Ben Gutmann
speaker
194 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 15 Nov
Ben Gutmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
So there's, to borrow another quote from somebody who is often misattributed, Einstein said everything should be made simpler, as simple as possible, but no simpler.
the truth is there's lots of complex things in the world right international diplomacy is complex uh you know corporate mergers are complex the human eyeball all these things are really you know really intricate they have lots of pieces they interact in different ways but there's a difference between complex and complicated so complex is a natural state of being complicated
is when we take something that could be simple and we don't do the work to make it so.
When we pull it in the complex direction.
And that is what I believe is the root of most of our communication problems.
Oh, yeah.
And actually, one of the pieces of inspiration in some of the work I have here is a version really close to that, actually.
So Randall Munroe, who is a web comic and author, wrote a book called Thing Explainer.
And what he did was he took all these really complex topics, stuff like the nuclear bomb and the Supreme Court,
and distilled them using just the 1,000 most common words in the English language and used that to explain the electromagnetic spectrum, all these different interesting things.
And there's a humorous result because even the word 1,000 for the 1,000 most common words is not in there, so you have to use 1,100.
It does show as an exercise that you can really, really get there on most topics.
Well, so it's important to look first at understanding that simplicity is not necessarily the fewest number of letters or words or sentences or pages or slides or whatever it is you have in your message.
It's the least amount of friction.
And if you're a designer, so my background is in design and if you're a designer, you understand this.
If you work in user experience, you'll, you'll know that what you want to optimize for is the least amount of friction.
You don't want somebody to have to go through lots of different steps that are complicated and have all these different fields and everything else that between you and the shopping cart, right?
You want to be able to get them straight there.
And the same logic applies for how we communicate.
Because sometimes that does mean this story would be better told with two or three slides instead of one slide.
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