How to be a polymath

Danny Crichton:

Uri, thank you so much for joining us.

Uri Bram:

Thank you for having me.

Danny Crichton:

So I feel like you are one of the world's most interesting man. I think of you as the Don Equis New York meetup host. If we're thinking about the meme, and ironically, you're probably the only person who's shown up in the studio wearing a jacket. I mean, you are, as much as we're faking this, I'm sorry we're not doing this on video, Chris, our producer is always pissed off we never do video because I have a face for radio and apparently-

Uri Bram:

Likewise.

Danny Crichton:

You even have the elbow pads.

Uri Bram:

A jacket with elbow patches, though I have to say it came with the elbow patches.

Danny Crichton:

I don't think, do the academics actually attach their own elbow pads?

Uri Bram:

I think they do, but I think they were also faking it. Maybe a hundred years ago they really did wear through at the elbows, but now it's merely a marker.

Danny Crichton:

It's merely a marker. Well, it reminds me of a math professor who was allergic to chalk but still had to have chalk.

Uri Bram:

Wow.

Danny Crichton:

And so he would wear three-foot long rubber gloves and would hold his mouth away from the board. And I was like, I get that chalk and math is something that really works well together, but at some point if you're allergic to something, you probably should give it up. Nonetheless, you are the Don Equis of events. So you just launched a new game called People Do Thing. It got Kickstarted, I believe you've launched it. You were kind enough to send me a demo copy, super fun. You've been hosting kind of meetups all around, but that is not the only thing you do. You've run a publication, you wrote a book, a book that I think was really strongly reviewed, and then I just asked about it and you told me not to read it.

So you also are the world's worst salesperson. You just sit suavely at the side of the bar sipping on a whiskey highball or something like this and having a good time. You've hosted meetups all across the city, you host policy events, you had a smell competition. It's just kind of endless. Give me a perspective on your mind and your brain because you're probably one of the most polymathic people we've had on the podcast. Where do all these ideas come from and where do they go?

Uri Bram:

This is the nicest introduction I've ever had. I'm just blown away. Where did the ideas come from? I mean, they come from space, right? Do you feel like you ever have ideas? I feel like ideas attack me when I'm not expecting it. They come from some, the fates or whatever, the muses have just sung something and occasionally they sing it to you.

Danny Crichton:

I have muses. I'm also at a venture capital firm where people come pitching every single day and a lot of people are pitching all the time. So I feel like I'm surrounded with so many ideas that I just need to find a void and cleanse myself of the million-trillion-dollar ideas that are coming in every morning.

Uri Bram:

Do you find that your new ideas are recombinations of the ideas that you got pitched or you feel like sometimes something truly new hits you?

Danny Crichton:

The stuff I get excited about is almost always out of nowhere and I have no idea where it comes from. It's like a bad neuron hit in the brain and I'm like, oh my God, what about that? And it's like 6:00 AM in the morning and that gets me really excited.

Uri Bram:

Yeah. Well, continuing my trend of being the worst salesman, that's what happens to me and I can't explain it or promise to do it again in future. I think there's something really fun about being at the frontier. Firstly, you can just do something that is much more interesting. No one has set the rules yet, so you get to make something up from scratch, but also you can do something much worse. If you're at the frontier on something, you can make a half-baked product and it'll still be the best thing in town, whereas 20 or 30 years later when people have refined it and refined it and refined it, then you're in a game of who's most able to pull off that refinement.

Danny Crichton:

So I also just think, similar to you, I do love the 80% done kind of rule, like I'm not a perfectionist. I am a perfectionist and it actually is very distracting as a creative process. So I have to just move on. I have to throw things away. I have to get them launched. That's why there's so many risk game scenarios that are like we've all played, they're sitting around the table, but we haven't actually produced them, because I'm like, there's a million tweaks we need to do before anyone sees this and then we never publish them and now they're a year behind.

Uri Bram:

Relate 100%.

Danny Crichton:

You've joined a lot of our Riskgaming experiences. You've been to Hampton at the Cross-Roads. We were trying to go through the whole math here. You've been to Experimental Automata, which we've not published. You've been to Gray Matter, which we've not published. We are very behind schedule. But I mean, how has that experience, has that been rejiggering of your creative energies?

Uri Bram:

I love the Lux risk games. I think it's the most interesting thing I've seen anyone do in communications and community building, and I rave about it to random strangers all the time. So I'm a big fan. I think part of what I love about it is the in-person element. I think I am sick of being on my phone and yet completely addicted to my phone, and having an event, which I think you mentioned earlier that you don't actually tell people to get off their phones during the events, but I have noticed that once you are at a risk game, you're just absorbed and you don't even think to pick up your phone, which is an incredible achievement. I think that should be the headline.

Danny Crichton:

We don't headline that and you are correct, we never tell people to get off their phones. They just never really use them.

Uri Bram:

Yeah, I think what I love about risk games is that I'm often trying to optimize for the wrong thing, and I have this aha moment at the end where I had some goal and either I was or wasn't successful at my goal, but afterwards I realized that actually I was distracted and I should have been focusing on something else completely. And so even if I did well at what I thought I was doing, I end up... I consistently lose these risk games, by the way, I think I've been in the bottom half for most of the games I've played. But that's been very enlightening and I think that's a really important lesson.

Danny Crichton:

I think we had a couple of VCs play Hampton at the Cross-Roads as a union president there. And I will say we did have to help the player for the union president because they were really not good at union organizing. And it was like, no, no, no, you're not. You're not thinking about what a union does and what it needs to succeed. There's a very base level of knowledge here that we had to solve. I think you're being too modest. I think you've actually done quite a bit better. But then you have your own game. So when did you start thinking about People Do Thing?

Uri Bram:

Yeah, so Person Do Thing started out when I was in Thailand 10 years ago, I was at a cafe and trying to explain that I'm vegetarian despite not speaking any Thai. And I was there with a friend who spoke a very little small amount of Thai. So we all kind of talked to this waitress and we're saying, "No beef, no chicken, no pork." And there was this moment where you could just see in her face she understood. She was like, oh, these people are trying to tell me very badly that they want food with no meat in it. And so we started this conversation about what's the smallest set of words that you could use to describe every other concept? And so the game is essentially you have 34 very simple words you're allowed to use, like person and do and thing, and you get given a card, a word you're trying to describe, and then you try and describe it using only these simple words. So you sound very stupid, but it does, I think, have quite a lot of philosophical depth.

Danny Crichton:

And what do you think that depth is?

Uri Bram:

So the game embodies important curse of knowledge problems. So you see people often playing badly because they know what the answer is, the description they're giving does fit the answer, but the description also fits many other things, and they just can't understand why the people who are guessing are not going on the right track at all. I think that's very interesting. I think learning how to encourage the right directions from people, often the best way to get an idea into someone else's head is not trying to directly and abstractly describe it, but to tell a story, to narrativise it and kind of draw them along a path where inevitably the answer will be the thing that you want to say. And I think these kinds of tricks are, I'm obviously talking my own book here, but I think that playing this game can help you communicate better and think better about other people in a way that's incredibly interesting and just very fun.

Danny Crichton:

Isn't that a theme across a lot of your work though?

Uri Bram:

I think so. Yeah. I think I have the... You know people say about good in software and good in hardware. Some people are born with natural empathy and the ability to read other people's minds. And I think anyone who went to high school with me would say that I lacked these abilities as a teenager. And so I think I spent a lot of my life trying to figure out how to communicate and thinking about it and practicing it. And I feel like a lot of my projects, you're right, do tend to bring that together.

Danny Crichton:

Your book is literally called Thinking Statistically.

Uri Bram:

Yes. So I wrote this book just after college, Thinking Statistically, I had a really beloved professor in undergrad who I asked one day, "How many of the undergrads here do you think know about Bayes' theorem?" And he said, "A hundred percent. Everyone knows about Bayes theorem." And then he kind of stopped and reflected and said, "Maybe not the music majors. So let's just say 99%." And I thought, you're very ill calibrated here. This explains why-

Danny Crichton:

Your priors are absolutely awful. Your priors are awful.

Uri Bram:

Exactly.

Danny Crichton:

That's the problem with Bayes theorem.

Uri Bram:

And I loved this professor, and I thought this explains why so many of the stats classes, the intro stats class will just tell you how to calculate a standard deviation, but it'll tell you very slowly, and I actually think there's this separate set of conceptual tools that all statisticians and econometricians have, but it seemed to me that no one was trying to explain them directly. So I wrote this very short book, which tried in a relatively light, fun way to explain those concepts.

Danny Crichton:

But I think, you keep going back to this pattern because I think about some of the projects, you're in Thailand 10 years ago, you wrote this as a post-undergrad. It's all about trying to upgrade people's thinking and cognitive capabilities.

Uri Bram:

Interesting. I was not expecting Riskgaming to be a therapy session for me, but this is working very well. Yes, this is-

Danny Crichton:

Sense and perception, you hosted this event, and I apologize, I couldn't make it, but you hosted this scent, museum of scent, or explain that a little bit.

Uri Bram:

Yeah, there's an amazing gallery here in Manhattan called Olfactory Art Keller, which basically stakes the claim that most other art is visual, and yet why can't we have art for the other senses? So he has this very small gallery, which is a series of bottles that you sniff, and I organized a number of events getting people to come to this gallery. We had a little quiz where he would give you a bottle that represented a country or a musician or something and you had to guess what it was. I found that very fascinating. I also came to an amazing scent event that you hosted, right? With Osmo.

Danny Crichton:

With Osmo, yeah.

Uri Bram:

Yeah, that was phenomenal. How are they doing?

Danny Crichton:

They're inventing new scents all the time now and scents that no one's ever smelled before, which is the fun part. So I mean obviously we have existing ingredients that you can do from earth, but now that we have the 3D modeling for smell, you're actually able to go to the inverse direction and say, okay, what is something that we predict you will perceive as a certain scent, but no one in the world has ever smelled before? And so they now have multiple ones of these. It's the first time, like you were the first person in the world to have smelled this, which is kind of a special treat.

Uri Bram:

I mean, this is incredible. It's hard to explain in audio, but this is the same feeling of being on the frontier of if you're pushing the boundaries of something that's never been done before. I think it just opens up space. I think naturally most people, once they are doing something that has been done many times previously, will fall into the same patterns, the same rules, the same, oh, it's always done this way. So I often feel that with nonfiction books, there's a format that most nonfiction books fall into, and this is just what you do, and without really thinking about it, you do it the same way everyone else has done it. But yeah, if you're in some new open land that has never been explored, you can suddenly make all the decisions yourself and you feel differently while making those kind of products.

Danny Crichton:

Does that attract you from an energy perspective? Is that what, you know, you go into this and you're like, no one understands this, I'm angry. People need to understand this more.

Uri Bram:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. Anger is extremely motivating. I'm very motivated by novelty and I'm very motivated by, oh, people just don't get it, and surely we can collectively get it.

Danny Crichton:

Do you think people can collectively get it?

Uri Bram:

I don't know. If I'm honest with myself, there's some days when I think, oh, each of us is born with a mind that is directed at certain things, and if you weren't already feeling connected with this kind of thing, maybe it's not for you. But other days I think, oh, everyone can get everything if we just figure out how to teach it.

Danny Crichton:

Thinking about different types of audiences. One of the challenges I always have is you have a new thesis. It takes time to persuade. A lot of what I do is argumentation. It's not enough to just expose people to a new idea because oftentimes, particularly if it's an idea that is novel, strange, unusual, people just reject it immediately. So you have to do it slowly. There are, I'm not always trying to persuade, but I do want people to understand something and they oftentimes will not. And so you have to take multiple steps. Oftentimes with risk game, I think of that as the exact same thing with this game, this experience, these different scenes to open your mind to a concept that you don't understand, whether that is national security because you come from technology or vice versa, you're playing a role that you've never done before to your own point, you oftentimes have these moments at the end, these epiphanies, that is what we're trying to do. Epiphanies are really, really hard to come by.

We were texting before this call and you were like, "What are the most impactful books you've ever read in your entire life?" I do have a list of every book, near every book I've read in my life, and I was like, because the epiphany moment, I don't know how to... Will it work for you? There are books that were life-changing for me, and then other people might read it and say, this wasn't a good time or you were busy, it just didn't hit you at the right moment. So I'm curious, oftentimes a lot of what you do is one-off. You've hosted events, you've hosted the museum of smell, this gallery experience, whatever the case may be. Now you have a game that anyone can kind of play, so decentralized, you're not necessarily hosting. But I'm curious, to what degree do you want to double down and just say, hey, you got to play 5, 10 times, got to find the right magic moment, as opposed to saying, hey, it's an ephemeral experience and it's over.

Uri Bram:

Interesting. I often feel with books that you have to meet them at the right time in your life. And I also have this problem of thinking, someone asks for a book recommendation and I think, well, I enjoyed it five years ago, but I don't even know if I would enjoy it today and I certainly don't know if you would enjoy it today. And at best I can kind of say like, oh, if you're into this, you might be into that. I will say that if I was going to heist any one object, it would be Danny Crichton's list of books, best books ever. I would break it into any gallery or apartment and steal it.

Danny Crichton:

How about the Louvre? Breaking in, 88 million in jewels and we found you.

Uri Bram:

No, you know, it's possible. The Crown of France can lie the gutter. I want the list of the best books to read. I think there's this interesting problem I have where I often read books for silly reasons, and a book is a big time commitment. You're spending a lot of your time in order to do it, but I'll end up reading a book and being like, well, wait a minute, where did I hear about this? I think I just saw some random tweet about it. Whereas I should just ask my five smartest friends, what's the five books I've had the biggest impact on you? And then read those, whether or not they necessarily will land the same way.

Danny Crichton:

Have you read, I don't know if we ever talked about this, have you read Finite and Infinite Games?

Uri Bram:

No.

Danny Crichton:

See, that's a book that is widely recommended. Actually, if you look statistically for a lot of Reddit posts or Hacker News posts, people have done these analyses of what are the most recommended books. Finite and Infinite Games is really recommended as it has a philosophy. It's very mathematical and rendered down. So the idea is like you have relationships that are finite games, and so you play them, they're transactional, and then the more that you can kind of move towards infinite games, a totally different mentality, right? There's sort of an infinite value function, and so thinking about it transactionally is really, really poor. I hated this book, it's truly like, I don't understand. It is one of these, I'm like, I'm sorry. And I know if you're listening, definitely people who've read this, it was like life transforming based on statistical data on the internet, because that's also our listenership. It made no impact on me. I quit a third of the way through.

Uri Bram:

Amazing. I mean, so something I've been thinking about a lot recently is agreeableness and disagreeableness, and the fact that most of the progress in the world comes from disagreeable people, as in you kind of have to buck consensus and you have to be willing to say something and for people to disagree with you and to keep pushing through in order to change things. You seem skeptical. Is this not true? Can you make progress via agreeableness? That would be great.

Danny Crichton:

I agree with you. I think when you look at Brian Eno's idea of a scenius, groups of people that come together into a scene, so genius plus scene coming together. Why are there certain communities, the Vienna Circle or the Bloomsbury Group in history or Los Alamos? It's not that everyone was collegial and was nice and pleasant, and in some cases they were very much not. There were real assholes in all these groups that everyone hated.

But what you end up figuring out is that the argumentation triggers folks. Maybe back to your argument about getting angry is motivating. If you're an intellectual and someone tells you you're wrong, "You should be offended by this and I will prove you. You are incorrect, and I am going to show you that you are wrong in your theory and answers, and we will fight back." And it galvanizes you, it goads you. I mean, one of the biggest challenges I think with a lot of internet writing is a lot of people are passive readers. So you get a lot of page count views, a lot of people are reading it, but no one ever responds because very few people actually write or respond to it. How many people read something you do and take it seriously and write a repost? I would love, I want more reposts. I want people to just trash the hell out of it. It's great. It's fun.

Uri Bram:

One of the things I wish people understood is that you can just email people who have written things on the internet and that except for the very, very, very extremely successful, you're probably way underestimating... sorry, overestimating how much mail most people get and how delighted they would be to hear your opinion about whatever they just put out.

Danny Crichton:

Yes. Yeah.

Uri Bram:

I have made some of my best friends by emailing strangers on the internet. My favorite of which is a dear friend I'm going to go visit now in Seattle, who we met through Amazon primarily because I wrote Thinking Statistically. And they have the little algorithm that says "People who enjoyed this book also enjoyed X." I just emailed the guy who had the most recommended book for people who'd enjoyed my book, and I said, "Hey, Amazon says we should be friends." And here we are 15 years later.

Danny Crichton:

So it worked.

Uri Bram:

It worked. It went very well.

Danny Crichton:

I've never thought of the Amazon shopping algorithm as a social networking tool.

Uri Bram:

I think they could build an amazing dating app just matching you with people who bought the same trash that you did. I think this would be a huge success.

Danny Crichton:

Feels like very OkCupid like 10, 12, 14 years ago, and the algorithm and matching, and look, Amazon can barely keep Goodreads functional, let alone it'll be larded with 25 layers of ads and sponsored by the sponsor that you didn't want to sponsor by the most recommended.

Uri Bram:

Yes.

Danny Crichton:

Like a space balls level of indirection. But that's super interesting. I mean, is it just sending emails? Is it just connecting?

Uri Bram:

Yeah, I think just being friendly, having something intelligent to say. But yeah, I think mostly when I get comments on things I write, most of the things I write get no comments even though people have read them. And sometimes I have years later found out that someone read it and found it meaningful, but I never heard anything about this. And then, yeah, I think you have some highly disagreeable people who spend a lot of time online telling everyone else that everything they do is trash. And I think a lot of people would be surprised how that's the largest share of comments and feedback that many writers and thinkers get.

Danny Crichton:

Yes, yes. I do think, I guess this is where I was getting triggered by disagreeableness, but the key is having high quality critics is very motivating. It's one thing to send a flame. I've received so many death threats over the years, you lose count. And that's okay. I got more death threats over my attack on Android than anything I've ever written in my life. And you're like, oh, people really love Android. Sorry, I had no idea. On the other hand, what you really want as an intellectual is someone who takes you very seriously and says, "Okay, you wrote something, you put a lot of time into it. It was very meaningful and I read it really, really well."

Right? It's like the old quote about critics is like, they're criticizing the book you wrote, not the book you would've wanted or something like this, but you're taking the work seriously and responding to it. So I do think that that kind of intellectual community is suffering on the internet. There's just not a lot of folks who annotate the web, so to speak.

Uri Bram:

I'm sorry to digress, but what death threats have you got? You write incredible things.

Danny Crichton:

They're all over the place.

Uri Bram:

Surprised.

Danny Crichton:

The internet brings together unlikely bands of brigands and then they find your work, sometimes years later. I always appreciate that death threat that's like eight years too late. And it's like, oh, it's nice that SEO and Google has somehow directed you to a piece I wrote in 2017, and you did the work to find me, and like, "I absolutely hate this. You suck. I'm going to kill you." Period.

Uri Bram:

In a sense a great compliment. No, I think a lot about this because I think there's a lot of people with interesting ideas who basically decide it's not worth the fight. And anyone who is saying something revolutionary is probably wrong. I mean, mostly if you think that the consensus is wrong, then you are in fact wrong. But a lot of important progress is made by people who break consensus, and I worry that it's a rare confluence of person who has an interesting, important idea and is willing to spend 10 years of their life arguing back against critics until they can get the idea accepted.

Danny Crichton:

Have you argued against critics?

Uri Bram:

Very little. I'm a coward is essentially the issue here. So I don't publish things that I think will annoy people and therefore relatively little of my work gets-

Danny Crichton:

Do you think that that is a problem?

Uri Bram:

That I'm a coward? Yes. I think this is one of my great problems.

Danny Crichton:

That you don't have enough what's called intellectual courage to go and go do... Because what you do is you build a lot of these events, you bring a lot of communities together, and that's why the disagreeable thing is so funny because you're one of the most agreeable people I know.

Uri Bram:

Yeah.

Danny Crichton:

You show up, you bring everyone together, everyone's having a great time, and you bring very diverse groups of people together. So people who themselves disagree with each other, but somehow all agree with you. So I mean, isn't that a skill? Isn't that in its own self a valuable contribution?

Uri Bram:

Interesting. I hope so, yeah. I do think bringing people together is one of the most valuable things you can do in the world and very rarely rewarded in proportion. So I think within headhunting, maybe within investing to some degree, you can glean rewards from putting the right people together. But mostly if you put people together, whether it's socially, romantically, professionally, you can create huge value for other people and very little for yourself.

Danny Crichton:

You just wrote, I'm remembering you had rules for hosting parties that went pretty viral. I saw it all over the place. It was 14 rules, if I recall?

Uri Bram:

It was 21, but it was an arbitrary list of numbers.

Danny Crichton:

Inflation is very high these days in 2025, so the numbers are getting bigger all the time. But what were some of the rules?

Uri Bram:

I will say first of all that it was a sad lesson to me that people truly do love definitive statements. So there are no rules for hosting parties, but it was called 21 Facts About Hosting Parties. And I think if it had been 21 opinions, it would've done worse, and if it had been 21 incontrovertible truths, it would've done even better.

Danny Crichton:

But what were some of the rules?

Uri Bram:

Yeah, so one of my most concrete tips is to always start parties quarter to the hour because if you start something at 8:00 P.M. people will arrive at 8:30, but if you start it at 7:45, people will arrive at 8:00. This is an empirical thing I've noticed. I think you should do everything you can to get people to circulate. So my least favorite kind of dinner is when you're seated at a big round table, so you can only talk to the two people next to you. And I would much rather be somewhere where you're either standing if possible because you can more easily create and recombine groups, walk around, high top tables. I say take away the chairs around a table. I say put food and drink in different parts of the room so people have lots of excuses to go, "I'm just going to go over there and grab a drink. Just going to go over there and grab a snack."

Tell people who else is coming. I think people rarely go to an event if they know fewer than three people, at least in my social circles. Maybe in Hollywood among actors and extroverts, this is different, but in my nerdy intellectual circles, people don't want to go somewhere unless they know they'll know people. Either use an app that shows people who else is invited or tell people that, "Oh, so-and-so is also invited," or texts out a group invitation in a WhatsApp group and then people will know who else is coming. That kind of thing.

Danny Crichton:

I seem to recall, I mean, I also believe in the no chairs rule, as Chris will know, at one of our original summits, we had a huge crisis in which there were no chairs for four hours, and the negative feedback on that was very, very high. I have never seen so many ones and twos out of 10 on the anti-chair. I promised, I found this modernist chair from some artist that was just like the edge of the chair, so there was no seat. So it looked like a chair, but there was no way to actually sit in it, which I was like, "Here's your fucking chair, here's your soup." I do understand, but no, I think I'm with you. People tend to get locked in and I'm one of these folks that I always prefer to go in depth. I'd rather have a three-hour or four-hour conversation with one person than five in a conversation with 20, it's the appetizer versus main course. I want a good steak, not a slice of carrot or something like that, or pick your metaphor out.

But I do think the circulation is hard. Some people do it more gracefully than others. Some people are actually really good at it, others run. I was at a relatively awkward networking event that was mandatorily required to go to, and the number of people who just run away in order to try to do something else is very high. So there's some grace there. Although I think you can do a lot with the design of the event. In some way Riskgaming is very good at that because you need to negotiate and you need to run it the right way. And that was part of the excuse. It's like, "I got to go. I have to negotiate this contract and you're in my way."

Uri Bram:

And you have a shared context. You have a thing that you're doing together, a thing to start conversations. And yeah, I think that shared context and the catalyst for being able to talk about whatever else you might want to think about is really great.

Danny Crichton:

And then the other rule you had was that as host, you have to make it fun for yourself.

Uri Bram:

Yes. I tend to think that parties are like babies, and if you are stressed while holding them, they will be stressed too, and that you should make all other decisions according to keeping yourself comfortable and calm, basically. And so my main example is just having mediocre food that you order in but doesn't worry you is ultimately better than having the perfect, this dream you had in your head of baking this pie and making quiches for everyone. That's going to stress you out. If you can do that without stressing, you have my full admiration, but if that's going to stress you out, it's not worth it. It's better to just be calm and when people arrive that they see that you feel good and that you're not anxious because anxiety is quite infectious in this way.

Danny Crichton:

We were just talking about in, we'll call it the green room, but it was my office before the podcast, about the shattering of the attentional commons, which is a really fancy, intellectual, obnoxious way of saying that everyone's on their phones all the time and are distracted. It's very hard to get people to focus. I've even noticed in dinners in the last year, not necessarily dinners I host because I really don't host that often because I'm always intimidated to host and it's a huge amount of work and I am worried about the quiches because I'm a terrible cook. As a side note, I am really bad at opening eggs. I continue to smack them on the counter and then they smash and they blow up, and then I have raw egg juice all over the kitchen. I don't even know what to do. I don't know how to open an egg. Everyone knows how to cook. I know how to vaguely cook an egg. I can't open the damn things. I would buy one of those machines that would like pre-open and drop it in.

Uri Bram:

The Juicero of eggs. That would be great.

Danny Crichton:

The Juicero of eggs. That's actually kind of a funny invention. That's something we could find. We can fund that. We will angel fund that. But we were talking about the fact that people are losing focus. And I do think we're at this, I don't know if you've read any of the huge literature that's been written on stolen focus and this idea of returning to this, but Simone Weil, very famous French philosopher, is very much back in vogue for some folks, Iris Murdoch, who made attention the core theme of a lot of her philosophy of saying what we choose to spend time on, what we choose to focus on, what we choose to put our attention on is extremely important. Our entire philosophy starts there. If we don't care about something, we don't put attention on it, it doesn't matter. It's a valueless object. It's a valueless concept. And that could be an intellectual concept like democracy. It could be something just like a relationship. Do you think going into 2026 that we are still struggling with the attentional commons and what do we do about it?

Uri Bram:

Oh, for sure. I find it very strange that I'm unable to stop myself from doing things that I don't really enjoy. So I think we've all had this feeling of you're scrolling Twitter or you're watching Netflix, whatever, and you're like, I'm not even really enjoying this anymore, and yet I am compelled to continue. I think there's a certain property of compulsiveness that is orthogonal to quality and enjoyment. There are certain books I read, murder mysteries. Like once you start, you can't stop, even if you're like, this is not good but I still need to know what happens. And there are other books. I often say my favorite novel is A Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. Every page is phenomenal, but I would read three pages, put it down and feel no compulsion to keep going. It took me multiple years to get through this book that genuinely was very good.

So yeah, I think this is a huge problem, is avoiding that, how to get out of that. You're doing something that you're not enjoying, but you're compelled to continue. And if someone else can help you break out of that loop, you're just clearly better off. Yeah, I love risk games that get me out of my house and off my phone, but I need more such things in my life

Danny Crichton:

One of the challenges I always have here is clearly we know how to engage people better. I'm forgetting the exact title of the Hollywood screenwriting book, like Save the Cat, but all the books, all the screenplays now follow the book's plot line down to the second in many, many cases. You can go to Marvel films, the third act starts at exactly the precise moment in every single film. The hero has a reversal at exactly this moment in the film.

And we've almost statistically have shown, and there are a bunch of books that are focused on the stats of storytelling, and they get reinforced. So we have this expectation, the pattern of right here, this thing should happen, hero's journey, et cetera. So it reinforces for all of us these plot lines. And so we see this in literature, we see this with movies, I think TV shows are maybe a little bit more creative in getting out of those sort of structures. But then when you go over to TikTok, social media, they're engagement engines, they suck you in. They're like a warp field and you're in a black hole. What do we do about that? Because we're just getting really, really good at knowing how to capture you and get you glued for life.

Uri Bram:

Yeah, I don't know that there's an individual level solution. Obviously thousands of people are spending their time figuring out how to optimize the TikTok algorithm to addict me, and am I able as one single person to defend against that? And there are supposedly apps that will postpone the dopamine high from various other apps, and yet I don't use them and I'm unable to get myself to. I think there is some, Lee Child, the thriller writer, has this New York Times piece called, I think, How to Create Suspense. And it's one of these amazing pieces where he says, before a certain year, televisions didn't have a certain feature and therefore they didn't have to worry about people coming back after the break. And once they did have to worry about people coming back after the break, they started doing something differently. They started asking questions before the break and then giving you the answer after the break.

And what is the thing that changed everything? Well, it's the invention of the remote control. And because of the remote control, people would switch channels during ad breaks. I'm not sure that I'm doing this justice, but he basically says, anytime there's an open loop, there's a question that you don't know the answer to, your brain will get stuck on that until you hear the answer. And as you're reading this article, you realize that he has done this to you while telling you about it. He has exactly created this open loop. And I basically worry that all of the apps and shows and contents that addict me are in one way or another pulling off this trick. And until I learn in my own brain to not care about the answer to open questions, there's no saving me.

Danny Crichton:

Well, I feel like this is the FOMO effect of newsletters, like we get dozens and dozens of newsletter editions, and at some point I want to know all the information. I want to know... This is what captures me. I don't have an addiction to TikTok. I don't even have TikTok installed. I defend TikTok's existence but in general, at the firm, Lux's policy I think in general is anti-TikTok is the corporate line. But nonetheless, I have an addiction to nonfiction and I have a FOMO of I want to know all the history, I want to know all the theses, I want to know all the secrets of the world, and yet I get way more enjoyment from novels. And I don't think just enjoyment from a pleasure perspective, but I also just think from an intellectual edification perspective, novels are vastly superior.

Uri Bram:

Interesting.

Danny Crichton:

Emotions are in there, memory, much more human effects that we generally don't get to include in nonfiction because it's very hard to put in terms of facts. It's very hard to report on outside of new journalism. And so I get these amazing books that sounds so great on the cover, these nonfiction, they're award winners, whatever. And then I'm reading them, I'm like, I am so bored. This is a really, really, really, really long magazine article. And I just don't know how to break the loop.

Uri Bram:

I find novels completely addictive. And you hear people make fun of oh, in the 1800s, they said that novels and recorded music were going to addict the youth. And I'm like, they were clearly correct. Simply, this is not mockable. I wish we could remix, I think we don't think enough about the intellectual property regime that gives us the products that we have. So within music, once you have accepted that people can make a cover, you can decide no one is allowed to cover my song, but if you allow anyone to cover your song, you have to allow everyone to cover your song in whatever style they want to do it. There's this kind of forced licensing agreement. And I often wonder what would happen if we did that for nonfiction books. What if someone could take a nonfiction book that had great content but was not well-written and just rewrite it and they had to give royalties to the original author, but they could redo it in a thriller style or in a mystery style or whatever and give it that narrative compulsiveness.

Danny Crichton:

Well, I do think across social media, I mean, I was just seeing this with 432 Park, the building on Park Avenue here in New York that has a bunch of construction issues. It's one of the super tall pencil towers. The trash can building is how it's usually referred to. Now you know what I'm talking about. But the New York Times had a big piece on it. They've had model big pieces, but they had a big piece on it like two, three weeks ago. And then I noticed that, I follow it because I'm a nerd, I follow all these engineering building channels on YouTube, and they all are now talking about the building and they're all recycling the work that was in the New York Times article. That's where it's coming from. If you didn't read the article, you wouldn't realize why is everyone talking about this all of a sudden?

It's like the NYT did all of the investigative work, did all these interviews. They're the people who actually did the direct connection, direct experience on the ground. And now you have all these storytellers who are coming, to your point, reading that article and saying, "Interesting. My audience would love this, but they're going to want it in my style, my version of this." So it's essentially a re-annotation, a rewriting to make it either more suspenseful or more YouTube-centric or whatever the case may be. So I do think there is a little bit of this ecosystem of people who essentially remix content.

Uri Bram:

Interesting. Yeah. I'm not on YouTube enough. I am not familiar with this one.

Danny Crichton:

Not addicted to that one.

Uri Bram:

I'm kind of glad that it's happening. Not yet, but I will be someday. I worry that we don't allocate our attention as content creators very well. There's lots of people writing the same mediocre thing, and I often wish that many of these writers would instead spend a hundred hours writing one really deeply researched thing instead of 10 kind of whatever things about whatever the latest trend is. But it's very hard to get people to allocate their research time and their thinking time in the way that I think would be socially optimal.

Danny Crichton:

Well, that's back to the intentional shattering, and that's both true of readers or viewers or listeners in that we are very distracted and we want to read 500 things simultaneously. And so we read a couple paragraphs of one thing, move on, come back, all over the place. It's also true of the writers and the content producers themselves. They're distracted as well. We are supposed to write a book, a newsletter, a podcast, host events. I'm not talking about myself, of course, certainly not. But you get distracted because there's so much stuff going on, and/or now I am talking about me, you get bored.

I mean, I have not written a book. I do get asked fairly regularly to write books, and I'm always like, a book is such a multi-year commitment. I have never picked, I have a lot of obsessions, and if you've read my work for 10, 15 years, there are things that'll come up for 30, 40 articles and then they disappear because you get bored with them. There wasn't probably a book there. It was maybe a chapter. And then I'm like, well, I've pissed on the mountain, I'm moving on to the next mountain. I've laid territory and that's it.

Uri Bram:

Most nonfiction books have one idea repeated 12 times. You often get the feeling like, oh, this was padded out. This didn't have to be this long.

Danny Crichton:

I get really tired of the padding.

Uri Bram:

It's really bad. My one defense of it is that people read books and it shapes their identities. So if I'm reading a book over the course of two or three months, and even if it's just the same idea repeated again and again, then it keeps me in the brain space of thinking, I'm a person who cares about X. Or, oh, how do I tie this into whatever I'm now seeing? And maybe it works like spaced repetition, but I just wish we did that explicitly. We would have very short books. And then you would get a weekly quiz in your email after you've read the book.

Danny Crichton:

Have you ever run into, there's a book called Quantum Country. Have you run into it?

Uri Bram:

I don't know it.

Danny Crichton:

This was a book focused on quantum computing, and the idea is, it's by Andy Matuschak, who is an interaction engineer over in San Francisco, very prolific online, lots of experimentation around learning technologies. One of the things that Andy was trying to do is exactly what you're describing. It's like, what if we just wrote the book from ground up in terms of the actual code and saying, we want you to be an expert on this subject. What would we do? And it actually has an SRS system, a space repetition system built into the book. So you go back, it was done a couple of years ago kind of pre-AI, but you could imagine with AI today, you could actually generate fresh exercises, make it more engaging, et cetera, et cetera. I do think that there's ways of improving the format.

Uri Bram:

Yes, it's interesting. I do actually know that book and I haven't read it. So this is kind of giving the life [inaudible 00:34:57] thing.

Danny Crichton:

Well, given how much everyone's investing in quantum, and again, I think the company line is, fuck quantum. I'm not sure I agree with that. But again, that's like think our corporate line right now. But everyone loves quantum these days, so you should read Quantum Country. But I know we're coming towards the end of the time here, so we're getting close to the end of the year as well. 2026 is around the corner. What are the new ideas? What are the new projects? What are you thinking about these days?

Uri Bram:

Oh my gosh. I am thinking a lot about games. I have a game that I'm excited to show you about, kind of like the next Cold War.

Danny Crichton:

The next Cold War?

Uri Bram:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not saying that it'll happen. Basically about technology, space races. It's about all-pay auctions. So this idea that everyone spends, but only the winner gets anything out of it. I think this is an important dynamic in the real world that games don't historically model very well. So I have a game around that that I'm very excited about. I am excited to spend time with you and go to whatever risk games may or may not come out in 2026. And I'm excited about small groups. We were talking about this just before. I think the optimal social media is a four to six person WhatsApp group, and I'm excited to have more of those in 2026 and spend more of my time directly engaging with a small group of other people rather than indirectly engaging with a very large group.

Danny Crichton:

I will say, we were talking about this beforehand. We basically did a full podcast before the podcast. We should just record everything. And Chris, we'll just dump a pile of goo and he will magically solve everything in the world today. But we were talking about small, small group chats because there are a lot of large group chats. I'm sure you're part of these massive chains with hundreds of people, and I mute all of them, and a lot of them are on discord, and I don't know how anyone does Discord because every time I go there, they're like, "You've missed 10,000 messages." And I'm like, I get that it's a flow, but as someone who we just described has a serious FOMO problem, I'm like, no, no. I need to catch up on what did I miss? Yeah, yeah. It's like a bar. You don't know every conversation they had in the bar when you're not at the bar. And I'm like, that's true, but I also can't catch up. I would catch up on it. I'd watch the surveillance footage and listen in on each of the conversations if I could, like you can on Discord.

But I do think that there is this model of, if you look at Dunbar's number, 150 is sort of the number of people we can keep track of. It's built around, and the concept here is you can look at different animal species and their social networks and connect that to the size of the brain. And as brains get larger, they get more sophisticated. And you can actually see that smaller animals with smaller brains tend to have very, very tight social networks. It might just be a couple of people. And then you can graph it out. And homo sapiens, given the size of the average homo sapien brain, should be around 150. That's the comfortable size of people we can do. So you can see this in a lot of context. A lot of companies change culture once you hit 150 in the startup world, because you're moving from a culture of everyone to a culture of abstractly I vaguely know everyone works here, but I don't even know your name anymore, apologies.

And so I do think that there's this motion in social media where we're going from broadcast to these very, very tight interlinked networks where there are little nodes, and you or yourself are in a node of a bunch of networks, others are similarly inter-networked, and so things will flow through those networks, but it's much more filtered than it is on the worldwide web today.

Uri Bram:

Absolutely. Well, I'm excited to discuss many.

Danny Crichton:

We will have more games. We will have, hopefully, you at the holiday party and you're working on the new Cold War, which is a very disagreeable topic I think these days.

Uri Bram:

That's true. That's true.

Danny Crichton:

I feel like people do think it's like a nice party game. It gets everyone together, it gets people communicating better. Now you're going to play factions and knock out whole continents in a nuclear conflagration. So even you have gotten more cynical over the course of 2025.

Uri Bram:

Oh gosh, it has happened. You're right. You're right.

Danny Crichton:

Uri Bram, thank you so much for joining us.

Uri Bram:

Thank you so much for having me.

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