Devon Zuegel
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Devon Zuegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But then we ended up getting to this place where we thought, oh, everything has to be controlled. Everything has to be planned. The width of your hallways, the distance of your house from the road. And we ended up, I think, overdoing it, frankly.
I think it's important for us to revisit what should be planned and what should be left to a more organic process where people can solve their problems on their own.
My basic framework is that there are some core decisions like making sure that everybody has access to clean water and that there are reasonable transportation networks throughout a city that allow things to be connected that do have to be planned in advance. But things like what color do you paint your house, especially for a big city, doesn't necessarily have to be so controlled.
I do think that you might have subsets of communities that still choose to do that. Sort of like a federal system, you want to have as many decisions pushed to the lowest level as possible so that the local level can make choices, but then also recognizing that there are some that require a more global solution, but always trying to push it down to that local level as much as possible.
Oh, I've learned so much from Michael Nielsen. I think probably the number one biggest thing from Michael is always having a sense of wonder in everything I do and everything I see and I learn. I was traveling in Japan last year and Michael happened to be in Japan as well. So we ended up hanging around Japan for a while together and
And he was doing a world tour at the time of all these different iconic places. Like in Japan, he was going to bamboo forests. Also, he went to Hiroshima to see where the bomb was dropped. And he went to all these world historic places. It made me realize that I had gotten jaded where I thought, oh, there's all these tourists. That's a tourist spot. I'm not going to go there.
But seeing Michael go like, no, this is one of the most important places in the world for world history. In the case of Hiroshima, it was the place where one of the first atomic bombs was dropped. That is an inflection point in world history. And.
I think basically Michael has reminded me to not be jaded and always see the wonder and how special things are, as opposed to getting into a more perhaps cynical worldview.
Yeah, so this is the really fun event I host with some friends each year called Frontier Camp. And we take about 120 people that we admire to go camping for a weekend in Northern California. And the theme is frontier technology. We define that really broadly.
It includes things from gene editing and supersonic flight, but also people who are working on the frontier of California land use policy and things like that. Basically, anyone who's pushing the frontier of what they're doing is fair game with a particular focus on hard tech.
I think the biggest thing I've learned is that people are really seeking out containers for them to live in and for them to act and to meet people. And they're almost looking for places that will give them social infrastructure to have particular types of conversations. So I'll be concrete. There were some people who actually already knew each other before coming to Frontier Camp last year.
I knew that they knew each other, but it wasn't until they were put in this context where it was explicitly about talking about a particular type of work and it was explicitly about optimism for the future where they started exploring potential collaborations for each other. I have two people in particular in mind, but one of them gave a session about something they were thinking about.
It was, again, this unconference format so people could add their own sessions and did a session about what they were working on. And someone else who they knew and even knew that they were working on this, they came up to them afterwards and they said, hey, do you want to collaborate on this?
This was almost six months ago now, and now they've written some papers together and introduced each other to other people. And so I really think that by creating containers with a particular purpose in mind, you can end up creating opportunities for people that they might not naturally create themselves. I love it because it feels like such low-hanging fruit.
If you know the concept of a shelling point, it's like, here's this idea that you're going to pick a place to meet and just people go there. In the way that the Healdsburg Plaza in Healdsburg is a shelling point where If I tell you let's meet in Healdsburg, but I don't tell you where, it's obviously going to be in the center of the plaza.
I think you can create a shelling point for a community too quite easily by simply calling it out. Another example of this that I love is a friend of mine named Jason created something that he calls The Neighborhood in San Francisco.
And he did a lot of work on the neighborhood, but I think the key thing that he did was actually really simple, which was he told our friends and our loose network of friends of friends beyond that, he picked a point in the middle of San Francisco and drew, I think it was a quarter mile circle around it. And he just said, next time you consider moving, move to this area.
Then we can all live close to each other. And it's so simple. It's literally just a circle on a map. But the next thing I knew within the next six months, that became the center of gravity for a lot of the people that I want to talk to. And now... It's the obvious place for me to spend my time in San Francisco because all he did was he had to draw that circle.
I'm really obsessed with the question of coordination and what are the key small things that you can do or you can say to get people to behave in the ways that they want to behave, but may not come naturally to them if they're working unilaterally.
A lot of my communities, especially over the last few years, have become disjoint because they are very different from each other. So my core network and friend group and people that I know is people in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area who are working on frontier technology, for lack of a better term.
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