Full Transcript: Rethink Moments - Shift Your Attention with Aza Raskin

This transcript was taken from my recent conversation with Aza Raskin. If you want, you can listen to the full episode below whilst reading along.

The Rethink Moment

[00:00:00] Aza: A shift that had to take place is that I've always been a person who invents things who makes organizations. I sort of had this one tool and that tool was, I make a start-up to solve the world's problems.?

Rachel: Aza Raskin has always found ways to create new tools that will forever change our perspective, whether that's as an interface designer at Mozilla, entrepreneur with Massive Health or as the inventor of the now infamous infinite scroll?

Aza: Starting a company founding a non-profit, passing a law, getting into philanthropy. These are both tools, but also straightjackets, because the scale of the problems we face are not going to be solved by making a new app.?

Rachel: Today on Rethink Moments, how an invention that, each day, wastes a million lifetimes, pushed Aza Raskin to ask profound questions about his own life’s work.

Aza: And when that's all you've ever known, that creates a huge existential crisis.?

Rachel: What happens when an idea's purpose is transformed way beyond your control? And how do you decide what's truly important? Stay with us.

The importance of asking questions

[00:01:47] Rachel: I wanted to start by going back to your childhood, because you are the oldest of three siblings, and I read that you were raised in a Jewish family in California. I was also raised in a Jewish family in California. And something I've been thinking about recently, partly because we haven't been able to do it for a long time, is how much impact Friday night dinners had on me and the way I think, and the way I show up in the world. So I was wondering if you could share what Friday night dinners were like in the Raskin household?

Aza: So I guess I should start by saying, you know, I grew up in a Jewish household. In the sense that you can't spell Jewish without ish. And what that means is, I think grew up in the cultural context of asking questions versus anything particularly religious. So, we didn't have a strong like Shabbat dinner, but our family had a very strong ‘let's all eat dinner together’ ritual and my father we, we called him Jef and he spelled it with one F -? just J E F because he thought the second F was redundant. And my mom was mom.

Rachel: Aza’s his father, Jef Raskin, was a renowned expert in human computer interface, known for starting Apple's Macintosh project in 1979.

Aza: And the reason why he wanted to be called Jef is that he wanted to be on first name basis with his kids. He wanted to have sort of an equal playing field and that I think really rolled into dinners because they were intellectually engaging.

It was about asking questions. In the sense that, you know, science is the process of finding the ways in which you're deceiving yourself. I think our family dinners sort of were the same kind of thing which were about asking questions to find out where the edges of our knowledge were. And also, you know, saying really horrendous puns.?

But I will say puns are really interesting. One, because it gets people to grown, but two, because if your brain has little co-processors seeking to find puns, which is to say alternate ways of seeing something, it means you are taking consistently a multi-perspectival approach to everything. You see things from multiple angles all the same time.

And so even though they're just groaners, I actually think it trains your brain to see things in multiple ways. And there is, of course, no just one truth. You know, the world is very complex. And so the best you can do is just get closer and closer to seeing how things really are. And to do that, you need to see from as many perspectives as well.?

How great ideas grow

Rachel: So, the capacity that you're talking about, and I'm not just saying this, is something that only very great minds can stay in that space for a long period of time. Why do you think you can sit in this space and have this interest, but also this ability to find the metaphors and not just find the metaphors, then turn them into products and designs that do make them visible and real to people?

Aza: I think we are never our best selves alone. We are always our best selves together. If you just put me into a room by myself, I don't think I would have that ability. I think it's the other incredible human beings that I get to interact with that provides the rich soil on top of which you can make metaphor, because I don't think you have to have like a superlative or brilliant mind to come up with genius thoughts because you know, really brilliant thoughts are almost always obvious in hindsight. What you need is really great soil from which your ideas can grow. You need to have a really great base of metaphor to draw on because then the idea is simple. Oh, it's just X, but for Y and then you want to do that, you know, IDEO calls them, T-shaped people. We want to have a broad understanding with some places that you go deep. And I actually think you want to be more like an M you want to have like a number of different areas that you really understand, and then a broad swath of fields to draw from.

You know, and that insight is actually embedded in our language. The word interesting, like when things are interesting. Well, all the most interesting things happen at the intersections of fields. And in fact, interesting comes from the root intersect. So, it's right there in plain sight.

Developing guiding principles

[00:06:36] Rachel: Something interesting I've noticed in Aza's work is the way he explores the themes of attention and tempo differently with each project or venture. How fast or something or slow something goes, or how big or small something is, in ways that profoundly influence our lives. With the infinite scroll, this thread is really clear: the intention was to create something that could focus our attention and control our tempo when on websites and apps - we'll get to that in just a moment. But I also saw similar connections in his more recent work, like the Earth Species Project. Aza's ambition to use AI to see if we can understand the language of dogs and dolphins seems like an idea designed to capture attention. I wondered if Aza had thought of it this way…

Aza: I like attention and tempo as, guiding factors. It's always interesting to hear other people reflect on the connective threads in your life. Cause you're like, ‘oh, that's so cool. I hadn't seen It that way yet’. There are two, I think, themes in my life. One is attention and the other is language. These are the two threads that I think if you look at them interweave to explain almost everything that I've worked on. I am very inspired by my father's work. And he introduced me to a term called cognetics, and cognetics is the ergonomics of the mind.

So ergonomics is the study of how our bodies bend and fold so that you can make a chair, for instance, that actually fits with our body and doesn't hurt us - doesn't break our backs, all these kinds of things. Cognetics is the study of our mind. How much can your mind hold?

Will it make mode errors, like, how many things can you hold in your short-term memory? And if you don't understand how the mind bends and folds, then you make interfaces - computers and social systems - that break us. Right. I sort of think of it as we are like origami and we bend and folds in some ways and not in others.

And if you don't understand that you just tear us apart. And I think of attention as a particular and very important sort of central place to understand in cognetics. Because the degree to which you place your attention on the things that do not matter is the degree to which you're being unwise. So in some sense where you place your attention is the most important choice that you can make.?

Rachel: It reminds me of…I can hear the roosters by the way!

Aza: Yeah, they're saying hello.?

Rachel: They agree with you. They're saying hello. It's a beautiful new book by, I think it's Oliver Berkman. Have you read it? 4,000 hours. And I'm going to stuff this up, but it's something like ‘your experience of being alive consists of nothing more than the sum of everything to which you pay attention’.

Disclaimer: I did stuff this up. The book by Oliver Berkman is actually called Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

And the whole premise of the book is that our lives - when you ask people, how many weeks do you think you have to live on this planet - Most people come up with 30 to 50,000, some people say a 100,000. And the average is actually 4000 weeks. So that's his metaphor.?

A shift in philosophy

Rachel: Back to the infinite scroll then; I never realised this - and I'm kind of embarrassed to admit it because I've studied technology and trust for over a decade now - I never realised that Aza's intention when he designed the infinite scroll was to try to stop distractions or disruptions to users' trains of thought. He was designing against the page flips we then had to go through.?

Back in 2006, Aza was just graduating from the University of Chicago. His father was teaching a graduate class in interface design there, and Aza ended up becoming his teaching assistant. Along with a couple of the best students in the class, he founded a start-up called Humanized. This is where the principles of attention and tempo that would inform the infinite scroll began to be explored.

Aza: The idea was: what if you could just use language to control your computer independent of any app that you're in?

So, you can just be in Word, select an address and say ‘add a map’ and it would pull it from Google Maps and just add it right there. You could be in Photoshop and select some text and say ‘spellcheck this’ and it would pull in a spellchecker. It was breaking down the walls of applications. You can imagine it to be a Siri before Siri. It was really about moving from interfaces that needed your attention to interfaces that directly interfaced with your intention via the most generative things humans have, which was language. So that was sort of like the mindset that we're in, like, how do we get this thing out?

And I started blogging and writing about all the different things that were sort of wrong with the web, where we're making these sort of silly decisions. And I had a very information theoretic approach to interfaces. How do you make interfaces as efficient as possible? And what I think I really missed back then was that when you make an interface really efficient or simple for an individual user, it does not mean that you're making something which is good for society.

So, the thought was very simple. It was, you know, this technology called Ajax, just come out. So, if you cast your minds back, this was the days of MapQuest where you'd had to click a button and the map would move over. You click a button, the map would move over, and Google maps had just come out where you could start to scroll, infinitely around.

I was like, well, when you're looking at a page of results, say from an Amazon search or you're scrolling down Twitter, or you are looking at Google search results, or you're on a blog. Why do you have to keep clicking this ‘more’ button? It just doesn't make any sense. Every time you, as a designer, ask a user to make a decision they don't care about, you’ve failed.

So just add more, there's already semantic meaning to a scroll. It means you haven't found what you're looking for. So, if you're scrolling more, just add more to the bottom. And I went around to, you know, Google and Twitter and these companies and gave presentations saying this is a better interface. And what I didn't really foresee was that this would be used not as a utility to understand the user's intent and support that, but instead as a trap to get people to use the product - to not let people's minds catch up with their impulses and put people into this sort of zombie state. And I did a calculation many years later and realized that very conservatively, you know, this one invention wastes over a million human lifetimes per day.?

Rachel: So, this invention of the infinite scroll that you began thinking about in 2006 now waste over a million human lifetimes a day. If I can ask, how does it feel when there is such - it's bigger than a disconnect, right - there's such a misalignment of your intentions and the consequences of something that you create?

Aza: I always start answering this particular question with the realization that I may have been first coming up with this particular technology, but I don't think it was such a brilliant idea that somebody else wouldn't have come up with it. And, in fact, other people did. And at the same time, I was also adding geolocation to the web just after I was doing some of the very first prototypes of what mobile browsing could look like. When people hear ‘invent infinite scroll’, they sort of imagine like that was the one big thing that I was working on, but actually there were dozens of things I was working on and that was just one of the ones that happened to bubble up to the top. Another one that was a little later was Songza. You know, I was a classical music snob growing up - I played French horn in in youth orchestras and travelled the world and I got out of college and, I'm like, what is this Green Day thing anyway? There's too much music, so I got other people to make playlists for me. And it turned into that thing, which is mood and time-based playlists, which is now everywhere. So, like, there've been lots of cases where this thing that you invent, or that I invent, ends up becoming part of culture.?

I think when I look back, the thing I regret most is not packaging the inventions with the philosophy or paradigm in which they're supposed to be used. That there was a kind of naive optimism about thinking that my inventions would live in a vacuum, and not be controlled by market forces. And what's terrifying to me is that lesson that I learned has not been learned by the rest of the industry. Designers going into Facebook or Twitter or Tiktok, still operate with the same philosophical operating system of ‘oh, let me make something neat’ without seeing the massive effects around the world. To make that more concrete, here's a visual metaphor, which is, I remember seeing for the first time the satellite images from space of Earth. And you can see that dust from the Sahara is getting picked up and moved over to the Amazon, which is like providing nutrients to the Amazon. And the Amazon is breathing and letting out humidity, which comes up as massive plumes of clouds. And that moves over and makes rain for North America. Right? It's this really beautiful, complex interdependent thing when you see it. And we don't have a good mental model, is that the designer sitting inside of Facebook, they're doing the same thing. There's sort of this digital cloud that lifts up out of Menlo Park and Palo Alto.

And the kinds of systems change misinformation and disinformation and climate denial and vaccine data, all of these things, the like hyperpolarization ends up being a cloud that lifts from Silicon Valley and settles over the world so that, [Jair] Bolsonaro gets elected and, of his supporters, 98 percent of them were like swimming in this fake news. And for all of Brazil, it was 86% of the voting population, had seen at least one piece of fake news that made a change to the way they voted. Right? So, it's happening that Silicon Valley can put a bullet into the lungs of the Amazon, which changes the fate of the entire world.

And so these are the kinds of philosophical operating systems I think we need to upgrade ourselves into when we make technology, and the thing I regret most looking back at my career.

Being stuck with a label?

[00:18:02] Rachel: So, let me go back to something you just said, which was around how you embed the philosophy with the idea, because this is something I've lost a lot of sleep over and in a completely different context. As you may know, my first body of work was really about identifying this thing called the sharing economy. And I remember the moment that I realized the negative impacts that this was having on the world. And I’m just wondering if, you know, being known as someone that invented the infinite scroll when you've done all these other things, how you reinvent a narrative when you've been given a label?

So many people can identify with that. So how have you gone on that journey of trying to reinvent that narrative? And I don't know if it's let go of that label or accept it. How have you sort of accepted it and then done something with it and moved on??

Aza: I very much empathize whether you're saying, you know, I think social media creates the extreme version of this, which is you will always be defined by the worst thing you ever said. Because it just keeps getting surfaced again and again, because that creates the most engagement. My relationship with infinite scroll is sort of an interesting one because, as I said said, it was just one of the many things I had worked on.

And so it wasn't until really much later, when we had just started Center for Humane Technology, this 2018, and I was looking back through my life at all the things that I had done, and it turned out that having invented infinite scroll gave me a particular purchase to speak about the attention economy.

And so I sort of said, ‘hey, here's this thing I had done, and reporters all latched onto it and gave me a great platform, and also tied me to this thing. And so it's actually a more new thing for me to like have it as part of my identity, sort of in in a public sphere. It both weighs on me because everyone wants to talk about infinite scroll – here we are talking about infinite scroll - versus say, you know, the, the minds of the other beings of Earth and how we're working on translating animal communication. But also at an identity level I hold it a little lightly because it was never the thing that I hung my hat on, it was never like core to the story of who I was.?

Deciding what’s truly important

Aza: I think more core to who I was, and like a shift that had to take place, is that I've always been a person who invents things, who makes organizations. I sort of had this one tool and that tool was: I make a start-up to solve the world's problems. Music discovery and listening to music. You know, by 2020, I remember learning the status was, this was back in like the early 2010s that 50 percent of America would be either diabetic or pre-diabetic - let me make a start-up. I had one tool and it's been a much harder process realizing that starting a company founding a non-profit, passing a law, getting into philanthropy - these are both tools, but also straightjackets because the scale of the problems we face are not going to be solved by making a new app. And when that's all you've ever known, that creates a huge existential crisis. And honestly, when I had that realization in 2016, after Trump got elected - I was running another company called Post Social, it raised a whole bunch of money, and it was working on solving social media - and realizing I was getting trapped by the same attention metrics as everyone else, despite my philosophy. I went through a really bad depression because it was like, well, what can you do? I can't imagine a solution. That's at the scale of the problem. And that waking up process, I think is much more core to who I am.?

Rachel: There’s so much in what you just said, so let's dive into this because it sounds like one of the most profound rethink moments you've had is: you've created companies. You believe in the concept of a start-up of designing something, getting funding, scaling up, releasing it into the world.? And so the realization that it's not just the idea, it's the system that you've been trapped in, and coerced to believe whatever it may be, that this is the way to solve problems. The realization that that mechanism of a start-up doesn't work anymore. I can only imagine that created the most immense void, of ‘well, if that's not the solution, if I don't take my ideas and my thoughts and create this start-up and bring it to the world, how do I do that?’

So if a start-up is not the solution to solving huge systemic problems, what you do think is - have you got to that process and sort of your rethink journey?

Aza: I mean, I have ideas and I'll talk about them, but I want to start with some epistemic humility, which is the real answer is: I don't know, I have hypotheses, I'm making some progress, but it's a really hard problem.?

Rachel: Around 2017, Aza came across the work of Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist and systems change thinker at MIT. She'd written an essay that really spoke to him, about the 12 places to intervene in a system. Starting with the lowest level interventions, she works her way up to the highest - the highest being the ability to change and transcend paradigms.

Aza: She says you know: what is a paradigm? The shared idea in the minds of society, the great being unstated assumptions, unstated, because they are unnecessary to state - everyone already knows them - constitute a society's paradigm or the deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. Right?

That there's a difference between nouns and verbs, that money measures something real and has real meaning, thus people who are paid less or worth less. That growth is good. That nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purpose. Evolution stopped with the emergence of homosapiens that one can even own land.

The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We built skyscrapers because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. And then here is the really deep insight: it's whether it's Copernicus or Kepler that showed that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, or Adam Smith who postulated that the selfish actions of individual players and markets somehow wonderfully accumulate to the common good, people who can intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have found a leverage point that totally transformed systems.?

So that, I think, in a nutshell, is where I've aligned. And when you look at all of the work that I do now, it's really trying to intervene at this sort of cultural or paradigmatic level.?

Earth Species Project is about questioning, you know, we're using the latest in unsupervised machine translation to decode non-human languages. So quite literally make first contact with whales and dolphins. Humans have been around speaking for a hundred thousand years, maybe whales and dolphins have had culture that have been passed down and they've been speaking vocally for 34 million years. We want to change the paradigm that human consciousness is the only real consciousness. But I just want to put some humility in here: it's a hypothesis so it's not like I think we've found like the one silver bullet, but this is the direction that my mind now thinks, versus ‘how do I create a product that'll solve the problem?’

A breakthrough realisation

Rachel: So, I was writing down words as you were speaking, and your language was really interesting because it was the language of internal mechanisms and barometers. And I think this in some ways links back to where we began with this idea of tempo and scale and human attention, because my belief in shifting and changing paradigms is that you have to shift what humans are feeling and connecting to. You have to change tempo and scale and our relationship to time. And maybe this is an optimistic thing to say, but I do think the pandemic has started to mess that up in a way that creates an opening for a paradigm shift. Is it optimism - or belief - that we can still create a paradigm shift?

Aza: I'm not always the best dinner party guest, because often I will start going down these paths, and asking other people to come there with me. And it's really hard. I think, you know, the thing that gives me hope is looking back through time - there have been other times when there's a kind of game theory that says that the right or harder thing just won't happen.

Rachel: I have to admit the course I took in game theory at Harvard was the only course I totally failed. My mind, unlike Aza’s, struggled with the concept of?interactive decision-making.

Aza: And that gives me hope that there's just so many unknown unknowns coming down the pipeline that we don't know how it's going to turn out. We are heading into a time of increasing chaos, meaning that what's happening now is less and less predictive of what's about to happen. And that should both be scary and also give us hope, because in chaos, initial conditions matter and that's worth fighting for.?

Rachel: So, when you look back over a period of your life, what do you think the most profound we Rethink Moment has been?

Aza: My co-founder for Earth Species took me on a long hike, sat me down, we did sort of a meta love and kindness style meditation. And he gave me some very specific feedback about a way that I was showing up - a thing that I was doing, that was very difficult to hear because he was right. And that moment of deep listening transformed me, and gave me part of my new theory of change, which is: we do not change when we speak, we change when we listen - and when we can truly see ourselves from the perspective of someone else, that moment changes us. Right? And to me, that's what Earth Species Project is about, which is if we can learn to listen and understand the other minds of earth, that process - the hope that process will even succeed - will change us.