Building for Tomorrow

Host: People talked about the waltz in society Europe, the way that people talked about Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs a few years ago, right? Like it was this incredibly scandalous, awful, destroying the youth kind of thing.

Host: Welcome back to the A16Z podcast and welcome to 2023. Week three. It's hard to believe we're here, but if the last few years have been any indication, we are in for a lot of change. And that's why we brought in someone who literally studies change, and that is Jason Feifer.

Host: You might recognize Jason as the longtime editor-in-chief at Entrepreneur Magazine, the host of several popular podcasts, and the author of his recent book, *Build for Tomorrow*. But in today's episode, Jason is sharing his six frameworks about how people understand and adapt to change – or how sometimes they fail to adapt to change. And he does this through studying and interviewing some of the world's most influential people, both past and present.

Host: So I'm going to give Jason the floor, but I did want to flag that at the very end, we play a very fun game where I go through a bunch of current technologies that are facing some degree of pushback and Jason shares how they might fit into his framework. So that includes things like remote work, AR and VR, biohacking, and lots more. So if that sounds fun, make sure you stick around to the end.

Host: I hope you enjoy this episode and have a great 2023.

[Theme music fades in and out]:

Host: We have Jason Feifer on the line. Jason, thank you for being here.

Jason Feifer: Thank you for having me.

Host: For people listening, we had to go through a lot of roadblocks to get this recording on the books and then now actually recorded. So Jason, thank you for your patience. Why don't you just give everyone a super quick background on who Jason Feifer is and what you've done over the many years you've been involved in technology?

Jason Feifer: Sure. I have to say, by the way, I kind of love when things break. This was not a bad experience for me. The thing is that when something breaks, it gives you an opportunity to fix it or to do something nice. And then people are kind of more grateful. Which is what you did. I didn't fix it. You fixed it. But fixing it involved inviting me into your Riverside account and then me setting up this room and hitting record. So I have a weird amount of power in the A16Z world right now that will be drawn from me the second this is done.

Jason Feifer: So anyway, who is Jason Feifer? I am the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. That means that I have the unbelievable pleasure of spending all my time talking with and learning from the most innovative and smartest people in the world. I am also the author of a book called *Build for Tomorrow*, which came out of a lot of work that I've done, both with Entrepreneur and then also in this podcast that shares the same name, though it originally started as *Pessimist Archive*. I know you guys at A16Z are *Pessimist Archive* fans. I used to be a part of that project and launched a podcast under there that I then evolved into my own thing.

Jason Feifer: So anyway, what am I? I'm a guy who gets to learn from incredibly innovative people and then turn around and teach innovative people how to be more adaptable, because I think that that's the most important thing in success.

Host: That's amazing. I want to get to your book that you recently wrote and published, *Build for Tomorrow*. We will talk about that and talk about the many themes and lessons from it. But I want to hear from you. Why do you think that skill is important? That skill of adaptability seems to be something that you've geared your career around, now your recent book. Why is that important today? And why of all the things that you could possibly focus on or write about, why have you chosen that?

Jason Feifer: Well, I chose it because when I became editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine – and to be clear, I didn't have a business background per se. I really have a media background. But when I started at Entrepreneur, I would go out and I'd be interviewed on podcasts or I'd be speaking at events. And I got this question over and over again. The question was, "What are the qualities of the most successful people or most successful entrepreneurs?" I kept thinking it's like a weird coordinated attack that all these people are asking me the same question. And then I realized, if you listen to the questions that people ask you, you discover that what they're really doing is telling you what they think your value is to them.

Jason Feifer: So I started to think, why are people asking me this specific question? I realized the answer is because people see me as a pattern matcher. I get to talk to a lot of people and therefore my value is that I can see patterns across lots of different experiences. So I thought, if I am to seize the opportunity here and be really useful to people and match their expectations of me, I should have a good answer to this question. I spent years thinking about it and talking to very smart people. What I came to was that the one thing that seems to define success is that people hang on through enough failures to get there.

Jason Feifer: The journey of anybody in business – we're talking specifically to a tech audience, but it is certainly not just specific to tech – you are absolutely not going to have the right idea at the start. But by just putting something out into the world, you can start the iterative process of developing something that people really want and that solves real problems, hopefully in incredibly innovative ways. That requires a level of personal adaptability because it's not just enough to keep revising the product. You yourself have to be able to rethink who you are and what your company needs from you and how to relate to the people you're trying to serve, and then to just overcome the emotional battering that is things not working out.

Jason Feifer: I've spent years and years running various theories like this by global game-changing folks. And they all say, "That sounds about right." That made me feel confident to put it out in the world that adaptability is the most important thing.

Host: I love that you said that. It happens on both the micro and macro scale. We're talking, as you said, to a tech audience, but this applies everywhere in life. You wake up one day and you have certain plans and then it rains. You're like, "I guess I have to adapt." It's funny because even in those micro examples, there is a huge spectrum in the way that people respond. Some people get very upset. Some people say, "This is an opportunity for me to stay in and work." If we extend that to the macro lens, which I'm very excited to talk to you about today, this has happened throughout history. You see this new technology arise and you're like, "That thing that I've worked on, that skill that I've developed for 10 years, no longer matters or soon will not matter." It's an opportunity to understand that you do have a choice in the way that you respond and that adaptability impacts us at the daily level, the weekly, yearly, decade-long level.

Host: I'm excited to talk through that. You are one of the most prepared guests I've ever had. You sent me these six different – would you say they're frameworks or theories around how people maybe miss the opportunity to adapt or don't really recognize some of these larger themes that have happened throughout history. Why don't we just start there? What are these six different frameworks or theories that you've developed and how would you kind of package them?

Jason Feifer: I appreciate that. Yeah, I sent you a very, very long document that I pecked out at midnight in a hotel room. That comes out of me seeing how people convince other people to work with them. The answer is often that they just come with a solution. If you go to somebody with a solution, how do they turn down good solutions? Don't ask for an opportunity, be the opportunity. So when we were first in touch, I was like, "I'm just going to show you a whole lot of stuff and hope that you will read through it."

Jason Feifer: Look, I'm fascinated by both how entrepreneurs solve problems today, but also about how change happened throughout history. The reason I really love the history stuff is because you know how the story ended, whereas we don't know how the story ends now. Anybody who's working on anything right now has truly no idea what's going to happen despite their best efforts to control it. Yet when you look backwards, you can see how decisions that were made played out. I think those are really instructive. If we can find the patterns across all of this, we can see where change and adoption of change goes right and goes wrong.

Jason Feifer: Throughout my work on all this over many years, I've been trying to make sense of all the data. How can I draw lines between why people threw rocks at early automobiles and why people are uncomfortable with Lime scooters on the streets? I think we can learn a lot by trying to compare all these things. I came up with these six frameworks, which are really ways to understand why people are uncomfortable with or outright resist some kind of new innovation. We could be talking about big, global changing things like social media, but we could also be talking about individual innovations that you are just trying to introduce to a client base. Why are people uncomfortable with these things? What does it take to get them to embrace or understand this newness? How do we get them to adapt?

Host: Something I liked from *Pessimist Archive*, which you've been a part of, is that it really is anything from the automobile to the mirror. There are some of these things that people think are very commonplace today, but were faced with resistance when they were first introduced. We'll go through the different reasons for those. But it's important to note that this isn't just social media or this big airplane. It could be the mirror. It could be the teddy bear. It could be jazz music. There are many things that people faced with resistance that you would not expect today. The lesson that will get you is that we see many parallels.

Host: Why don't we dive in? Why don't you introduce the first framework from the six?

Jason Feifer: Number one is we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability. If you look back through time – and this won't be unfamiliar to listeners of the A16Z podcast, because I know that Mark was talking about it not that long ago – you find throughout time incredible concern that is repetitive about new things. The number of things that have been claimed to be addictive goes on forever. The things that people say about social media, you heard about the radio. But it also gets kind of funny and time-specific. The spinning wheel of the bicycle in the early days of the bicycle, people thought would make people go insane. Novels were believed to make women infertile, among many other things.

Jason Feifer: What I think you're seeing – and I'll tell you one story that really captures it – is that we generally believe that we exist in a kind of balance and that that balance is very easily upset by new things. When something new comes along, we tend to process it as a loss. We see some new way of doing something and then we instantly identify the thing that we will no longer have access to, or the thing that we're very comfortable with that maybe we won't be able to do in the same way. Because we cannot imagine what the gain will be and maybe don't even believe that there will be gain, we start to extrapolate the loss. We say, "Because I lost this thing, I will then lose this thing."

Jason Feifer: 1877, Thomas Edison invents the phonograph – or he might not have called it the phonograph, but it was the very first record player, really a cylinder, and then it became a flat record like we know today. People's minds were blown. Consider that until that moment, the only way that you could listen to music is if a human being was playing an instrument in front of you. There was no other way to do it. Suddenly there was a machine that had captured sound and could play it back to you. People didn't believe it at first. They had to be shown that there wasn't a live band hiding behind a wall somewhere. Once they did come to believe it, they were amazed and fascinated by it, and they wanted it in their homes.

Jason Feifer: You know who really hated that? Musicians. Musicians really hated that because they saw themselves being replaced. The leader of the resistance was a guy named John Philip Sousa. You may not know his name today, but you certainly know his music because he wrote all the military marches that we're still very familiar with. John Philip Sousa wrote this article because he was the champion against recorded music. He was leading the resistance for his fellow musicians. He wrote a piece called "The Menace of Mechanical Music" in 1906, I think. It is this string of arguments against recorded music. My favorite goes like this.

Jason Feifer: He says that if you introduce recorded music to the home, or the phonograph or record player enters the home, it will replace all forms of live music. All live music now gone, because why would anybody perform live when there's a machine that could do it for them? Then mothers will no longer sing to their children. Why would a mother sing to her children when a machine could do that? Then because children grow up to imitate their mothers, John Philip Sousa says, the children will now grow up to imitate the machines and thus we will raise a generation of machine babies.

Jason Feifer: That of course didn't happen, but you can see the logic. You can see where he's going. There's some kind of very specific balance here: we are performing live in the home, which inspires mothers to sing to their children, which inspires children to grow up to imitate the mothers and therefore find their humanity. That one little change to that very important chain breaks everything. But that's not what happens. What instead happens is that we find gain in totally unexpected ways. Think about what happened with John Philip Sousa and recorded music. Recorded music enabled musicians to reach people that they couldn't physically reach. John Philip Sousa lived in a completely geographically based world where the only way that he could have people hear his music and make money off of it is if he traveled to them. But now he had the ability to scale.

Host: I like the analogy of something breaking because that really does seem to be the emotion that arises when people visualize certain new technologies. It's like there is a current world order and something about this is going to break. Maybe all of it. Sometimes it gets that far. It reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote that Mark, you mentioned Mark's interview, he brought up there. This idea that when you're brought into the world, you think that everything is normal and ordinary and just a part of the way the world works. You basically live that way until you're around 15. Between 15 and 35, everything's new and exciting and revolutionary and probably something that you can build a career around and be a part of. Anything after 35 is just fundamentally against the natural order.

Host: That's where you see a parallel from the music example you gave. You see AI coming into play right now, a lot of dispute between artists and the people creating the AIs and the other people building technology on top. One of the reasons it's so interesting to learn these stories from history is because you can apply them or you can see the parallels today. But the society that we live in today broke the society from 100 years ago, which broke the society 100 years before that. There's no true way that humans are supposed to live.

Jason Feifer: That's right. We really are the products of change and we forget that. We're actually the argument for change because the things that we grew up with were the things that people had previously opposed.

Jason Feifer: The belief in a kind of easily breakable humanity, I think, is also a belief in fixed opportunity. Economists have this theory that I love called the lump of labor fallacy. Are you familiar with it?

Host: I am not.

Jason Feifer: The fallacy is that there's a lump of labor. The idea is that there are a fixed number of jobs and a roughly fixed number of people to do those jobs. Anything that creates an imbalance in one way or the other will create unfixable disharmony. This would drive a lot of fear that new immigrants to a country will take the jobs from the people who already live in that country, and there will be a lot of unemployment from the people who used to have the jobs. But that's not what happens, of course, because when immigrants come in, they are also consumers themselves. They create more jobs. There isn't a lump of labor. It's totally flexible.

Jason Feifer: Similarly, there's always been the belief, as John Philip Sousa had, that new technology will reduce the work available to the same labor pool. He believed that recorded music will replace live music in many instances, and therefore there will just be musicians out of work. To be fair to him, that was true for a while because musicians used to perform live the scores for all movies. You went to see a movie and the movie was silent and there was a live band playing the score. That wasn't necessary anymore. It was a difficult transition. Every time there is a shift, we adapt to it and it creates new opportunities. That's not to say it's easy. It will be disruptive and there will be losers in that disruption. But what we need to do as a whole, as a society, is be alert to how and where those new opportunities come from and how we can start to help people realize those new opportunities and then create new value out of them ourselves.

Host: I think something that people fight against sometimes is the amount of abstraction that exists in our lives. That is really a macro theme. Many hundreds of years ago, humans were focused on how to have enough food to live, how to make sure they're not getting diseases and dying at age 20. They were really focused on the nitty gritty of how to survive. Over time, we've abstracted that from people's lives. For the most part, that is a good thing. We can focus on things that are enjoyable, that are discretionary. This idea of the different skills that humans should have – one great example is people saying Google is removing our memory spans. We can't even remember things anymore. We just Google it. But coming back to this idea that the way we've operated for a period of time does not mean that's inherently correct. It doesn't mean that you being able to recall all of these historical dates or all of these names from the past or all of these random facts in a trivia test – that's not necessarily good or bad. It just is changing.

Jason Feifer: Yeah, that's right. I'll credit that to Lee Rainey of the Pew Research Center who originally put that to me. I was really struck by it. He was saying, a sign of intelligence decades ago would be the ability to easily retain information. The ability to read something and retain it, the quick recall of that information – that was a sign of intelligence. Now, a sign of intelligence would be the ability to quickly find and process information. Is that to say that one is better than the other? No. It's just to say that it's different. Intelligence takes different forms based on the needs and the resources of the time in which somebody needs to be intelligent. We shouldn't be weighing these things against each other as if one thing is better or worse because progress simply doesn't work that way. Progress doesn't wait either.

Host: Let's bookend that and move on to number two. What is the second framework that you've developed?

Jason Feifer: The second one is that we don't often know what things are for. If we don't know what something is for, then we will either be alarmed by it because it seems like it's breaking something that we were familiar with, or we just think that it's frivolous. Oftentimes I'll go and speak to crowds and talk about change and adaptation and technology, and then somebody will raise their hand and say, "But you make a print magazine. Why are you still doing that?" The answer is, look, I think it's important to ask if I'm in the content business – and I am – what is content for? What's it for?

Jason Feifer: Decades ago, content was for monetization. You could sell ads against your content. You could sell subscriptions to your content. Now, you can do that, but it doesn't make you nearly as much money. I'm not just talking about Entrepreneur. I'm talking about the entire media ecosystem. So I look at content and I think, what is this for? Content is for relationships. That's what it's for. Why does Red Bull pour a ton of money into content? If you like extreme sports, then Red Bull is your place. They've got a magazine for you. They've got videos. They've got events. Do they make money off of that? I have no idea. Probably not. They probably lose money off of it. Where do they make money? Energy drinks. The reason people buy the energy drinks is because they feel really good about Red Bull because they developed a relationship with Red Bull because of the content. Content builds relationships, and then you can monetize the relationship with products or services that people trust you to provide because of the content.

Jason Feifer: That is why we do it. A print magazine is an unbelievable way for people to feel really good about Entrepreneur or media. We do still make money on the print magazine, to be clear. It doesn't lose money. It just doesn't make the kind of money that it probably did 30 years ago. But that's how I think we need to think about the entire media ecosystem. What products or services can we build that people will trust us because of the content? Stop thinking about the content as monetization. What is it for? It's for relationships.

Jason Feifer: I think that people fundamentally misunderstand oftentimes what the new thing that they're looking at is for. As a result, they think that it is either bad or frivolous, and therefore they make incorrect conclusions.

Host: I think they also maybe struggle to see what it can be for eventually. When you're met with a new technology, it's not the perfected version of that technology. There are so many examples of this. There is an 1865 newspaper editor that I found that said, "Informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." I could see how when that technology is either inexistent or nascent, you're like, "What on earth would I use this for?" But with millions, if not billions of people who are using a technology, there is so much creativity that goes into building out the use cases. Sometimes it does take some time.

Jason Feifer: That is very similar to something that Henry David Thoreau wrote in *Walden*: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." The funny thing is that Maine and Texas possibly back then didn't have anything to communicate. But as soon as you give them an ability to communicate, they will find something to talk about. They will find commerce. They will find information to exchange. That's the thing. Things aren't fixed. Once you introduce something new, people find ways to use it.

Host: That's right. Ken Olson was also famously quoted as saying there was no reason for an individual to have a computer in his home. To your point, at that time, there may have not been because there weren't connections between computers. There weren't certain jobs, certain information that this person had access to that would make that valuable. But with time, with more people who are integrated into that technology, with the evolution of that technology, the increased speed, the increased access, things change. It is important to focus on what something is used for and remember that your first encounter with a technology likely won't be the version that you encounter as it grows and progresses.

Host: Just a final note there, I think it's very common for us as humans to encounter things and skeuomorphically apply something that already exists. Email is the perfect example of this, where literally it was like, "There's mail, and then we're just going to call it email." But now it's a fundamentally different thing. You see the same thing where people jump on Zoom calls and they're like, "Let's have a happy hour." They just apply what we do in the physical world. But these things will evolve on their own into completely new things. It's worth having that lens of "this will change."

Host: If you're on the innovator side of that, what we need to be doing is asking, "What is this for?" of a nascent technology or something that we're developing, and then running experiments, seeing hypotheses through. Ultimately, the reason why we were able to get to what you're describing there with a nascent technology that maybe is really for nothing right now, but becomes something that's transformative, is because someone or a series of people had an idea of where this thing should go.

Jason Feifer: When you look back at time, it's not like these things are preordained. Oftentimes, people had lots of different ideas and directions for technologies. There were all sorts of funny designs for the bicycle that turned out to not be the final one that we have now. But what people were doing was carrying a hypothesis out into the world and seeing how people react to it and then reacting to that. That's ultimately how innovation happens. The winners, the people with the competitive advantages, are the ones who are constantly asking, "What is this for?" and then are willing to see if they're right, and if not, be adaptable enough to take the data that they're learning and build it back into something better.

Host: Completely. I think that's a perfect segue into framework number three, which is that innovators don't always build a bridge. Can you speak more to that?

Host: Yeah, right. So here's the challenge that innovators often have. It is that they are so familiar with the value of the thing that they have created that they do not realize that other people do not see that value or do not understand it or don't understand how it fits into their lives. I think that Silicon Valley is guilty of this all the time of introducing very revolutionary ideas without doing the groundwork of connecting this new idea to something that people are already comfortable and familiar with.

To play that out, I'll take you back on another historical story. So in the 1800s, the car was introduced. People didn't call it the car. They called it the horseless carriage. And that, of course, is if they were being generous. If they were not being generous, they would call it the devil wagon because they totally thought these things were the devil wagon, and they would throw rocks at them. And if you drove down the street in one of these early cars, somebody would literally yell, "Get a horse!" at you. They would yell, "Get a horse!" at you.

And when people tell the story now of how cars became the dominant mode of transportation, what they tell is the story of Henry Ford. Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing and therefore made cars cheaper and more accessible to the masses. And though that is true, it skips over an important point, an important part of the story that I heard from a car historian. And it was something that Henry Ford was the beneficiary of. It goes like this.

So in the earlier days of the car, people are calling it the devil wagon. They're throwing rocks at it. And the auto industry is trying to understand what on earth is wrong. And they start to look at the way in which they're advertising the car. And they realize that they are advertising the car as a replacement to the horse. They're saying, "Get rid of Dobbin" – Dobbin being the generic name, like Spot for a dog – "Get rid of Dobbin and get this car. This car is so much better than your stupid horse."

But here's the thing, people hated that. They found that offensive. And they should have because they loved their horse. Their horse was a member of the family and as far back as they knew, every generation of their family had a horse. And now here come these people saying, "I have a totally better way for you to be, and your old way is stupid." People hate that because people hate new things. What they like is better versions of old things.

So what we need to do as innovators is we need to build what I like to call the bridge of familiarity. And that bridge goes not from us, the people with a great new thing, to the people who we want to have that great new thing. That is not the direction to build the bridge. You build the bridge the other way around. You start with where they are, and you build towards you.

So back then, the shift that the auto industry made was that they stopped talking about the car as a replacement to the horse. And they started talking about the car as a better horse. So they started popularizing terms like horsepower and naming cars after horses, which we still do today with the Bronco and Mustang. "Oh, it's kind of like my horse. And I can sort of respect it and use it like my horse." Well, that makes a lot more sense to me than someone just coming along and telling me to get rid of my horse. This is what we always need to keep in mind.

I was just talking about a guy who had a product that they were calling it chicken chips. Chicken chips. Chips, like out of a bag, like potato chips, but chicken chips. Now, does that sound appealing to you?

Host: No, I was going to say, I'm not sure where you're going with this, but I would definitely not grab that off a shelf.

Jason Feifer: Yeah, and that's the thing. It did really well in taste tests. People really liked the product. Nobody was buying it. Because chicken chips sounds disgusting. So after a bunch of consumer insights research, they changed from calling it chicken chips to protein chips. Why? Because people are already familiar with protein bars and protein packs and protein shakes. So the idea of it being protein first now signals to an existing audience. And where's the protein coming from? Well, you can find out that it's coming from chicken. And that little shift completely unlocked sales for this company.

Host: I love that you brought up a current application of this because that was going to be my question. There are so many cases where there is pushback, and in many cases, rightfully so, whether it's Web3, whether it's autonomous vehicles, whether it's different versions of space. There's a lot of pushback in some of these new, emerging, perhaps exciting industries. And I think you're right that there is that familiarity gap where people are just like, "Why do I care if people are going to Mars? I have problems on Earth." Or "Why do I care if something is decentralized? Tell me why that matters."

And so I think it's important to use those frames of just like, "Why does this matter?" That simple question. Why does this matter to someone today? And even like you said, using simplistic terminology can completely shift. And I think another area that this reminds me of is, as I mentioned, AI is... we went through AI summer, things are still trucking ahead very quickly. But it's like, how can you reframe something to not sound so scary? Someone who's a designer is like, "Oh, this artificial intelligence bot is creating art based on my artwork. That sounds really bad." And in some cases, I can see how there is a negative consequence. But yeah, just thinking through how this can be framed as something new.

And I will just add one more thing there, which is your examples of cars and applying forces to them reminded me of a conversation I had recently, which is someone basically saying, "I want to get an electric vehicle. But man, I just love hearing the sound of my car." They just love that familiarity. And I was like, huh, I wonder. I could see an electric vehicle company one day, maybe just adding in that sound for familiarity. It's not creating the same emissions, but again, giving someone that bridge that you talked about, that familiarity bridge of what they like and what they love and what they're familiar with. And then just giving them a little step towards the next thing.

Jason Feifer: Elevators used to be obviously hand operated. And then by the time we got to the 1950s, automatic elevator technology existed, but people didn't want to get in them because they were used to having a human being operating it. Consider it. There's literally no other example in the world, or at least that the average person will use, in which you walk into a completely enclosed space with no windows and no human operator, and it moves you. There's nothing else like it. And so people weren't getting into these things. Now, there were also all these interesting fear-mongering campaigns happening from elevator operator unions that were also contributing to it.

But anyway, one of the ways that the elevator industry found could get people inside the doors was by recognizing that what people needed wasn't necessarily an actual human. What they needed was the feeling that there was a human involved and that there was a human touch. There was a human that would be there to their aid if something went wrong. And simply adding in a soothing female voice that said things like "going up," "going down," "floor one," "floor two" – that by itself helped a lot of people feel comfortable getting into the elevator.

So that reminds me a lot of your example with the electric car making that noise. We do things like that all the time. Potato chips are engineered not just for flavor, but for crunch. And there's a reason for that. It's because people are looking for those kinds of things as signals of quality. So you have to understand where people are and then start to build from there.

Host: I love that example because it is one of those things that I have just taken for granted in elevators. I have never thought about the fact that there would be an elevator without some of those things. And now there are, but I never noticed how that might influence people today because we're so used to elevators and just accepting the fact that they're part of our everyday lives. But there was a time where I guess that really mattered. That's so fascinating. Let's move on to number four. What's framework number four?

Jason Feifer: Right. So framework number four is we mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem. So I'll tell you another story from history, which is that the waltz, when it was first introduced centuries ago, people talked about the waltz in society in Europe the way that people talked about Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs a few years ago. It was this incredibly scandalous, awful, destroying the youth kind of thing. Society had all sorts of reasons why they hated the waltz. It was sexual. It involved too much physical contact among young people. But doctors were saying that the waltz was physically harmful, that dancing the waltz would take years off of people's lives.

Now, this is something that comes up all the time. I mentioned a little earlier, there were doctors who said that the bicycle made people insane and that novels made women infertile. But I talked to a historian of the waltz, and he made this really interesting point, which was that in that case, the doctors were actually right. The waltz was actually very bad for people's health. But the thing was that they thought it was the dance that was harmful – the spinning, the contact. It wasn't the dance. It was literally everything around the dance.

So how did people dance the waltz in the early 1800s? Well, here's what they did. First of all, they were in buildings that were enclosed, didn't have modern ventilation. They were being lit generally by oil candles. So you have the lighting pouring noxious fumes into an unventilated space. Then they were all dancing on top of these particular kind of rugs. And the rugs would kick up all this dust and other particles that people would then be breathing in. And of course, they're wearing these incredibly tight, corset-like clothing. So you better believe that was a pretty unhealthy environment to dance in. The waltz wasn't the problem. All these other things were the problem.

Now, the reason I tell you this story is because we often mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem. People thought that the waltz was the problem. The waltz wasn't the problem. The circumstances of the waltz were the problem. This really goes to, in a way, that 1% again, which is to say people see the 99%. They see the hardware. They see the processing of credit cards, but they miss that 1%. And sometimes they miss that 1% and they think that the 1% problem represents a 100% problem. In the case of Lime scooters, "These are all terrible and dangerous and let's get them off the street." Where sometimes that 1% is actually the thing that makes it work that you only understand and that your competitors don't. The more that we can focus in on that 1% and make sure that we're maximizing it, the more we are able to create things of value and also protect things of value.

Host: I think that reminds me of something I love about digital products in particular. And it's that you get data on all of this. So if you were to compare the Lime example to bicycles, well, you could go and have a bunch of bicycles sold and then people distributed throughout the country are crashing and getting hurt or using them for purposes they shouldn't be. But really, it's extremely hard to get that information and to really act on what that 1% problem is because those distributions are not foreign in many aspects of life. People have heard of the Pareto Principle, 80/20. There often is something smaller that is accounting for a larger issue. And that's what's so beautiful about these digital products is you can get that information to really tease out, "How do we improve this product? How do we fix something that might be a 1% problem that people are viewing as a 100% problem?"

And I think you're also right that it's just so hard, and we've kind of spoken to this throughout the conversation, just so hard to understand how technologies manifest. And often, I find that people's reservations or fears early on about those problems just don't end up being the very real problems that exist later. So just a quick example that many people would be familiar with is just the phone. A lot of people worried about the radiation from phones early on. And that was like the big thing. "Can we have phones near us? It's going to impact our health in these ways." And no one back then could ever have imagined the very real consequences of phones today. And I'm not saying that phones are net negative, but who could have imagined that these phones that we were worried about in terms of radiation would be the talk of the day in terms of upending democracy or kids spending too much time on this? I'm not taking a side on either of those topics, but more so just saying no one could have ever predicted that those would be the issues of the day with that piece of technology.

Jason Feifer: Yeah, totally right. Just a really useful quick framework to try to think through those exact kind of things is, people often ask the question, "Is this perfect?" Or that's at the heart of the 99% problem – people are seeing an imperfection. And then therefore they say, "Well, this whole thing is damaging or dangerous and has to be removed." But the problem with asking "Is this perfect?" is that the answer is the same every single time. The answer is no. It's not perfect. It's never perfect. Nothing's perfect.

So the better question to ask is, "Is this new problem better than my old problem?" Because once we start tracking progress through problems, one, we just create the space for problems, which are inevitable, and therefore, when a problem arises, it doesn't shock us. But also, it keeps us focused on the task at hand, which is not to create some kind of perfect balance – like we were talking earlier about people believing that we're all in some kind of perfect harmony that gets easily disrupted – but rather that we are a nonstop rolling series of problems and everything that we ever create just creates other problems. And so the question that we must evaluate is, "Do we have better problems?"

I would say that for all the problems, and certainly there are many of them, of a, let's say, just interconnected world, that the amount of prosperity and access to information – just for two things to start – the things that come out of that, which is all sorts of problems, large and small, I think that we have better problems now than we did back then when we didn't have those same levels of prosperity and access to information.

Host: Well, you'll have a plus one there for me. I know not everyone agrees with that, but let's move on to number five, which I think relates to what you're speaking to, which is that people not only resurrect or dig up problems with these new technologies, but they also tend to map them to other problems within society, which may be removed or overlapping to the new technology.

Jason Feifer: Yeah, we imbue our innovations with our own cultural or personal anxieties. We've been talking about technology in a more traditional sense, but here's something that was innovative all the same, which is the teddy bear. So the teddy bear was invented in Germany right around the turn of the century. And then it made its way over to America about 1906. 1907, it became popular enough to trigger its own moral panic. There was a national moral crisis over the teddy bear in 1907. It started in Michigan with a priest named Michael G. Esper, who had given this sermon about how damaging teddy bears are and how dangerous they are. It sounds so ridiculous for there to be a moral panic around teddy bears. And it always just reminds me of the fact that people probably will look back 100 years from now, and there will be something like the teddy bear. I don't know what it'll be, but it always just reminds me that this is so ridiculous today, and something parallel will happen tomorrow.

It started with a reverend named Michael G. Esper in a little church in St. Joseph, Michigan. And one day, he gave this fiery sermon about teddy bears. He said – this is an actual quote from the sermon – "When your little girl asked for a doll and you gave her a teddy bear, your action was fraught with a consequence that is only excusable on the grounds of your ignorance." He called the bears "bundles of horribleness." He said they are "the most harmful and repulsive nature fakes ever perpetrated."

Now, what is going on? How could somebody be this worked up about a teddy bear? And well, first of all, I should say that it wasn't just one crank in Michigan. What happened was that he gave that sermon. That sermon was then reprinted in newspapers around the country, the 1907 version of going viral. And then it triggered other churches giving their own sermons. It triggered schools banning teddy bears. A national crisis and conversation took place as a result.

Here is what he was concerned about. He was concerned that if girls play with a teddy bear instead of a doll – you heard that from the quote – then they are going to do lasting damage, not just to themselves, but to the family. Why? Because girls, of course, have one purpose in life in 1907, and that is to grow up and become mothers. And when they play with a doll, they develop a maternal instinct, and that enables them to then grow up and be mothers. But if they set aside the doll and play with a teddy bear instead, they will not develop a maternal instinct. They will not grow up to be mothers. And thus we will have the end of the human race. That was his real concern.

Now, you listen to that and you think, "Well, that's a real logical leap. What could possibly be going on here?" And the answer is that if you look at what was happening in the culture of the time, women were becoming educated in a way that they had never been before. And they were also entering the workforce in a way that they had never been before. And that was very alarming to the traditionalists of 1907. And they were distilling all of that anxiety down into the teddy bear. Oftentimes, what we see here is we see our own concerns about either shifts in culture or sometimes our own fading relevance. And we therefore treat something new as if it can only be bad because it is upsetting the delicate control that we like to have on things.

I mean, I will tell you, as a longstanding member of the traditional media – you don't get a membership card to traditional media – but I started my career in community newspapers, and then I've worked in national magazines ever since. I'm often deeply frustrated by the way in which I see traditional media cover technology and the kind of alarmist look for the worst possible outcome and then report it as if it is fact or at least certain outcome. I mean, just one example was that completely absurd New York Times story from earlier this year in which they found out that LinkedIn was doing some basic A-B testing. And then they ran this story about how LinkedIn was actually conducting a gigantic hidden secret experiment on whether or not people get jobs. I mean, it's just like, guys, do you not know that A-B testing is a really basic thing that actually improves things? And that your firms do it as well? Yes, that the New York Times does it as well. I mean, this was just really nuts.

But anyway, what's driving this? I'll tell you, I think that – and I don't think that people are doing it consciously – but I think that generally speaking, people in traditional media are very, very afraid that the systems that drove the relevance of the organizations that they work in, and therefore the structures that people work in, are going to get upended.

Host: I completely agree. And I think in some cases, it's not just anxiety. It's really protecting an investment of some sort. And that could be an investment in a skill like a journalism degree. That could be an investment in a taxi medallion that no longer is relevant or is less relevant or worth less literally than it was prior. And so, yeah, I think it's important for people to keep that in mind on both sides. I like that you pointed out, it's not just important for the person who might be anxious or scared or protecting what they've invested in. It's also important for the people who are developing these technologies to understand that technologies, especially if they're game-changing, will upend power. They will upend structures that already exist. And there's beauty to that, but it's also very scary for someone on the other side. And so figuring out how to bring that technology into the masses in a way that's understandable, in a way that's clear, in a way that's perhaps, if possible, less scary is important.

So why don't we dovetail that into the final framework, which I think is related.

Jason Feifer: We oversimplify problems. And when we oversimplify problems, we inhibit our ability to come up with meaningful solutions. Because you cannot create a meaningful solution to something if you do not really understand the underlying problem. So my story for this is, again, more of a recent one. And after the 2016 presidential election, there was all this concern about how Russia had interfered. And pundits and politicians all had this word for it, which was "unprecedented." It didn't matter what cable network you turned on, you would hear them talk about "this was an unprecedented attack on democracy," et cetera, et cetera. And they all blamed, in one way or another, social media, and particularly at the time Facebook, and to a lesser degree Twitter, for the problem.

And I started to wonder as I was hearing people talk about this being unprecedented, if it was unprecedented, because it just seemed maybe too simplistic to say that Russia interfering with American elections was unprecedented. And so I found this guy named David Shimer, a historian and foreign policy analyst who had just written this book called *Rigged* about the hundred years of Russian interference in American elections. I called him up to ask him about it. And he said – I'm just going to read you what he said to me because I just thought it was really powerful. He said, "If you treat something as unprecedented, what you're saying is there's no history behind it. What you're saying is it's never happened before. And that makes it much easier to create rumors, myths, and even lies about the subject."

Now, then he went on to basically explain to me how for 100 years, Russia had run the same exact playbook on American elections. And that was to utilize the dominant mode of communication at the time, which could either be newspapers or radio or television or social media, to exacerbate existing tensions in American culture. And that was the playbook. Now, of course, in 2016, social media played a larger role in American life than it ever did before, and it hasn't been around that long. But what Russia did with social media was not really any different than anything else it had ever done.

And I asked David, "Okay, that's a really interesting academic point, but what are we supposed to do with that?" And he said, "Well, look, as a starting point, it's this. Right now, the conversation is entirely about social media. And that's not to say that social media is blameless. Facebook, for one, could have certainly had a smarter approach to this problem, a more proactive approach to this problem. But if we simplify the problem of Russian interference in American elections down to 'it's a social media problem,' well, then look, you could throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail and you could shut Facebook down today and you wouldn't solve that problem because that problem is bigger than social media. So if everybody is focused on only one part of a problem, then you are not solving the problem." We need to have smarter conversations about exactly what is underpinning the problems and the challenges that we face, either culturally or at an individual company, and then start to really develop meaningful, comprehensive solutions.

Host: Yeah, I think you're right about that. I also wonder sometimes whether, as I mentioned before, we're becoming so abstracted from the things in our lives, how that plays into all of this. And what I mean by that is, social media is one example that you give, but you could also give self-driving cars as another example or some of the other things that we engage in that we just don't understand. Even you and I on this call, I cannot explain to you the technology behind this call, like the really nitty gritty, like what bits are moving where and why and how this is so much faster than 20 years ago. I can kind of speak a little bit to it. And we're involved in technology. We interview people who create these technologies.

And then I just think back to people who – I mean, the New York Times example that you gave earlier, where someone doesn't know that A-B testing is happening. Well, there are people who are even further from the technology than that, who just don't understand the world that they are now placed in. And so I do wonder – I think you're correct that people simplify these problems because that's the only tool they have. They don't know the nitty gritty about how these algorithms are working. They maybe don't have the historical perspective to understand, like the scholar you spoke to, about all of the different pieces or ways that Russia was involved in the past. And so I don't know if I have a solution. Do you have any thoughts there? Like, we are becoming more abstracted. And then simultaneously, these technologies are becoming more complex. And so it's hard for people not to simplify, if that makes sense.

Jason Feifer: Yeah, well, I think that's absolutely right. People will and must simplify. And I think on an individual basis, there's just kind of little that you can do about that. It'll be a kind of chaos of noise and out of which will come use cases that make sense to people. I think about AI right now and the way in which people are using these new tools to do every random thing. I was laughing today at these AI images somebody had created of Avengers characters if they were in a Wes Anderson movie. Like, look, it's so funny. And then you're going to start to imagine all the ways in which this could be used for bad or for good. And people will try all sorts of things. And it'll be noisy and chaotic. And I think when you put something out into the world, in a way there's kind of nothing that you can do about that, outside of if you are an innovator, an entrepreneur, then find the use case that is going to solve people's problems and really focus on it and then tell a story that is so compelling that it breaks through that noise or it helps clarify to people why this is useful to them.

Of all that we've talked about today that were incredibly disruptive and that were feared and resisted, you would think that electricity would be this thing that's going to invade my home and animate my objects. What a terrible, terrible thing. But the thing was that at the very beginning, electricity for the average resident of the home had only one use case. Only one. And that was safer lighting. People were lighting their homes by gas. And they understood that that was incredibly dangerous because if the flame goes out and the gas keeps coming in, you could get poisoned to death. Electricity was an ability to remove that danger in your lives by bringing in safer lighting. For that reason, people welcomed it in their homes, largely. There wasn't the kind of mass panic over electricity. And once we had that, we could start to build and create new uses for it. There was a new familiarity of this thing in our home, and now, of course, we wanted to see what else it could do.

And what is that? That's problem solving. That's storytelling. That's also being aware of and building into the very foundation of the thing that you're building – if you're a company, if you're creating something new – of what people need and where the shifts are in their needs.

I was talking to this disruption expert, his name is Hamza Madasir, and he was telling me about this really interesting theory of what killed Kodak. The story, of course, is that the digital camera killed Kodak. And there's a good reason for that. Kodak, very famously, they were part of developing the digital camera. They basically put it on the shelf. They saw it as irrelevant or competitive or whatever they thought. And then, of course, somebody else, many other people came along and created a digital camera and the business was gone. But he says, "No, no, no, that's not what killed Kodak. What killed Kodak wasn't the digital camera. It was Facebook." Why? Because when the digital camera first came out, people saw it as a novelty, but they didn't see it as a replacement to the camera film. Yeah, the photos were grainy. And even if they were good, what were you going to do with them?

Host: People were used to printing photos out and putting them on their refrigerator or putting them in albums. And you had really nothing to do with the digital camera. But then Facebook comes along. Facebook is really the first major use case for sharing and storing digital photos. Now people know what to do with these things. And as a result, they know what to do with their digital cameras. And as a result, they like their digital camera more than they like their film camera. And that's what killed Kodak.

Host: Now, what's the moral of that story? The moral is that Kodak was so busy thinking of itself as a camera film company that it thought all of its competitors were companies that made camera film. And therefore, the way to compete was to make camera film better, faster, and cheaper. But as a result, they didn't see disruption coming from a completely different space. They could have, if they didn't think of themselves as a camera film company and thought of themselves as a memories company. If they did that, they would be obsessed with their consumer and how their consumer shares memories, captures memories, and what they want to do next. They would have seen Friendster and MySpace and anticipated that eventually somebody would come along and make a much better version of those two platforms. Eventually people would want to share memories in different ways.

Host: I guess the reason I'm telling you that story is that we need to build into the way we operate the assumption that there will be problems and that there will be change. Change not just that we are introducing into the world, but change that we are navigating ourselves. Change will constantly come for the thing that we make, even if what we made changed things for others. If we are aware of and alert to that change always coming for us, we will start to build structures and approach the world in a way that anticipates that change, or at least operates in the belief that the thing we do today is not the thing that's going to happen tomorrow. That's the only way to solve these problems. That's how to make things seem complex—by never allowing us to oversimplify, but to realize that everything we do is part of a complex structure, and whatever balance we find, if we find it at all, is going to be very temporary.

Jason Feifer: You're so right to say that balance is temporary. We always find these temporary states of the world, but that is just subject to change. I think the six different frameworks that you've provided today are really helpful, as we've talked about, for someone who is the innovator or someone who is part of this wider world that is being innovated on. So why don't we just quickly wrap up by you sharing the six different frameworks?

Host: Number one, we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability. Number two, we often don't know what new things are for. Number three, innovators aren't building a bridge to the people they're trying to reach. Number four, we mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem. Number five, we imbue our innovations with our own cultural and personal anxieties. And number six, we oversimplify problems.

Jason Feifer: Now, it's funny, Steph, we've been calling these frameworks the whole time. As I read them back, I realize that really what we're talking about here is major problems. But of course, if we think about what's driving those problems, then we drive solutions. And that's really where the frameworks come from. So if we are grappling with why something isn't working, or why people aren't understanding or valuing this new thing that we have spent so long creating with such care, then I think thinking through those problems will help us identify where we have gone wrong and where the beginnings of solutions are for people and ourselves.

Host: I couldn't agree more. I know we only have a few more minutes, but I want to play a quick game just to make this relevant and tangible for people today. We're not going to be able to get through all of these, but there are two parts to this very quick game. The first part is looking at a couple pieces of technology, using that broad sense of technology. I'm going to read you a headline from the past for a particular piece of technology, and you're going to tell me which different problem or framework applied. So let's go with the mirror, which I mentioned before.

Jason Feifer: Yeah.

Host: The quick headline is, "Little AIDS for Vain Women." And then there is a much longer paragraph which basically talks about how a woman no longer has to go into a store or go back home in order to fix up her makeup or see her face. She now has it on her. She can now see herself at any point in the day. "Little AIDS for vain women." Where do you think this fits in?

Jason Feifer: Okay, so that's definitely number two, which is that we don't often know what new things are for, because they're describing something very similar to how we talk about selfies today. These mirrors are exacerbating and playing into people's vanity. Those old articles about the mirror would talk about women who would literally not pull their faces up from the mirror. There were concerns that women would wander out into streets and get hit by cars because they're looking at the mirror the whole time. And of course, now we talk about that with our cell phones and with selfies. But what people didn't understand was that the mirror wasn't going to override our basic humanity. The mirror was going to be a wonderful new tool that people used in certain circumstances, and frankly, everybody would be happy to have one.

Host: Exactly. I also think it plays into number four or five, where basically people were just a little worried that women would have a new tool to use in ways that they didn't like. But with that said, let's move on to something else we've talked about, the camera.

Jason Feifer: All right.

Host: This actually relates to the prior point. So maybe we'll move on to the next one. But basically, this headline says "People who photograph their vanity." And it goes on to talk about how a stroll down Broadway reveals hundreds of unknown faces taken in the imperial style of photo so much in vogue. So basically now not only could rich, wealthy, famous people be photographed or painted, but now everyone could.

Jason Feifer: Yes. So this is number five, which is that we imbue our innovations with their own cultural and personal anxieties. Possibly what those writers at the time were reacting to was when America was a far more dominantly religious country. There was a belief that vanity is a sin. People were really taught that any focus on themselves was vain and therefore an insult to others and an insult to God. When the camera came out, people were often very concerned about photographing themselves and sending the photo to others because it was such a sign of vanity. There were these interesting Emily Post style etiquette guides explaining that taking a photo of yourself and sending it to someone else is not vanity. It is a gift. The camera was coming out at a time when people were moving around the country, but transportation options were not that great. It's possible that a family member would move away and you would never see them again. The best you ever had was these little photographs. That was the way you could look into your brother's or sister's or aunt's eyes, and that was a gift. That wasn't vanity. That was a real tension around the camera, and I think it's a tension that we're seeing play out now in the way we share things from our own lives today.

Host: I agree. There's a level of judgment in both. All right. Final one in part one of this game is the airplane.

Jason Feifer: All right.

Host: So I like this one because it's a little different. The headline says, "No chance for the airplane." And interestingly enough, this one also relates to women. It says, "It can never have the support of the feminine sex, and that alone is all that is needed to relegate it to an inescapable and dingy obscurity." This is one of many headlines that took many different forms. I think I read another headline that said it would take over a million years for the airplane to be successful, only to which I believe the Wright brothers took flight two months later. So what do you think about the pushback against the airplane?

Jason Feifer: Oh, that's a really interesting one. I'm going to slot this one into a complicated one, but I'm going to slot it into "we don't often know what new things are for." The reason I'm going there is because this is really about the dawn of the technology. It took some time, not just to perfect the technology, but then to develop it into a way in which it was really commercially viable. At the time, I could imagine that people would look at the airplane and wonder, even if you get this right, what am I going to do with it? It's sort of in the way that right now, Richard Branson can send people into space, but there isn't really a point to it at this point. It's just a joy ride for wealthy people. But it's very possible that at some point in the future, there will be a true purpose for going into space. I can't anticipate what it would be for the average person. In the same way that when the car was introduced, people often didn't know what to do with it, because the very idea of a commute didn't really exist. People weren't commuting long distances. They were mostly joyriding with these things. A lot of people were saying, "This is obnoxious. I don't need this thing to joyride." So I think people just didn't know what it was for, because they couldn't imagine how it could develop into something that served a purpose in a world so connected that there would be reasons to be flying around all over the place.

Host: I think you're right. I think that was one of those exponential technologies where if you're early on in that curve, it's just so hard to see how this could progress.

Host: Okay. Second part of this game is to share things today that people are pushing back on, or maybe as we've been talking about, maybe are earlier on in their adoption curves. One of them that I'm going to skip by, but I'm just going to call out because it relates to what you just said, is space. I think part of that is it's just really hard to imagine a future where the everyday person is engaging with space. Let's go to one that's a little different that I think you might find interesting, which is remote work. This is not like a specific piece of technology, like a phone or a laptop or a camera, but I think it's kind of like some of the other things we talked about, maybe more like cultural phenomena. Remote work is something that many of us are doing now. We certainly are leveraging the technology there. But there's a lot of pushback. A lot of people want to send people back to the office. What do you think this fits into the current pushback around remote work?

Jason Feifer: So I am slotting this one firmly into "we mistake a 1% problem for a 100% problem." I think to the companies that I have called who have shifted to four-day work weeks, who are generally always remote. They tell me this really interesting thing: if you get it right, if you can implement the four-day work week, then productivity remains the same. People are working one day less. They're much happier. It's a great retention and recruitment tool. But here's the problem. After about a year, people start to say, "I'm starting to feel disconnected from my colleagues." The problem here is that how do you get to a four-day work week? You eliminate meetings and colleague chit-chat and basically anything that feels inefficient so that everyone's just focused on efficiency. But it turns out all those inefficiencies had a purpose, and that purpose was building the fabric of a company culture. So you could ask, is this perfect? The answer is no. And then you must ask, is this new problem better than the old problem? If you asked, "Is this perfect?" and said no, and then got rid of the four-day workweek or any other form of remote work, because your managers don't feel like they're able to properly oversee their direct reports, and that's a problem so we need to get rid of this whole thing—possibly what you have is a 1% problem. Possibly you have a management training problem. Possibly in this case, what you have with employees not feeling connected to each other in four-day workweeks is that you haven't figured out how to replace those longer meetings and ways of people communicating with other ways that are more efficient but still build those bonds. That is a 1% problem that can be solved, rather than a 100% problem that you had to get rid of. I think that remote work is fantastic. I work from home. That's not to say that it is not without its problems, and we need to be solving those problems, but I think that we have better new problems than we did before.

Host: I completely agree. Let's see if we can fit in two more, although I have a bunch more, so maybe we'll do a full separate episode.

Jason Feifer: Okay, then I'm going to make shorter answers.

Host: Okay, AR and VR. Right now, there's a lot of hype. People talk about this term, the metaverse. What do you think? Where does this fit in to your different set of frameworks?

Jason Feifer: This to me is very clearly "we don't know what things are for." I don't think that the killer use case for AR, VR, or the metaverse has been introduced yet. So what people are hearing is a lot of hype. And then if they get the Oculus—I got an Oculus, you know where it is, it's in my closet. The reason is because I didn't really know what to do with it. I couldn't find enough ways to integrate this into my life. I think the technology is incredibly impressive. I just don't think that the use case for mass adoption is there yet. So we don't know what this is for. I think it's incumbent upon the very smart people who are building these things to make that argument to the consumers who are waiting for the answer.

Host: Great. This one's a little different. Biohacking, or you could say longevity science, you could say genomics. I know those are all slightly different, but they all overlap. There's some concern around people doing certain things to their bodies. There's also cultural issues with changing what babies you might have and what genes they have. What do you think about this whole space of biohacking?

Jason Feifer: Yeah, incredibly complicated, intersects with a million moral questions. But I'll slot it into "we imbue our innovations with our own cultural and personal anxieties." I think that the big disruptive potential of biohacking leads to unbelievably large questions, fundamental questions. But are we going to get there? Is that where this is really headed? I don't know. I have a hard time parsing what is realistic and what is somebody's hyperbolic fever dream. But I do think that as we introduce these and anything else, it's worth having really intelligent, serious conversations about the world that we want to build and how the innovations that we have can help us get there.

Host: I couldn't agree more. I know we're out of time. I'm just going to quickly share for listeners or watchers at home. I think a good exercise would actually be to go through the six different frameworks that Jason has shared here and just think about where this might fit. We've got NFTs, which we didn't get time for. We've got autonomous vehicles or cars. And then this is similar, so it's cars, but ride sharing. We're kind of over the hump for this one to a degree, but maybe think through what some of the pushback there was. And there's the train, something that also had pushback when it was being introduced into society. But Jason, I want to say thank you for taking the time here and for sharing all of these thoughts through your many years of research and talking to different people within this field. If anyone does want to find you or your book, where should they look?

Jason Feifer: Yeah, Steph, thanks. This was so fun. I really enjoyed it and am just honored you had me on. I've been a longtime listener to the show. My book, where a lot of this comes from and much more, is called *Build for Tomorrow*. You can find it audiobook, ebook, hardcover, wherever you get books. It's designed to be a guide to adaptability to help people think through great changes in their careers and their lives. Otherwise, get in touch with me. My website is jasonfeifer.com, J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. There you can get links to my social media accounts, my newsletter that I write on this subject. I'd love for people to reach out. I promise I will respond to anyone who does.

Host: Wow, that's a big commitment. I find it hard to keep up. But Jason, thank you so much. We'll include all of those links in the show notes. And we'll have to do this again sometime.

Jason Feifer: I would love it.

Host: Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at youtube.com slash A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time. Thank you.