What Works

The tech industry has a central role in shaping our work, our communication, and even our identities. Its mythology is woven into the products and services we use on a daily basis. So understanding how the people leading the tech industry think—how they perceive their own stories and generate their own hype—is a solid step toward making sense of what can seem so nonsensical.

And there is one book I go back to over and over again when I need to make sense of our mythologies of disruption and failure, value and genius—and that's What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub.

In this episode, I share 3 ideas from that book that help me make sense of the headlines shaping politics, business, and work.

Footnotes:

• What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
• "Mark Zuckerberg" on In Bed With The Right

Find a text version of this episode at whatworks.fyi!

• (00:00) - Introduction

What does my new website, the TikTok "ban," and the ongoing purge of "woke" from government websites have in common?

The power to decide what content counts and what doesn't—and use that power to shape the knowledge and experiences of others.

In this episode, I continue to examine the state of The Website today. Amidst a backdrop of diffuse epistemic violence, the website is both an archive and a communication tool we can use to preserve the knowledge and ways of knowing we care about. In the second half of the episode, I share a piece I wrote last year on how artificial intelligence disrupts and deskills our critical thinking.

Footnotes:

• "Broken Links" by Tara McMullin on What Works
• "Knowledge Is Power: A Brief History" on Mental Floss
• Full text of the House bill "banning" TikTok
• "Multiple Ways of Knowing: Expanding How We Know" by Elissa Sloane Perry and Aja Couchois Duncan on Nonprofit Quarterly
• "Black Box Thinking" by Tara McMullin on What Works
• "Scientists Increasingly Cannot Explain How AI Works" by Chloe Xiang on Vice
• "Google is redesigning its search engine: it's AI all the way down" on The Verge
• "Hostile Epistemology" by C. Thi Nguyen
• "Microsoft Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills" by AJ Dellinger on Gizmodo

Find a written version of this audio essay, subscribe free to the What Works newsletter, and learn more about working with me to turn your meaningful ideas into remarkable content at whatworks.fyi.

• (00:00) - EP 486: How Knowledge Really Does Become Power

I'm back! Maybe you noticed or maybe you didn't—but the show (and my newsletter) has been on its longest hiatus since its inception. In the final quarter of 2024, I decided I wanted to (re)consolidate my web presence, abandon most "platforms," and breathe some new life into my work.

This episode reflects on both my own challenges with wrangling my online presence and the ways the state of the web has made it extra challenging. While there’s a lot to complain about when it comes to social media platforms and the billionaires wreaking havoc in online and offline spaces, this isn’t that kind of episode. It’s an effort to illuminate some less obvious issues that, in turn, can help us figure out what we want to do next.

If you've been feeling a bit blah or displaced or just overwhelmed in your online work lately, I hope this episode gives you a fresh mental model for making sense of those feelings. And I hope that model gives you the inspiration it's given me.

Footnotes:

• Check out the new (and hopefully improved) whatworks.fyi!
• "For the Love of God, Make Your Own Website" by Gita Jackson, Aftermath
• "Decoder guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future" on Decoder
• "Digital Homelessness" by Venkatesh Rao
• "The Web Renaissance takes off" by Anil Dash
• "The Creator Economy Is Eating Creative Acts" by Tara McMullin, featuring Kate Tyson & Charlie Gilkey
• "Wait, I Think You're Platform-Pilled" by Tara McMullin
• "Is it OK to say the word 'homeless?' Or should you say 'unhoused?'" on The Guardian
• Alienation by Rahel Jaeggi
• Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding by Rebecca Falkoff
• American Bulk by Emily Mester
• Creating Digital Exhibitions for Cultural Institutions by Emily Marsh

You can check out the What Works archive at whatworks.fyi - where you’ll find a written essay version of this episode. Plus, you can find out more about working with me to turn your own meaningful ideas into remarkable content. 

• (00:00) - What even is a website today?

So, health insurance is in the news. And so is Americans' feelings about it. I got to wondering how we ended up with this terrible health insurance system in the United States. I uncovered a fascinating story about the marketing campaign that sunk Truman's national health insurance program in the 1940s. I also discovered some interesting parallels to popular marketing messages among today's influencers, gurus, and marketers.

Today's episode is a little trip through history that will hopefully put some of our current issues in perspective.

Footnotes:

• Gallup's survey data on healthcare
• "The Lie Factory" by Jill Lepore, in The New Yorker
• Interview with Leone Baxter in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
• "Campaigns, Inc." via the California State Archives
• "The deprofessionalization of medicine. Causes, effects, and responses." by RR Reed and D Evans
• "Professional Identity Misformation and Burnout: A Call for Graduate Medical Education to Reject “Provider” by Deborah Ehrlich and Joseph Gravel
• "White Privilege and Professionalization: A Decolonial and Critical Feminist Perspective on Professional Nursing" by Natalie Stake-Doucet
• "Why Doesn’t the United States Have National Health Insurance? The Role of the American Medical Association" by Marcella Alsan and Yousra Neberai
• "Oli London & the Right Wing Grift" by Matt Bernstein

Find an essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi!

A problem, question, or challenge is often more than meets the eye. But we're biased to accept how an issue is initially framed. We acquiesce to the original terms. That's called acquiescence bias. When we don't counteract our acquiescence bias, we miss opportunities to get to the root cause or think creatively about a challenge.

Today, I share 3 ways to resist acquiescence bias as you consider your next moves, goals, or plans.

Footnotes:

• "In Your Spare Time" from No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin (read it or listen on Spotify)
• "Don't call it a Substack." by Anil Dash
• More on why podcast metrics were so screwy this year
• A skeet thread on the difference in referral traffic from Bluesky and X

• (00:00) - What is spare time?

Do you see your software?

Do you see how it influences how you run meetings, brainstorm ideas, fulfill your responsibilities, and communicate with others? Do you see how its text boxes, radio buttons, tabs, search results, and menus train you to think? Do you see it, or do you just use it?

Footnotes:

• "The impossible dream of good workplace software" on Decoder 
• "Practico-inertia" by Rob Horning

Stop me if you've heard this before: we're overloaded and overwhelmed by information. There's more content than you could ever hope to consume. More scientific theories, philosophical concepts, and art forms than you could ever hope to engage with.

Enter personal knowledge management (PKM). It's a modern term for an ancient practice—how one collects, preserves, and utilizes knowledge worth remembering. In this episode, I speak with Sari Azout, the founder of Sublime, an app for personal knowledge management (but that description truly doesn't do it justice). We talk about the philosophy behind the product and how that plays out in the product's design.

Plus, I dive into how Sari's PKM philosophy is part of a long lineage of practices people have used to remember what's worth preserving.

Footnotes:

• Check out Sublime or get started right away with an invite!
• Too Much to Know by Ann Blair
• More about Sarah Mackenzie & Read-Aloud Revival
• "The Glassbox and the Commonplace" by Steven Johnson
• More on John Locke's commonplace book index system
• What do you want to preserve?
• More on Corita Kent at the Corita Art Center

Every new episode is published in essay form at WhatWorks.FYI!

• (00:00) - How I keep track of ideas and information

In management cybernetics, there are 3 types of systems: simple, complex, and exceedingly complex. The systems we pay the most attention tend to be, you guessed it, exceedingly complex. In this episode, I explore what that means for how we do our work and run our businesses—and what happens when we forget that people are exceedingly complex systems, too.

Footnotes:

• Cyberboss by Craig Gent
• Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
• Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
• "Practicing the Future: 3 Ideas for Rethinking Change" at What Works     

Every episode is published in essay form at What Works and delivered in my newsletter—check it out and subscribe!

You've probably heard of a scarcity mindset. Maybe you've even been accused of having one!

In this short, I explore the false binary of scarcity and abundance mindsets to propose a third way: resourcefulness.

Footnotes:

• "Thought-terminating cliché" on Wikipedia
• Adam Tooze on The Ezra Klein Show
• Information on the US tax gap
• "Breaking boundaries to creatively generate value" in The Journal of Business Venturing
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• This is a significant revision of a piece originally published in 2021

Essay versions of every episode are published at whatworks.fyi!

We're constantly bombarded by data. And it's easy to think that with the right clues, we could answer the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything.

But data aren't facts. They're not a secret code. Data are media—they mediate our interactions with the world around us. To make them useful and meaningful, we need a critical framework for working with data as media. That's what I've got for you today—a deep dive on how predictability, relevance, and actionability can help us see data for what they are and for what they're not.

Footnotes:

• Anytime I talk about data and how it mediates our lives and work, I'm referencing the work of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen and his concept of value capture. I've written about his theory previously here
• I also make use of Byung-Chul Han's The Crisis of Narration, specifically his critique of a 2008 Wired essay by Chris Anderson about the end of theory

Get written versions of all new episodes at whatworks.fyi—where you can also become a premium subscriber for just $7 per month and help support the work I do at What Works.

• (00:00) - A hypothetical