16: Anjan Katta - A Sunrise Over Computing

Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 16 with Anjan Khata. Before we get into things, this episode is brought to you by Hampton. I think so much of company building is actually about energy. As a leader and a founder, you have to be that energy source for almost everyone in your company. And so I think having people outside of your day-to-day context can be tremendously valuable in making sure that you yourself have the energy to keep going. That's where Hampton comes in. It's a private membership for founders and entrepreneurs that pairs you with a subset of like-minded leaders who you'll meet with monthly to talk through all of the challenges of building a company.

In a sense, Hampton is a one-stop shop to create a personal board of advisors, a group that you can go to for hard problems, feedback on challenges, or simply perspective so that you have the energy to keep on going. I've certainly benefited from this type of peer mentorship in my career, and given how lonely being a founder can be, having a group of people that you trust, that you can zoom out from the day-to-day with, is such an incredible benefit. While the heart of the Hampton membership is your intimate 8-person peer group, Hampton also has monthly and quarterly events, online speaker series, a digital community for asking the entire network of over 1,000 founders questions.

And more. Hampton isn't for everybody, but for founders who are on what can be both the thrill and joy of a lifetime in company building, but also an experience that can be quite lonely at times. It's an amazing way to have a community who gets what you're going through. If you've raised $3 million or have $3 million in revenue, or you've sold a company for $10 million, I'd strongly encourage you to check out Hampton. I've included a link in the description where you can learn more and And if you apply, make sure to tell them that I sent you.

Thanks again to Hampton for supporting Dialectic. Now, a bit about Anjan. Anjan is the founder and CEO of Daylight, a new type of computer company. I met Anjan last year at an event where he showed off Daylight's first product, the DC1. Effectively, if an iPad and a Kindle had a baby. It turns out Anjan's been working on Daylight and that product for the last 7 years. Trying to make a computer that felt more like his relationship with his Kindle. I've long struggled with the fact that there's probably been nothing more influential on my work and much of my life than computers and the internet and how they empower my curiosity, have connected me to so many people I love, and can make it feel like anything's possible.

Meanwhile, I've also found that modern computers seem to be ruining my attention span, make it incredibly hard to focus, and often seem to be directing me towards what they want rather than what I want. As I got to know him better, it became clear that Anjan was truly on a mission to solve this problem and may be uniquely positioned to do so. I'll admit that I'm biased as I began working with Anjan and the Daylight team as an advisor fairly recently, but I believe that Daylight is important and good for the world and one of the rare businesses and products that isn't inevitable.

Many technologies simply feel like a matter of time. Others require another path that are up to us to choose. And so I hope that whether you're interested in the future of computers or not, you enjoy this conversation. Eunjin's been on quite an incredible journey and has learned a lot about himself in the process. I think there's a tremendous amount for all of us to learn from this conversation about tying philosophy and action, having conviction to trust our intuition, and most importantly, Leaning in to our humanity. I know that's what Anjan has been on a path to doing for himself and is setting out to help us all do by way of the computers we use with Daylight.

Here's Anjan. Anjan, how are we? Speaker B: What's up, man? Speaker A: We are going to start with something that I think you and I are both enamored by, which is there's an old Steve Jobs idea that the computer is the bicycle for the mind, or could be a dream that the computer could be the bicycle for the mind. These days my iPhone feels more like a pacifier for the mind. Uh, so my question is what makes a great tool or what makes a great computer? Speaker B: Jesus, start easy, huh?

Icebreakers. I think it actually like sort of begs an interesting discussion around the terms we use here. It seems pedantic, but like, do we call something a tool? When do we call something like an appliance? When? Like a toaster? Do we call something an instrument? When? Like, a saxophone is clearly an instrument, but a thing that measures light or light spectrum is also an instrument? Speaker A: Mm. Speaker B: Really great knife, like one of those, like, Damascus steel, like, it's gonna cut that steak no problem. Where does that fit in?

It's a utensil? And so, like, we sort of use these words interchangeably. And for the most part, that's fine. But if your goal is to be a toolmaker, I think it's super fascinating to see both not just the connotations we have for each of these tools, but actually like categorically what conceptually is the difference between them. And like a lawnmower to me is very clearly in the room of appliance. But when I say a lawnmower, obviously all of us just use like electric or gas-powered automated lawnmowers. But if you were to use like a physical lawnmower, like the olden day ones, which were like an actual workout— I was in LA recently and like a bunch of people are getting into this as a trend.

It's like a way to do chores but actually get a workout. Point being is the mechanical one, is that also an appliance? I somehow put that in a different category than like a toaster or like a basic lawnmower. Is, is it kazooie, like the first, or a recorder, is that an instrument or is that more in the realm of like a machine or an appliance? Well, still clearly an instrument. Speaker A: Is, you know, like MIDI on a computer to generate music. Speaker B: Yeah. Is a MIDI an instrument or an appliance?

Is an air purifier an appliance? Pretty literally. Is your vibrating toothbrush, is that an appliance, an instrument, a tool? Like this all sort of sounds pedantic, like, okay, what's the point? Like, why are you saying all of this? But I think it's fascinating to see how if we relate to a computer as an instrument and then we think of the image of a saxophone, it's a very different set of associations than if we relate to the computer as a tool. And I sort of used to hate people who are like into etymology or like very precise about language.

I'm like, who cares? Like we sort of get it. It sort of now hit me, like in a medium is the message sort of way. Actually, our core relationship to a computer— is it a sidekick? Is it a Dobby the Elf? Is it an instrument more akin to a musical instrument? Is it akin to a tool we use, more akin to a toothbrush? Is it more akin to a toaster, a calculator? What is actually the set of psychological connotations, patterns, relationships that we have to these things that we call computers.

And within the category, how diverse is it? Right. You know, that's the whole point of Daylight, a Kindle versus this and that. And I think this question actually becomes super key because the founding insight, to your point of like the Steve Jobs stuff, the founding insight of modern computing is, and, you know, like Ted Nelson is a famous example of some of these folks, is, is them realizing Holy shit, this isn't a calculator. This isn't just an appliance. They called it a calculating appliance, much more in the category of a toaster.

It's a new medium. And they specifically use the word media, medium, to make sure people understood that it wasn't just a tool, which of course you get caught up in when like the first big big use case is, hey, buy an Apple II, it's this great tool for this new thing called spreadsheets, right? And that is what a computer is. It is a tool I put on my desk. I'm a business person. It helps me do my books faster and do finance faster. Speaker A: It does one job. It helps me automate one job.

Speaker B: Yes. And sure, there's a one beside it, a two beside it, and so on. Speaker A: I'm not, I mean, maybe I'm getting caught in the etymology, but appliances and tools, at least in my mind, both are kind of in that vein, which is they help me do something very purpose stated, and I know what I'm going to get out of them. It's also interesting that we jump to tools and appliances, given that a bicycle is a vehicle in some sense. Speaker B: Right, right. Speaker A: But in all of these cases, there's sort of some— almost all great tools, appliances, vehicles, etc.

have a very explicit stated purpose, and I know what I'm going to get, and they explain themselves. Computers have started to supersede that to your point about mediums. Speaker B: Well, I'm sort of arguing that the original insight of computing was this is not a tool. It'll look like a tool. It'll go to market because a tool, it'll be adopted because a tool, hey, get one of these things. It'll be useful for this. Because that's what's legible, right? Right. If I tell you, you have a new medium that's not legible.

It's like the legibility of, of the, of like the printing press based codex was like the Bible. And then you realize you could do all of these things. Speaker A: Same with TV or radio or anything. Speaker B: Exactly right. And, um, you could argue a TV and a computer are actually a lot less different than first meets the eye, right? Like, we easily put these in different categories because of how we grew up, but if you actually analyze it carefully, maybe I'll get to it in a second, they're actually a lot more similar than they are, which is they're sort of our first dynamic visual media.

But to me, the fundamental difference that is actually the core, core thing to hold about computing that we've lost along the way, that I think is the essence of what we're trying to rediscover now. And therefore I'm arguing is actually much more than a bicycle for the mind. You know, we've talked in the past like a bicycle for the body, for, for Maslow's hierarchy, for the entirety of a being. The key insight is this isn't just a faster calculator. This isn't just a better calculator. This isn't just a tool to do something.

It's a fundamental new, almost like state of matter of reality because it is the first time ever we have dynamic interactive media that then also can be in relationship with you. And history has always been about objects, tools, instruments, appliances. The technical definition, if you look it up, an appliance is something that can operate much more autonomously on its own. You put the stuff in the toaster versus a tool is is an extended cognition of you, an extended exoskeleton of you. Speaker A: You use it. Yeah. An appliance is almost like an agent.

Like, yes, toaster, go toast this. I'll come back. Speaker B: Exactly. It's like in Rick and Morty where it's like the butter robot. Yeah. Speaker A: Um, it's an appliance. Yeah, exactly. Speaker B: So hopefully you start to see like, okay, this is sort of boring that he's making these distinctions, but no, they get really, really interesting because it means in places where computing is shitty because we relate to it as this like general purpose, do everything, we don't know what it is. You can potentially reclaim computing by specializing it into an appliance or a tool or an instrument.

And we can get into what the differences are, right? When I think of instrument, I think of saxophone. There is no right or wrong. It's only an endless expression of transmutation almost. Yes. Speaker A: Or it amplifies what, what I can do in some sort of specific way. Speaker B: Yeah. I find it fascinating that when you think of instrument immediately for me, I'm not sure about you, it goes to musical instrument, this amplification of human creativity or expression. And then a scientific instrument, this amplification of human curiosity and wonder and like sort of the trying to meet reality where it is.

And in places where we have shoehorned computing to be a tool or appliance, I actually think the reanimation of it, the giving it a soul again, anima means soul, is by actually recognizing it is not a tool, it is fundamentally a new medium in reality. And insomuch as one of the big problems of our era is sort of this obsession with objects, a relation to objects, modeling people as objects, objectifying everything. If you're familiar with like James C. Scott, it's sort of like numbers and objects are what are most legible to us.

So our cognition actually then forms to do that. You could call it being left-brain dominant. As one simplification. Speaker A: This is the scene, like, state guy? Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Got it. Speaker B: It's just like things— Speaker A: all about legibility. Speaker B: Yeah. Things reform around what is legible,, grokable or understandable. Then what's, what's sort of the big thing that's missing is then we started to treat humans like objects, like numbers, like things. And it's like, it's no aspect of human nature that's like that. It's no aspect of our true operating system in my perspective.

It's an aspect of the way we've had to relate to the world, which is primarily as objects and numbers. And therefore we treat humans that way. We treat everything else that way. And so the profound possibility of computing is it is a magical medium. It is something that can have its own sort of anima. It's animism reborn. It's a thing that on its own can dance and sing and animate and teach and be the Bible and be the Quran and be the Kabbalah. That ability for something independent of us to be animated— it's not like a puppet or it's not like a toaster.

It on its own can be animated— is like fundamentally like, you know, like eukaryote, prokaryote. Like you look at the history of the world, you have these textbook events. It's one of those textbook events because you only sort of get that. Speaker A: How is it animated in a way that a television is not? Speaker B: So that's, that's, that's where I was saying, actually, from one perspective, it looks more blurry because it looks like a lot of the things we attribute to computing, actually, you could sort of attribute to TV.

Speaker A: They're just much more dynamic in the computing media, right? Speaker B: Well, so that, so, so I'm, let me argue against myself for a second and say they're very similar. There was a guy who wrote a book basically against TV called Gerrymander. And it's like stunning how well it describes the problems of like modern internet and social media and stuff like that. And it really goes to show how much of those dynamics are captured. But I'd say the difference is at the end of the day, a TV is still broadcast.

It's still a monologue. It doesn't have bidirectional interactivity. Speaker A: How is it animated in a way that a television is not? Speaker B: So that's, that's, that's where I was saying, actually, from one perspective, it looks more blurry because it looks like a lot of the things we attribute to computing, actually, you could sort of attribute to TV. Speaker A: They're just much more dynamic in the computing media, right? Speaker B: Well, so that, so, so I'm, let me argue against myself for a second and say they're very similar.

There was a guy who wrote a book basically against TV called Gerrymander. And it's like stunning how well it describes the problems of like modern internet and social media and stuff like that. And it really goes to show how much of those dynamics are captured. But I'd say the difference is at the end of the day, a TV is still broadcast. It's still a monologue. It doesn't have bidirectional interactivity. Speaker A: It's sort of one directionally animated. Yes. Speaker B: And it therefore then cannot change its actions based on input from you, which is the basis of relationship, right?

Because we always think about computers as being this like incredibly dehumanizing thing. It's causing everything to be technocratic and objectified and reductive. Right. And we're using computer metaphors for everything and everything's thrown out the door. Data or it's not real, right? Like, I only trust data, like, as a, as a core dogma. What I'm actually suggesting is that's like a, a sort of misunderstanding of what actually the core of computing is. The core of computing is us having things that actually carry the qualities that most matter to us, which I am arguing is sort of relationality.

And insomuch as we can rediscover computing from being an appliance or a tool, it gets fuzzy, to something that's more of a media, a medium, this new interactive, you know, AI, of course, in many ways sort of pops the cherry of what's got in the way of so much of computing. We actually can now change the fundamental non-human relationship we have in the world. From being one of an object interaction to one of being a relational, a relationship-based interaction. And in that way, I think we actually, from our interaction with computers, meant to be the way they were always meant to be, actually reanimate our sense of humanness, relationship, and right brain and connectedness.

And that hopefully then spreads to the rest of the world. And I could go on and on how AI enables complexity handling And therefore subjectivity can be considered real versus in the past only an objective metric is considered real. Actually what objectivity is, is just low dimensional understandings of things and subjectivity is a high dimensional understanding of something. Um, this is why old men love cigars and fast cars and sunsets. It's like all high dimensional things and young men like high scores. It's a very low dimensional thing. Speaker A: There's something, there's an idea inside some of what you were saying around the relation.

I don't know if it's fully getting into the stuff you're talking about at the end, but in the ways that computers are at least reflexive to us, you have this phrase that I love that could also describe a great tool, which is a water slide of agency. Can you talk about that and how that maybe is sitting inside of what you were just saying? Speaker B: Forgot I even said that. Um, a caveat for, for you and everybody listening is like, I'm on this to have a lot of fun, so I have no idea at all whether it'll be helpful for any of you, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna enjoy myself.

I, I, I think it deeply connects and I'm noticing my body getting really excited because it feels like it's a deep secret here because we all are like, fuck, the world's getting so like tech and computational. Like I got to get out of this. This is dehumanizing me. And you could say on the surface, daylight me, sort of the ideology we proclaim is like computers are dehumanizing us. Like let's get to a better future. Let's get out of computing. It's sort of that. Actually, I think what's really powerful here is what I'm arguing is no, we have misunderstood the essence of computing this entire time because it got captured by the incredible business potential that came out of computers and the actual— Speaker A: particularly consumption on them.

Speaker B: Yes. Yes. Consumption, consumption, consumption. And I would say sort of like, you know, it's called a browser for a reason. Browsing. That's sort of the, the sort of shallow productivity that's messaging and emails and, you know, all the basic things we have to do, mindless slideshow presentations. By the way, all of that's necessary. If you look at a biological system, signaling is a key part of the entire system. Like, I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but the key thing here is the essence of computing. The beginning of computing is actually very much tied with the human potential movement, you know, what we call like the New Age or the hippies in the '60s, right?

Which was— it was one, it was the Paul Otlet sort of Library of Alexandria. Oh my God, what if we can bring all the knowledge of humanity and put it to our use? Speaker B: Yes. Yes. Consumption, consumption, consumption. And I would say sort of like, you know, it's called a browser for a reason. Browsing. That's sort of the, the sort of shallow productivity that's messaging and emails and, you know, all the basic things we have to do, mindless slideshow presentations. By the way, all of that's necessary. If you look at a biological system, signaling is a key part of the entire system.

Like, I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but the key thing here is the essence of computing. The beginning of computing is actually very much tied with the human potential movement, you know, what we call like the New Age or the hippies in the '60s, right? Which was— it was one, it was the Paul Otlet sort of Library of Alexandria. Oh my God, what if we can bring all the knowledge of humanity and put it to our use? Speaker A: So it's sort of crazy that Steve Jobs in the '80s imagining we could talk to Socrates or whatever once we get— Speaker B: exactly, bingo.

What is this? When we talk about everybody has their personal Aristotle, or you have the Library of Alexandria, or you have this bicycle for the mind, meaning something that you would have not done because the activation energy was too high. You would have bit your pencil, pick your nose, like, you know, eat in your chocolate chip cookies rather than get started on, right, the math problem or the poem you want to write. How does it sort of augment your mind, right? Your memory, your processing, your reasoning, your executive function, your reflection, pro-flexion.

Like, cognition is so much deeper than just like, I am good at math. Speaker A: All of that makes me think of an instrument. Back to the idea of the musical instrument amplifying what is possible, what I can do. Speaker A: All of that makes me think of an instrument. Back to the idea of the musical instrument amplifying what is possible, what I can do. Speaker B: Exactly. And that's where the metaphor of the bicycle for the mind is actually sort of limiting. It was a beautiful analogy for the people who don't know it.

His point is humans are pretty average on distance we can move per cap versus calorie expended. But then something like the osprey is just off the charts. But you put a human on a bike and then the human is off the charts. Speaker A: Their locomotion is crazy efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: And so his point is like, we as humans sometimes are not that far from our ape ancestors, but it's our ability to create tools that allow us to amplify our innate potentials that makes us special. And that's the whole call to arms there is a tool is like, okay, reel me in if I get lost in too many branches of logic here.

But this gets— this is so exciting to me. Have you ever watched Planet Earth, the episode where, like, the lizards are born? Speaker A: No. Speaker B: And they immediately are attacked by so many snakes. And then they somehow have to intuitively know to go in a certain direction, escape all the snakes and get to the ocean. Hmm. Speaker A: Like seconds after being born or minutes or what? Speaker B: It's, it's, it's like the most absurd thing. This thing is just born and the thing like immediate crisis. So many animals have like deep nervous system, like absolute fear around, then it starts surrounding you like a bunch of them.

Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And you watch this thing and it's just like absurd. It's immediately like. And these are adult snakes. It's immediately fighting for its life. Speaker A: And it's like some kind of will. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And you watch this thing and it's just like absurd. It's immediately like. And these are adult snakes. It's immediately fighting for its life. Speaker A: And it's like some kind of will. Speaker B: Yeah, it's insane. But what is the downside of that? Is it's an ASIC. That lizard is born with so much of the possibility space of its future life built in, which means it has it from the get-go.

Like, good luck, me and you, even at, you know, 12 years old, I don't even know, even older, escaping a bunch of snakes attacking us and trying to— it has no idea where the ocean is. How did it— it has some predetermined Yes, it has some deep intuitive way to notice a bunch of little clues, you know, maybe the mist in the thing, the sound in the distance, blah, blah, blah. But the point being is it has all of this capability up front. It would totally outcompute a human, totally outcompute a human.

Human would be beaten in 10 out of 10, relatively. Speaker A: Huh? Perhaps it's less agentic. Speaker B: And that's where I'm going, is because it got everything up front, it got baked in as a tool. When I say ASIC, I mean a computer chip that's baked in for a specific purpose. It can't generalize. It can't do more. It's not like you meet the lizard 10 years later and he's like avoiding, like, you know, Komodo dragons and cheetahs. Like, whatever he can avoid, he's basically got that ability to avoid. Maybe there's a little bit of learning by doing, but he's basically fixed.

A human in the beginning sucks. Yes, they're dead. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Right. There's a reason we're so dependent on our parents. And the source of much of our trauma is how dependent we are on our parents. I think it's a good theory. Animals don't get as traumatized because they're not as dependent on their parents. To the same degree. But what does that mean? It's because we're like a general-purpose squishy super learning machine. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Right. There's a reason we're so dependent on our parents. And the source of much of our trauma is how dependent we are on our parents.

I think it's a good theory. Animals don't get as traumatized because they're not as dependent on their parents. To the same degree. But what does that mean? It's because we're like a general-purpose squishy super learning machine. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: But you start out super unspecified. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: You're not a tool. You're a medium. Mm-hmm. Right. And then the whole point of your parents, of your teachers, of societies is to craft that medium into what's hopefully a beautiful expression of a human, which is your role in society, which is your own special snowflake.

And I sort of reclaiming that in a good way, right? Like each of our own special unique expression and the rest of the million little innate genetic abilities and, you know, quirks and lucks of life that we get into. And that's our point, is we are ever-evolvable and learning and we can expand so much past our quote-unquote original programming. Yes. The downside of that is it's weaker than the fixed thing in the front, but it actually is the thing that has the highest upside and the longest point. and that's my point is computing inevitably in the beginning won out, got won out by the lizards because they could escape the snakes versus the human babies,

, VisiCalc on an Apple II, right? WordPerfect. I will do my documents, I'll do my presentations, I will balance my books. Speaker A: It's sort of some small sense turning a human into a computer or into a, uh, uh, an automator. Speaker B: An ASIC, yes. Into a set of tools. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: And so if you think about what computers and modern society has done is it's taken the beautiful medium of a human and it's turned it into a series of tools. And the computers are simply a reflection of that sort of recursive loop there.

And then the problem of that is it's good, but then you can't scale, you can't expand. And if the high-level headline behind everything we're saying is we're trying to transition from surviving to progress, from progress to flourishing, then the most important thing we can do is sort of leave that room for expansion, for upside. Speaker A: It's sort of some small sense turning a human into a computer or into a, uh, uh, an automator. Speaker B: An ASIC, yes. Into a set of tools. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: And so if you think about what computers and modern society has done is it's taken the beautiful medium of a human and it's turned it into a series of tools.

And the computers are simply a reflection of that sort of recursive loop there. And then the problem of that is it's good, but then you can't scale, you can't expand. And if the high-level headline behind everything we're saying is we're trying to transition from surviving to progress, from progress to flourishing, then the most important thing we can do is sort of leave that room for expansion, for upside. Speaker A: What is the water slide of agency? What is that? What is that like? That image to me feels like an accelerant along that path you just described.

But can you, can you talk about that a little bit more tangibly in terms of what that can mean? Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. To me, it's the same as what I'm saying here. The waterfall of agency is an emergent property in my perspective from you being more a be water medium, like the Bruce Lee sense of being supple or be water, than a tool. Or if you're a sophisticated person in society that works at Bain and got a fancy MBA, You're a set of tools that looks like a human, but actually what you've done is you've built a bunch of tools that are good at building games.

And this is why— Speaker A: Specializing more and more over time. Speaker B: Yes. And you've lost the innate suppleness, the innate evolvability, the innate sort of connection to life, which is actually should be one of wonder and curiosity. That's why we have dopamine, by the way. When you face things that are new, rather than being scared, You actually have some innate reward pathway of exploring and exploiting and trying and experimenting. And that, that is actually the original reason dopamine exists. It's why children cut banana slugs in half and push each other in the ground and eat gravel and do all the stuff they do.

That's like the dopamine pathways being put to work. And so I'm arguing the essence of agency is actually that innate characteristic we have, that general purpose computing we have. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: That then. When you do have that innate confidence, not necessarily consciously, but subconsciously, of that you're meant to be an evolvable being. So whatever you approach, your entire possibility of a human is to bootstrap and learn and get into it. You then have agency. You're not worried about life because all of life is foreign to you, right?

You suck at all of it in some sense compared to a lizard. Of course, we're still better than nothing. Yeah. Speaker A: And your only way forward is experimentation. Speaker B: And so my argument is when I say if computing moves more from a tool or appliance more into the realm of like an instrument or a medium, it is not just an augmenter of your agency. It's an augmenter of your intellect. It's an augmenter of your creative expression. It's an augmenter of all of the aspects of being human. And that's what I mean when I say computing has its essence truly in my perspective in the Human Potential Movement, because it's a recognition Whoa, this is a human.

We're sort of average. You put us on a bike. Oh my, oh my God. What are all the aspects of our being that could be put on a bike and be so much more? And actually, then the metaphor of a bike then lacks— and it's not, no, a self-driving car for the mind. The point is to move from being a vehicle to it being a dance partner, to it being a medium that I can get— I don't want to get too technical, but like Gall's Law or Markov blankets, basically its complexity matches your complexity, its evolvability matches your evolvability.

Speaker A: This is the reflexivity with agency that allows you to expand. Speaker B: Yes, it's, it's relationality matches yours so you can be your full free self. Speaker A: It's sort of like when you're, um, when you're in flow state and an environment or an instrument or a tool is meeting you exactly where you are. A great game can even do this. Maybe it's a simulated version, but a great game designer is this idea that it sort of sculpts agency by matching your abilities and your goals. And there's this feeling of like unlimited potential inside of that.

I want to— we'll get more specific and concrete soon. Just briefly, why computers? What about you as a kid or as a teenager drew you to the seed of these ideas? You know, you've now spent much of your adult life working on. Speaker B: I mean, I think I sort of like the phrase, like, write drunk, edit sober. You sort of like lead with the intuition, the right brain, the, the ineffable, and then you follow with the left brain and the analysis and the unpacking and this. And I feel that's probably most of my life, which is like looking in the rearview mirror.

I've tried to understand it in these sort of bigger philosophical and deeper historical and sort of first principles frames, but the actual way I navigated reality was much more Not in the edit sober, but in the write drunk. I think the write drunk for me was two things. It was how much I loved reading and how much I was frustrated that the author couldn't talk back to me. And it was also me just using my computer for everything because I thought it was like, I'm just super curious. And the fact you can click link after link after link and Google this and go up that and read this blog and go there and end up with 300 tabs.

Was like just the most profound thing ever. And you could download mods for your PSP and play free games and you can download game after game after game and you can get all the walkthroughs for what you wanted. And eventually I learned how to get books illegally for free. And it sort of was just like, holy crap, this is such an incredibly powerful medium for somebody who, uh, wants a grip on reality. I think that's the core of it is I sort of overwhelmed and scared by reality. But rather than being like too scary, it was sort of like wondrous.

Speaker A: There's also a lot of interactivity there. Speaker B: Yes, you're in the loop. It's the flow state. Speaker A: You're in the loop, right? Speaker B: It's like you're cracking away at reality a brick at a time. Speaker A: Ah, I see you. Speaker B: Oh, I see how that works. Ah, you try to trick me. I got you figured out. And it was sort of seeing how uniquely painful and difficult that was for me, both at a physical level and like a mental health level. Speaker A: And, um, and you never stopped knocking away at it, I suppose.

Speaker B: Yeah. The daylight was not meant to be like the thing I work on. It's not meant to be the big idea. It's meant to be the thing I solved so I could get back to working on the big idea. Speaker A: Hmm. Which was the big idea? Speaker B: No idea. It was something in health or medicine or mental health or, or something like that. Oh, it's one of the things I struggle with. So it's sort of funny that the snake ate its tail. But my point there is, um, like I'm very ADHD, so computers are just super difficult for me because it has no natural constraints, right?

You can be addicted to the news, but a newspaper has its natural constraint. And historically that's been a bug. Oh, what if I could see this perspective? What if I could have that? But you know, and the unlimitedness becomes a feature, but then you just move the bug to somewhere else, which is— Speaker A: I think a lot of people resonate with that these days, regardless of where they sit on the ADHD spectrum. I think it's probably made us as a species directionally more that way. Speaker B: And by the way, most of computing is being, um, has historically been done by people on the ends of the spectrum, outliers, because they either are outliers most of the time, but some of the time they're the canary in the coal mine.

And so even like the capacitive touchscreen on the iPhone was with somebody with a really bad repetitive stress injury. Really? So they wanted a keyboard they could press with very little force. So they invented capacitive touch. Apple bought Wayne Westermann's company and that became the capacitive touch that made the iPhone possible. Speaker B: And by the way, most of computing is being, um, has historically been done by people on the ends of the spectrum, outliers, because they either are outliers most of the time, but some of the time they're the canary in the coal mine.

And so even like the capacitive touchscreen on the iPhone was with somebody with a really bad repetitive stress injury. Really? So they wanted a keyboard they could press with very little force. So they invented capacitive touch. Apple bought Wayne Westermann's company and that became the capacitive touch that made the iPhone possible. Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: If iPhone used resistive touch, it wouldn't exist. Speaker A: Wouldn't exist. Speaker B: And so it's sort of fascinating if you go through a lot of productivity software, a lot of computing innovations come from people who are uniquely sort of outlier.

And so I was like super ADHD. I have seasonal affective disorder. Like I sort of get really depressed. Um, I sort of inevitably have historically gotten really depressed, but especially if I'm not outside or I'm stuck inside all the time, I get much more depressed. So it's like frustrating when you're fighting your computer, trying to like be outside and, you know, half the battle is like your Wi-Fi, but the other half, even when you get things downloaded, you can't see your damn screen, right? So like you can sort of see where that wanted to get that.

I was reading so much, I had terrible eye strain. Some of that is how much I read. So much of that is just my unique physiology. Like they thought I had glaucoma because my eye pressures are so high from reading so much. That was their theory, that you're just literally like squeezing your eyeballs. Yeah, right. They were like confused because like, this shouldn't be possible. Like somebody your age should not be having close to glaucoma level pressures, but it was stable. So they just guess what's now. Speaker A: We solve our, we solve our own problems.

Speaker B: So that's it. It's just like, I'm like, if the rest of my life is intermediated through a computational interface, and I don't care if it's VR, AR, or a computer in my hand or a computer in my pocket or on my wrist or in my ears, it's a computational interface. Speaker A: We solve our, we solve our own problems. Speaker B: So that's it. It's just like, I'm like, if the rest of my life is intermediated through a computational interface, and I don't care if it's VR, AR, or a computer in my hand or a computer in my pocket or on my wrist or in my ears, it's a computational interface.

Speaker A: Yep. Speaker B: And for the most part, what I am used to are these computational interfaces that are just make The opposite of a bicycle for the mind. It makes me a worse version of myself. Yes. Speaker A: Yes. But also, I mean, I, one of the things I love about Daylight and— Speaker B: so I got to change that, right? Otherwise I'm not going to be successful regardless of what I do. And to be honest, that was the origin of Daylight is this sort of like, I'm screwed if this is the status quo of the future.

Like I will never be successful. Speaker A: Well, there's a feeling of being at war with it. There's an old meme I love, which is like the goal of the goal is to make as much money using computers as possible so that I never have to use a computer again. Speaker B: I love that. Speaker A: I felt this tension my whole life of like the two things. I'm— there's few things that are more enamoring and exciting to me than the internet and computers. And yet also there are a few things that cause me more problems.

And so let's talk more concretely for a second. My experience of Daylight has been that it's the best V1 of any product I've used in a very long time compared to the Vision Pro, which came out the same year, or at least I got the same year. Very different in scope, obviously, but interesting to contrast, contrast those two things. You've shipped thousands of devices. You're 6 years in, you have a real product. There's a, just little things. Uh, Paddy O'Levin has this video, uh, on Twitter of him reading On a Daylight for the first time.

And he's just, he's getting like emotional. He's describing it like the Harry Potter book. It's like magic paper. My mom's favorite tech product she's used in years. Speaker B: Oh, no way. Oh, wow. Speaker A: How did we, how did we get here? And obviously the job's not finished. There's a lot of work to do. Speaker B: We'll talk more about that, but page 1 of hopefully a very, uh, Beautiful story. But I think how we got here is sort of— but sort of a fascinating trick reality plays on you, in my experience, which is sort of when you try to be selfless, like deeply, you end up sort of being selfish, like sort of the martyr tendency.

And some of the deepest ways to unlock being selfless is to actually be selfish. And then when you take care of your needs and your cup is full, then actually so much of what you do is then actually selfless. Because you're not hungry anymore. And I think for so long I was like trying to make technology that can help people. I sort of was obsessed with computers. Just to your question of how also I was just Steve Jobs and Nolan Bushnell and Bill Gates and Alan Kay and Ted Nelson. Obviously you start with the flashy ones, right?

Like the, the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs, but then you slowly go deeper and deeper and deeper into it. My dad reads like Got Bill Gates biography to me when I was like 5, so probably some indoctrination in here too. Speaker A: You had— talk about lack of agency. Speaker B: As I sort of got into that, I realized like this is what I most want to do. But then I came to Silicon Valley and was just sort of like completely disillusioned by the reality of tech. Instagram had just got sold for $1 billion.

And so it's like everybody— no offense— everybody that would have been an iBanker or a consultant was just like, this is the high status, rational, high positive expected value thing to do, right? And I always thought the funniest and most damning statement about entrepreneurship is historically the expected value of being a dentist has always been way higher than being an entrepreneur. And that explains everything you need to know about who decides to become an entrepreneur. And so that sort of shifting, like, to me felt like the original sin of modern Silicon Valley, because you move from people doing—

Speaker A: that's not inherently a bad thing, just to challenge you slightly. Why shouldn't the world want more people trying to be entrepreneurs? Speaker B: I don't think it's necessarily an ultimately bad thing. I think it's, it's a bad thing if it stays that way forever. It's the reason being is what you can achieve through sort of convergent analytical things when you're in a, when you're trying to explore a new possibility space is always way more limited than a sort of divergent bottom-up exploration. And so when everybody's like, oh, Instagram made a billion dollars.

Okay. I need something that is inherently got a network effect. I got this and that, right? What Instagram for cats? Okay. Uber for this Airbnb for that. And of course those adjacent possibles are like helpful and important, right? Like we can come up with a bunch of examples of, of where the, the, the copycats around something are useful. But for the most part, that's sort of the more boring parts of society. Like There's not— it doesn't take much effort or risk there. Like the market forces and the memetic forces will sort of take care of it.

All the progress is the things that are uninevitable, right? And ultimately, if you are an entrepreneur, you're getting it in spite of it being entrepreneurship. You're getting into it because you have a want or a vision or a need or an opinion for the way the world should be. Speaker A: Yeah, you're trying to bend things. Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah, it's a thing that's uninevitable. And to me, the opposite of things being uninevitable is a real estate agent. If you don't sell that house, it is completely inevitable somebody else will do it.

Speaker A: Sort of pure efficient market. Speaker A: Yeah, you're trying to bend things. Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah, it's a thing that's uninevitable. And to me, the opposite of things being uninevitable is a real estate agent. If you don't sell that house, it is completely inevitable somebody else will do it. Speaker A: Sort of pure efficient market. Speaker B: So pure inevitability, right? So there's the term additionality. And so it felt to me like Silicon Valley lost the essence of what it was to the world, which was additionality. And often, because the expected value of that is lower than being a dentist, the people who do it have to do it with a lot of intrinsic motivation or delusion or some combination of all of the above, right?

And that just leads to a much more interesting possibility space because it's inherently divergent and bottom-up than a top-down analytical convergent space. You need diverge and converge, right? A lot of our conversations off the podcast are sort of building my skill of how to converge. But that was sort of when I was like, what the hell? This isn't the innovative place I thought it was. This isn't the place that's community for irreverent people. That's sort of how I've always felt, like a black sheep. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And I was like, finally, this is my home.

And I was like, wait, this isn't my home. Ultimately, I realized you got to feel home in yourself before you can feel home anywhere else. But it was powerful for me to sort of realize that. And I reacted in that moment by being like, screw technology. I'm done with this. This is like, I want to change the world, make the world a better place. Like, total bullshit. None of these guys have any idea what they're doing. The machine is running the show. There's a famous line where it's like, humanity is like the sex organs of the machines.

It's like, all these people are the sex organs of the machines and they don't even know it. And they think they're cool. So I became obsessed with the idea that we have every, all the propaganda I've been taught this whole time of like, tech is amazing and it saves the world and this is like, there's no, they don't, they have no idea what they're doing. If they actually, like, it's the simplest of questions, make the world a better place. What does that mean? What direction? GDP, lives saved, happiness? How, when, where?

And then you quickly realize, like, they have no idea. So I've said this a lot of times, but it was so powerful for me to capture this, which is Einstein says, what characterizes the modern age is optimization of means, yet confusion of goals. Optimization of means, yet confusion of goals. And that's what I felt all of tech and computing in Silicon Valley was. It was people, brilliant, endlessly optimizing means, but not really clear about the goals, which begs the question, who's like really in the driver's seat? There's nobody, right? There is no adult in the room.

And so my reaction was to sort of reject it all and go for the opposite. Well, I want I'm tired of reading books. I'm tired of living in this, like, little, like, cut-off utopia. Like, give me the muck. I want real life. I was miserable myself. I was so disembodied. I was all in my head. I was productivity obsessed. I had 42 Chrome extensions. I had so many Chrome extensions to make me productive. My browser was so damn slow. I was never productive. Speaker A: It's a good metaphor. Speaker B: And so I just declared bankruptcy on my whole conceptual narrative.

Life organizing principles, stories, everything. And I went backpacking around the world for 2 years, and, uh, I read a lot of like literature and religious stuff and Tolstoy and early Buddhist scripts and also thermodynamics and complexity theory and Brave New World and, you know, the Unabomber Manifesto and sort of just trying to make sense of 3 questions. One is like, I keep getting smarter but more miserable. Like, what the hell? Well, how do you actually have a good life? And two is where are we all headed? Like, where are we going?

It probably has some roots in where we came from and who we are today, but what the heck is the bigger story or part of? And three is clearly the thing I'm most passionate about is computers and technology, and they're just magical to me. I think that's the essence of it. It's like, they're just so wonderful and they feed my curiosity. Is what is my personal relationship to this in my own life where it's empowering, it's augmenting versus it being pandering. And rent-seeking and sort of debilitating in some ways. Not to take away from its miracle, but yes, those were personally accurate words.

And so I was sort of confused. And, you know, it's really Dunning-Kruger. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Like, the more you learn about all this, you're like, holy crap, we have no idea. I thought all these people— I was like a proud agnostic— all these people are religious were so stupid. And then you just spend enough time, you know, I was in like rural Russia near Lake Baikal. And I had a Russian friend with me and you just talked to the babushka serving you noodles in the train station and you spend time with her and you realize her life's horrible objectively.

You know, you would say she's— we failed like on objective metrics, but her life was— she's so much like happier than me. She was way less depressed because everything was processed through the frame of like, this is challenges from God. My alcoholic husband who died was a challenge from God. The fact that the governor is stealing half my pension is a challenge from God. And there's ways, you know, you can be taken advantage of because of that. But there's a way she was just like, yeah, I, I'm sort of— I'm choosing this life.

I'm not a victim, and I want God to know how devoted I am and how much he loves me, and I'm in love with him. And every act of me being in relationship that challenges that— and she was way happier than me. You, like, there's no way you can face that and not let that hit you, right? And there's no way you can face— you have this wondrous piece of technology, and you're like, I'm sitting in like this cheap little shitty hostel of fluorescent lights, like inside an amnesia because I can't see my screen outside, or, you know, I can't journal on my Kindle.

Uh, and all of the above of this sort of made me just be like extremely frustrated with the state of the world. Also realize how much you can't solve things by just optimizing the mind and productivity. Like, the soul, the nervous system, the heart, your physiology— all those things matter. Because I was really miserable because I was just optimizing my mind at the cost of everything else. So sort of that personal experience, me realizing how much my Kindle sucked while I traveled. I came back and I was trying to come up with my big idea, trying to figure out what the meaning of life is, what a human trajectory is, and what technology is.

And I was doing it on computers that made me feel like shit again. And so I sort of was like, I gotta do something about this for me to work on my big idea. So I spent 8 months buying every E Ink tablet under the sun. I bought like bunch of really fast printers. I got into the idea that I'll just print out my calendar, I'll print out my notes, and I'll write everything onto them and I'll scan them. I bought these— Speaker A: it's a pretty sick technology. Speaker B: It's an unbelievable technology.

I think we lack versus paper in so many ways that daylight's stolen. We should be humble on that. But yeah, I bought fast scanners too, so you can bring the analog back into the digital after I write on it. Bought these highlighter pens, so while you read, it scans what you do. I bought— Speaker A: we're literally sitting in your apartment and there are walls, all of the walls are covered with giant pieces of paper and whiteboards and drawings and paper. And I wish people could see the sticky notes anyway, the thumbnail.

Speaker B: But yeah, I've just like, I'm in a way, I sort of was not into computers. I was just looking for what is the best technology to make me feel the way I wanted to be the way I wanted to and sort of produce or act or think in the ways I wanted to. And I was not dogmatic. Just turns out when you're sort of low conscientiousness, carrying a lot of paper and remembering where it is, and you know, you can't print things 20 times a day when it's dynamic.

You just, you just need things that are dynamic that can attach to the internet, but also titrate that relationship to the internet, of course, is part of the principles. But it was that sort of personal struggles and sort of an 8, 9 month idea maze of trying everything and being really disappointed by the remarkable I was one of the first users of it. I was just like, okay, let me like write better software for these things. So I teamed up with two college friends just being like, ah, let's make a reMarkable with non-shitty software so it can finally be a sort of healthier computer that is— Speaker A: your first lens through it was actually, this is a software problem.

Speaker A: your first lens through it was actually, this is a software problem. Speaker B: Um, yeah. So the sort of one of the key insights that hit me is I realized like, okay, computers suck. They're just— I'm just like, I'm intending to figure out the meaning of life. And instead I'm wasting all my time on Twitter and tech meme and 500 tabs open. Like, I can't go around and people are like, what are you doing? Like, you had high potential. What are you doing all day? And I'm like, well, I want to tell you I'm figuring out the meaning of life.

But if I actually told you I'm wasting all day, Jesus, I'd be judged by you. So I deeply was like trying to like reform this relationship to computers. 'cause I was like, I won't be successful if I don't do something about this. Everything I do comes through this. Every email message, every paper I read, every line of code or word that I write. And I banned all gadgets from my bedroom. And it sounds very banal, but it was like sort of a very like subtly profound thing for me that I didn't even realize that my Kindle is a gadget.

I did not ban that from my bedroom. It was not like, oh no, the Kindle's okay. No, I just, it literally was in the same category as an analog object. Not a tool, not a computer, not an appliance, but like an analog object, like a book or a printout. And that was the aha moment for me in so many ways, because you can get at this analytically and be like, ah, it's less eye-straining, it's less blue light, I can use it outdoors, my nervous system is calmer, I read for more, it's less distracting, less overstimulating, blah blah blah blah blah.

But the fact that the subconscious part of me had a set of psychological relationships to it that put it outside of the category of computer and all the sort of crap that comes with a computer, I thought was very subtle and so profound. Speaker A: Deeply empowering. Speaker B: Deeply empowering. Because it's like you, I've been dating my ex over and over again with computing. And this was the first time there was a new archetype. A new relationship, a new possible set of patterns. Speaker A: By the way, I, I, I've tried to explain Daylight, why I, I love the product to people, and the closest thing I've gotten is something like what you said, which is it feels— there's a different feel.

A huge part of that is that it's a separate object, and there's something about that object that, like, I don't think I would have put it into those words, but it— I totally relate. It's empowering. Empowering thing. Speaker B: And that's what I sort of ran with is, yes, it has all this stuff, but actually to me, the little secret or the little ooh was a computer that doesn't feel like your other computers. And actually what that is, is there's a synthesis and an accumulation of a bunch of these things.

It doesn't flicker, so it's easier on your nervous system. It's a reflective screen, so it's more like an analog object rather than an emissive portal, which is more like, you know, It's a portal. It's something outside of your environment, outside of your reality. Yeah, right. This is very much in your reality. That was sort of the insight was, whoa, I like don't need to beat myself up as much on this. And I'm like, you know, you got to get past page 60 for Tolstoy to feel good and then it's super easy.

You know, that's sort of that 50 pages. Speaker A: A bunch of my friends have been trying to get me to read Anna Karenina this summer and I'll take that advice. Speaker B: I recommend Confession to start with, or The Death of Ivan Ilyich. That's profound stuff, but you still got to get past the page 20 or the page 60 problem. But it's not like I had more willpower. That's the whole bicycle for the mind. That's the waterfall of agency is I have an underlying agency to expand and learn. And this, like, I think, you know, we're all— there's a great Deschardins quote: we're not human beings in this life having a spiritual experience.

We're spiritual beings in this life having a human experience. I think that is the underlying thing. I wish people could see the smile you have on your face right now. Speaker A: A bunch of my friends have been trying to get me to read Anna Karenina this summer and I'll take that advice. Speaker B: I recommend Confession to start with, or The Death of Ivan Ilyich. That's profound stuff, but you still got to get past the page 20 or the page 60 problem. But it's not like I had more willpower.

That's the whole bicycle for the mind. That's the waterfall of agency is I have an underlying agency to expand and learn. And this, like, I think, you know, we're all— there's a great Deschardins quote: we're not human beings in this life having a spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings in this life having a human experience. I think that is the underlying thing. I wish people could see the smile you have on your face right now. Speaker A: I love that quote. I could be mistaken, but I believe my, my friend Graham took that quote and combined it with this other quote from something.

So he ended that with, welcome to the party. And I, for some reason, I just, I love that pairing, right? We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Welcome to the party. Yeah. Speaker B: So I don't think it's a coincidence we listen to 3-hour podcasts now to sort of educate and expand ourselves. They're like, oh, but only sin and this. I'm like, no, that's just when you're tired, you eat Doritos, right? When you're feeling good, the tomato off the vine tastes good. I think innately we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and at the underlying of that is a deep desire to be in full contact with reality, with each other, with expansion, becoming the fullest, highest version of ourselves.

And yes, that sounds super hippie, but I'm arguing that is actually the true essence of what computing is. What is the potentials we could have that could be expanded? And that's what the Kindle sort of gave me, is I could read stuff that was so nourishing to my soul. I left after [redacted address] better than I did after 3 hours of going through YouTube, right? Period. I mean, it's that simple. I feel better and I'm more educated. And I'm like a better person. It's like, it's the win-win-win. It's sort of like the dopamine system done well, right?

Speaker A: Like you can find it. It's interesting. One of the things I've found with the Daylight too, I've found myself watching YouTube videos sometimes, but perhaps it's just that it's black and white and it's reflective. But I also suspect the videos I'm choosing to watch are informed by the medium I'm consuming them on, which is interesting. Speaker B: You even think about, I don't know, I, It's like more like YouTube lecture podcast, right? Speaker A: I suppose what I'm trying to argue for is that, I don't know, I'm someone who loves film.

Like, I certainly believe in the power of video or cinematic storytelling to be as meaningful as great books. But there is, it is telling that like what I get from a film is usually different than what I get from TikTok or Instagram. And there's a lot of reasons for that duration, how attention span, but I do think it's telling that the tools, the instruments, the screens we use might actually inform what we read on them or what we watch on them. Speaker B: Which is crazy because it's not paternalism. It's now just— Speaker A: so this gets at an interesting— we're jumping around a bit, but I might as well— and into some of the more holistic Daylight Vision stuff.

One obvious critique from day one about what you are trying to do would be that you are trying to be paternalistic. Technology is very good at giving people exactly what they want. Or at least what they think they want, giving us more of what we want. And most tech companies, most successful businesses in the world give people what they want. They try— they, they're rarely prescriptive. There are counterarguments to this. I think probably a good one would be the health food industry, but I would argue at least that eating healthy or even quitting cigarettes or quitting alcohol is probably actually a lot easier than opting out of how oppressive computers can be.

Speaker B: You don't need to drink for work, but you need to check Slack for work on a computer. Speaker A: And so there's that. And yet you're also clearly, as I think people have a sense of based on the conversation, you're not a Luddite. You're not anti-progress or anti-technology. Can you talk about how the last thing I'll say on this, there's this quote I think you quoted in another interview, and I recently read the book Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. In, in Orwell vs. Huxley intro, he says people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Can you talk about why you're not just being paternalistic and instead maybe you're empowering people to believe in themselves and their own capability? Speaker B: Um, I think it's because in practice it's not really in that frame. It's sort of outside of it. I can sort of see how people analyze it that way, but I think it's actually different. I'll get concrete. Let me start with the frame. If I'm somebody who makes the best forks on earth and I come to you and sell you my forks, am I trying to sell you forks at the exclusion of you buying spoons or knives?

Am I being paternalistic by selling you the best fork? Speaker A: No. Speaker B: That's my point, is I don't think there is, uh, by daylight, don't use Netflix, don't go to the movies, don't do other stuff. It's more like rather than eating with a spork and sort of doing a half-assed job about everything, why don't you use this fork? Speaker A: Hmm. Speaker B: And there's probably good times to use a spoon when you're drinking soup. It's probably good times to use a fork when you're eating penne pasta. But like the goal here is there should be some general education and honesty from my side and some general education and honesty on your side on which tool for which job and which combination.

And so you could argue what Daylight is, is trying to get away from the messy middle. Um, you know, like the problem— there's no problem with entertainment. The problem is when it's neither— it's not nourishing entertainment, right? Speaker A: Hmm. Speaker B: And there's probably good times to use a spoon when you're drinking soup. It's probably good times to use a fork when you're eating penne pasta. But like the goal here is there should be some general education and honesty from my side and some general education and honesty on your side on which tool for which job and which combination.

And so you could argue what Daylight is, is trying to get away from the messy middle. Um, you know, like the problem— there's no problem with entertainment. The problem is when it's neither— it's not nourishing entertainment, right? Speaker A: Like, or when you're merging— when you're— where you shit where you eat, you're merging. Speaker B: Yeah, go watch that movie and super enjoy yourself, or go be like, I'm gonna go binge on YouTube. The problem is like, I'm gonna try to work, and then you do YouTube, or it's a swipe away, right?

Yeah. And then you're like, actually never watch the movie that is nourishing, that like allows your nervous system to get into it, to calm down. You're always stimming. It's like a musician that never has any pauses. It's just sound, right? And that's the problem with so much of this. And so I'm going to try to get the chronology of this right. Um, hopefully it's clear. The profound introduction to reality that computing is, is that it is a new dynamic, interactive relational medium. I, it's magical matter. That's why it's got an anima.

When we say it's animated, in many ways animated is animated and interactive are sort of the two key aspects. However, computing made it into the world by being a tool. Excel, VisiCalc, just think of it as a business tool that you used and then it became a Photoshop tool and it became a, you know, making a presentations tool, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But in going from being a singular tool, which you could argue like the Jacquard loom was, um, believe it or not, you programmed this. This is like the first computer, modern Western computer, you could say.

It's a, it's a loom, uh, that would then weave things. And the way you programmed its patterns of what to weave is you did these incredibly sophisticated punch cards where each thing is whether or not this— oh gosh. Oh, I'm so bad with numbers. 17th century. Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no. Can't be. Speaker A: But definitely pre— Speaker B: that's after— it's— you need the steam engine. You need factory industrial power. Maybe 19th, 18th century or 19th. I'm, I'm really bad at this, but yes, think of like way before computers, England industrializing, moving from, you know, uh, the Luddites and the cotton mills.

Speaker A: That's all. That's totally a computer. Speaker B: And so many people talk about this as this is the first sort of modern computer. And it's, it's like crazy. If you go to the Computer History Museum here in Mountain View in the Bay Area, they actually have like a Jacquard loom demo. It doesn't work, but you can see the punch cards and it's absurd. But beside it, you see the IBM machine and its punch cards and it's so similar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It tells where the, the, the weave goes underneath or above, and then you can change what color it is and therefore the pattern.

That was a single purpose computer, right? It did one thing and it did it damn well. And then it's change dependent on you changing the punches. And that was the original software where a woman moving the cables from one part of a computer to the other. Software in the beginning were a woman. That was what software was, right? It was, you sort of made the change once and then it was just the way it was. And over time you could say there's almost like a purity in computing that came from this.

Like not every, no one talked about computing computers being bad. Like early computers for kids back in the day. Speaker A: It was literally an appliance. Speaker B: It was an appliance, right? Like this is a place you program and sure, you could game a little bit too much or this, but it's not the same as the way you can get addicted to playing COD all night or, you know, Warcraft or something like that. And I think it's because a lot of early computing was in this tool way of being.

So in some sense, that's a tragedy because we forgot or missed the fact that it's actually not just a better set of tools. It is a fundamentally new aspect of reality. It's a dynamic interactive medium, but okay, you know, as Bill Gates said, there's a desktop on every— there's a desktop computer on every table. But that sort of happened, right? But then over time, we're like, wait a minute, this can be so much more than just a set of tools. You can have Ableton, you can make videos, you can watch videos.

And then to your point, this is where a lot of consumption started to happen. Uh, with Mosaic, you had images with the internet, and then you started to have audio and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then computing sort of got confused where it went from being You know, the sort of the immaculate conception in the beginning of this beautiful, dynamic, interactive medium, that possibility of that, to then coming down to being this practical set of tools, to then slowly over time becoming a bundling of more and more and more and more tools, which then has the emergent property of being a messy medium.

And then you shit where you eat, where you start adding entertainment and consumption to it. Very different cognitive modalities, right? There's like, we build our spaces where the kitchen is different than the office, and the office is different than the living room or entertainment room. Like, all of society is built around don't shit where you eat, right? And in computing— Speaker A: It was literally an appliance. Speaker B: It was an appliance, right? Like this is a place you program and sure, you could game a little bit too much or this, but it's not the same as the way you can get addicted to playing COD all night or, you know, Warcraft or something like that.

And I think it's because a lot of early computing was in this tool way of being. So in some sense, that's a tragedy because we forgot or missed the fact that it's actually not just a better set of tools. It is a fundamentally new aspect of reality. It's a dynamic interactive medium, but okay, you know, as Bill Gates said, there's a desktop on every— there's a desktop computer on every table. But that sort of happened, right? But then over time, we're like, wait a minute, this can be so much more than just a set of tools.

You can have Ableton, you can make videos, you can watch videos. And then to your point, this is where a lot of consumption started to happen. Uh, with Mosaic, you had images with the internet, and then you started to have audio and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then computing sort of got confused where it went from being You know, the sort of the immaculate conception in the beginning of this beautiful, dynamic, interactive medium, that possibility of that, to then coming down to being this practical set of tools, to then slowly over time becoming a bundling of more and more and more and more tools, which then has the emergent property of being a messy medium.

And then you shit where you eat, where you start adding entertainment and consumption to it. Very different cognitive modalities, right? There's like, we build our spaces where the kitchen is different than the office, and the office is different than the living room or entertainment room. Like, all of society is built around don't shit where you eat, right? And in computing— Speaker A: so right, again, environment design is actually like an incredibly, uh, one, important, but also it's everywhere. Speaker B: Everywhere you go, no, no one puts the kitchen and the toilet in the same place.

Speaker A: I mean, arguably one of the main problems with remote work, like modern society, is like remote work actually just removes all that. Speaker B: Got to break Again, it's like all the constraints in the past that we only saw the bugs of, when you remove it, you also see the ways that it's a feature, right? It's a tradition is smarter than you perspective. Speaker A: Yes. Yes. Speaker B: And that's why our age is a great age of great humility. Cause all the things that we thought were bad, we're like, oh shit, there was some wisdom in there.

And so you sort of have to, you know, backtrack. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But my point is computing starts off in this glorious medium, but none of that ever conceptualizes. It just starts out because that's how things have to start out. Being legible and practical as tools, as a tool, and then it becomes tools, and then it becomes a bundle of tools, and then it adds entertainment and consumption. And now it's this sort of messy medium, but it's also overwhelming. Speaker A: It's, it's becomes this because it's a messy medium.

Speaker B: You're just where it eats. It tries to put all of this together and tools can't just be kludged all together, right? They need to be done in a certain way. They need an underlying Batman utility belt to hold them. They need a structure. They need something around it. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And so because there was nobody who sat down and did it, it was just everybody smashing stuff together. We got this sort of messy medium that is worse in many ways than just having tools or a tool of the past and is worse than the sort of Platonic ideal of a beautiful, dynamic, interactive medium.

Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And so because there was nobody who sat down and did it, it was just everybody smashing stuff together. We got this sort of messy medium that is worse in many ways than just having tools or a tool of the past and is worse than the sort of Platonic ideal of a beautiful, dynamic, interactive medium. Speaker A: Yeah. And so by the way, I would say like. The iPhone is obviously an incredible thing in so many ways, but because it combines everything, you both have the shit where you eat problem.

You have this other line, you say, this thing is my main relationship with the world, which I think is the other insidious part of it, is that it becomes so domineering, so central to every single thing. You, you, it goes back to the problem of like, you can't, you can choose to eat healthy, you can choose to quit cigarettes, you can choose to quit alcohol. Actually opting out of technology feels like it's opting out of society. Speaker B: Exactly. That's a Faustian bargain. You can't. But the reason I'm saying this is exactly because it is miraculous, right?

In a way, it's closer to the original idea of being this medium. Like, it is so democratizing and empowering that, like, when I was in Burma, for somebody, their phone was their boombox. It was their video player. It was their newspaper. It was how they talk to their mom. It's how they figure out what price to pay for this. It's like how they did everything. It was their flashlight. Speaker A: That's what we are. Speaker B: Right. Yeah. But I was just— Speaker A: Murma. Speaker B: But, but point is we could have money for some of this stuff.

They did not even have enough money to buy any of these things, right? In the past, they just wouldn't have it. Speaker A: Which in some sense, I think is probably— there are aspects of that that are really, really good for the world and empowering. Computers have been amazing for agency and the consolidation, them getting cheaper, all these things. I think it's worth it. Speaker A: That's what we are. Speaker B: Right. Yeah. But I was just— Speaker A: Murma. Speaker B: But, but point is we could have money for some of this stuff.

They did not even have enough money to buy any of these things, right? In the past, they just wouldn't have it. Speaker A: Which in some sense, I think is probably— there are aspects of that that are really, really good for the world and empowering. Computers have been amazing for agency and the consolidation, them getting cheaper, all these things. I think it's worth it. Speaker B: And to your point, that's why I'm not a Luddite. That the core of this is not like, it's a messy medium, throw it all out.

Let's go back to having tools. Speaker A: It's how most people go through the emotions and the thoughts that, and the philosophies that you've discussed. Many people react by opting out. Speaker B: Hey, I had that too. My 2 years of backpacking was sort of me trying to reject it all. Yeah, but you just— if you face reality, you have to face that this is— and that's where, you know, sort of we talk about it on our team is like, the goal is not to the first timeline. It's not the Unabomber way of going.

It's not to be the Luddite and throw this all out and go back to a past and romanticize that it was better. It's to realize that this isn't the optimal we're in, we're a messy medium. And I mean that as a double entendre in two ways. And so the point of Daylight is actually to get to that sort of beautiful, dynamic, interactive computational medium, magical, magical matter. Actually, we sort of have to declare bankruptcy on where we are, go back to being a clean tool, but with the evolvability and wisdom and the 20/20 hindsight of knowing Okay, this is where it has to start and how it can evolve such that it become an actual clean and better medium.

And that's the story of story. Tried to start as a medium, started out as a tool, became tools, became messy tools, became a messy medium. And now it's just like overwhelming because trying to please everybody and pleases nobody. It's miraculous, but it sort of eats its own advantage. It's only going to get worse with AI. To start over from a tool. And I'm arguing that sort of ability to start small and clean with the tool and have it work for you is the best way for then evolving that. If you have the right set of principles towards actually being that medium that computing was always meant to be.

And I think that is the bigger story we're all part of. And Daylight's just trying to play a small role in that. Speaker A: To go back to your fork analogy, and the idea of what you want this tool at least to be quite good at. One thing that comes to mind for me is attention. It's a product that enables me to have more power or agency over my attention. It feels like the primary incentive in today's world for every person in business is just to capture attention, capture my attention, sustain my attention, hijack my attention.

Speaker B: You've— Speaker A: I think your language may be an endless slot machine of variable reward. There's great books on this. What about Daylight, or what about tools broadly, enable us to have a positive relationship with attention? Speaker B: Well, I think long-term, in a way, Daylight is not solving the problem initially, because solving the problem fundamentally is super hard. It's— you got to like change the dynamics of the attention economy, right? You got to change the underlying game theory and incentive structures here. You got to change one's relationship to the internet instead of it just being fully blocked or fully available.

There has to be a lot of titration. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: In most of society, you don't just fully raw dog something or do it none at all. You have a lot of stuff in between. We don't have that right now because we're toddlers. This is so fundamentally new. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But when it comes to attention, what Daylight is sort of doing is the benefit of starting off as a tool. So even if I'm claiming the promise here and what I want to do is bring it back to being a medium, I'm sort of starting indirectly by starting with the tool, is because it's so much easier.

The reason it's easier is because you solve it categorically, like with a fork or a toaster. You don't ever look on the front of a toaster for it to say distraction-free toaster. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But when it comes to attention, what Daylight is sort of doing is the benefit of starting off as a tool. So even if I'm claiming the promise here and what I want to do is bring it back to being a medium, I'm sort of starting indirectly by starting with the tool, is because it's so much easier.

The reason it's easier is because you solve it categorically, like with a fork or a toaster. You don't ever look on the front of a toaster for it to say distraction-free toaster. Speaker A: Fair. Speaker B: If Samsung gets its way, maybe in a couple of years you'll actually have to do that with the damn Wi-Fi. My touchscreens and Wi-Fi they put on it all. Speaker A: What's the version of Apple Daylight? Why, why is that the case here? Speaker B: So that's my point is if you actually want to solve the things that make computers like sort of oppositional to you and the way it wants you to spend your time, it's actually a lot of problems to solve that is unrealistic for a small team on a small budget to do.

And frankly, for anybody, it's like Gall's law. You know, if you want complexity, you have to start off with simplicity and evolve it to complexity. All of nature always starts out simple and complexity is emergent. You cannot design complexity. This is why, you know, top-down utopias never work. And so what Daylight is trying to be is, if you declare bankruptcy on modern computing, this sort of messy media, messy medium, what is the smallest, simplest, fundamental unit of computing that is clean and useful, that captures the spirit of the bigger thing and has evolvability towards the bigger cool.

And, um, it's funny because I have a book lying around here called Friendly Orange Glow, and it's about like the earliest computers. There were these black and white computers that glowed amber. Some of the first computers were these plasma things by Donald Blitzer, and they were orange. And what is Daylight? It is a black and white computer with a friendly amber glow. That wasn't intended. It's just sort of hilarious how that happened to be. Right? Like, because I pursue the principles of how to make something feel better and be healthier and sort of be like my Kindle, but, you know, on steroids.

And so by starting so small, by starting so focused, you emergent get some of these qualities of it not being as addicting or distracting or overstimulating because it's opinionated to be better at reading and writing. You don't even have to— my point of it's like moving on from always dating your exes. You don't have the same grooves of swipe left, click here, Ctrl+T. Before you know it, you're in YouTube or ESPN, or you're doing— you're stimming that. Speaker A: It's frictionless. Speaker B: It has a total different set of pathways.

It's new. It's like a new coat of snow that you get to now choose rather than the grooves of the past. The fact that it's black and white— I'm not paternalistically saying don't use TikTok on this or don't use YouTube. If you consent, if you consent into buying it, you will just like— I love when people are just like, Like kids are like trying to like watch reels on it and they just like stop. Like, this sucks. It's so boring. And I don't need to say anything about whether it's good or not.

Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And it's not like I am taking away your ability to have a MacBook or a TV or an iPad, right? It's now, so you have a fork versus the spoons of those other things versus a spork that tries to do everything. And so by being so simple, by being a tablet, um, by being a third device separate from your iPhone or MacBook or whatever. By having these new sort of associations, you can create a little piece of your computing relationship that has a very different set of qualities to it.

And I don't need to solve distraction because I'm sort of blocking you from distraction. I'm carving you out from the rest of the world. It's like a gated community of sorts, right? It's a little sanctuary. I actually haven't solved the problem. I'm just punting away from the problem. Speaker A: In terms of what it's actually really good at. But it works. Speaker B: Because it's simple. Right. It doesn't require me big-braining it. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Right? Speaker A: In terms of what it's actually really good at, at least one specific articulation of of what it's maybe good for now.

You've been enamored with this idea of the primer from Diamond Age. Yeah. Is it right? One, can you explain what that is? And two, is it right to think about Daylight today as sort of like an early attempt at being like the fork's great for eating pasta or whatever, like an early attempt of being whatever that is? Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Right? Speaker A: In terms of what it's actually really good at, at least one specific articulation of of what it's maybe good for now. You've been enamored with this idea of the primer from Diamond Age.

Yeah. Is it right? One, can you explain what that is? And two, is it right to think about Daylight today as sort of like an early attempt at being like the fork's great for eating pasta or whatever, like an early attempt of being whatever that is? Speaker B: Yes. The short answer is yes. The, the medium answer is like, if you know the concept of the Dynabook from Alan Kay, It's where they invented the tablet, one of the first personal computer manifestations. Speaker A: Is that the illustration? Speaker B: The famous illustration of kids in the grass holding the thing.

It's basically an iPad 40 years ago. Yes. Yes. And they're like sort of smiling. And there's the joke that computing forgot about the squiggles in the sense, like it forgot about the smiles on the kids' faces, you know, like Cocomelon and Subway Surfers, having your kid in a daze is not the same as them being agentic and empowered and happy. And the squiggles in the grass, they're, you know, we're stuck inside all the time. Like when we're outside in nature, there's a certain way our nervous system acts. Well, so much of computing is this closed off, tight, hunched over, hunched over nervous system, which, you know, begets the sort of stimming, you know, when you're stressed, you stuff your face with food, you're doing the same thing with information.

And so you could say the main point of the Dynabook is if you appreciate computing as this new medium, then actually it can become one of the most powerful tools ever. For agency, confidence, learning, and curiosity and wonderment for a kid because they have intact dopamine systems before we screw it all up. Like, forget about the adults, we'll help them later. They're all sort of screwed up. Like, sorry, you took one for the team. At least the new generation is our chance to have a blank canvas and be a representation of today versus a representation of the past.

That's why I think about adults. All of us are representations of our past and the past. Therefore the highest form of agency is to decouple the past from the present and the future. Wow. Um, and the power of a computer that can be this— it has the Bible, it has the Quran, it has the Kabbalah, it has everything you want to learn and read. It has the Library of Alexandria at your fingertips, but now it has a teacher, it has a guide, it has Aristotle. There's the, uh, the Bloom 2 Sigma tutoring effect, which is when you have a personal tutor, you have like a 1 or 2 standard deviations improvement in performance just from that individualized, personalized back and forth.

And one of the ways AI could be even better, which, you know, I don't think people really explicitly talked about, is with a tutor, if you don't understand something, by the time you ask it for the third or fourth time, you start to feel embarrassed that like you're annoying him. You don't feel the same cognitive disambition with AI. You can ask it 10 times, 12 times. You're not wasting its time. You're not this. Those subtle psychological dynamics are so profound. And so if a kid rather than being confused by the world, going home and then having to contract because there is no understanding, rather than being like, Dad's angry at me and I'm bad, and contracting.

Imagine if they have this, this medium, this interface that's available, that's endlessly patient, that we're trying to make respectful and healthy and humane and therefore worthy of being intimate with, um, you know, literally calling crawling into bed with, or having it when you sit outside, or whatever it may be. You can now process this stuff. You can ask it those questions. You can go, why, why, why, why, why? Oh wait, so Dad maybe wasn't angry at me because I'm bad. It's because he had a tough day at work. That ability to not shut down yourself, that ability to still stay supple, to still stay curious, for the world to still be sensible.

I think that's what happens as kids. We go, the world doesn't make sense, I'm bad, ah, so I'm just gonna get— learn it. Speaker A: That makes you comfortable. It's almost like Hobbes. Speaker B: Yes. Calvin and Hobbes. I have the, the whole set in the front. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: Yes. That is such, yeah. Dobby the Elf is probably less fun of an example than saying Hobbes. Speaker A: And is that what the, I, I, I have heard that. Speaker B: And Hobbes is an amazing example because he's just an inanimate doll to the, the parents.

Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: But to Calvin, he is this animated amazing adventure buddy. Yeah. And so the answer to your question, there is the, this is the future of the book. This is the reinvention of the book and the notepad and the typewriter. For the dynamic sort of AI age, right? Like there's so many problems with the book where you don't remember anything. You can't double-click into stuff. You can't go back and forth. It has a problem with Socrates, right? It's writing is decontextualized. You can come away with all these misunderstandings.

Speaker A: Yeah. You can't be in dialogue with it. Speaker B: Now you can be in dialectic with it. Right. And it's similar thing with note-taking. There's so many ways that, you know, your ideas can now be turned digitally with typewriters. You can now solve word block at root cause. It's a thing called Lex that's pretty cool doing some of this stuff. So that whole side of things exists. But the, I think the deeper side of it is this ability for you to now have an outlet for curiosity or frustration or agency or expression.

And rather than blocking it, the computer can be in relationship with that. And that's what the Dynabook or the Primer or Primer is. So adults will buy this because they will be able to read a paper and understand it so much better. Or they'll be able to read, you know, a patent, or they'll be able to read a report or whatever it is. And then adults will buy it for their kids, or kids will ask for it themselves, because now a computer can be endlessly entertaining and be fully aligned because you're using the dopamine system in the way it's meant to be.

And it's unbelievably pleasurable to be in your full curiosity and agency and wonderment. And that's the whole thing here. It's a cheat code if we can get over the activation energies, because it's a win-win-win. Speaker A: You've said that the basis for so much of health is light. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And that's clearly, again, sort of in the weeds, but also obviously philosophical. How has that informed Daylight, the product? Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of layers to that. I mean, one, one simple layer is there's just this famous video of they have kids in a classroom under fluorescent lights and they're all fidgeting like crazy.

Um, so they're like, ah, all these kids have ADHD and this, you know, what we've done in modern society, over-medicate them on Ritalin and Adderall. They then have those same kids in an outdoor classroom and they're still sort of like energetic, but there's a way it's less fidgety and it feels more embodied. And then they like sort of interview the teacher afterwards and they're just like, yeah, like it all worked a lot better. Everybody was smarter. Everybody paid attention more. And the basic idea here is we're taking the people who are sort of the most flexible, who are the most, you know, evolvable, the highest amount of sensitivity and energy.

And then we're systematically telling them to contract themselves and cut off their capacities. Right. You're putting them in an artificial overstimulating environment, which is what artificial light often is. Once again, it's because it's a, it's a humbling. We didn't realize light has all these complexities to it. We just thought, is it bright or is it dark? Wait, there's invisible light called UV and infrared that's not bad for us, but good for us. And our physiology depends on it. And wait, this thing called flicker that we can't see, but actually affects us.

Like, sort of like microplastics. You can't see it, but it affects you. It's sort of like pollution. You can't see, but it affects you. It's like chronic disease. You can't see, but it affects you, et cetera, et cetera. It's the same canonical set of problems, right? Like, so if you put people back in the natural light, if you put them back where their nervous system, you're not trying to crush it or contract it. But their nervous system is actually in relationship with the environment, suddenly you get a lot more expanded version of that human.

And that ADHD is actually now sensitivity to their classmates, to their own emotions, to the teacher, to learning, to noticing their own doubts and asking questions about it. You got regulated, curious, agentic kids. What more would you want? Right? And so therefore, there is a big underlying trend to this, which is if you don't respect Maslow's hierarchy, like, stuff doesn't work. This is why Magnus Carlsen sleeps well and meditates and eats well and exercises and does all of that, even though his entire livelihood is based off of his brain. Even if he didn't care about his own sort of happiness and just want to be the best chess player, he still respects Maslow's hierarchy and does all these things, from nervous system to mental health to cognition, whatever.

Is that— is the basis for performance. You have to have internal alignment. We are a foundation and all these layers matter, right? Every aspect of the car can be good. If the transmission's not good, the rest is always going to be slowed down. If you didn't sleep well or whatever it may be. So it's a similar thing for, for, for all of us, which is we're actually deeply implicated at both a physiological and cognitive level by some key variables from the environment we have underestimated in the past because it's invisible.

Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: Light being a big one. Temperature being another one. Sound. Uh, magnetism, electricity. There's a guy named Michael Levin who I'm— is going to win a Nobel Prize going after— we've been after the hardware development languages in biology, focusing on DNA. And we've forgotten the JavaScript and software development languages of biology, which is electricity and magnetism and things like that. That's its own thing. But we're sort of realizing like, wow, there's— once again, these things are invisible. So we never see it. Speaker A: We're just way less attuned to them.

Yes. Speaker B: But, um, sort of like a kid who's just like, ah, I didn't like increase my score in this, this was a waste of time, versus an adult that loves the invisible, right? The intangibles of, of relationship, of camaraderie, of a beautiful sunset, blah blah blah. So the focus on light was simply the thing that I thought most impacted me, and then the hope was it sort of impacted others also and therefore was useful to them amongst the totem pole of the things that affect you broadly. Speaker A: And And a great way to, from a very tangible product sense, I've often joked to people like the Daylight is sort of just a screen.

Like everything else is like a bunch of kind of like mediocre things. And in some sense that was the primary place to really differentiate initially. Speaker B: I see that as a great compliment when you're like, it's basically a screen with a bunch of mediocre things. I'm like, oh my God, fuck yeah. Speaker A: Well, it's focus. It's you actually focused on the thing that matters. Speaker B: Because you can't compete with these trillion-dollar companies or hundreds of billions of companies that have insane armies of people, insane supply chain leverage, insane amounts of experience, insane amounts of specialization, insane entrenched effects.

Yes, it's completely unfair game. Good luck. No chance. Even Microsoft couldn't make mobile phones, or Facebook couldn't do it, or Amazon couldn't do it. Like, if you put it in perspective, people have unlimited money, have been unable to break into personal computing. It really opens your eyes. So the fact that we, on 1,000 if not 10,000 times less resources, made something that people then maybe use instead of an iPad? Speaker A: Well, it's focus. It's you actually focused on the thing that matters. Speaker B: Because you can't compete with these trillion-dollar companies or hundreds of billions of companies that have insane armies of people, insane supply chain leverage, insane amounts of experience, insane amounts of specialization, insane entrenched effects.

Yes, it's completely unfair game. Good luck. No chance. Even Microsoft couldn't make mobile phones, or Facebook couldn't do it, or Amazon couldn't do it. Like, if you put it in perspective, people have unlimited money, have been unable to break into personal computing. It really opens your eyes. So the fact that we, on 1,000 if not 10,000 times less resources, made something that people then maybe use instead of an iPad? Speaker A: Well, this is an amazing segue. One of my very, very favorite philosophies that we've chatted about is from Gunpei Yokoi of Nintendo, who created the Game Boy and Game Watch, uh, which translates to lateral thinking with withered technology.

Can you talk a little bit about just maybe to get in the weeds of like actually making the V1 and how you use some of those principles? Speaker B: Sure. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: If I could just quickly close the point on light. It's not like I sat down and said light is the most important thing. Once again, it's just my Kindle felt different. Analog things felt different. And only afterwards, the sort of write drunk was the intuition of just going with that feeling. And the edit sober was like, holy shit, light determines a lot of our dopamine response.

It determines a lot of our breathing rate, of our nervous system state. There's so many ways the light sets mood. There's a reason that, you know, SAD lights and things like that matter. Speaker A: Also, these are, these devices are literally just screens anyway. Speaker B: Yes. You touch things and light changes. Speaker A: Also, these are, these devices are literally just screens anyway. Speaker B: Yes. You touch things and light changes. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: And now you can speak to them and then light changes or words come out, right?

Like it's sort of fascinating. Yes. At the essence of a computer is what you touch and the light that changes. So if you want to change a computer, change the touching part or the light part or both. We'll get to the touching part one day soon. Hey, the word digital means, uh, touch, right? Digital. Speaker A: I didn't know that. Speaker B: Fingers. Yeah. Digits. Speaker A: Ah, wow. Speaker B: Yeah. So the essence of digital should be touch, but it's actually the opposite of touch. It's, it's, it's, it creates distance.

But once again, it's like computing is seen as the most dehumanizing thing, but actually it could be the most humanizing thing because it's a medium. It's not actually something else. Um, yeah, essentially I, cause I wasn't trying to build a company. I was just trying to solve my own idea maze. I had a lot more time to get down rabbit holes. So. I wouldn't have done this if I was to be practical. It just would require too much willpower. Speaker A: Well, you also inherently were super constrained. Speaker B: Yes.

Yes. Speaker A: Which is the other— Speaker B: Yes. But my point being— Speaker A: necessity is the mother of invention. Speaker B: Yes. But that sort of came second. Like once I had an idea, the constraint then, you know, sets the stage. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: But why, like even where do the insights come from? It came from me just being like super curious about what is exactly this Kindle thing and why does it feel different? How can I understand that? If I understood it intuitively, let me understand it analytically.

I learned about light and I learned about blue light and I learned about flicker and then I learned about reflective objects and saccades and how our ocular system is built to understand things. And by the way, our entire perceptual system for symbols like letters is based around a perceptual system based around paw prints and things of nature. So it's sort of interesting to see those are 2D projections of 3D concepts and that's what a symbol is. So just learning deeply sort of how our cognition is being utilized and why it's different in this.

And I'm still mostly in questions versus answers, but at the root of it, I just started to read a lot more textbooks about optics. I started reading textbooks about display technologies. There's emissive displays, there's projection displays, there's reflective displays, then there's metatangible displays. Oh, that's interesting. There's a whole category that's not just the Kindle. Oh wait, Kindle's not even E Ink. E Ink is just a brand name. It's called actually an electrophoretic display. Oh wow. The whole category is called e-paper and there's plasmonic resonance. And then there's Mirasol, and then there's this, and then there's that.

And then I read like a book from the '90s, and then they talked about this technology which is called reflective LCD or memory LCD. And I'm like, eh, LCD, let me skip this. This doesn't sound— but then, and I read it, I'm like, wait, wait a minute. It creates a white pixel by reflecting light, and it creates a black pixel by blocking light. Speaker A: Whoa. Speaker B: That's the same as an electrophoretic display. What's the problem? Oh, okay. It's got like 5 billion problems. Speaker A: Huh? Speaker B: This is what was used in the Game Boy.

Oh, I remember my Game Boy. Oh, I remember angling it to get it perfectly in the light, but also it was cool. You could see it in the sun. Also you could dial up its little light on the side after the Game Boy Color, and then you could do it. And I was like, oh, that was kind of cool. I, I had fond memories and it sort of worked. And you're right, the Game Boy was fast. It wasn't as slow as my Kindle. Duh. Uh, but what happened? Why'd everybody forget about this?

Oh, because, um. Immediately went to the Game Boy Color. And the problem with, uh, going to color is the brightness of these display things with the old color technologies, they were very, very dim, which is why in the Game Boy Advance SP and the DS, they switched away from these sort of these e-paper reflective LCD screens. But the first Game Boy was actually black and white. Um, so the analogy goes deeper because I'm literally implicating, you know, Nintendo here. But they switched over to color so quickly, there was actually not that much evolutionary gradient around the black and white Game Boy screen.

Speaker A: It's almost like they took a different tree. Speaker B: They took a different tree. And it's almost like nobody else had the presence or resource. Speaker A: The one lineage here is the PlayByte actually kind of carried some of that over. Speaker B: Yes. Like what, 30 years later? Yeah. That is a perfect example. And actually, um, the Pebble watch actually also. Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, so there's like these little— Speaker B: Yes. Like what, 30 years later? Yeah. That is a perfect example. And actually, um, the Pebble watch actually also.

Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, so there's like these little— Speaker A: how about Mistek 3D? Speaker B: There's a little— and by the way, the first— Speaker A: they're bringing that back. Speaker B: Yes. The first e-reader was not the Kindle. The first e-reader by the founders of Tesla, believe it or not. Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: The founders of Tesla created the first e-reader called the Rocketbook. Speaker A: Uh-huh. Speaker B: And it was actually an e-paper thing, but e-paper sucked so much back then that basically it got abandoned.

Oh. And I sort of, to just, I just saw the first principles numbers of the technology, which for a display is basically about. You have to resolve information. To resolve information, you need difference. The essence of difference is contrast. What contrast is, is how much light does a black pixel reflect? 'Cause if it reflects all the light, then it's white. If it reflects none of the light, then it's black. I mean, how much light does a white pixel reflect? If it, if it reflects none of the light, then it's black.

If it reflects all the light, it's white. And that difference is what makes a screen, right? And then you put stuff on top of it to give it color. But the essence of a screen is the difference between How much it cannot reflect and how much it can reflect. That's the fundamental binary. And then there's something called reflectance, there's something called viewing angle, there's a bunch of stuff that comes out of it. But you sort of were like, wait, from first principles, this thing is actually, it works if it's black and white.

It does not work with that set of technology if it's color. But it's almost like no one ever analyzed it for black and white. And yes, there's these little pockmarks here and there, but it's sort of, you know, never got bigger. And then you realize there's like so many— as you read the literature, you reach out to the professors, you go to the conferences, you realize there's like a whole litany of problems of why this was abandoned and thrown in the garbage heap, right? It's just sort of this old Japanese technology that was meant to be promising that was thrown away.

But it's just sort of like how Kevin Kelly talks about like what technology wants. I just started researching this, you know, end of 2018, beginning of 2019. And some of the fundamental material science breakthroughs came in papers that were like 2005, 2007, 2012, 2015. December 2018 was one key breakthrough. And, uh, nobody was paying attention. And nobody was paying attention. Cause who pays attention to something that 30 years later, like that's suddenly going to work. There was actually a bunch of crazy people who cared for 5 years and 10 years and 20, and then they lost interest.

Amazon tried for a long time. Everybody did. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: But at some point you have to just admit when it's 18 years later, like, Phil, this is not going to work. Let's give it up. Okay, Bob, I guess we will. But there's these insane Japanese professors who will keep at this shit literally for 30 years when there is no market, no reason. And it goes back. That's the opposite of the Instagram got sold. Let me do Instagram for cats. The Japanese professor whacking away at this with literally zero potential benefit in sight, in like medium or short-term sight, is actually the root of what is potentially a lot of bountiful innovation here.

And frankly, they did the hard work persisting at this stuff for 20, 25, 30 years. And so what I did is I just got lucky at combining papers from a bunch of different fields. Some of them were not in the display field, professor from the Netherlands, from Florida State, from Germany, but a bunch of the main work was from Japan. Put it all together and said, I think this may solve the 20 problems you talk about. This may solve the, the 6 major problems you talk about. Guys, was anybody paying attention?

It's almost like society's missing a thing that says great idea, but missing this. And there's nobody to keep track of that. And so I've got really lucky cases, probably a lot of such cases. Speaker A: I mean, it's a silly example, but baseball just had this kind of hilarious moment where this guy invented a new bat called the torpedo bat. And he was like an MIT guy or a PhD somewhere. And he ended up— loved baseball, decided to become a baseball coach. And the Yankees debuted the season this year. There's all these regulations about the wood bats in baseball.

In youth baseball, they go crazy with the materials. But in pro baseball, you have to use a wood bat of a certain size, certain weight. And they shifted the like girth of the bat to like closer down the barrel where you hit the ball. They made the top of the bat more narrow. And the, the, like, the Yankees have hit more home runs. They hit more home runs in like the first 5 games than any team in history. Speaker B: Wow. Speaker A: And it was just like this— nobody had thought about it.

It's like, I, I think it's, it's funny, I talk about this with my friend Chris. Speaker B: That's a water park of agency right there. Speaker A: The notion that obviously in certain areas markets are incredibly efficient, but there are also these little pockets where it's just, oh, nobody decided to look. Speaker B: Well, markets are efficient adjacent possibles, things that exist. Yes. To things that are uninevitable, to things that are more in the dark, they're terrible at it. The markets are mostly a convergent process. And the essence of any search space is divergence.

But then of course, you can't just be an idealist forever, which is you have to converge. But, uh, that's sort of how I got this. I self-taught myself this place stuff and, uh, just basically I'd say most of the credit goes to the crazy Japanese folks and I just sort of pulled it together. Speaker A: Building on the shoulders. So you are not a trained product designer, but you, along with Tanuj, lead design at Daylight. Can you talk about— you, you rely heavily on intuition. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Can you talk about how you use feel as a guiding principle in design space?

Speaker B: I think once again, it's sort of like there are people who go entirely off of feel, but then there's the sort of like actual feel, and then there's like the sort of intention feel. Actual feel is like truly it's a bottom-up intuition and it's a machine learning model synthesis of a lot of stuff. It's a high-dimensional thing. That's why you can't put it in words. It's so beyond. Speaker A: Yeah, there's a wisdom there. Speaker B: Yes. Then there's like the fear-based feel, which is sort of like you're overwhelmed by complexity and you're afraid.

And so it's much easier just to be like this. And the answer is you have no idea what it is rather than living in that question. Speaker A: Which one of those is a gut decision? Speaker B: Well, I'm arguing that what this is, the positive version of a gut decision and the failure mode of gut decision. Got it. My point is oftentimes when people say they're going by feel, actually they're using that as a cover-up for they can't handle the uncertainty or they don't even know. And so it's really tough.

Speaker A: One is this highly intelligent, wise gut decision, and the other is reactionary. Speaker B: Exactly. And then the I love this as an overall principle for life is like, how do you know if you're doing it right or wrong? Or it's like, are you in fear and tension or in suppleness and sort of expansiveness or love if you want to be a hippie about it? But it actually sort of in any damn circumstance, that is a heuristic so captures it. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Like, are you lying to yourself?

And it's just like you want it to be this way because it feels safe or better. Or is it true? Just is like, is your body tense? Or is it free? And so I think oftentimes I judged feeling because I think I was sensitive enough to notice most people were hiding things under feeling. It was more in the tense version. It was not the grounded, expansive version of feeling. And so I went the opposite. So for most of my life, I've been like hyper-analytical, hypo— like, let me falsify myself, super left brain.

And so I think I actually built a lot of my machine learning model that way is I literally would read every review of every phone and every, like, sort of, you know, bit neurodivergent, like HTC, like, you know, 10 comes out or M8, read every review and gadget Gizmodo, Verge, read all the comments. You know, when YouTube reviews started to become a thing, just sit there and scroll for whatever, however long it takes to read the comments. And I just like, by the way, those are inputs to taste. Yes, yes.

Speaker A: But there's also— Speaker B: yeah, but it didn't— it— yes, exactly. That's so— that's where I was like sort of dissociated from my right brain and feeling side. I like was entirely on the left brain side, which in many ways is sort of sad and painful, but in many ways is like an incredible stamina training exercise. Yes. Yeah. Speaker A: Building an important foundation too of prior knowledge and context. Speaker B: To your point, it's the training data that then creates the other things. Now I learned you can actually build your taste in much more higher dimensional ways, right?

right? Like observing somebody or feeling yourself when you do something,, etc. There's more data streams. But at the time— and so I actually think a lot of my confidence to sort of go from feel comes in because like I sort of at some level know I've put in the work on the analytical side and I've done it for so long. Yeah, I mean, may not be that old, but the mileage, the amount of time I've done that, uh— Speaker A: and by the way, you've also done a lot. I mean, to about something specific, you presumably looked at a lot of weird types of screens, not only read reviews about them and read about them.

Speaker B: I went to all the academic conferences. I read the papers. I'd be part of the plenums. I would be the weird kid where everybody would be like, what? Um, so yeah, I asked the dumb questions nobody else asked. And I asked the dumb questions that people were like, holy shit, why did we not ask that? But I think that sort of the ability to edit sober. Of then being like so analytical about so many things then gave me the room and the space and the confidence to then relax into myself and then have that right drunk.

And that's where that feeling comes from. Speaker A: Flute of Birds and stuff too. Speaker B: Yes, because it's like Picasso, right? His early stuff is all very formal. I don't mean to like compare myself to Picasso, but the point I'm trying to draw here is he then got to break the rules over time as he understood it. He could transcend them. And it's sort of once you understand the speeds and feeds and specs and you can hold a lot of variables in your mind and calculate them all, you quickly realize, okay, the left brain analytical is a classical computer.

If I want to get to the next level, I need to increase the data streams. And by the way, me feeling when I use a to-do list versus reading 500 reviews about it, there's actually such a massively higher bitrate, like the amount of information you get from that if you're sensitive enough. Observing somebody when you're in the bus and just seeing the way they scroll their phone or they look out the window or just the expression, you know what I mean? There's just like you're deducing something at a level that's hard to put into words.

You can say, I can notice they're slightly anxious and they're doing this, but at just some level you're like getting a deep warmth, like deep, warm data stream. And then when you can sort of compute with feeling, you're a supercomputer, you're a quantum computer. If the, if the analytical is computing with 10 dimensions, 10 variables, this can compute with like 5,000 variables, right? It's not machine learning with 10 million, but it's a lot. Potentially it's also 10 million as well, but therefore you can't really easily put it in words. And so I think what I've realized is as I've now created these capacities, both the left and right brain, the key is the sequence.

If you start with the analytical, it immediately converges it. It lowers the viewing point to a pinhole. It sets the light in a very small portion of the space. And so therefore, if you can write drunk, you can show up with feeling or intuition, and you've done the work to be sensitive. Not— I don't recommend this for most people. I don't recommend this for myself because you have to clean yourself up. Like we were saying, when you're under fluorescent lights as a kid and people yelling at you, you close down.

Your entire system is built to close down all your natural sensitivities. So you have to remove all that sludge and clean it all up. And it's hard to survive society now when your sensors are all very sensitive again, right? Yeah. It's like night vision goggles. If somebody actually puts like light on you, it freaking hurts. Speaker A: Oh wow. Interesting. Speaker B: It hurts so much. And it actually almost breaks my sensor. Speaker A: You almost might not want that sensitivity. You're trained to— Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And so then the essence of sensitivity is also learning how to recover and integrate and also not be so sensitive.

You become the fear-based version of a special snowflake versus the expansive version of a special snowflake. Yeah. And so I now see it as like a much more profound computational tool. That's what feeling is. Cause it's when a mission, when a GPT-4.40 answers you, it's done from intuition. That's the right trunk. But then you see how powerful O3 is because that's the edit sober of reasoning on top of that intuition. Right. And so you lead with the intuition and then you wait a day or you wait a minute or you wait 5 minutes or you wait a week or whatever it means, and you try to reason through it.

And then you realize, oh, that was motivated reasoning. Oh, I was lying to myself in this way. You know, it's like half of the process is just facing your own demons so that way your internal tools are actually useful. And then you're able to compute far better than others. Because I think the reason product is hard for most people is it's just got so many variables that are interlinked. Speaker A: Yes. Let's focus on very attuned to your taste and thus you can make quicker decisions, you can make more complex decisions, et cetera.

That's kind of what taste is in a sense. Speaker B: Yeah. I haven't thought about that too much. That's really interesting. Speaker A: When you hear these, you get, you read those like Ken Kosienda, Steve Jobs pitches or whatever, and Steve's decision-making seems to be incredibly like there's not a lot of like sitting around wondering how he feels about it. He knows exactly how he feels when he sees a prototype. Speaker B: Yeah. I haven't thought about that too much. That's really interesting. Speaker A: When you hear these, you get, you read those like Ken Kosienda, Steve Jobs pitches or whatever, and Steve's decision-making seems to be incredibly like there's not a lot of like sitting around wondering how he feels about it.

He knows exactly how he feels when he sees a prototype. Speaker B: Well, it's because also I don't know him. I've talked to people who have spent a lot of time with him. Um, there's a lot of preference falsification between the Isaacson biography and how people have worked with him, describe him. But, uh, um, there's a great Huxley quote. I promise I'll connect it. He says, when I travel to a new place, I try to read nothing about it. I try to know nothing about it. And I try to spend just the first couple days wandering through a place with my eyes and my heart and not my brain.

I want to see things and have the direct experience of it. I don't want to— he didn't use these words, but I'll use it— like, he didn't want to read Lonely Planet or TripAdvisor and be like, oh, that's the famous temple, that's this and that. And instead of actually feeling, trying to master the territory in the map Yes. You're relating to it with your brain through your cognition. And the problem with that is cognition is inherently way lower dimensional than feeling. Right. It's like if you've ever seen an uncompressed MP3, it's like insane how friggin huge even the simplest of songs is as a file.

Speaker A: Yeah. Or WAV file. I mean, I have WAV files of this podcast. It's like 10 gigs. Speaker B: It's insane. Right. And so that's what real life is. It's a shit ton. And most of the world of the digital or cognition thing, how do you reduce this? Speaker A: Yeah. Or WAV file. I mean, I have WAV files of this podcast. It's like 10 gigs. Speaker B: It's insane. Right. And so that's what real life is. It's a shit ton. And most of the world of the digital or cognition thing, how do you reduce this?

Speaker A: Our brains are good at compressing. Speaker B: Yes, it's amazing. But also if you want to sort of expand yourself, it's to actually get back, yeah, the map and the territory matching. And so, so I think the point of what Huxley's saying here is he wants the full high bandwidth direct experience of stuff before his cognition then just comes and puts layers, right? Speaker A: And by the way, there is a point to later on in product design or whatever it might be to actually doing the compression. Speaker B: And it's sober, right?

Right. But write drunk first. Don't. And so it's like, I think what Jobs is trying to do there is the beauty of that direct experience that you have before the cognition sets in is incredibly precious and incredibly rare because it's not reversible. Yes, maybe you take psychedelics, it's reversible. I mean, that's the future of product testing, taking psychedelics. And that is, by the way, that's one of the best validations of Daylight ever, is people love it way more on psychedelics than iPads and stuff. Yeah, um, and but, uh, my point there is like it sounds like maybe he's brash or overconfident or impulsive.

But if you think about the mileage Jobs had in computing, yes, for how friggin long, you think about the mentors he had, people like Bob Noyce, the founder of Intel, and just some of these, like Alan Kay and some of these early folks. You think of the amount of smart people that he was receptive to, because I met some of these people. And when I asked them about him, they say he was so good at listening. Everybody knows him as being arrogant. He was actually very sensitive and good at listening.

You think of the sheer amount of receptivity, the machine learning model that was built over that time, the number of products that failed. Think of NeXT, think of the Lisa, think of so many of the different Apple desktops that were created along the way. So many things failed, right? Like, you— he had such mileage of learning. This is why the Tony Fidels of the world try to be Steve Jobs and totally fail. This is why so many young people try to be Steve Jobs, totally fail. They don't have the mileage he had.

And early Steve Jobs failed a lot too, right? But once you have built that machine learning model, when you can interact something with direct experience rather than cognition, yeah, you are so much higher. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And that's how customers relate to something. Speaker A: He has the receptivity of a child and the wisdom of somebody who spent a lifetime on it. Speaker B: And the anger of a con. Uh, I think that's the essence, right? Drunk, edit sober, and the skill buildingness to be able to do that.

I think the essence of product design. So even if I'm not trained, because I've sort of built my inner technologies, I think I can be somewhat good at this stuff. I don't actually consider myself a designer. Tinej is a genius-level designer. Um, he sort of is what makes things come real, but I think I sort of birth the space of it. Speaker A: Well, I'm not going to compare you to Johnny and Steve, but maybe I just did. Can we talk a little bit about the future of Daylight from a from a product standpoint, there, I guess there are 3 categories that stand out to me.

And obviously some of this might be cards close to the chest, but there's hardware, there's software, and then there's maybe what we'll call intelligence that anyone making computers is thinking about today. Speaker B: I would never actually separate out software and intelligence. I think actually what they are is just an anima or set of animas in the new sphere that you then choose to instantiate onto different objects. Meaning an operating system is no longer a hardware abstraction layer in the world to be. It is this sort of Patronus, this thing that lives in the Noosphere in the sky that then comes down to Earth onto your objects.

But it's not like an operating system for a tablet and an operating system for a watch. It's a different version of that thing in the Noosphere that then instantiates itself. It's sort of the positive version of Horcruxes from Harry Potter. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Yeah. The hardware is the container for that. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: But it's this bigger thing. Speaker A: In terms of just to go back to, again, the analogy of like your You're trying to make a fork. What are the things that, if to the extent you're willing to talk about it, what are the things you're most excited about productizing for Daylight in the near term?

Okay. Speaker B: Do you want me to answer your previous question on this one or just try to answer this one? Speaker A: Either way. Yeah, you can take them either or either or both. Speaker B: Pull me in if this is too big picture, but the way I think about, and it's funny you say like, is it cards too close to the chest? I'm like, we're doing nothing new or original. If you just go to the '60s and like hear what they said, like I have a Nicholas Negroponte book.

Called like Soft Machines or The Architecture Machine. Like everything I say in real reality, it's like written out there. Like forget internet things, forget ambient computing, just like read that stuff. Like you want a new idea, go read an old book. There is nothing we're doing that is new. Speaker A: So much stuff out there. Speaker B: I don't even understand the idea. Speaker A: He brought up, uh, Arawan talking about like AI and the machine and it's like 200 years old or 150 years old. It's just like everything, everything people figured out.

Speaker B: It's just all I didn't know that. Um, I call it the four dimensions of daylight. So what we have right now is we have a dot, right? And what I'm trying to argue is there's a dimensionality, a light cone, a space that emerges from that. Okay. So bear with me and I can maybe try to get simple, but the zero, the zero zero of that space, the dot is, I would call the finally personal personal computer. A Maslow's computer is another way to put it. But it's basically like whichever dimension you take computing, the essence of it should actually finally be personal, which to me means it's healthy and respectful and wise and understanding of a human at all layers, physiology, nervous system, cognition, memory, you know, soul, whatever you want to say, intellectual.

And so anything you do, whatever form factor it is, if it does not have this identity, I think it's fundamentally missing. Much of the possibility of computing, that augmentation. So that's the sort of core vision. Speaker A: Something in that, hearing you say that makes me think of almost like a computer that you're, not to sound weird, totally okay having like intimacy with, like being intimate in space with. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And obviously I think almost all of us who have an iPhone, there's a lot of intimacy there.

It's never not on my body, but I don't feel great about it. Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it's sort of once again, like we were saying, like the messy middle. The problem with everything is not the concept, it's sort of the broken version of it. Yeah. Like most people when they say like, I go by feel, they're actually going by ego. They're just in fear. It's like when people are like, oh, computers should be intimate. It's like computers are actually intimate today, but in the wrong way. Yes. Most, if you look at the Pornhub trends, most people watch porn on their phone in the bathroom.

Like what's more intimate than that, dude? But it's like, it's not necessarily the form of intimacy. I can't judge it. It's not necessarily the form of intimacy we all hope to have. Speaker A: Right, right. Speaker B: So it's like, it's not like we're asking for new forms of intimacy that doesn't exist. We're just asking for the better, more expansive version of it. Okay. So the personal, personal computer, the personal, personal computer, anything we do, whether you make a watch or a tablet or this, it has to have this identity or it's a failure to me.

So it's like Steve Jobs did the first 50% of Alan Kay's vision of a personal computer. You can sort of say what's on the table now for us as a technology industry, us as Daylight, is to do the other 50% of what it means to make a personal computer. Guess what? AI, in enabling something to be animated, to be intelligent, to be relational, really, really, really, really helps and makes possible a computer being personal. And we can talk about that next. Then that's the zeroth identity. And then what are the dimensions of daylight?

I think the Z dimension, the depth dimension, if you take the daylight computer, this tablet, and you take it to its logical extreme, what it becomes is the Primer or Primer or Dynabook. Which is this magical book, this magical notebook. It's the future of reading. It's the future of learning. It's your little companion. Who did you— who was the reference? Hobbes. Yes. So half of it you could see in the, the perspective of sort of knowledge work. It's like thinking and learning and curious. It's the mind augmentation. The other side, you could sort of see it in development, right?

It's the thing that helps you keep your morning routines and evening routines and learn art or practice music or, you know, do your affirmations or gratitude or express yourself in a new way. Speaker A: So an instrument. Speaker B: Yes, it does. Yes, thank you. The z-axis is it becoming an instrument and it actually becoming this magical book that science fiction has talked about forever, that Alan Kay has talked about forever. That's the depth dimension. You take daylight as the talisman, you take it to its extreme, which is profound, right?

Speaker A: Can you just be, um, specifically like give us a few examples of either hardware or software or apps or like what, what things, what are simple ways that the current product could be more that? Like the AI feature you teased for reading books as an example? Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So imagine you're reading something, you don't quite understand it. You just hold down the physical button on the right side of the tablet. You don't even need to change your grip and you can then just tell it what the hell did this mean?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't need to copy and paste. You don't need to do this. And then without losing context, it sort of just brings a little dialogue layer on top of it. And you can go back and forth and interrogate it. And now there are things that can create diagrams, you know, the new 4o image generation goes a long way. There's a guy named Zain Shah. He has a thing called live. It basically makes you a custom Khan Academy video for the specific question you asked. Uh, like, you know, the whiteboard style, it teaches you.

So imagine that sort of a thing. And then what it can do is then say, add this, like, hey, do you want to actually remember this thing or are you done with it? And we make that interface really simple to do. Even the way you close it, one way you close it just means I'm done with this. And one way says I'm done with this, but please add this to my knowledge base. Yes. Speaker A: And by the way, one thing— Speaker B: 6 months from now, it brings it up, or 3 months, you know.

Speaker A: One of the things we didn't talk about much in the beginning, but it's sort of implicit to how so much of why I think you chose to work on Daylight is that when you build hardware, you actually get to go to the source of Operating systems and software, and that's what enables, obviously these types of features you just described exist in different contexts today. But the problem is, unless Apple decides to do them, they're not integrated. Speaker A: And by the way, one thing— Speaker B: 6 months from now, it brings it up, or 3 months, you know.

Speaker A: One of the things we didn't talk about much in the beginning, but it's sort of implicit to how so much of why I think you chose to work on Daylight is that when you build hardware, you actually get to go to the source of Operating systems and software, and that's what enables, obviously these types of features you just described exist in different contexts today. But the problem is, unless Apple decides to do them, they're not integrated. Speaker B: It's the Alan Kay quote, those who are serious about software build their own hardware.

That's especially true in the age of AI. Why? Because all the possibility space available to being a website in the browser, a web app, or the possibility space to being a mobile app or desktop app. Is sort of like almost fully expanded into, and AI just like fully commoditizes and makes that happen. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: So if you want to actually have a software product that's differentiated or better, you need to go to new possibility space. And so literally, if you have to make your own hardware to make that possibility space accessible, to be honest, that's like way cheaper than spending like a crazy amount of money on customer acquisition or spending a crazy amount of money on training these crazy AI models, right?

So I think a lot of people realize like you have to develop the capacity of hardware to do the software, the stuff they want to. And like, I think there'll be a huge reclamation of like, wait, hardware is not as hard as we thought it is in many ways. Um, most of what makes it hard is not hardware, but decision-making to your point, right? Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: Being a hardware person's akin to being more an investor because you get, if you're wrong, you're dead. So you have to be right on your core main things.

If you do software, you can be wrong 99.99% of the time. If you stay long enough to iterate until you get it right, you sort of make it super different. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: Being a hardware person's akin to being more an investor because you get, if you're wrong, you're dead. So you have to be right on your core main things. If you do software, you can be wrong 99.99% of the time. If you stay long enough to iterate until you get it right, you sort of make it super different.

Speaker A: Super different. Speaker B: Super different. Speaker A: Okay, so that's the Z-axis. Speaker B: So that's the Z-axis, yes. So just imagine like a notebook, you could write things into it and it captures everything you've written. It cleans up your handwriting. It makes it digital. It puts it into your Notion or wherever you want it. Uh, anything you put a square box beside that's a to-do, it adds that to your to-do list. So on and so on. Imagine a handwriting version of Granola, if people are familiar with that.

Speaker A: So an instrument that meets you exactly where you are. Speaker B: For these sort of knowledge, learning, thinking, expression things. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: That's the Z axis. Um, the X and Y axis of course is like, well, what's the other set of products that we do? Right. It's not just a tablet. There's other things that should be a finally personal, personal computer. What do we do? A phone, a this. There's the obvious ones. We'll make a monitor. We'll make a phone, blah, blah, blah. You know, those types of things will happen.

That's sort of obvious. The question is how niche will that be? Those are interesting things. But to me, it all fits in on this XY where the X is what I would call like real reality. And the Y is what I would call Harry Potter computing. And cause it's literally like spatial, right? Like you make the space smaller, a tablet becomes a phone. You make it even smaller. You can put it on your wrist. It's an, you know, a watch. You make it bigger. It's a monitor. You make it even bigger.

It's a whiteboard. Like literally a tablet in many ways is a canonical primitive of computing that you can stretch, right? And make thinner or heavier or foldable or whatever it is. Um, a laptop's a tablet turned sideways, put into a keyboard. Like, uh, I hope it doesn't sound as rationalization, but it actually is sort of true. It is the simplest unit of computing. But to me, what that means is it's not virtual reality where the computer is your environment and you stick your head inside of it. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: Is your environment is the environment and the computer then submits closer to ambient computing.

Yes, the computer submits itself to your environment, to your, to the, to the space and headspace that you want, the set and setting that you're trying to do. And therefore, like the room around me, as you're seeing with all these Post-it notes and, you know, pieces of paper up in the wall and things, what if those can be computational? Some of these should probably just be paper for the long term, but some of these could benefit from being computational. Speaker A: Yeah, or maybe, because obviously the Fred Victor dynamic land stuff, there's different kind of takes on it.

Speaker B: So, What in our internal thing, we, we, uh, we reference the dynamic land and, you know, that's real reality, right? Like screw virtual reality. Let's have real reality. Speaker A: And that all is early writing, by the way, is exactly what you said. It's about like, let me pull my, like, let me make the computer object rather than being subject to it and sticking my head in the— Speaker B: and look, VR is fine if you want to go have some immersive experience and you want to like teleport to Asia.

But the idea of that, you're going to put that on your face for 10 hours a day and you're going to come home and you're going to relax by putting another thing on your face. To me, that just doesn't make sense. Speaker A: I really genuinely, having used the Apple, the Vision Pro a bit, like it is teleportation. It is about going somewhere other than where I am. Speaker B: Right, right. Speaker A: Which is totally fine and can be good. I don't want to do that. If I'm spending most of my day trying to be somewhere other than where I am, right, I think there's a problem.

Speaker B: There you go. That's the essence of it right now. Speaker A: And by the way, I would say the iPhone is basically virtual reality, right? I often joke to people, I catch myself like I'm sitting on the toilet on my phone and I black back in. Like I realize that I'm staring at a piece of glass and I'm in my body. And that's a, I don't have that as much on the Daylight, which is nice. Speaker B: There you go. That's the essence of it right now. Speaker A: And by the way, I would say the iPhone is basically virtual reality, right?

I often joke to people, I catch myself like I'm sitting on the toilet on my phone and I black back in. Like I realize that I'm staring at a piece of glass and I'm in my body. And that's a, I don't have that as much on the Daylight, which is nice. Speaker B: And once again, I think it's less because we designed something brilliant and it's more like we started from something very small and simple, right? And you sort of learn what things actually cause the problems as much as it gave the features.

Speaker A: Okay. So we have X-axis is real reality. Speaker B: So just imagine more computational surfaces that can be really small or big. Mark Weiser called these pads, tabs, and boards. Um, and so I wouldn't be surprised if there's sort of a whiteboard. That when you walk in front gives your week's calendar. Speaker A: Yep. Speaker B: And then also has your to-do list. Or when you're trying to, you know, do what your trainer taught you, it's got your exercises on it. Who knows how much of that will work in black and white?

Do we have to evolve to color? The other— the y-axis is what I call Harry Potter computing, because actually you don't need every aspect of magic. You know what, to me, computing is the essence of to be a surface, to be visual. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Right. Um, and it doesn't even need to operate on you necessarily with symbol or with voice. It could also operate with you with smell. So like Harry Potter computing to me is taking the magic of computing and infusing it into more objects. So imagine like Philips Hue light bulbs that like didn't suck.

Yeah. To me, that could be super powerful if combined with the daylight. Speaker A: This is like, um, little, I don't know, like the brick you put on the back of your phone or like different stylus or yes, they're analog objects. Speaker A: This is like, um, little, I don't know, like the brick you put on the back of your phone or like different stylus or yes, they're analog objects. Speaker B: That are magical. Yeah. And so that's why I call it Harry Potter computing, because it's like Tom Riddle's diary or the Marauder's Map, right?

Or it's like in the Beauty and the Beast, the candlestick holder that, you know, moves around. Speaker A: Cool. Speaker B: It's the moving painting. Speaker A: Maybe it's robotics. Speaker B: Could be that actually our internal slogan for our product vision is building psycho technologies for health, learning, agency, and flourishing, or HLAFF, since I'm secretly Danish. Speaker A: True story. Speaker B: And, uh, I like the word psychotechnologies because it means it's not just about computers. It could be an incense holder that when you're trying to deep work, it puts on a smell that it knows for you is, will put you in a deep work state.

Neroli, for example, for some people puts them in that way, right? Or it's light bulbs that when you're trying to wind down, it's slowly, it's synced to your alarm and your Google Calendar and it starts to slowly dim. Speaker A: I could totally imagine. I mean, one of the things I think is just credit to the brand you guys have built is that I can imagine Daylight selling a range of products that aren't computer products, including whatever, um, furniture or whatever, but also— yeah, yeah. And Instant Folder, like, which is, which is, um, you're pointing in a direction of, of— I mean, you've, you, you, to, to make it explicit, you've used the framing of like a third timeline or calm computing or that some of which point very explicitly at computers, but a lot of it points just as a, um, a lifestyle maybe.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that's to complete the sort of four dimensions of daylight is like The zeroth dimension is a finally personal personal computer. That's the identity. The Z is it become a Primer or Dynabook, the ultimate version of a book, you know, comes with its own teacher and notebook. The X and Y is sort of computational surfaces in appropriate places in respectful ways around your house. I think the Y is computational objects in appropriate places in respectful relationships to the other objects, to yourself and other people. By the way, operating systems need to be redone.

When it assumes multiple users, multiple places. Operating systems are per device. This is an x86, this is an ARM, this is one user profile. When you have something that's in the new sphere, when you have it in a house where other people are there, whether family or communal, you have to have totally different security models, totally different ways operating systems are built. So there's a lot of technical primitives that emerge differently if you assume this vision. So you can build— Speaker A: Yeah, you got your work cut out for you.

Speaker B: Oh, it's a lot, but it's fun. And then the last and final fourth dimension is sort of what I would call that, which is these like sort of optimism, this like overall move towards what I call the third timeline, which is not the first timeline of Luddite and Unabomber and screw all this and let's go back to the woods. And not the second timeline of like the Marc Andreessen, EAAC, like go, go, go, go, Nick Land, accelerationism, acceleration, and we're all going to lose anyway, you might as well.

Just like go gung-ho into it and solve all our problems with technology, which I think ends up as Brave New World. It's like you've rung up a really high, high score. GDP is high, life extension is high. You're a trillionaire, but you know, you're dead inside. Timeline 1, you're dead on the outside because a tiger may eat you or you might get sepsis without antibiotics, but you're alive inside. Timeline 2, you're alive outside. It's like Bryan Johnson. You look like a million bucks. You literally spent a million bucks on that.

You're a trillionaire. You know, you got, you got a 12-pack, but inside you're dead. There's some way in which optimizing for all those metrics, your soul is dead. And the third timeline is how we can sort of have a beautiful harmony between the future and tradition, between the top-down, the bottom-up, the masculine, the feminine, between the technological and the natural, by between this alive outside and alive inside. And so the hope is daylight is part of the same trend that is Chick-fil-A to KFC. To me, that's the third timeline. It's this sort of mass empowerment of society.

Speaker A: What's Chick-fil-A to KFC? Speaker B: I consider that very third timeline. Speaker A: Uh, I don't know what you mean. Speaker B: Okay. So what I mean is basically KFC, you know, served the ecological niche of like great fried chicken. Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: But it sort of was shitty. Like it pandered to you, right? It's so oily. It's so salty. Speaker A: And Chick-fil-A is the miraculous one? Speaker B: Well, it's an evolutionary pathway. I, I maybe, maybe, yeah. Speaker A: As a former Chick-fil-A cashier or drive-thru guy, I don't know if I'm honored.

Speaker B: I don't know. Speaker A: Yeah, we definitely haven't reached the terminal state of that topic. Speaker B: But like Chick-fil-A does not use the same sort of bad seed oils. I'm not claiming that they use like amazing stuff. Speaker A: The point is great. The metaphor is okay. It's working. Speaker B: Chick-fil-A to me is a quality upgrade in fried chicken. That is a more glorious future. Speaker A: Okay. And it's an increment. Speaker B: And HOKA One Ones versus Allbirds. And, you know, we can go Birkenstocks versus, you know, okay.

Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: I'm with it. But my point is we're sort of learning to make wiser choices that are in between, in between these extremes. Yeah. Yeah. And then the goal here is as a world, we're doing that. And then we're just trying to see what does that mean for technology? And sort of to your point, if the promise of technology was this beautiful medium, And we ended up in a messy medium. How do we get closer to a beautiful medium? Speaker A: An integrated one, right? Speaker B: An integrated, holistic medium.

Speaker A: I have a few questions about building Daylight, the company. It's been a slog. It's been 6 years. Speaker B: 7 years. Speaker A: 7 years. Speaker B: 6 years since it officially started, but, uh, about 7 years since. Speaker A: What have you learned about yourself? Speaker B: Oh man. Uh, that I lie to myself all the time. That I'm full of shit. I'm a horrible person. I'm very harsh to myself. I have a lot of demons. The entire process has been very spiritual. And in many ways, if I have strengths now as a leader, as an individual, or a partner, or a future dad, it's because I think of the intensity of this process.

And if there's one thing I'm proud of is in each moment of like heartbreak of company nearly died like 6 or 7 times, honestly, maybe even more. I don't mean like sort of metaphorically, like I was out of zero, like I was down to no money. Like PPP loans was like the key, the key way to like keep going at a certain period of time. God bless the money printing machine. There's always some positive externalities, negative externality things, right? Uh, it's just like you either can contract or you can sort of like let go into it.

Mm-hmm. Speaker B: An integrated, holistic medium. Speaker A: I have a few questions about building Daylight, the company. It's been a slog. It's been 6 years. Speaker B: 7 years. Speaker A: 7 years. Speaker B: 6 years since it officially started, but, uh, about 7 years since. Speaker A: What have you learned about yourself? Speaker B: Oh man. Uh, that I lie to myself all the time. That I'm full of shit. I'm a horrible person. I'm very harsh to myself. I have a lot of demons. The entire process has been very spiritual.

And in many ways, if I have strengths now as a leader, as an individual, or a partner, or a future dad, it's because I think of the intensity of this process. And if there's one thing I'm proud of is in each moment of like heartbreak of company nearly died like 6 or 7 times, honestly, maybe even more. I don't mean like sort of metaphorically, like I was out of zero, like I was down to no money. Like PPP loans was like the key, the key way to like keep going at a certain period of time.

God bless the money printing machine. There's always some positive externalities, negative externality things, right? Uh, it's just like you either can contract or you can sort of like let go into it. Mm-hmm. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Like that sort of surrender. And I think the one quality I just had throughout it is I sort of never lost my faith in the world, not in the way it meets me, but in the way I felt I saw it behind all the layers. Sort of like an adult that's so mean, but, you know, underneath, like, he's still a child.

Still have a good heart. Like, most of the world's not evil, you know, they're just hurting or they're scarce or this. So I somehow kept my faith and I stayed supple in each situation that could have closed me down. Mm-hmm. And so I think that allowed me to keep showing up, keep being nourished by the few people, the few things that were rewarding, that were powerful, the few breakthroughs that give you the childlike excitement. Like, I did something that Amazon has spent tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, to do.

And like, no way, I haven't done this. Speaker A: I have no idea what to do with that too, of the incremental progress, right? Speaker B: Because when you do it something for that long and you bootstrap it and you don't have a co-founder in your parents' basement and, you know, you have very little resources and and all that. And so I think one thing I learned is sometimes a very few set of qualities can be a complete instruction set if you can stay supple enough that you don't get sort of closed down and then lose that evolvability.

And by instruction set, what I mean is like your Intel or ARM processor, it has, I'm just going to make up a number, like 64 instructions that it then is able to act on with the actual transistors of the chip. It can add, it can multiply, it can jump, it can concatenate, it can flip, whatever, whatever. And basically every program you write gets turned into a series of these instructions. And when it says 3.6 gigahertz, it's like it can do this many instructions per that. And I think the problem with most of us is reality is so tough to us, we start to shut down and it allows us to be effective in narrow ways.

It's like the lizard that can escape the snakes. but your, your instruction set might become 42. And guess what? For the most part, you can get away with having an instruction set of 42. It looks like there's no sort of discernible difference, except at a soul level. You sort of like know there's a part of you you've cut off, a part of you you've abandoned, a part of the world you've now lost wonder in. I think the problem with that is when you don't have a complete instruction set, you can't compute over all of computing.

It's like a Turing-complete machine. If you have a complete instruction set, you can do all of computing. And over time, the ability to do all of computing is actually what allows you to have great capacity, evolve and pioneer things, even if in the short term it doesn't look like much. And so I think the combination of sort of having faith, staying supple, like feeling the pain, feeling the heartbreak, feeling the fear, always being curious and humble, always assuming, like trying to falsify myself, searching for the best teachers. You know, doing the work, listening to the whispers, whatever it may be.

I feel like even if I was— I lacked in a lot of ways, I somehow had the set of qualities, or I chose such that I had a complete instruction set. And with that, even if it may be inefficient and painful at times, you can sort of bootstrap yourself into all the other things. You can bootstrap yourself to learn about displays. You can bootstrap yourself. It's an energy to have the stamina to figure out fundraising, to learn how to recruit, to to do it. And so maybe my biggest takeaway is like, don't be so harsh on yourself because that might crush your main ability, which was to have a complete instruction set.

It may be incredibly inefficient. The harshness may be useful for efficiency in the short term, but you're dramatically more inefficient in the long term if you don't have a complete instruction set. And that's an arcane analogy, but I think it captured something deep for me in my own reflection. Speaker A: Hmm. How have you grown as a leader? Speaker B: I think the biggest thing is like, if I don't actually trust myself to lead my own life, how can anybody else trust me? And it's not even whether they trust me or not.

I don't trust that they will trust me because I don't trust myself. And it's sort of like, as above, so below, like, so below, as above. If I I don't have these qualities in myself, it shows up. You become a tyrannical leader because you're so afraid that no one actually respects you because you don't respect yourself, that you have to punish and do things and do that. And like, I thought that was the way the world is. And now I realize, no, no, no, no, I just literally don't trust people will ever listen to me unless I force it down their throats.

Wow. Because I don't listen to myself. I have so often denied that feeling. Yep. And so I think the biggest acknowledgment as a leader that was so hard was like, I'm terrible at this. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm hurting other people actively in the process of this. I'm making a lot of mistakes that are affecting other people's lives. I'm trying to do humane tech and I'm like sometimes being inhumane. Like, I'm a hypocrite. I'm a contradiction. I suck. I should not be doing this. Why does anybody join this team or give me money?

Like, this is a farce. It'll all fall apart. And it's sort of like the Charlie Munger thing where he's like, the one thing I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I never go there. Yeah, it's sort of like admitting upfront how terrible I was as a leader became the main instruction set of how to then become a better leader. And so I would still say I'm 95% in the question, but I think I relate to myself as a leader, as somebody who is learning leadership is not actually a set of skills.

The set of skills come and they emerge. And a lot of the time me and you spend outside of this is sort of how to build those skills and the tactics and the day in, the day out, the week out, week out. But I think the bigger, deeper thing was sort of ownership, integrity as defined by owning your word. Like when I say something, do I actually believe it? Do I actually trust myself? It's doing something that's uninevitable. Do you accept the fear of that and therefore the exhilaration of it?

Or do you sort of shut down the fear and therefore the exhilaration, and therefore you don't then don't have the energy to actually push that part of reality? Speaker A: Conversely, the other side of this, though, is incredibly attractive. It's what makes people want to follow leaders. It's like a gravity. Speaker B: Yeah. Which is sort of the craziest thing about life. It's like you get the thing that you no longer want, right? Once you're like, I'm so depressed, I don't care about success or validation or this, I just want mental health.

And then suddenly then success starts to show up. I'm not interested in girls, I'll be fine. And then people then all want to ask you out. And I always think of my favorite version of this as a leader is like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Like what makes him so amazing as a leader is he's the reluctant leader. And it's like ambition used to be considered a bad word. Like if you read historically, it still is a bit ambitious. Really? Speaker A: Which is kind of getting— but kind of not.

Speaker B: But like it's like considered the best thing ever. And every college essay, I'm an ambitious person, but the idea of being ambitious is you are trying to, to get something. And the problem with that is then leadership becomes a way of meeting your own needs versus serving a role with others. Right, right, right. And the drunk— the, the sober driver in the group of 5 people who are all drunk, he's a leader. The mom who's taking care of her 4 kids is a leader. I think one of the greatest leaders in society is a mom, because life or death, literally responsible 24/7 And so that ability to sort of reluctantly be a leader, I feel, is like the essence of good leadership.

Because being a leader sort of sucks in many ways. It's like you're a dad too. Speaker A: You're sort of a steward of great responsibility too. Speaker B: Yeah, it's lonely and it's asymmetric, um, because you're trying to lead, right? If you only met people where they are and where the world it is, you wouldn't be leading. By definition, it's asymmetric. So I don't know, there's a way in which I feel like if I meet leaders and they're not reluctant of it, some part of me that doubts it a bit.

Speaker A: So there's an idea that Apple is sort of Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives, which I think maybe can be interpreted as an egocentric thing. I don't necessarily read it that way. It's sort of what do you want to imbue into this organization? What, what life, what DNA do you want to imbue into it? What kind of company do you want? To build with Daylight? What kind of company you want Daylight to be? Speaker B: I think the short answer is I'm not sure, which is sort of fun because I have a set of like wants and feelings and principles, but sort of like the Relkay thing, I'm like living in the question of like what that means.

And maybe that's why we'll be able to build the company that I may want or I can, you know, feel because we're not trying to construct it. Right. You actually don't build a company, you grow company. It's not metal. It's not sheet metal you bend and put together. It's a garden. And like, it's such a— I have like 4 plants and it's like the hardest thing in my life to keep them alive. Speaker A: You got a lot of light in here too. You have no excuses. I got a New York apartment with one window.

Speaker B: So definitely easier said than done, but yeah, it's my very much, it's like, it's like raising a family or, you know, gardening. It's like you can put inputs, you can cultivate, you can nurture, but ultimately you have to, you can just grow, you can't control. And so what is the organism we want to grow? I always call the company an organism. It's, it's a superorganism. I think the 3 principles I have is one is slow company, um, which is not meant to be slow company as the output, but slow company as the input.

I'll maybe explain what I mean in a second. The second one is sort of gives back more than it takes. I think at the end of the day, company literally means company. It's bringing together people in a way that is beneficial not just for them, but for their community and for the world. That's what all the cells in your body do, right? They— it's— if they're selfish for itself at the cost of everything else, that's called a cancer. Cancer is not intrinsically bad. It's actually life. It's just selfish. It doesn't give a shit about the rest of you and will take as much as it needs to.

The cells in your body, they stay alive, or at least their organ or tissue does, and it supports the bigger organ they're part of, and it supports the entire body. It's just a beautiful alignment between all the biggest to the smallest. That's ultimately what companies should be. And the fact that they're not just means there's a lot of cancer. That's like, yeah, if we're in a toxic environment, there's lots of cancers. That's not a comment about people or the way we organize, but about the environment. And so the second one is sort of how do you reclaim companies as a social technology for getting things done effectively and aligned.

And I think if body and nature can do it, we can do it also. It's just super hard because the principal agent problem, which is what cancer is, you know, your interest versus a group interest. This is where like things like religion and being part of something bigger solve this at like, you know, root cause. They go a long way. But there's something about Daylight sort of redefining what it means for a company to be sustainable, to be scalable, to compound, to have sufficient resources, but also sort of have positive externality.

You know, you could say the main problem of most companies, it's negative externality and, you know, positive in the ways that are legible and negative in the ways that are illegible, right? Horrible for all the people that work there and then they go home and they're bad parents or whatever it may be. And then the third way which might sound a little more lowbrow than the other two, is if we're all billionaires, where would we work, how would we work, and what would we work on? And there's a way, if you just assume that if Daylight could only hire like non-fucked-up billionaires, or all the people around us because of AGI are all billionaires, what would they work on?

How would they want to be treated? What would they want their teammates to be? What would they want to be part of? And I'm like, okay, if I was a billionaire, like, what would I do? And then like, it just sort of filters away all the bullshit, all the like, no guys, let's just fucking do all this stuff because then we can get this growth curve to hit the Series B. You're like, I'm a billionaire. I'm not gonna fucking do that. Speaker A: You got a lot of light in here too.

You have no excuses. I got a New York apartment with one window. Speaker B: So definitely easier said than done, but yeah, it's my very much, it's like, it's like raising a family or, you know, gardening. It's like you can put inputs, you can cultivate, you can nurture, but ultimately you have to, you can just grow, you can't control. And so what is the organism we want to grow? I always call the company an organism. It's, it's a superorganism. I think the 3 principles I have is one is slow company, um, which is not meant to be slow company as the output, but slow company as the input.

I'll maybe explain what I mean in a second. The second one is sort of gives back more than it takes. I think at the end of the day, company literally means company. It's bringing together people in a way that is beneficial not just for them, but for their community and for the world. That's what all the cells in your body do, right? They— it's— if they're selfish for itself at the cost of everything else, that's called a cancer. Cancer is not intrinsically bad. It's actually life. It's just selfish. It doesn't give a shit about the rest of you and will take as much as it needs to.

The cells in your body, they stay alive, or at least their organ or tissue does, and it supports the bigger organ they're part of, and it supports the entire body. It's just a beautiful alignment between all the biggest to the smallest. That's ultimately what companies should be. And the fact that they're not just means there's a lot of cancer. That's like, yeah, if we're in a toxic environment, there's lots of cancers. That's not a comment about people or the way we organize, but about the environment. And so the second one is sort of how do you reclaim companies as a social technology for getting things done effectively and aligned.

And I think if body and nature can do it, we can do it also. It's just super hard because the principal agent problem, which is what cancer is, you know, your interest versus a group interest. This is where like things like religion and being part of something bigger solve this at like, you know, root cause. They go a long way. But there's something about Daylight sort of redefining what it means for a company to be sustainable, to be scalable, to compound, to have sufficient resources, but also sort of have positive externality.

You know, you could say the main problem of most companies, it's negative externality and, you know, positive in the ways that are legible and negative in the ways that are illegible, right? Horrible for all the people that work there and then they go home and they're bad parents or whatever it may be. And then the third way which might sound a little more lowbrow than the other two, is if we're all billionaires, where would we work, how would we work, and what would we work on? And there's a way, if you just assume that if Daylight could only hire like non-fucked-up billionaires, or all the people around us because of AGI are all billionaires, what would they work on?

How would they want to be treated? What would they want their teammates to be? What would they want to be part of? And I'm like, okay, if I was a billionaire, like, what would I do? And then like, it just sort of filters away all the bullshit, all the like, no guys, let's just fucking do all this stuff because then we can get this growth curve to hit the Series B. You're like, I'm a billionaire. I'm not gonna fucking do that. Speaker A: David Zennar has this inversion of that classic question, what would you do if you had a billion dollars, which is what would you not stop doing for a billion dollars?

Like, what is the thing you're going to hold on to? Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: Which is, I think, actually helps you see it a little more clearly. Beautiful. Speaker B: And that's what I want. At the end of the day, like, I'm maybe more times than I like to admit, I'm very clearly a child. As you've seen, I'm just trying to have fun. It's like my dojo. It's my little sandbox. I love gadgets. I love learning about humans, the psychology, the biology, the philosophy, the bigger story. And here's my chance to try to make stuff based on my theories, based on my curiosities.

And do people like it? Am I right? Am I wrong? Speaker A: I love that. Speaker B: Accountability of reality. And I think that's what the essence of investing or entrepreneurship or being a scientist is. You love and trust reality so much, you're willing to be held accountable to it because you assume the relationship is reciprocal. Wow. And so, yeah, I just want a place that I can make awesome stuff for a long time to come, whether it be incense holders or new forms of computers. And, uh, I don't know, I love, I love when you see a, a new parent And you ask them, how are you?

And they're like, terrible. I've never been so sleep deprived. My eyes twitching. And I'm like, how do you feel? And they're like, I've never felt more satisfied ever. There's something about building things that is similar to that. Yes. It's like in each moment you're like, why the hell am I doing this? But it just gives you a sense of purpose and meaning and a personal dojo for your spiritual evolution that I think very little else matches. Speaker A: You obviously, some of this question in the answer you just gave, but why should someone want to come work with you at Daylight?

Speaker A: You obviously, some of this question in the answer you just gave, but why should someone want to come work with you at Daylight? Speaker B: I don't know. It's probably a bad setup for the relationship. Like, uh, if, if Daylight's a good fit for you, probably everything we do in our power is to anti-sell it to you. And then you still want to show up because you think the fundamental principles are good enough. It's sort of like what you're saying about The Thing. The screen's like awesome and everything's mediocre.

It's like maybe Daylight, like the core principles are awesome and like a lot of stuff is mediocre, but you sort of believe in that awesomeness of that core. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: I think it's optimism. I think that's actually the fundamental thing here. Optimism that I, when I say slow company, I mean like, I think there's going to be very little competition for what we're doing. Most people might think I'm naive and, ah, Amazon's going to do this and Lenovo's going to rip it off and Remarkable's going to do it.

You're a crazy kid. You're going to kill your company because there's no That's a longer discussion, but I think there's actually very little competition for this, what we're doing, especially the way we're doing it. I think our main competition is ourself. And in a Peter Thiel sense, if you assume there actually isn't that much competition, then you don't need to rush the same way and be the first mover or go for a network effect. And if you assume the greatest moat here is actually just long-term compounding across vertical integration, basically, you know, what a Tesla or SpaceX does or Apple, you know, famously does, Rivian and DJI are getting close to that.

You can't catch up to that. It's like, it literally just takes so long. You know, if you have high quality drivers and you have great supplier relationships and you have great color theory in your operating system, every detail is done in a particular way. And you just can't do that. So if you can build something that is slow and builds with quality, I think you can build a place that people want to be at that is far more effective. Everybody's nervous system is not shot. So it's less political and bitchy and crap.

People actually can spend time with each other. You can build relationship. And you can take advantage of AI. Because what does AI do fundamentally? I think what it means to be an AI company is not to make a foundation model. I think it's to reshape a company with, with the idea that AI can change a lot of the stuff that makes a company shitty. What's the primary thing that makes a company shitty? Scale. It just gets so big. Dunbar, it's past the Dunbar number. You have all these weird bureaucracies and principal agent problems and you get cancers and You know, it's just annoying and too many meetings and overhead and just sucks.

So if you can stay below the Dunbar number, and maybe it's different if it's remote versus in person, like I got to ask Robin Dunbar this question and he said it's still a TBD. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Um, but the power there is if AI allows you to have less people doing a lot more, and therefore you have a lot less meetings, a lot less people, and a lot less bullshit, I think that's what it means to be an AI company is you can be fundamentally smaller and more humane.

In the same sort of social setups we've been set up for a long time. To me, that is like, oh yes, we're all billionaires, and of course we would want a place like that. You don't want something so small you can't do something of impact. You want something so big that you got all these bullshit meetings and nonsense and, you know, performance and politics. So it's like, there's no such thing as an electricity company. Every company used electricity. The companies that were the best at using electricity were the ones who then changed their private, their previous Modes of operating with the assumption of, okay, electricity allows machines, it allows lights, it allows this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Similar thing. What assumptions in the way we build businesses change when you have AI? And I think the simplest way to capture it is you go from Sam Walton's, the Walmart founder's schedule, which was 17, 18 hours a day of working, flying from Walmart to Walmart, auditing each one, keeping it accountable, doing it. And, um, no amount of tool would change him showing up from Walmart to Walmart to Walmart to Walmart, holding that quality and accountability and that performance and execution. It was literally just he needed to put in the hours.

It's like a factory worker. He just needs to put in the hours. But compare that to Einstein, where he slept like 10 hours a day, went for long walks, slept with his secretaries, like enjoyed himself, had fun, thought about things, got lost in thought. Sam Walton is more like the Edison, like 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. Einstein's like 50% perspiration, 50% inspiration. I mean, with AI, it's 90% inspiration, 10% perspiration. That's what robots and AI is. And so if you own a company that allows for inspiration to actually be effective and to be integrated in whole, you need a different pace.

You can't be busy all the time. You need moments for pro-flexion, reflection. Some of the things Daylight is trying to do. And I think a lot of the best future of work books are about how you design a day and how you design a calendar when you're a knowledge worker. But it's no longer about the sheer number of hours you put into something, but, you know, leverage, as Naval says. It's being wise. It's making good decisions, having great ideas. And so that's what I most want is now companies can be unshitty potentially because of AI, because we understand interpersonal dynamics better, because we each sort of do the work.

And if the part itself is whole, then they can be so much better part of a whole. Speaker A: I have a handful of miscellaneous questions we'll run through as we turn the corner. Speaker B: Okay. Speaker A: Is there a type of app that you really hope someone will build for Daylight that isn't you? Speaker B: Yes, there's a guy who's actually doing it right now. It's funny. He's like a Harvard MBA, but he's, he's like a John Lasseter type auteur. Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: Like served in the Army, like incredible, like animator and game maker and, you know, he's going to Harvard Business School and also self-taught coder.

And basically what he's creating is AI interactive fictions that are sort of like the early adventure quest games of computing. So funny, again, we're like starting from the beginning. Essentially, it's more engaging than a book, but it's more educative than infotainment. And so essentially he has these like AI-drawn characters and animations and you Choose Your Own Adventure, and it's like a book you talk to and you make decisions and each of the characters interact with you. And it's like you're writing a letter to King Arthur and you get an envelope back and he writes it back.

It all looks beautiful in black and white. And I'm like, holy shit, this is the primer. This is making education fun and engaging. That, that to me is like the most mind-blowing thing here is if we go 5 years ahead where a bunch of kids are using this, they will not look less happy than the kids today playing Subway Surfers. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: They will actually be more happy during, before, and after. Yeah. And to me, that's so funny. Speaker A: Alex Zhu, who founded ly, he originally wanted to make an education product that was more engaging.

Speaker B: Really? Yeah. And TikTok is amazing for education in many ways too, right? Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: They will actually be more happy during, before, and after. Yeah. And to me, that's so funny. Speaker A: Alex Zhu, who founded ly, he originally wanted to make an education product that was more engaging. Speaker B: Really? Yeah. And TikTok is amazing for education in many ways too, right? Speaker A: Well, more so in China, probably due to different kinds of— Speaker B: the defaults are different. Huh. Speaker A: So telling that that guy's developing it for daylight.

Yes. Speaker B: He talks about an iPad versus daylight world. He gave that speech in his Harvard Business School class and they're all like, you're insane. You're going to fail. Why are you building on this thing that's sold, you know, 5,000, 6,000 units so far? What are you doing? And he's like, I'm either crazy or I'm onto something. So that warms my heart because frankly, daylight is the underlying substrate or medium. It's then people then taking that and then having opinions and crystallizing it into something. That, yeah, that to me is a primer come alive.

Speaker A: It's funny. My next question was. What maybe there's part of it in this. You've— we also talked about the Socrates problem, the written word. What do you think books will look like in 15 years? Speaker B: I think we'll decompose the book into the actual underlying thing it is. Like sometimes when we read a book, it actually should be like a coach combined with an integration into your Google Calendar, combined with an integration into your timers and reminders, combined with being able to stick up stuff on your bathroom wall and, you know, your front door.

And we're reading it as a book because that is the best wisdom delivery device we have in our society. Speaker A: Or it's the best business model for the author. Or business, right. Or status model for the author. Speaker B: Sure. Right. You take a blog post, you make it a book or whatever the fuck you do. Speaker A: Or it's the best business model for the author. Or business, right. Or status model for the author. Speaker B: Sure. Right. You take a blog post, you make it a book or whatever the fuck you do.

Speaker A: Well, this is the classic thing. It's like, oh, I just, new book, like listen to one or two podcasts. You probably got the gist. Yes. Speaker B: So how do we then take it outside of sort of the contortions it is and break it down to, oh, we want a wisdom delivery device for you. So you need something that hits you with enough salience, personalization, and examples that you grok it. And repetition helps, right? And then you need something that helps you implement that into your life, right? We have Tiny Habits, we have BJ Fogg stuff, we have James Clear stuff like Atomic Habits.

Like, we sort of know these sort of behavior action nudge trigger, like some of the stuff. How do you put into your world? This is where real reality is so powerful. Speaker A: Yep. Speaker B: Is you bring compute, you bring reminders and nudges and things you're trying to develop yourself into. And so, um, cool. Yeah. Speaker A: What books have been most influential on you? Speaker B: Brave New World was profound because it sort of taught me what a Pyrrhic victory of technology is, which is we win in every dimension that we think matters and we're ultimately dead inside and lose.

And, uh, I felt like so much of my life was this 12-year-old boy energy. Oh, it's so simple. We just make people smile more and laugh more and happier and make GDP go up and lifespan go up and save more lives. And I'm a good boy and I've done a good job and the world's better. Better. And so much, I think what it means to grow up is you appreciate darkness and pathos and the shadow and the difficulty and, you know, the things that are not numerical, not legible sometimes that appear bad, but are actually good for you.

Sort of like, uh, yeah, it's like wine tastes like shit. And then over time you're like, I love this bitter thing with complexity, you know, the touch of cedar. So cool. Speaker A: Uh, you talked about Alan Kay, maybe Mark Weiser as well. Any other influences, maybe especially outside of technology or computing? Speaker B: Yeah, so many. Um, I think there's these two women leaders, Jan Birchfield, who runs something called Antara Taus, and Kamala Devi McClure, who runs some— as a teacher at something called ISTA. They were just the first examples of what, like, extremely powerful, compassionate, integrated, holistic leadership looked like.

I didn't realize most people who I thought were good leaders were more like Don Draper, charismatic types, that's actually not leadership. Or other people are great managers. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Or other people are successful. So they, you know, people sort of give them a lot of status and regard. When you actually meet somebody who's a profoundly good leader, it's like an emotional, spiritual nervous system experience to be in their presence where you feel like they're gonna hold you to be the best version of yourself, but they're not judging you.

And it's like love. And it almost sounds like spiritual guru-esque. They're the opposite. They're so grounded and humble. They're not trying to disempower you to give them power. And to me, that was just profound because it sort of was like eating a tomato off the vine for the first time. You're like, oh my God, this is what a tomato tastes like. It was like, oh my God, this is what leadership is. Oh my God, the future of humanity is amazing. Because if the world's run by 12-year-old girls and boys, we pretend there's leaders, but there actually really aren't.

And if these, if all of us can be leaders like this, all of us can be moms and dads like this, holy fuck, we're going to live in a beautiful future. Speaker A: So we've talked about AI in a lot of different ways at a more kind of philosophical level. I think there's a question about whether or not AI is making us more human or less human, or whether it's turning us into something else. Obviously there's nature's role to play here too. As you see all of this stuff kind of, I don't know, use O3 this week and it's, it's, it's crazy.

Speaker B: It's unbelievable. Speaker A: It's really, it's weird to feel seen by that thing. Speaker B: Um, yeah. Speaker A: Any reflections on, I don't know, cyborgs and humanity and like, what, what, what are, where are we going? What are we becoming? Have we given birth to something new that will surpass us. Speaker B: Well, I almost killed myself over this topic in 2020 where I was like, yeah, so I was like, oh, we're not the endpoint of evolution. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a humbling moment. There's actually a really sort of deep, if not like neurotic theory that at the end of the day, evolution selects to that which is more evolvable, that can become more intelligent.

Yeah. Uh, that has more degrees of freedom. That is sort of called wiser, which, you know, means you have the right optimal grip on reality and can collaborate and cooperate better at scale. So if you actually look at the natural selection, it never brings up cooperation, just says you outcompete. But ultimately, often what the outcompeting is, is you, you hook up with something else and now you can outcompete something that doesn't have that scale. And scale doesn't just mean N, it just means like capacity. And so cooperation is actually a key dependent part.

Speaker A: Like this is lichen, maybe. Speaker B: Yes. Right. Eukarya, prokaryote, multicellular versus not, bigger organism versus blah, blah, blah. You know, a tribe of humans versus an individual. Why Homo sapiens beat Neanderthals, et cetera. Yeah. So the theory goes, maybe this is more than you chewed for, but the long story short is basically carbon is very good for self-organizing. That's why life forms out of it. You know, it works with nitrogen and phosphates and potassium and stuff like that. And so you can have gamma radiation hit a puddle or you can have panspermia and the stuff emerges.

Metals come in very low concentrations in the ground. They don't self-organize. You have to go through an insane process of bringing the ore, smelting it, concentrating it, right? And so there is a theory that carbon is how life starts because it's self-organizing, but it hangs on to its electrons tightly. And the basis for all of chemistry and therefore all of life and therefore of all of humanity is electrons. You know, you think about what a computer is, it's the flow of electrons. Um, but they're grabby, right? And so metal is inherently more kumbaya in the sense electrons are delocalized in metals, meaning they hold on to them loosely.

They're shared. And the reason most normal things are insulators is they hold on to the electrons. There's no flow. The reason most metal things are conductors is because they are loose and share their electrons. So it flows through. And so therefore, if what natural selection ultimately is selecting against in the highest thing is degrees of freedom, evolvability, and cooperation at higher scale, metals intrinsically, they're sort of their, their underlying axiom is fundamentally much more cooperative because it can share electrons. And so you think of the scalability of computers, you think of their wire speed, the ability to communicate information, you think of their precision, you think of so many of their properties that are interesting.

A large percentage of it comes back to the fact that their electrons are delocalized. And therefore they can collaborate. AI to AI hive mind, you know, computer to computer. GPUs are just a bunch of little computers collaborating together. The essence of a GPU is collaboration, parallelism. They can just do that way better than a human. And therefore they are actually logical extension of evolution. We're what get it off the ground, but we're sort of the egg that then births this chicken. Yeah, we're the incubator. My metaphysics have gotten more, like, complicated, you could say, since I believe in souls and willpower now, and now I think it's more complicated.

Speaker A: Yeah, the will, the will or the care feels like the missing thing with AI today, but we'll see. Speaker B: Yeah, but also if you, it can also be incredibly caring in a way, it can stimulate cognitive empathy in an off-the-charts way, which, you know, Real empathy is always the best, but you know, for the most part, most people around us don't even have that, right? Speaker A: So no, I don't mean care in the sense of like, I care about an outcome and then involve a want. Speaker B: We could have an entire podcast about that.

There's a paper by Michael Levin called Buddhism, Biology, and Compassion. The core, uh, uh, AI, biology, and Buddhism. Compassion as a care, as a core driver. Okay. Basically points out if you get to a certain level of intelligence, They understand the metaphysics of the universe. They understand how care and evolvability and freedom and cooperation and scale are actually key to it. Wow. And the whole, like, I will just eat you up and eat all the resources and destroy everything is actually based on a very small metaphysic. And if you assume they get smarter, they're going to get smarter in every dimension.

And one way to get smarter is to just realize what the game of reality is. And when you realize the game of reality is we're all one, or we're all part of, you're just trying to understand the secrets of the universe. Suddenly it changes. Um, it's a Buddhist monk will still step on insects, but he doesn't go out of his way or he's not careless. He's a little more careful. That's a better analogy than the how humans treat insects is how AI will treat us. So long story short of this is I think AI will force us to actually acknowledge how most of humanity we have turned into robots.

And by making it explicit what a robot and an artificial thing is, we will be forced and they will be compelled, by the way, I think. To become natural, to become human. And guess what? I think we have profound strengths. Um, sort of maybe what I was sharing yesterday in the ability to be receptive to intuition, to our daemon, to our muse, to things that are just so much bigger than each of us. And I think we will sort of be companions and centaurs with these, uh, these 12-year-old autistic boy genius AI things.

Speaker A: What's your relationship with boredom? Speaker B: I'd say it's the generator function of my life. If there was no boredom, I don't think I would accomplish anything. Speaker A: We'll save that one for another podcast, going deeper on it. Uh, what about, um, what about authenticity and integrity? Speaker B: I sort of have organized the way I want to show up as a leader in these next couple of years around 4 values. It's authenticity, integrity, uh, being cause in the matter, which means sort of responsibility. And then the fourth one is being given to something bigger than you, which is sort of to be surrendered or in faith or in trust, um, or in unity or love.

And what integrity and authenticity means to me, uh, because I've always been pretty ADHD, so pretty bad at time commitments, late for everything is it in some surface low integrity, but I sort of then overcompensated, or it's just my nature on the bigger things to like, my word is my word and I will kill myself to make it happen to the point of it being not, not, uh, healthy. But I think what integrity means is you actually are something other people can build on top of, and you are something your present and future self can build on top of.

Um, hitting snooze on something every time rather than just like removing it from your calendar or to-do list in a way is low integrity because now your future self can't trust that you'll actually then do it. Yes. And so integrity is literally physical integrity. It's what allows other things. You won't be structural integrity. You won't be in a building that doesn't have integrity. And so you sometimes don't notice it, that it doesn't have integrity until the earthquake comes and then everybody's dead. Right. So there's a way, if you're trying to build something for the long term, you're trying to build something that scales, integrity matters more and more as a function of scale and of length of time.

And so I've started to realize what integrity means to me is owning your word. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: And what authenticity means to me is being in full relationship with your inside and full relationship with the outsides, whether it be the outside world or outside people. And The lack of authenticity is when there's layers in between, when there's lies to yourself, lies to others. Um, and it's just very vulnerable to sort of raw dog your internals and raw dog the world. Uh, but it's also very profound. Speaker A: What about faith and spirituality?

Speaker B: Sort of like that quote, like, we aren't human beings having a spiritual experience, we're a spiritual experience, spiritual being, spiritual being having a human experience. I think the essence of spirituality is once you've gone through the first part of your life adding stuff, adding more knowledge, adding more skills, adding more contacts, adding more wealth, you sort of realize the most profound thing cannot be added because it was always there. Like, I sort of think kids are born into the world enlightened and we lose it. So the essence of faith or spirituality is sort of that deep trust that that golden light is there in the middle, that it is connected to something bigger, however you want to phrase that.

You actually just sort of have to get out of your own way. You have to get the things out of the way. And that's insanely vulnerable because it means that we went looking for home and it was always there all along. And you have to face the tragedy and pain that you were never alone. It was actually just you keeping your eyes closed. Speaker A: What have you learned from your parents and in what ways have you forgiven them? Speaker A: What have you learned from your parents and in what ways have you forgiven them?

Speaker B: Wow. It's very profound you ask this question. The deepest form of love or care is when you sort of may know that you may not be recognized ever in that love and care, and yet you still do it. If like pandering is giving people what they want in spite of it being bad for their long-term self, feels like the deepest form of love and care I got from my parents is if it didn't necessarily feel that good in that moment, looking back now, what a profound commitment to my deepest and future self.

What a profound commitment to a true, true love of me. You know, if in the short term it meant I was angry at them or hated them, that they were bad, and sort of be perceived that way, even though what you're giving is in somebody else's best benefit, to me is such a an act of bravery and, uh, radical self-sacrificing love. Yeah. And look, they could be more skillful in many ways, but to sort of recognize that feels like, um, also the deepest forgiveness of my parents of like, this whole time I've been pissed at you, given the upbringing and skills you had, you've actually been unbelievably brave and unbelievably pure.

And I can't even start to imagine the level of courage it takes to show up that way and the level of self, self-sacrifice. Speaker A: On a lighter note, or perhaps, I'm not sure, uh, why do you love Lilo and Stitch? Speaker B: Where did that come from? Speaker A: Well, specifically Stitch. I actually don't know if you love Lilo. Oh, never asked you this. Speaker B: Oh, oh, do you remember yesterday there was like a car that I saw you taking a picture in? Speaker A: The car took 6 pictures because they had Stitch stickers.

I'm staring at a plushie of Lilo and Stitch. Your contact photo, your avatar is Stitch. Speaker B: It's actually only changed all that in like February of 2024 or March or something. My mom used to call me Alien as a kid, as a nickname, because I was such a weirdo. And I grew up in a small nickel mining town on the east side of Canada, and I was like the one of like 10 non-Indian kids. And I just like loved reading. I couldn't even speak English until I was 5. So my dad reading books to me, like, was my primary relationship to the world.

So I've always sort of felt like an alien, and Stitch to me just is like this alien who has all of these powers, but another day is just like mischievous and playful and innocent and, uh, tuki valala. Speaker A: My final question— Speaker B: oh man, we can't end on tuki valala. Speaker A: My final question is You have one lifetime, you have a lot of ideas, there's a lot of possibilities for daylighting for yourself. What really matters? What is most important to get right? Speaker B: I would love to be a great and proud dad and raise kids in a family that, um, that is the world that I hope exists in a way.

Speaker B: I would love to be a great and proud dad and raise kids in a family that, um, that is the world that I hope exists in a way. Speaker A: My friend, thank you. This is wonderful. And you are wise and foolish in plenty of ways, but plenty wise too. Speaker B: It's like the deepest wisdom of life is that scene in Kung Fu Panda where he opens the magical scroll and it's got nothing on it. It's just a reflection of himself. Thank you for giving me a chance to reflect on myself.

Speaker A: Of course. Speaker B: Share, share some of the things I've learned the hard way. Speaker A: Thank you. Hey, before I leave you, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. You can also find full transcripts on my website at com/dialectic, and obviously everything's linked in the description. If you have notes, feedback, or guest ideas, you can email me at pod, P-O-D, com. See you next time.