How can newly minted futures and foresight folk make their mark and attract the right work?
What does it take to assemble an informal group of independent thinkers to collaborate at the frontier of change?
Venkatesh Rao is a prolific writer, consultant, sparring partner, Yak Herder, and our guest for episode 155.
Interviewed by: Amanda Reeves
More about Venkat
https://venkateshrao.com/
Yak Collective: https://www.yakcollective.org/
The Art of Gig: https://artofgig.com/
RibbonFarm: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/
Tempo: https://amzn.asia/d/77AlQ1x
The Gervais Principle: https://amzn.asia/d/0JDGd54
Twitter: https://twitter.com/vgr
Audio Transcript
Amanda Reeves: How can newly minted futures and foresight folk bootstrap themselves to attract the right work?
What does it take to assemble an informal group of independent thinkers to collaborate at the frontier of change?
I'm Amanda Reeves, and I'm your host for FuturePod today.
Venkatesh Rao: It's trivially easy to start up a group of people who are like, vaguely friendly with each other and just have them chatting and talking.
But actually getting people to work together, put projects together, build things together, that's much, much harder. And I think we've started unlocking the formula quite a bit.
So it's a lot of fun. And both an organizational challenge, learning how to do this. Like how do you get an informal group actually doing physical things together? And how do you manage that and how do you grow it ambitiously?
This is the future of work and I think we are figuring out how to actually work in the future of work at the Yak Collective.
Amanda Reeves: That's Venkatesh Rao, a prolific writer, consultant, sparring partner, yak herder, and my guest for today. Venkat, welcome to FuturePod.
Venkatesh Rao: Really glad to be here, Amanda.
Amanda Reeves: I'd like to begin with the Venkatesh Rao origin story.
Venkatesh Rao: All right. My origin story, so of course I was bitten by a radioactive spider.
Amanda Reeves: It's true, it's true.
Venkatesh Rao: That's usually how it starts. It's kinda an interesting question because there's two ways to think about origin stories, right? There's the sort of boring external story of like, you grew up there, you went to college there, you know, worked here and so forth.
So yeah, the LinkedIn stuff, and the ten second version of that is: grew up in India, went to college there, came to the US for grad school, did my PhD in aerospace engineering. Worked a few years in research at Xerox, then struck out on my own as an independent consultant, which I've been doing for 10 years now.
So that's the boring, straight story and there really isn't much to say about that. But I think the more interesting story for all of us, and especially for people who get into like independent work, is the inner origin story, like what were the psychologically interesting breakthrough moments?
And I was reflecting on that recently and I made a list of things I think were important in me becoming myself, which is a weird thing to say. I think musicians like to say this, that you've got to sound a lot like other people before you sound like yourself, right?
Because careers are like that. Work is like that. You start off imitating people you admire and emulating work you like, but it takes you a while to like figure out what you want. And I think the first time I ever did that was when I got into amateur astronomy as a high school kid. And the reason I bring that up is it was probably the first activity I ever picked purely on my own, not because friends were doing it, not because a teacher recommended it, but because at some point I just got interested. I think it was actually Halley's Comet in 1986, so that was the last time Halley's Comet came around and our school was doing like an astronomy session and I was like, I'll go.
And that hooked me. Right? So that I think of as the very first time I actually made a decision to become myself on my own. And when I look for moments like that, running quickly through the next, I guess, 30 plus years, I'm 48 now. There's a few others like that. For example, deciding to work in control theory sometime in the middle of undergrad.
It was a subject that I didn't do very well at. I got a B in it. Something about the subject really spoke to me and I ended up doing a PhD in it.
Amanda Reeves: Can I ask what attracted you to astronomy? If that's the big first decision where you started becoming yourself. What was it about it?
Venkatesh Rao: I think it's the ideal mix of like, Nerd out equipment gadget geekery on the one hand, buy a telescope, learn about lenses and mirrors and stuff. On the other hand, it does suddenly put you in touch with the largest horizons humanity is capable of contemplating at all. And if you're used to say, I don't know, following cricket games, you're Australian.
So we can say, we can talk about cricket, but yeah, cricket is like a planet- you get the idea, right? So it's a planet scaled interest. Or if you're talking to kids in school about like, I don't know, books you're reading or movies you're watching, it's like a local interest. And astronomy I think has that, especially if you have like a profound moment like, watching Halley's Comet and suddenly it hits you that you're living your little life on this pale blue dot, speck of dust with universe. And out there, there's this weird thing with a tail spinning around the sun and it's like, you know, sudden expansion of the imagination. So things like that, and I think moments like that are actually what make up the beats of an origin story.
Another one I can mention is the book, The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. I read this I think sometime in like 1997 or 98. It was already about eight years old at that point, and very influential. But even though I was a very big reader before and have been since and have read like, you know, hundreds of books, the reason that book sticks out for me is it was probably the first book I very genuinely picked out for myself to read. I don't know how I found it. Maybe a review or something. But it was like, all right, this is not on the radar of any of my friends. It's not a textbook, it's not a bestseller list of the sort I might pay attention to. But something about this speaks to me, and reading that book ended up being like a formative influence on my thinking.
And I think this is generally true of these origin story moments. If there are moments when you define yourself by making a choice for yourself, that can't be traced to any obvious influence in your life, like friends or school or work or anything.
So yeah, I think there've been a few like that through my life, but yeah, that's what I would call my origin story.
Like maybe a dozen such moments. I don't want to try and list them all off the top of my head, but there have been moments like this that made me who I am, I think.
Amanda Reeves: One of the things that's really interesting about your work is that there is this very clear sense of this internal direction. I think One of the first things I read of yours was talking about following the direction of maximal interestingness.
Venkatesh Rao: That particular phrase is, not mine. I stole it from Marc Andreessen when I was working with him briefly during, my gig with a16z. And yeah, it's a very interesting idea, which is when you are thinking about a lot of complicated and ambiguous things, some things are clear and legible, other things are confusing and ambiguous, and it's stressful to look in the direction of the confusion and chaos and ambiguity.
And it's like relaxing and peaceful to look at the stuff that's clear. And this tends to drive a lot of our default choices I think in life and work, which as we repeatedly pick the direction which is clear and calming for us. It's like, you look away from chaos and towards order or something like that.
And maximal interestingness I think is a heuristic, the way I interpret it at least, is go in the direction that makes you more uncomfortable. That creates certain amounts of cognitive dissonance or ambiguity in your head. And there's like lots of versions of this basic idea. Nassim Taleb's idea of antifragility, and like, going for hormesis and things like that, that's a version of the idea.
Friend of mine, he wrote a whole book about using discomfort as your north star for seeking interesting directions to think. That's in general been a heuristic of mine. But even though in the abstract, I appreciate it a lot, I have to say that in my own life, of course, you can't keep doing it all the time because it's stressful. So you have to find the balance between things that make you feel comfortable and calm and things that stress you out and provoke anxiety and discomfort. So finding the right balance of those and maybe pushing yourself to take on a little bit more discomfort than you would if you stop to think about it. Even like, you know, 10% more discomfort over comfort, I think it makes a huge difference because so many people are at zero and some people are, who are like hurting so badly in life that they actually go into self soothing mode and picking the calming, comforting behaviors even more so than average, right? So doing even slightly better than average gets you really far.
Amanda Reeves: So Venkat, I wanted to talk to you today about the way that you work because I find it really interesting. My understanding is it's largely built around this idea of being a conversational sparring partner.
Can you pull back the curtain a little and talk to me about how you approach sparring as a service?
Venkatesh Rao: Yeah, so this is, it took me a while to get there. So, I have I think four or five chapters, a whole section in part one of my art of gig book devoted to unpacking how I use the model. The origin story within the origin story of that technique is when I started off as an independent consultant, I literally had no idea what I was doing. So I was like, just imitating ideas from other places, just trying different things out. I tried writing an analyst report for one client, taking a trend and writing about it. Hated it, both the work and the particular client, I didn't get along with super well, but you know, you have to try half a dozen things like this, and think about what you actually like and don't like and how you're reacting to it, whether it's working or not. It's, I think of it as like, gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince or princess kind of situation. I would say sparring came out of at some point I realized that most of my clients, they didn't want polished deliverables or PowerPoints or reports or like, process, block diagrams and methodologies and all those things.
There were senior executives who had people to do that kind of stuff for them. So, you know, ranks of middle management able to do that. What they really wanted was to think out loud on things that were on their mind in a relatively safe situation, but not in a therapeutic mode where it's like maybe they're talking about like how to grow the organization, or how to lay off people, or how to pivot the product roadmap. So something externally oriented, not about like, you know, how am I processing my trauma from my childhood? So not therapeutic questions, but leadership and management questions. And when you're thinking about these things, especially as an experienced manager, it's actually surprisingly hard to find people to think with because people in your own workplace tend to be either reports who kind of look to you for direction and they don't wanna, like, talk ambiguously with you, or they're your peers who might be in a slightly tense competitive situation with you. Or they might be your bosses. If you're not the CEO they might expect you to do the thinking and not to work the thinking with you.
Amanda Reeves: There's like a status thing that starts to come in as well. There's that expectation of what is it that you are delivering and what's the value you're bringing and thinking out loud sometimes undermines that sense of your value.
Venkatesh Rao: I would say status is more of a concern earlier in careers. By the time good leaders at least get to a senior enough position. So maybe they've spent like 10, 15 years and are vice president or something higher at a reasonably medium to large company, they've usually worked out issues like you know, status sensitivity and insecurities because it's pure Darwinism.
Like if you haven't sorted through those issues in the first 10 years of your life, they're gonna kill you and you're never going to get to being a VP in a meaningful role, in a meaningful company, you might get like, you know, honorary titles, but they don't mean anything. So in general, I've found that that's not usually what is the problem with executives.
It's quite simply that if there's a VP in one department who's trying to chat with the VP in another department, they literally have competing interests. So they can't have like the open-ended sparring sessions, so to speak. And you can't do that with a therapist, partly because therapists are inward focused and partly because therapists tend not to actually understand the business world and work of their patients or clients.
So, I realized that that was actually the biggest value I was delivering to my clients. And they didn't care about the polished deliverables or like, offline research or anything. They just wanted to talk and they wanted to talk in the mode where, it's a little bit like improv theater where you have to do the yes, and. You have to build on what they're saying, but it can't be completely yes and, because then there's no conflict or tension and nothing of value comes of it. You have to like challenge them and stress them where they wanna be challenged and stressed. Right.
And this is why I'm part of the metaphor of the sparring partner because think of the role of a sparring partner in training a boxer or any other kind of martial artist.
It's not a competitive bout, you're not actually fighting each other to win the contest, or worse on a street fight where you're trying to like kill each other. You're trying to fight in a way that works on your weaknesses, helps you develop your strengths and so forth. So, if you're a sparring partner and you notice, for example, that the boxers right punch is better than their left punch, well maybe you kind of attack them on the left or something like that.
I'm not a boxer, so I'm, I don't know if I'm even using the terminology correctly, but there's something similar to that in executives. And a concrete example of that might be somebody who's new to senior executive roles and they're used to being the extremely competent individual leader running small groups of relatively junior people.
It's new for them to be working with people as senior as themselves and not having to do all the managing themselves. So for example, giving their own reports were senior enough that they need room to grow and cultivate their own management style. How do you actually get them growing without just telling them what to do?
So one way I might in a sparring session push back is if somebody who's new to a VP role is coming up with like, all right, I'm gonna tell the managers who report to me to do these three things in a very task oriented way. I might push back and say, do you really want to do that? Or do you want just establish like overall intent and let them figure out how to get it done.
Because at your level you really shouldn't be doing the howto thinking for them. Right? So that's kind of a little bit of a made up example cause I can't actually talk about any of the more serious ones, but that's what sparring is. And it turns out that an hour or so of this sort of thing a month with another hour on my part offline, writing up notes of the sparring session and like, review notes and sending that on, is like 99% of the value I was delivering.
And when I figured that out a couple of years into my independent career, I basically dropped everything else. It was like all the rest is basically futile and low value adding busy work and I don't really need to be putting it into the PowerPoints or polished PDFs or doing lots of other things.
I can just drop it all. All I need to do is periodically talk to my clients, send them email notes, and the email notes are like super rough. They're just like very quick notes as I might make for myself. And I was surprised by how well it worked and how much the clients appreciated it. And the longer you do it, the more valuable it gets.
Because if you're working one-on-one, some clients have worked for more than a decade, now you build up a huge history of shared thinking with them. And you can refer back like just this morning I was sending an email to a client and I said you need to hire somebody in this role. And remember, you did the same thing three companies are going like 2014 when you hired that guy to do X, Y, and Z. So you can build the shared history and context, so becomes very valuable. And it's a lot of fun too on my part because I get all the fun of challenging high level thinking about how to run companies without actually any of the accountability or responsibility.
I'm like on the side of the consultant working with them, just getting the fun of the intellectual challenge.
Amanda Reeves: Yeah, you just get to do the fun part. Amazing. So if sparring is the main core of what you do. Are there other things that you wrap around that? Or is it essentially the sparring plus fun and special projects?
Venkatesh Rao: I do occasionally augment it with other stuff. Like, you know, I might do a spreadsheet analysis model of some thing, but very quick and dirty, not anything super polished. I might do stuff in your domain, which is futures and futures thinking where it's like, all right, we talked about these three or four things that could happen in the next five years given the macro trends.
Let's work out of two by two of like scenario possibilities and just flesh them out a couple of degrees further and then talk about it in the next meeting. So I might do things like that, but I think the unifying theme with all these sort of augmentation frameworks is I try to follow like a couple of rules.
One is, I don't invent my own process and methodologies unless I really cannot find something already out there and preferably something that's so well known and commoditied that I don't have to teach my clients how to use it. So like, you know, at a more polished, structured level of the sort of scenarios you do?
Yes. There's a lot of methodology and techniques to it, but at a very simple paper napkin level, scenario thinking is like, you know, structured future oriented common sense that everybody sort of does intuitively, reasonably well. And so long as you observe a few disciplines, it's good enough. And you don't have to like write up like polished PowerPoints.
You can just send an email saying, all right, I thought of these three or four scenarios and here are the differences among them and let's talk about them next time, right. So that's I think the core to what I do, just pull off the shelf frameworks, commodity, no learning required and just use them at whatever intuitive level of understanding the person might have.
So if they're very sophisticated and they've done futures work themselves, I might, you know, level up and do something more structured. If not, I might just keep it paper napkin level. I would say the rare exception of something like say Wardley Maps, which is a relatively structured technique you kind of have to know about.
You have to spend like 15 minutes at least talking about, alright, the X is this evolutionary redirection, and this is the value chain. But generally, I think people put in too much process scaffolding. Like they might say, we need a four hour workshop explaining all about wardley maps, and then we can begin to actually use it and we need this big, clunky software to draw our diagrams.
I tend to cut all that clutter out. I'm like, let's spend 10 minutes, maybe read this one blog post offline on how to do this technique and then just apply it right off and see if it works for us. And I think this has also been super helpful because in the consulting world, especially if you take what people offer at face value, you'll always end up believing that you need to put in a lot of upfront work to use their techniques and methods and models and stuff.
Typically, you can get 80% of the value for like 20% of like just skimming what their core idea is because people are smart, they don't need that much, you know, homework or structured process scaffolding in my experience. At least, the kinds of people I work with, maybe I don't know, middle management level or earlier career, people who are tasked with doing more detailed stuff. Like if you're supposed to write like an extremely detailed scenario about the future, yeah, you might need a lot more of scaffolding. But at the level of like talking to senior executives, you typically don't.
Amanda Reeves: I think the difference is when you are going from working one-to-one, if you're trying to help someone get their own implicit ideas explicit. It's a very different thing if you're trying to help a group start to have that shared and collective understanding.
And so I see that being the difference. The longer time, it's about creating space to think together rather than, how do I think more expansively myself.
Venkatesh Rao: I think that's one dimension of it, and definitely when I work with groups, which I tend to avoid. Usually if I work with a trusted principal, one-on-one client and they ask me to do something like a, you know, an OODA Loop workshop or something like that, I'd do it. So I've done those kinds of things for large groups as well.
Like, the one I've done most often is my OODA Loop workshop, which I've done a few times for groups of like 200 people with breakout groups of like eight to 10 people and so forth. So yes, then you have to add a little bit more structure, but even there, I think the focus is can you start with people where they are and get to value that they themselves can use in their own locus of agency with the live interaction as quickly as possible?
Because I think the danger mode is on the front end, if you give them a lot of homework or preparation or study beyond their own technical work or whatever, like the expecting people to read, say if you're working with the semiconductor industry, expecting a group of people in a workshop to read up on recent industry news, that's fair.
Expecting them to read somebody else's like big fat book on a framework? No, No you don't wanna do that. That's on the input end. And the reason is simple, because you just won't get compliance. You're not their mom, you're not their professor, assigning grades. As a consultant, they'll only do it if they feel they're getting value out of it.
So don't give them stuff where they'll question that and like just phone it in, like, It's no use assigning them a big fat book if they don't read it or pretend to have read it. Right? So that's on the input end. The output end is even more important where early on I made a rule for myself that I'm never going to do work for anybody who then has to sell it to somebody else up the chain of command or like two degrees removed.
If you can't actually use the output of my work yourself, then I'm not gonna do it because then you kind of have them stage managing what they're presenting to somebody else and like so on down the line. And especially if you've got like say a middle management person who's been assigned to do like some study and then they're reporting to their VP and then the VPs reporting to the CEO and then the CEO might use that as forward to talk to the board to maybe do something, blah, blah.
It's a lost cause because four degrees of indirection, it's like too many people are trying to manage it and the actual thought process gets lost and it becomes a whole theater inside a theater inside a theater. You don't want that. So that's one thing I do. And the other slightly stronger discipline is I tend not to work for people who cannot sign their own checks or get really close to it, as in, I want this work done and I can say yes or no.
The work is good or the work is bad, and I have signing authority on payment or somebody who's may not have direct signing authority but has like, sign off authority on accepting the work or not. And they're so trusted by their superiors, if they say pay this consultant, the consultant will get paid.
And this is not just a discipline around just getting paid because of course people like us have to get paid and you don't want too many invoices being written off because a company is not paying you, but also the discipline of making sure that you're doing work that is actually used by the people it's delivered to, and they are aware enough of the value that they're very close to the process of paying for it. So you want that loop to be extremely tight and within that, yeah, depending on the size of the group and the nature of the problem, you may add more or less structure, but I think the basic principles here are important to keep in mind no matter what kind of consulting you do.
Amanda Reeves: What's emerging around you that's catching your attention and how are you making sense of this?
Venkatesh Rao: So here, I think I got really lucky in the last few years. I think the two biggest things that are going on in the world right now at least in the world of work, that you have some hope of, like being a part of the action is machine learning and crypto and blockchain stuff. And I happen to have my two biggest projects right now are in those two areas.
So for the last couple of years I've been working with this wonderful company called DemStore, and it's an AI hardware startup, they make chips for AI. And my client there, the CEO, I've been working with him for 10 years. He's one of my oldest clients. And the other one I just started, I can't talk about it yet, but it's a very interesting project in the Ethereum ecosystem.
So I think those are really exciting for me because it's getting me a view of the front lines. And I always I like to be where the exciting action is, even if I can't be super directly useful, I like to at least play a supporting role. It's kind of, I guess a personal preference. I'd rather play a supporting role on the happening frontier of change than being the main character somewhere in like the Backwaters.
I think that's a personal, I like that kind of excitement.
Amanda Reeves: Excitement adjacent
Venkatesh Rao: Yeah. The sidekick, the guy who bursts into the bar after the main character bursts in. And another big area that I'm focusing on. I had a big project until last year. I was working for five years with Amazon on their sustainability work, so climate change. So that was a very exciting project. Learned a lot. I do still have one small client in sustainable materials. And that's something I'd like to do more of. I've done quite a bit in the last few years, but that's the ideal portfolio for me. Like, you know, working in machine learning, crypto and climate, I think be between or among these three things, you've kind of covered 90% of the exciting new stuff that's happening in the world that in a sense gives you, gives humanity agency for actually doing stuff. Like, there's lots of things you could worry about, lots of other problems that need solving, but when you look for what powerful new technological levers do you have to actually change how the world works, these are the three big ones. And I'm fortunate in having a piece of the action and all of them.
Amanda Reeves: And can I ask how this is showing up in the work you're doing with the Yak Collective?
Venkatesh Rao: Yeah, so the Yak Collective is a lot of fun and it's ramping up quite a bit. And as we speak, we are actually doing our first annual YakCon. So the YakCon is a weeklong thing. Just yesterday we did a four hour session where we introduced people to our activities and now we have a week of asynchronous activities on the Discord.
And next Sunday we'll have another session. It's been, you were part of some activities early on and I'm sure you've kept it on your radar. But it's taken, I think, lots of trial and error with lots of different ways of working together to actually figure out what does it take to take a large group of sort of, independent people working together informally on a mix of like, money-making activities and also enrichment activities.
And it's mainly been enrichment activities like learning new topics, including, you know, things like machine learning or crypto. Getting into new industries or just fun stuff like we, the project you led on Astonishing Stories with Sachin we continued that as a storytelling workshop, that's still continuing and we might revive that. So that's fun.
Amanda Reeves: Amazing!
Venkatesh Rao: We are now into our third year and I think we now have like a good playbook. Like how do you actually create an online community that does things as opposed to just sitting around in forums chatting, because there's plenty of that on Twitter or Facebook or wherever. It's trivially easy to start up a group of people who are like, Vaguely friendly with each other and just have them chatting and talking. There's like 99% of the social web is like that.
But actually getting people to work together, put projects together, build things together, that's much, much harder. And I think we've started unlocking the formula quite a bit. Like apart from like informationy products or projects where we think about things and write things together, we are actually getting to like much more hands-on stuff.
So for the last couple of years, one of our projects has been the Yak Rover project, where we are trying to like design an open source Mars Rover. So it's like an ambitious goal, but we are literally actually meeting every week on Zoom talking about robotics and each of us is building a little hobby scale rover.
So it's a lot of fun. And both an organizational challenge, learning how to do this. Like how do you get an informal group actually doing physical things together? And how do you manage that and how do you grow it ambitiously? So yeah, Yak Collective, I think is another frontier. It's not maybe a tech frontier, but it's sort of an organizational and social frontier.
This is the future of work and I think we are figuring out how to actually work in the future of work at the Yak Collective.
Amanda Reeves: And I think that was one of the things that really attracted me to the collective. It's been a really interesting thing to watch, evolve, and unfold and find its own direction.
Venkatesh Rao: Yeah. You kind of have to like throw away half the rule book of what you think you know about managing organizations because managing this kind of organization is a very, very different thing. And that's been a large part, like I would say half of what we've done is just throwing away the old rule book and deciding, we're just not gonna do that kind of thing anymore.
I'll take a very simple example. Like in the corporate world or in school, you're used to preparing for meetings with pre-read. So good meetings are ones where you're assigned some pre-read and people do the actual pre-reading and show up prepared to have a good conversation. Right.
Amanda Reeves: I'm sure that's fictional. I don't know a single organization where that actually happens, but yes.
Venkatesh Rao: Uh, I actually know quite a few. I increasingly, that's one of my tests for, do I want actually work with this organization as in, do they have a discipline of prepared meetings where the meetings are useful? And the company that does this best is actually Amazon. I worked with them for several years, like I said, and they innovated this meeting format, where the first 15 minutes are literally sitting quietly and reading a long form document. So whoever asks for the meeting has to prepare not a slide deck, but a long form document. And the meeting begins, not with the presentation or just diving into an agenda, but people quietly sitting for 15 minutes and reading the document and talking about it.
And we adopted this format of the Yak Collective as well, and all our chat tracks tend to run on this model. And this has been a powerful thing, which is if you know that running a meeting, we are assigning pre-reads and expecting people to actually do them before the meeting is basically utopian, it's not going to happen. Most people are going to show up, pretending to have read, or if they're more honest, just admitting they've not read it. Just do the reading in the meeting, like most things that you might read, they're not that hard. And 15 minutes to read an you know, 2000 word essay and get the gist of it. It's challenging, but it's doable if you're picking the right readings, and this has become a very powerful thing. For example, the governance chat, which we have on Fridays at nine US Pacific Time that's been going on for more than two years now. And we put out the primer on governance readings a year ago.
So we released that as an NFT and made a little bit of money out of it as well. But the track has been really powerful and the regulars have been attending weekly for like, more than two years now. And it's because we have this format that works, which is you don't have to prepare, you don't have to do anything, all you have to do is put this on your calendar, show up, you'll be given 10 to 15 minutes time to actually read the thing, and then you just discuss it. And no more expectations. There's no follow through, there's no action items. And if you feel like it, you can follow through and read more on your own or participate in projects that come out of it like writing a summary.
But you don't have to, right? So it's been a very powerful model for us and this is throwing away the rule book of how to run meetings from traditional orgs. And now we end up with a meeting track of meetings that we all actually really love and like several of the participants admit that this is the only meeting that they look forward to and actually show up for regularly.
Amanda Reeves: That's high praise.
So for someone who has a background in aerospace, who does this strategic sparring, who runs a collective, when you meet someone new how do you explain what it is that you do if they don't necessarily understand what you do?
Venkatesh Rao: I stop trying basically, too hard to explain. I do have a very simple website with, you know, the basic biographical information, but it's like, if you don't already know who I am, it probably misleads more than it leads because the sort of like, you know, explicit checklist, LinkedIn type information doesn't actually convey very much. So I think actually the way I get to know most people and they get to know me is through my writing. Usually they find an essay or blog post of mine that they really resonate with, and they might like it enough that they go back and read several more and by the time they've read three or four, they kind of get a sense of who I am sort of, on the inside as opposed to who I am in terms of a resume.
And that tends to be the best basis for starting deeper relationship because in a way, sparring is continuing a blog comments discussion in a richer, higher bandwidth way. And that's often how it starts. Like, I sometimes get a client saying, Hey, I really like this article and I have this comment on it.
And then we send a couple of notes and they're like, Hey, I need some support for running my company. Do you wanna like start a consulting gig? And it's like, the blog, comments, discussions, just segues into a consulting relationship. And I think this is increasingly going to be the case for a lot of people like us in the independent consulting world where your trajectory and weird past is not always easy to explain to people, but then you don't have to explain it. You can remain illegible. So long as you have some basis for building up trust and common knowledge and a shared vein of thinking that you can build on productively. It kind of doesn't matter. And in, in some cases it's, it can be really weird.
Like there are people I've known and worked with for years and I don't know their names, the names of their kids, or even like, lots of details you'd be expected to know about people you work with a lot. So it's, it's really weird. It's like online culture translated into the whole world, including physical. like when you get to know somebody on Twitter or through a blog post comments, often you end up connecting over stuff that would never come up in more conventional social interactions, but you can connect far more deeply. Like, you know, maybe you both really like Seeing Like a State by James Scott and that book is one of your favorite books. And because of that, you start talking and you might spend like years talking in terms of that book and other books like it and never get around to like talking about vacations and kids and degrees and stuff like that.
And that's okay. It's nice if you can get to know people at all sides of their life and you want to, that's fine. But if you don't and you just have this one rich vein of connection that doesn't wander beyond it, that's fine too. So, like I said, I've kind of given up trying to explain who I am or becoming easier to be known or whatever it is.
It's like, all right, just read a few of my articles and we can start talking and we don't have to understand each other any more deeply than that. Or maybe that is the deep way to understand each other.
Amanda Reeves: It sounds like there's more focus on becoming who you are rather than explaining who you are.
Venkatesh Rao: Yeah. Like take you and me, for example, we've maybe been in a couple of video chats together. We've crossed paths on Twitter and other places. I know nothing about you. I don't know where you grew up, what your academic background is. But one of the resonance points for me is you work in futures, which is like a LinkedIn item, which I'm also interested in.
So that's like a superficial level connection. But for example, your handle is, uh, wabisabi futures, right? And that is like a connection point for me because the whole Wabisabi aesthetic. It's sort of like an idea that resonates deeply with me and to me, somebody who choose that as their handle immediately says a lot more than like, you know, five lines on your LinkedIn biography.
And that to me is like a more important point of connection than many other possible points of connection. And I think increasingly the world is ending up in this mode where you actually connect on what matters rather than you know, proforma connection modes.
Amanda Reeves: Speaking of your blog posts, I know your Art of Gig newsletter was a really valuable resource for me when I was preparing to make the leap into gig work. And I've really enjoyed rereading it now, congratulations on releasing it as the two volume set.
For the final question, I really wanted to ask you about one of the ideas that really stood out for me. This idea of 20% beef. Starting a beef, but only 20% beef as a way to challenge assumptions and present alternatives.
Venkatesh Rao: So yeah, about starting beefs. It's one of the questions that comes up, like a hundred percent of the time for people just starting out in their gig career is they literally have no idea how to solve the chicken and egg problem of you can't get leads and gigs until you have a track record and testimonials and you can't get the track record and testimonials until you've actually landed a few gigs.
Right. How do you break out of that vicious cycle of not being able to get started and there's like things you can try that are kind of like dumb and naive, like, you know, just making up a hundred cold pitches and sending them off to the CEOs of a hundred companies. It might work in rare cases if you have like some really special skill, but in general, like brute force does not work. And uh, I was thinking about, alright, what can I help people think about this and do I know any tricks? And then looking back on my own history, I realized that what actually worked for me is this rule I called, uh, 20% beef. I'm not sure the idiom is, um, common everywhere. it sounds like it's common in Australia as well as the US but beefing is like, you know, just picking a bone of contention and fighting with people especially in public. I wrote an article in 2020 called The Internet of Beefs, where I analyzed social media as this is basically like a medieval jousting arena where it's like all knights having jousting contests all the time. And it's, the way it plays out is that you pick a beef with people and litigate that very publicly, and there's like, what I would say, a hundred percent beef is this kind of like, Hobbesian, toxic, pointless, end of history warfare that does nobody any good where you're fighting for the sake of fighting. So you shouldn't be in that mode where you just get a reputation as a combative person who's like fighting all the time for no good reason. But a little bit of that is actually really valuable.
And the reason is, people are so nice to each other, and I think this may be more of a problem in the anglophone world than all parts of the world, but people generally don't challenge each other publicly. If you see somebody spouting bullshit, it's courteous in the anglophone world, not to call it out.
And I know Australians tend to be much more plainspoken than Americans, but even Australians I've met, the culture is, unless you have a good reason to, you don't call other people out on their bullshit, even if it's like an outright lie, unless it affects you. If there's kind of this live and let live, culture and discourses, which creates this whole culture of everybody's like 90% noise and nobody's calling anybody else out. And for people who are new to a topic or an industry, it's like when they're trying to process the, say, say you're new to the semiconductor industry and you're on Twitter, following like the VCs and engineers and CEOs who are talking about semiconductors, and they're so nice to each other 90% of the time and never calling each other out or disagreeing in public. How do you know what signal and what's noise? How do you actually learn, uh, how to think in that domain? And, the reason I think 20% beef is good is once you actually do the work and learn about a subject and start forming like well-formed deep opinions about it, you start to actually suspect and smell like, all right, this is bullshit.
This is real. This, they're just saying to like, please their clients, this they're just saying to be nice, and it's a very powerful move to basically call bullshit on something nobody else is doing so far at the moment. And what that does is, you suddenly bring into common knowledge the idea that, hey, this thing that everybody kind of like conventionally agrees is a good idea, is actually a seriously bad idea and wrong.
Once people see that, they admit it to themselves and then they're like, wow, this open opens a whole new vein of powerful thought for me. And then, if you happen to the one who sort of said it out loud for the first time, they come to you as the thought leader of that particular direction of thinking.
And I think this is a great way for, uh, young, independent consultants and gig workers to actually, not just create a brand for themselves. A brand is kind of like a superficial, visible sign of doing this deeper thing. But really actually, um, going back to the origin story question.
Picking a beef of the right sort and like popping from the crowd is actually part of your origin story. It's like you were one among the thousands of faceless people doing like, you know, futurism or whatever it is you do. But then at one point you dare to say that this conventionally believed thing is bullshit, and here's the right way to think about it.
Suddenly you pop and people start paying attention to you as somebody who's a serious person and a truth teller. And it can sort of break out of the chicken and egg loop. And I think there's other ways to break into this career, but this is, I think, a good and useful way to do it.
Amanda Reeves: I love the way you talk about that you don't have to pick every battle, but you do have to pick a few. One of the things that really stood out to me was that yes, you, you're picking beef, but you don't just pick beef and stop there.
There needs to be a sense of offering, offering some sort of viable alternative. So just having a go at something, that's a very Australian phrase, having a go, just having a go at something and, you know, tearing it apart is one thing, but the work doesn't stop there.
There needs to be a piece that comes along and suggests an alternative.
Venkatesh Rao: Yes. And, and, and, uh, for people who like geeky metaphors, the metaphor I came up with for that is, if you're challenging Euclid's geometry, and you say the parallel postulate is bullshit, and you stop there, you've not done anything. People are gonna continue using Euclidean geometry, but then if you go on and say, Hey, let's replace the parallel postulate with this alternate idea about parallel lines, and then you build a whole new geometry on that, and that goes to like, you know, the theory of relativity, you've opened up a whole new world, right?
So that's, I think, the important part of like, pick a beef, but make it principled on the basis of ideas, not people. And then offer an alternative that actually gives people a choice of a different, you know, world to explore.
Amanda Reeves: I think that's so important for futures and foresight work because if you're going to pick a beef with, you know, the current narrative or you know, assumptions that we hold really deeply, you can't. Well, you can, but it doesn't go very far. You need to then provide something else to consider.
Venkatesh Rao: Yeah.
Amanda Reeves: Well, Venkat, on behalf of the Future Pod team and our community, thank you so much for making time to be a guest today. It's been such a pleasure to have a longer chat with you and hear about what you're up to and how you think about your work.
Venkatesh Rao: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Amanda Reeves: Today's guest was Venkatesh Rao, writer, consultant, and yak herder at the Yak Collective. If you'd like to dive into Venkat's previous work, I have three book recommendations for you.
Tempo explores timing, tactics, and strategy in narrative driven decision-making.
The Gervais Principle is an internet cult classic that uses The Office to explore organizational dynamics and is a fantastically entertaining and insightful read.
And The Art of Gig, a two volume philosophical guide to the modern gig economy for independent consultants.
You can find links to Venkat's writing and the Yak Collective in the show notes.
FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you'd like to support the pod, please check out our Patreon link on the website. I'm Amanda Reeves. Thanks for joining us today.