like, ah, this is the 1950s.
No. But that's always there like sitting on my shoulder is like, he has this statement about hyper connectivity leads to hyper individualization. And like you think about like the number of jobs that are made possible by a huge city. It's like super exponentially more than the jobs available in a small city because the number of interconnections grows faster than the population.
And at some point in order to function in one of these systems, you lose the ability to keep track of everybody. Like we're way over that rainbow. Right. You know, we're now at the point where people are proposing that distributed ledger like blockchain and style technologies are going to help us scale economic interactions beyond the point where they're already breaking.
You know, Richard Waru at Harvard or Syracuse or whatever. Anyway, he wrote a book called, you know, the Scalability of Trust about this, you know, about how we're reaching a point kind of akin to the point where we started doing double entry accounting in the first place because we could no longer track reciprocal exchanges in our villages, you know, because we'd grown these early cities. And so like the question again to lean on Richard Doyle here, Doyle in Darwin's pharmacy basically suggests that we may have reached the end of the utility of the ego or that we're swiftly approaching it. That you know, that the ego is one of these things where it's like you've got your copy of the double entry ledger where you know, you're like, you're tracking how you are in relationships everyone else.
And that the scale of interaction in an internet enabled society is so great that there, you know, he argues basically that it's eroding like a self, like the default mode network. You talk about, about Mihaly C, I can't say his flow state work in your book. And you know, there's this thing in, I spoke about this with Michael Philip on his show, Third Eyedrops a couple of years ago about how like when you're in love or you're in a flow state or you're tripping or whatever, the information is coming in so quickly that you don't have the attention, you don't have the blood and the glucose to allocate it to like telling a story about yourself while this is all happening. Right.
You know, so it's like, for me, I wonder about, I mean, we know that like depression is just completely pandemic in a way that it wasn't, at least it wasn't being observed as being you know, 50 to 100 years ago. And I wonder if a lot of this has to do with the fact that we're stuck like the sugar abuse problem or like the more problem like we think more thinking is better, you know, that we think we can think our way through things. But when the information is coming at you so fast that you don't have time to think about it, then we're back in this question of like Daniel Kahneman and like the balance between intuition and reason. And are we moving, have we moved into an age where reason is something that is not the province of an individual, but the province of society.
And I'm not saying this is wholly good. I mean, like roll the dice, right? If you remove reason, half the time you're going to get people that don't bother to like check facts. Part of me is wondering like it does seem as though we're moving into a state where mindfulness was pushed really hard in the workplace.
And then now it turns out mindfulness actually removes the incentive for productivity that people have been really deep in mindfulness training. So probably is that true? That's awesome. Yeah, they just don't feel the need to work as hard.
So it kind of backfired. So our company is getting rid of it. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like it is this question about, you know, we waste 40% of the food we produce.
Maybe we don't need to be more productive. And I know that you make this distinction in the book about like sitting there and doing nothing is not what you're talking about. But I do have to wonder, you know, if the not not not nothing of, you know, a meditative awareness that has uncoupled itself from an autobiographic memory is actually adaptive in this space, you know, in order to simply like navigate the unpredictable and uncertain world that we're in. And then the other way that you're going to respond fast enough to actually like dodge the ball coming at you.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a point that I made in the book that really got people's heckles up. And I make to be clear, I'm agnostic on like doing nothing.
I think that's a great option sometimes too. I was just like distinguishing subtracting from doing nothing. So yeah, the minimalist crowd did not like that statement. But did they do nothing about it?
Or did they respond to me trying to jump? Yeah. Yeah. So the, I mean, the first thing, you know, this is obviously the first time I'm thinking about it through this angle.
I'm in the flow comments really interesting to me, right? Because it's like, it kind of ties into what I was talking about, you know, it flows as like the psychology of optimal experience, right? And if what we're talking about here is this like, you know, what we should be striving for is not necessarily unlimited growth, but like continuous progress. I would find it progress if I could spend my whole life in flow.
I mean, like that was when I played soccer, I was like, my favorite thing about it is like the, you know, 10 minutes, you know, the second half starts and then all of a sudden there's like five minutes left in the game. And like that whole time you've just been like so immersed in it. And I actually think that like some of the depression that I experienced after playing soccer came from like not having that in my life anymore. And so anyway, I think that that like that would be progress.
And I mean, it's a little different than not thinking, right? Because I think like, you know, in that soccer analogy, I mean, I was never thinking faster and more intensely than in soccer games, right? It's just that you're like so immersed in like the current thinking that you're not distracted by other stuff and you make really fast decisions. Like, you know, even like some of the sports science things that you see on TV, it's like so and so like kick this ball and to do that, they had to like start timing something, you know, by down to the 100th, 1000th of a second, you know, 10 seconds before it started to happen and their brain had to start their leg moving.
So you're definitely, you're performing at a really high level when you're doing that. So that would be cool if we're all progressing to spending more. I would be happy if my grandkids got to spend more time in a full state than I did because of subtracting or because of like the way things are headed. That brings us perfectly with no heat lost into your last chapter in this book on from information to wisdom.
And you repeat the refrain, which you mentioned earlier in this book about Lao Tzu advising to attain knowledge, add things every day to attain wisdom, subtract things every day. So this feels like the right place to land this. In the concrete and in the recognition that wisdom is what we need today in order to make sense of this world and in order to live in it rightly. And so I would just like for you to talk a little bit about, you know, what wisdom means to you in light of subtraction and you know, the concrete advice that you offer people in this book.
Obviously there's much unspoillable stuff, but I think, you know, landing it on some key takeaways is at least respectful of the point that we're making here in this conversation. Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, like this, the reason why it's his advice persists for two and a half millennia is because it's hard, right? And we're not doing it left to our own devices. And I think that's the first thing to remember, which, you know, anyone who's listened to this last hour is gonna, is gonna remember that, you know, subtracting is hard and we tend to overlook it in all these different ways and in our, as we try to accumulate wisdom.
I mean, there's no pithy quote from two and a half millennia ago about like, hey, you've got to learn a lot of stuff to gain wisdom, right? Or like, even like modern education scholars have spent all this time like studying scientific misconceptions. And you know, the goal was like, oh, we're gonna identify these like misconceptions that people bring to the classroom and then to subtract them. And they eventually gave up trying to subtract them because it was so hard.
It was just like, not what people do. You know, once you've got these mental models, what you tend to do is adapt them. Like the example I use in the book is one that you'll appreciate in a couple of years with your toddler is so my son, he was, you know, in a Santa Claus phase, he's up to like five or so, I think, and I gave him Legos for Christmas and they're plastic. And then you look at me and he's like, you know, I did Santa Claus doesn't like, you can't make plastic.
I thought his factory was like, and I said, I said, oh, no, no, no, for stuff like Legos, like, you know, Santa, he works directly with Amazon. So he's got his life. And so, like, so what happens is like, in my son's playing with it, he's like, this is something that doesn't, he can keep his existing mental model and then he can, he can modify it with this new information. And when I showed him how this new information fit into his existing mental model, he's like, oh, awesome, great, let's keep going.
And you know, you laugh at that, but it's Leon Festinger, his favorite, his famous experiment, I got in a dissonant. So he brilliant, like psychologist, and it's just like the best idea ever for an experiment. So he wanted to, he joined a cult and the, you know, it was a doomsday cult. And so like, this experiment had no downsides, right?
He joins this doomsday cult. And if the doomsday actually happens, he's in the cult. So he's saved. And if the doomsday doesn't happen, then he has like this amazing experiment of what happens when like something that's so obvious hits people right in the face that like contradicts with their mental models.
And what happened was when, you know, he joined the call, he's sitting in the room with the doomsday cult members and like midnight strikes when the doomsday is supposed to happen. And you know, so first people started basically like modifying their beliefs. They're like, oh, well, that's not the official clock of the apocalypse right there, right? It's like, you know, that's actually like five minutes behind.
So, and then like it got to like, four in the morning and people are sitting there like, oh, man, this, you know, eventually by the next day they said like, oh, look, like our belief was so strong that we've saved off the apocalypse. And you know, we all do this. Like that's the genesis of that, you know, removing, not the genesis, but the, that removing misconceptions research is just an example of us doing that on a different level. So it's hard.
I think one thing that can be really helpful and is shown in the science is like using the right analogies. So, and the reason that works is because basically if you, if you present somebody with information that contradicts what's already in their head, right, then, you know, it's this new thing fighting against an entrenched thing, the entrenched thing has gone on. But if you present that with new information plus an analogy that supports the new information, then you've got like kind of two things fighting against that one entrenched thing. It can win out.
And so like, I think that nature adapting and selecting is a really good kind of mental model for our own thinking or an analogy that we can bring to our own thinking. It's like, hey, like selecting can be beneficial, right? These are complementary approaches to making progress. And so that like just evolution on a, on a grand scale, but then even like thinking about information down to the, how our brain, you mentioned our brain getting smaller over time.
And I don't, this is an example. I don't think of how our brain has gotten smaller, but also our brain does like prune on use synapses, right? So when we sleep, one of the things that's beneficial is like the, the circuits that have been used are like going away to, you know, allow the ones that have been used to do more. So that's like this kind of example that we're doing automatically we've evolved to do, which is like getting rid of the stuff we're not using.
So I think those are two really powerful analogies that can kind of remind us to subtract information. And then if the analogies don't work, then it's back to like, you know, kind of tough to style advice and maximize this information to ink ratio, right? And you're thinking about all the ideas as, as ink and you're thinking of the, the ones that matter as information. So yeah, I don't know.
Is that helpful? Oh, yeah. I mean, well, you know, clearly there's something about thinking of life in three phases, you know, childhood, adulthood and elderhood, which is kind of like neglected by our youth of obsessed society. But like, elderhood is defined, you know, the aging brain and like the neuro physiological signature of wisdom is a sparser brain.
It's like historically connected to the autumn and the winter of one's life when the leaves have fallen from the trees and you can see the sky again, you know. And so like, I really like the way that you, you know, you point to that as like, you know, it's, it's so easy to forget. And I had this conversation with Kevin Kelly, who's very much an additive guy, more technology. We've never forgetting the technologies that we've made.
We're just continuing to recombine them and do more and more liberating stuff. And I'm like, okay, yeah, but if you remember everything, you can't become anything. In order to transform, you must forget. Right.
So yeah, and that's like, you know, in the psychology of it, like the working memory stuff, right? It's like you can only keep a limited amount of things in your brain to take action at any given moment, right? I mean, so like, yeah, we can accumulate all this information and like put it on our computers or like share it in society. But then when it's us out there acting in the world or acting on a given situation, I mean, that's why like medical checklists are useful, right?
That like helps direct this knowledge that we have through these steps that we can actually remember and take action. So yeah, totally agree that that's absolutely essential. So I'm going to go back to Tyson Newkaporta who says very early in Santok that his writing this book is a way for him to share the knowledge that he has and then forget it so that he can move on. This is like a huge piece of like the Aboriginal wisdom is the importance of the fact that you're not the world is changing.
Your knowledge is always changing. So it doesn't, you know, like you let you have to let go of these things at some point. And of course, then you find that book in the store and it's like, he's already like, oh, of it. But for me, it's smart, it's joint.
Yeah. So I'm going to hold onto that for a while. Yeah. Yeah.
And that's one of the fun things about doing these podcasts is you get to think about it and of all the ideas because it's certainly like once you've written stuff down, it's like you've, it's that slice in time, you've captured that slice in time, you've put it down and it's freeing. You can move on. And you know, some of the stuff is like less useful than some of the other stuff. And you end up, you know, I don't know, when I read a book, I end up taking away like one thing from it probably from my books because I've written them all like, you know, pull five things with me through the rest of my life.
But yeah, it's a, that's interesting that he says that. And you have the interesting to hear what he like after he then talks about it with you, what he thinks. I mean, I do have to like, like go over my like chapter outlines to remember what's in the book before I talked to people and people are always like, well, did you actually write this thing? I was like, yeah, I was like, you know, it's like, that was a while ago.
Yeah. Part of the reason I wrote it is so I don't have to remember it. Well, now that we have exported our, other listeners have to suffer us now. Yeah, I just want to thank you so much.
Yeah, this is awesome. This is like the most fun conversation I've had in a really long time. So I'm an VSA viewer job. I got to figure out how to start my own podcast and get to get to the book.
Well, I know how to turn yours though. There's no carrot at the end of this stick. It's just a stick. So, let's see.
But it was great talking to you. And I hope that we have another chance at some point at which point we will have forgotten everything we said today. And that's okay. Yeah, that's awesome.
I would love to have another chance. This is like, by far the most useful way for me to be spending my time. So so appreciate it and have fun with that toddler. I will.
Thanks a lot. Have a great day. You too. Thanks again for listening.
Future fossils is an independent, entirely listener supported program. If you believe in the work that I'm doing, you want to help see it thrive into the unimaginable future, then you can avail yourself of all the backstage goodies at patreon.com slash Michael Garfield, or you can just leave a review at Apple Podcasts. That's more helpful than you know. Reach out to me personally at Michael Garfield on Twitter or Instagram and have a wonderful yawn.