The Visile #2 - Podcast Transcripts of Julia Galef, Dharmesh Thakkar, David Perell, Ana Fabregas, James Reinhart
4 interesting podcast transcripts across tech, startups, VC and philosophy.
Welcome to the 2nd issue of The Visile newsletter.
The Visile curates 3-5 interesting podcast transcripts every week across startup + tech + VC, and serves it to you with their key highlights.
For why podcast transcripts, and not podcasts, click here.
This week features James Reinhart (thredUP), Ana Fabregas and Chrisman Frank (Synthesis), Dharmesh Thakkar (Battery Ventures) and Julia Galef (author, The Scout Mindset).
I strive for 5 podcast transcripts, but I ended up with 4 this week. This thing takes a lot more time than I thought:)
Enjoy!
1) Colossus / Founder’s Field Guide featuring James Reinhart of ThreadUp with host Patrick O’Shaughnessy: Lessons in Process Power
Sajith: James Reinhart is founder and CEO of thredUP, an online thrift marketplace. He talks on a bunch of topics including how they arrived at thredUP’s biz model which is a negative working capital business, the first principles thinking around how they design processes - be it operational ones such as photoshoots, or even organizational ones such as maker days / no meeting days on tuesdays and thursdays, the evolution of fashion biz models over the last 50-60 years and finally the rise of sustainable fashion.
I liked James’ briefing on how the steady accumulations of innovations and process power helps create and constitute a compelling moat. The other learning to me was around how they rethink several business + operational aspects from a first principle basis - clean out kit to make the goods returned meaningful, not encouraging people to spend it on ThredUP but instead on brand partners, working out how to do photography at scale (incl building their own mannequins) - all of which become the lego blocks of their compelling business model and constitute a moat.
Link to podcast + transcript. Link to my public Notion page containing all the highlights I collected from the transcript. A shorter subset of those highlights is below.
Process power / building moats
James: “People will say like, "Well, what's two things that you guys do amazing?" And I say, "It's like the wrong question. The question is what are the 100 things that we do that are each a little bit amazing?" And because it's the classic Michael Porter famous book, he's like, "Competitive advantage gets built by compounding the unique activities that you do." And so, if you do three things uniquely well, when a competitor has a 90% chance of copying each of them, it's 0.9 times 0.9 times 0.9. That's the probability that they can copy you. If you do 100 things that are unique and valuable and defensible, it's 0.9 to the 100. We really live by that idea of, how do we widen the moat with all of the unique activities that we do. I think that's the way the ops team is just wired.”
Process power / rethinking processes and operations from first principles
James: “We just became obsessed with all the individual pieces in the value chain. And to give you an example, like when we started using the iPhones taking the photos, we weren't taking any photos on mannequins at the time, everything was a way flat photo. We got to take photos on mannequins because that's how women want to shop, they want to see it on a form. We started taking photos on a mannequin. And then John realized that process is slow. You have a person who is putting items on the mannequin and then you have a different person taking a photo. We built a new process to essentially continuous flow of taking photos.
So then all of a sudden, we start to be able to take photos much faster, put them on mannequins much faster. The problem with that was that, then we were destroying mannequins left and right because no mannequins that are built at the time were built to have thousands of photos taken on them every day, the mannequin is designed for this bespoke photo shoot. So then we had to like figure out how to make our own mannequins. So we started working to develop our own mannequins. They were custom molds of fiberglass. We could build something that were light, that we could repaint. When you're taking 10,000 photos on a day on a mannequin, the mannequin starts to look a little worse for wear. So how can we refinish the mannequins?
And then we figured out like, okay, well, how do we improve the lighting? So we built new reflective lighting shields that allowed us to take a photo and then cut that photo out of its background so that it looks just amazing online.
We then started to automate a bunch of the processes in the facility because we felt like we really understood them...it's much easier to tell a person to do things differently than it is to tell a machine to do things differently. (why he thinks the process should be automated only once perfected.)
...when we got to our next facility, we started to build these carousel systems. So now, today, we run some of the largest carousel and conveyor systems in the world. We think it's the largest in the world, though that's a hard thing to prove.”
Removing supply-side friction
James: “What we identified was that for more expensive things (like a bike etc.), it makes sense to sell them on your own. But when you have individual units that are $12, $15, $20, the actual organizing principle is to get rid of them in bulk. So we invented the thredUP clean-out kit, the thesis was, it holds a laundry basket worth of stuff and the average bags has 25 items in it. And so the idea was, well, if you could pile like a whole bunch of stuff in there and thredUP would pick it up at your house, comes with a prepaid label. You don't need to take it anywhere, you don't do anything. All of a sudden, those 25 items might turn into 50/75/100 bucks.
And then you're like, "Oh, okay. The ROI on my time across 25 items makes a lot of sense." And so I think people started to be like, "Wow, historically, I've just given this stuff away and I found it annoying to do. Now, thredUP sends me a bag with a prepaid label on it, I send it and then I just leave it wherever my mail gets picked." We even pick it up at your house. And people are like, "Well, this seems pretty easy." Anyway, that's how it got started, but it was all about stripping out the friction on the supply side.”
Two little concepts - speed of updation, and making inventory internet readable
Patrick: “It reminds me of two of my favorite little concepts, one was the story of how Business Insider, the website was successful, which was nothing more complicated at the time when it launched. Wall Street Journal, New York Times only updated their websites once a day. They just updated them more often. And the second is this amazing concept of around the internet, if you make information readable to the internet that are dormant otherwise like Uber and Airbnb are the big popular examples, in your case, secondhand clothing, magical things just start happening. “
2) The North Star Podcast featuring Chrisman Frank and Ana Lorena Fabrega of Synthesis w host David Perell: How Childhood Education Will Change
Sajith: Terrific podcast episode on education, and the likely futures of early childhood education. David Perell interviews Chrisman Frank and Ana Lorena Fabrega of Synthesis, an edtech company that aims to commercialise and evangelise the educational philosophy that is practiced at Ad Astra, a school that Elon Musk began for the kids of SpaceX employees. There is a fair bit of chatter on the specific approach Synthesis uses to drive learning at their end, which is video game simulations that mimic real life problems. Students across ages collaborate to solve (mimicking real life approaches to problem solving) and learn from each other and the process. But the real gold is in how Chrisman and Ana bring out how traditional schooling originated to serve the needs of the industrial revolution - creating an army of blue collar workers or bureaucrats who would follow instructions - but is ill-equipped for today’s world, when the jobs that we are doing didn't exist a few years back. New ways of learning + schooling will need to emerge to prepare kids to thrive in this new world. Synthesis is one such approach.
To me the key takeaway was that in the future, the features that we view as integral to schooling as we know it today - let us call it Push Learning, such as quiet classes, age-segregation, bounded learning (where you learn to a syllabus), learning from textbooks, to a centrally determined cadence and format, will give way to Pull Learning, where we will learn on demand (learn something when we need to use it for solving a problem), learning via videos and interactive games and learn with kids of different ages where older kids mentor younger kids. Accompanying Pull Learning will be the unbundling of schooling. Daycare and socialization will be consumed locally, while learning will be delivered at internet scale, with parents picking different learning approaches like how they piece together extracurricular classes.
Link to podcast + transcript. to my public Notion page containing all the highlights I collected from the transcript. A shorter subset of those highlights is below.
On how traditional school learning disadvantages our kids
AF: A lot of what happens in school is that the kids don’t really have a chance to practice making real decisions or solving real problems. If you look at the textbook math problems, or when you teach kids how to read systematically, with the curriculums in school, it’s really hard to make the connection to the real world. It feels very much prefabricated, because that’s how it is. The kids know that the teacher knows the outcome, and that there is this one right or wrong answer. So, (they were) learning out of context.
We don’t want kids to feel vulnerable, we want for them to figure things out quickly. And if not, the teacher sort of like runs and gives the answers.
DP: A lot of times what we learn at school is there’s very set problems, there are ways to do it right, there are ways to do it wrong. Open-ended problem solving is not taught in school, that’s one reason there’s just not a lot of people who are as good at that even though oddly that seems to be what more and more is economically rewarded.
AF: ...two of the hardest things that I’ve had to do, at least like in the past 10 years was trying to keep a group of 20 plus kids quiet, sitting down and paying attention. The reason for that, it’s because it’s so unnatural. Human beings, especially kids are not meant to be sitting down, especially for that amount of time. They’re not meant to be quiet. They’re meant to be talking and socializing. So, we’ve really like taking learning and what being a human is out of context by putting it in these institutions that we call schools, and then we’re like, “Oh, why aren’t kids learning?” Or, “Why is this not working?” I’m like, if you reflect on it, it doesn’t make sense. That’s definitely a big concern.
Rethinking age segregation in schooling
AF: In the real world, when do you only interact with people your own age? I really can’t think of one scenario where I'm stuck in a room with only people my age. That doesn’t really happen. So, it doesn’t really make sense why we keep kids for 12 years only with kids their age. Not only that, but when you think about the most organic way to learn is from people that are older than you and younger than you, and it works really well.
...one of the best ways to learn something is to teach that. So, when you have mixed age groups, you have the older kids that have learned a concept teaching it to the younger kids, so they crystallize that learning and that’s the best way to learn it when they actually teach it to somebody else. And then you have the younger kids go to the other, like the little ones and teach it. So, it becomes a very beautiful cycle of teaching and learning done by the kids.
Schooling is for socialization, but it doesn’t really deliver
AF: So, it’s this terrible trick we play on kids where what they crave most is to be around other kids to have that social development and then we gate that behind seven hours of sitting at a desk, and listening, and then half an hour of recess. It’s absolutely a horrible thing to be doing at this scale.
...every time I hear people say like, “Well, I would love to homeschool. But what about the social aspects like homeschool’s kids are not socialized? Or they need to go to school in order to learn and socialize with peers?” I’m like, “No.” I’ve taught for 5 years, I went to 10 different schools, ranging from all types of schools. And the reality is that out of those seven hours that kids are in school, and you can ask them, they’ll tell you, “Yes, I get to socialize in the bus, in my 20 to 30 minutes of recess.” And before they would say lunchtime, unfortunately, when you start to ask around, a lot of schools are starting to do quiet lunches.
When kids are in class, the teacher has to cover all these materials, so the reality is that we’re like in a monologue, we’re like talking, covering this and that. The kids barely have time to chat. During group work, they may chat but group work is very rare. Like it’s not the norm. It’s not what kids are doing all the time. So, it’s just really ironic when I hear this from parents like, “No, they need to go to school to socialize.” I’m like, “I’m sorry to break it to you, but kids are not really socializing in school. It’s not happening.”
Learning On Demand vs Learning Just In Case
AF: There is a difference between learning on demand and learning just in case. When in school, we teach from a curriculum, all these concepts and all these subjects just in case kids are ever going to use them in the real world. This approach is not really effective, because unless kids are using that knowledge, in the next 14 days in the real world, that knowledge is going to decay, even if it was theoretically interesting to them.
So, a better approach is to teach on demand, which is what Chrisman was just saying. When the kids find themselves in a situation where they need to learn this mental hack or this mental model in order to advance or win the game or get unstuck, then the relevance of that mental models comes to play and they’re like, “Oh, I need this. It makes sense why would want to learn this.” They put it into practice, boom, they learned it.
So, that’s sort of like also the approach that Elon (Musk) had when he was coming up with like, how he wanted the school to work, he was like, “Don’t teach to the tool, teach to the problem.” When they need it, and when the relevance comes, then you use that.
The (multiple) future(s) of early childhood education
CF: ...it’s going to seem foolish to leave your child’s cognitive development up to whoever happens to be around locally. If you look for a good private school in the Bay Area, there is like four or five, and they’re all trying to get the kids into the same prep schools and the same college. So, they all basically do the same approach. Even though in theory, they could do something different, they largely don’t.
What I think is going to happen though, is local is going to be daycare and socialization. If you want to teach your kids to think or to acquire knowledge, it’s going to be on the internet because it’s just going to evolve so much faster.
I think if I was running a local school, I would try to figure out how to plug into the internet and let the internet do what it does best and I would focus more on that, like daycare socialization, that things that can only be done, hands on in person.
3) The Full Ratchet podcast featuring Dharmesh Thakkar of Battery Ventures with host Nick Moran: A New Paradigm for Software Sales
Sajith: Dharmesh is General partner at Battery Ventures, investing in B2B Tech / SAAS plays. He talks about how software GTM (go to market) has shifted from top down selling, where you targeted the CIO / CTO and moved downward, to bottom up where the end user, typically an engineer, starts using the product, and then it grows within the organization, and finally results in an enterprise deal. This type of bottom up SAAS, comprising product-led growth or motion, typically results in faster growth as well as expansion of the market. For now, a large number of smaller enterprises can also use your product.
This is a good podcast, and the key learning is how the present environment favours a certain kind of software product that can deliver quick time to value, and then use that a-ha moment to land into the organization, and then demonstrate further value through newer features, and expand usage. Good hacks and perspectives on relentless focusing on end-user experience (think product, not technology), on using open source / community as a route to building top of the funnel, on achieving ‘pricing market fit’ by aligning your pricing mechanism (seats, consumption) with the perceived value to customers, the rising importance of customer success in orgs which sell via consumption-led pricing.
Link to podcast + transcript. Link to my public Notion page with all the highlights I scraped off the transcript. A shorter set of highlights below.
Quick time to value as the key axis of software adoption and growth
Dharmesh: ….you have a whole generation that is used to instant gratification (from consumer software)...And (when) those guys come to work, running corporate systems and IT and DevOps, they expect the same kind of time to value from the software they buy, right?
So there’s this been this whole generational shift where even the classicaI CIO buyer or security buyer, that used to focus on features and functionality and buy the most feature rich systems are now kind of seeing a trend shift to well, performing systems that deliver quick time to value. Instant gratification is a way to land the deal, you can expand it with more features and functionality. But if you don’t deliver value in a clear way, you’re going to lose your buyer, whether it’s a CIO or a developer. So I think there is a systemic shift to a newer younger buyer, who has much more emphasis on time to value because people pay for what they see. And if they don’t see value quickly enough, they lose patience; so I think there’s certainly a generational shift, which is impacting the way IT and software is purchased.
90-90-90
So we have this mantra of 90-90-90, for bottoms up cloud companies where we say 90 seconds to download or get your Cloud account, going 90 minutes to see the first aha moment, and 90 days to the first deal.
So I was talking about the time to aha moment. And that to me is like perceived value, right? You see instant gratification, because you got immediate value, compared to the status quo, which would take you you know, months to deploy, let alone seeing the aha moment. And then once you see the aha moment, you’re like, 80% of the way there…. and if we can see the aha moment then you can see perceived value justification of hard dollar ROI relatively easily. I think where most (software) companies fail is they get so inundated by the complexity of deploying and showing all the features that you never get to the time to aha moment. So you never even have a chance to get to the ROI calculation. If you can show the aha moment, the ROI calculations are relatively easy in many segments of IT.
How software sales has shifted from top down to bottom up motions
Dharmesh: ...this to me was one of the hardest things to unlearn and relearn, right? When I started my career in venture, the industry was all focused on building really sophisticated systems. And then you know, having an experienced sales reps, go sell it to CIOs, right and the, the community was around like the top 1000 companies that have more than a billion dollars in revenue. And you know, that’s kind of how business was done.
And if you look at the last five years, Snowflake, Data Bricks, Twilio, Atlassian and MongoDB, you see a pretty important pattern that all these companies have nailed. In terms of focusing on the end user, the practitioner, the person who is going to ultimately use the product, and directly go to them, sometimes using an open source approach, sometimes using a SAAS approach, or both, and focus on time to value. And if you can focus on that the sales cycle is a lot faster, your land deals move a lot faster. And once you have your foot in the door, you can always expand from there and become an enterprise standard.
So it was kind of an unlearning and relearning moment for me. But that’s our focus going in most new companies, we focus relentlessly on the end user and focus on time to value for those end users. Because I think there’s a strong correlation between that and long term growth.
On community-led growth vs product-led growth; open source as a customer acquisition channel, not a business model
Dharmesh: I think community / open source, and product led growth are kind of parts of the same continuum, honestly. I think community led growth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success, right? Community is a popularity metric, product led growth is a profitability metric. And I think you need both. Now, you can use a community motion, or open source motion to become popular, right. But unless you do the hard work of building a good product that people find value in, you won’t be successful, right?
Product-led motion is a graduation from the community led motion; the best community led companies created great top of funnel great awareness. But the best companies had the product-led motion that enabled the free users to try the free SAAS product, get enough value, and then convert to the paid product. So I think it’s a necessary step in the evolution of these community led companies. And the best companies will look like open source companies like Databricks, MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp that started with open source community roots, succeeded primarily based on their product led motion and their multi tenant cloud product which delivers clear and distinct value.
Pricing market fit: align perceived value for customer with your pricing unit
Dharmesh: Pricing market fit is all about aligning the perceived value with your pricing unit. if you’re using Atlassian, JIRA, or Gitlab or JFrog to make developers productive, the perceived value is the number of seats, because the more people use it, the more productivity benefit you get. But on the other hand, when you’re focused on data analytics, for instance, the more data you mined, in Snowflake or Databricks, the more value your business is deriving. And in that case, it’s tied to the volume of data, there, a consumption model makes a lot more sense.
The rising importance of customer success
...a major change that we see happening now is this transition from subscription billing to consumption billing, right? Just like we went from perpetual software to subscription billing, we can now go in from a subscription billing to consumption billing where companies like Snowflake and Databricks and MongoDB, and many others are saying, hey, pay us for what you use, you can subscribe to an annual deal, but you only pay what you use for. And in that case, customer success is basically in the expansion path to recognizing revenue, right? If you don’t deploy the software, customers are not going to pay for you for it, and you’re not gonna be able to recognize revenue. So you could have $100 million building all I care, but you won’t be able to recognize any of it, unless Customer Success is driving consumption, right. So everybody is essentially a customer success person in a consumption model. And I think there’s increased awareness that customer success is offense, not defense. And I think that’s a one way path which benefits the end customer.
Common threads or key success factors across the winners
….relentless focus on the end user experience. Technology for too long, was focused on features, functionality, and sophistication of the platform. And at the end, none of that mattered if it didn’t provide clear, concise value to the end user in a quick timeframe. And so, if I look at the last 10-11 years of investing, the companies that have succeeded over time have continued to evolve, and continue to focus more and more on a well defined persona, very quick time to value and then matching the growth stage with the right go to market model. If you’re landing customers with 10-15k deals you need inside sales motions, which are focused on velocity and reducing any blocks. Once you land a bunch of customers that are fortune 500, global 2000, that’s when you layer and your enterprise sales team go expand and drive a higher net dollar retention. So I think a focus on the end user and delivering value, rather than just being carried away by technology and features has been the recipe for many companies to be successful.
4) EconTalk podcast: Julia Galef, podcaster and writer, with host Russ Roberts, discussing her new book, The Scout Mindset.
Sajith: This is a good transcript for those curious about Julia Galef’s book ‘The Scout Mindset’. Julia Galef is a podcaster (Rationally Speaking podcast) and now author of The Scout Mindset: Why Some People Say Things Clearly and Others Don't. Sheis a generally interesting commentator / provocative thinker, and is influential in the Rationalist / Skeptics community. Here she talks about her new book. The scout mindset (as opposed to soldier mindset) encourages holding your beliefs / identities lightly, so that these beliefs don't define you, and you are able to approach life in a curious, skeptical way. The objective of having a scout mindset is to take better decisions, without being biased by preconceived notions or blind beliefs.
This is a slightly rambling conversation, though always interesting. The most critical takeaway I thought came towards the end, where she comes with a phrase ‘keep your identity light’, a riff on Paul Graham’s ‘keep your identity small’. That to me is the core of the scout mindset - have beliefs, views, but don't let your entire identity and personality be held hostage to them.
Link to podcast + transcript. Highlights below.
The ‘Scout Mindset’, and how it contrasts with the ‘Soldier Mindset’
Julia Galef: 'Soldier Mindset' is my term for the motivation to defend your beliefs against any evidence or argument that might threaten those beliefs. So, you might know this under names like rationalizing or denial or wishful thinking or motivated reasoning, or to some extent confirmation bias. And, Soldier Mindset is just my umbrella term for all of those things.
And, the reason I call it Soldier Mindset is just because the way--like, if you look at the language that we use to talk about reasoning, it's very militaristic. You know, we talk about defending beliefs. We try to support our beliefs or buttress our positions like we were defending a fortress. And, when we talk about dealing with opposing arguments or criticism, we talk about poking holes in someone's case or shooting down an argument. Very militaristic. So, I call it Soldier Mindset.
And then, Scout Mindset is my alternative to Soldier Mindset. And, whereas a soldier, their role is to attack and defend, the scout's role is just to go out and see the landscape, the situation as clearly as possible and put together as accurate a map as they can of what's really there. So, Scout Mindset is the motivation to see what's really there and not just what you wish was there.
Why we should adopt a scout mindset
I should emphasize that we're all a mix of scout and soldier and we might be more scout-like in some circumstances and more soldier like in others. So, it's a spectrum.….out of the entirety of everyone who exists, there's a large subset that are just not interested in the idea of being more scout-like.
Part of what I'm doing in the book is, like, pointing out this is a mindset that benefits you. My basic answer is because it improves your judgment. Having an accurate map of the world, knowing, like, where are the bridges crossing the river, and where are the risks and dangers, and which route can I take that will get me quickest to where I'm trying to go. Having that accurate map is really useful for making decisions.
And, we have to make tons of decisions in our lives whether that's about what's going to make us happy or where should I invest my money or what medical treatments are worth trying? Should I enter a relationship or leave this relationship? Should I have kids?
So, we just have thousands of decisions, big and small; and my claim is that the more accurate your map of the world, the more accurate your map of yourself and your strengths and weaknesses, and how other people work, the better your decisions are going to be.
Where does having a scout mindset help?
I would describe the kinds of situations that we're in into three categories.
One category is very sort of concrete everyday situations where Scout Mindset comes naturally to us because it's something with direct consequences for our life and we have little incentive to deceive ourselves, anyway. So, like, being in Scout Mindset about 'What's the best way to get to the train station in time to make my train?' or something. We don't really struggle with Soldier Mindset very much on those kinds of issues, right?
And, then on the other end of the spectrum, there's this category of ideological issues where we have a strong incentive to deceive ourselves because it feels good or because it helps us fit in with our tribe, our peer group. And, conversely, we have little incentive to be accurate. At least, little direct incentive, because as you put it, 'What is the harm of someone having false beliefs about tax policy or immigration or something?' because there's no direct consequences for them. So, indeed, we see a lot of Soldier Mindset in that category.
But, then one category in the middle that I think you neglected is issues where we have strong incentives in both directions, and so we tend to vacillate. So, I think a lot of important life decisions fall into that category, and they don't even have to be necessarily important in the grand scheme of things, just fraught.
Like, one example I described in the book is when I was running workshops--like, teaching workshops on decision-making and cognitive science--I had this strong incentive to find out from my students if there were any problems with the workshop--like, if I was teaching it badly or they were lost or unhappy. So, I would try to ask them, 'How's the workshop going for you? Are you having a good time? Does it make sense?' But, I also really hate hearing bad news and I really hate getting criticism. So, I also had the strong incentive to get the answer that I wanted to hear. So, I noticed after the fact that when I asked people these questions like, 'Are you enjoying the workshop?' I was nodding at them unconsciously. And, a couple times even, like, giving two thumbs up as I asked, 'Are you liking the workshop?' Because I had these two competing--there was this tension between the scout and soldier incentives.
So, I think there are a lot of cases in which people do, at least in theory, recognize: 'I think I would be better if I could be more of a scout about facing my problems head-on or about taking criticism, or thinking about risks.' But that's just hard to do. It could be helpful if I can give them some strategies for making that an easier transition.
And so, it seems to me that if you're practicing those habits even in domains that don't have a direct benefit to you like politics, I think that's good for you in general and it makes Scout Mindset easier in cases where it actually does benefit you because you've been practicing it just as a general habit of mind and not just trying to, like, turn it off and on, when it seems directly useful or not.
Why we evolved the soldier mindset; how looking at life through a longer-term horizon can help us manage the inconvenience of dropping the soldier mindset
One theory I discuss in the book is that the bulk of the time humans were evolving, we did live in small tribes. So there was a small and fixed group of people to whom you had to look good and remain in their good graces. And, if you failed at that, it could actually be a matter of life and death for you, if the tribe decided you were untrustworthy or disloyal or something like that.
And, it seems to me like that instinct which might have made sense in the evolutionary environment, we kind of ported it over to not just the modern environment where it's just less true. Like, it's less true that we rely on a small group of people for our survival and that we have to please them and remain loyal to them in order to survive. You can find another community if you really don't get along with your current community. You can support yourself just fine even if lots of people in the world hate you. So, that's less true.
...that extreme risk aversion when it comes to any social consequences--we've ported that over to a context where it doesn't really apply so much, like saying you were wrong about something. It feels like you're admitting weakness or you're being defeated in some way, (like) losing a physical battle in the ancestral environment might lower your status in the group. But, in practice, it just doesn't actually seem to work that way.
‘Hold your identity lightly’
Russ Roberts: You said something really beautiful in the last part of the book. You say that you should "hold your identity lightly."….tell us what you mean by holding it lightly, and why you think it's a good thing.
Julia Galef: This is my variation on something that Paul Graham said. He wrote an essay that's pretty well known called ‘Keep Your Identity Small’. He was talking about this well-known problem where lots of beliefs can become parts of our identity. It’s not just politics and religion. All kinds of beliefs can become part of your identity. I lived in the Bay Area for a while and I know that people's views on the pros and cons of different programming languages can be very identity-relevant beliefs for them. When someone disagrees with them, we take that personally and we feel it's almost like someone's stomping on your flag, your country's flag or something. It's a similar feeling.
Paul Graham's point was: All else equal, you should let as few things into your identity as possible.So, you don't feel like your views on politics or programming or whatever define you in any way. And I thought that was great advice.
My disagreement with it is minor and is maybe less of a disagreement with what Paul Graham himself meant and more with the way many of us tried to implement it, which is just that in practice it's really hard to not let things into your identity - just practically speaking, logistically speaking. I prefer the phrase, 'Hold your identity lightly', where yes, you can define yourself as an EA (Effective Altruist) or as a Democrat or a libertarian, but you just try to retain some detachment from that belief. And that involves things like always keeping it separate in your mind what I believe and what the ideology says. And, maybe there's a lot of overlap, but they're still two distinct things. So, you can notice when your views diverge from the ideologies. And, always keeping in mind that your support for the movement or the ideology is contingent. It's contingent on--'For however long I continue to believe that this cause is doing good, I support it. But, if it seems to me that it's no longer doing good, then I won't support it.' And, just always retaining that separation in your mind: that your support of these causes or ideologies is contingent and is not just an inherent part of who you are; and supporting that cause or that label is not the end in itself.
Russ Roberts: I think it's really important to have those identities, like you say, for all kinds of reasons: not just so that we can support a cause we happen to be mostly sympathetic to, but just for our sense of self.
Julia Galef: it gives people a lot of power over you, too, if you're not holding your identity lightly.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I think that's just such an incredibly important point. Part of it is just the role our identity plays in our lives. It is in many ways our armor. It is our way of joining the tribe of people who are like-minded and gives us a sense of belonging. So, it can be extremely important. And, when it's threatened, we do come back often as soldiers and we forget it's not a war. You can actually be part over here and part over there. In a way, that's really the lesson of your book, which is a nice thing.
Julia Galef: Yeah. That's a good summary. You said it better than I could have.
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