The Immortal Library: Information, Resilience and the Benefit of Turmoil

On. Welcome to Nontrivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, I take a look at the sordid history of the library. The library has been a beacon of knowledge and a marker of civilization for hundreds of years. But the library's journey from the scriptorium of medieval monasteries to massive cultural institutions like the Library of Congress has been perilous.

This is a journey that touches on many modern concerns have around information including propaganda, censorship, access elitism and the conquest of both political leaders and rich industrialists to own.

The information society is exposed to is to own society itself, to control what people think and believe the library has always been caught in the middle between the power struggles of the elites and a public hungry for knowledge and the opportunity such knowledge brings in this episode, we will use the library's history to showcase fundamental patterns related to unification censorship, critical thresholds growth and variation, replication in scale growth and destruction, crossover opportunities, resiliency and simultaneous discovery.

And you thought a talk on libraries was going to be boring. Let's get started. The immortal library information resilience and the benefit of turmoil. So this is going to be a talk on information, which is obviously a big topic in uh you know, today's news cycle, right? We just got the recent purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. And so this is a good example of, you know, a corporation taking over a major platform that is kind of the town hall of information.

And so we got these issues about free, you know, freedom of speech and what should allow, you know, what is allowed to be said and content moderation and who has rights to what and all this kind of stuff. So these, these topics come up all the time and it's really in the news right now.

So this is kind of timely, but what I'm gonna do to anchor our talk on information is the history of the library because today's uh or rather this week's book is called The Library, a Fragile History, written by two authors out of Scotland. Andrew Pedigree and Arthur Devi. Andrew Pedigree and Arthur Devi. And they are, uh you know, university professors out of Scotland, they wrote this book called The Library of Fragile History.

So it's obviously about the history of the library, um which might sound kind of boring to some. But really, I mean, you know, we, we obviously in this, in, in this podcast, I'm, I'm doing a book um on a regular basis and so reading is, is important to a lot of us. We, we like to read books, it plays a big role, but information in general plays a major role in, in society, right? Uh who owns the information, how is it promulgated?

How is it, uh you know, put forward, who has control over it, who has access to it? These issues come up all the time.

And so as a nice kind of backdrop to that conversation, understanding the library, which is, is, is really, you know, the, the, the storehouse of information, at least before the internet, especially uh you know, the place where you can access to it, uh get access to it, you can improve the opportunity uh your your stake in life by, you know, knowing more and understanding opportunities, gaining skills and all that kind of stuff.

So, so the use of that the storing of that the control of that the access to information is a really important topic. And so that's gonna kind of be an overlying theme uh throughout this episode. So, um as I like to remind all my listeners, uh if you head on over to patreon dot com slash nontrivial, you will see the visuals that I put together with my talks.

Uh because I have a slide deck that is put together that I use to anchor the conversations, you can see the nice visuals that I put together. So if you are a visual person, go ahead and head on over to patreon dot com slash nontrivial and you will get a visual tour of everything that I say. Um So for those of you seeing the overview slide, you can see, I have a number of topics I want to discuss on this episode.

Um literacy as a unifying force, uh you know, literature as a practical tool, you know, the purpose of being interested in things like literature and libraries, uh you know, growth incentive reach scale. Uh This, this idea of expurgating text where you're going and burning books. We're gonna talk about that. Um You know how the library rises out of the ashes and how it kind of reinvents itself. We'll talk all about opportunities, resiliency, you know, targets knowledge.

Uh you know how you grow through destruction, some of the reasons why people put the library uh together and still continue to do things like this with information in general. And then, you know, ultimately, why is the library still here? The physical library? Why is it still actually, you know, relatively popular? We keep thinking that new technologies and or even political landscapes are gonna wipe it out and they just don't, don't do that. It has this resiliency to it.

So I think it's an interesting conversation. The patterns and concepts that I'll be talking about in this episode are ones that I mentioned in the introduction, right? Unification censorship, critical threshold growth and variation, replication and scale growth and destruction, crossover opportunities, resiliency and simultaneous discovery. A lot of these patterns, I've talked about in other episodes. So let's see how they play out with respect to the library.

Ok, again, this week's book is the Library a Fragile History by Andrew Pedigree and Arthur Devi. So, um I'm gonna start with thinking of literacy as this unifying force. Um So if you want to, so I think politically, right, I mean, obviously countries want to unify things for better or for worse or whatever the motives are and the way that you do that is you get people to basically buy into the same story.

Uh you get them to speak the same language to read the same things that you, you need something to kind of anchor the unification, right? And, and Charlemagne would be a good example throughout history. Charlemagne, right, who, who made sure all his monasteries and bishops devoted their efforts to the study of literature and the teaching of it.

So if you think about literature in general and the rise of the library and trying to get people to, you know, essentially kind of speak and read and write the same language or how did the quality of that language improve as opposed to just being scattered all over the place and everybody doing something different. Well, a lot of that comes from unification efforts.

And so Charlemagne is an example where he wanted to, you know, really take the, the, you know, the West and central Europe and, and unify it uh under a unified language, right? And so the the monasteries were used, the scriptorium in these monasteries were used to start to get really good at Latin and to get good at copying text and to do it with a standard, right? In other words, don't just, you know, copy it.

However the heck you want have there be a, a quality standard to the replication of text and the more standardized that is the more you can unify around it because you know what to expect when you go to read something, you know, there's gonna be a certain quality, you know, that the the proliferation of information is happening, you know, according to whatever agendas are in place.

So the focus on education and writing and, and the proliferation of, of eventually books um really started with a lot of the monasteries uh throughout Europe and, and the political forces like Charlemagne behind them that uh you know, promoted the, the replication of text and the reading and the writing within those.

So, so all of a sudden in history, there is this push uh largely because of political reasons and unification to, to put emphasis on, on education, on literacy, on writing and to, to have storehouses of that information. And the monasteries were really the ones uh that, that acted as those storehouses of the information and, and the insurance that, you know, text was being replicated with quality standards.

And so, so what we think of now with information and, and you know, we'll get into obviously the internet and all the technologies later, you know, none of that could have been achieved without the ecclesiastical network of monasteries that really started this idea that hey, rather than just, you know, having scripts uh scattered everywhere, we should have a a protocol, right?

We should have, we should think of information as, as being really important and powerful and we should store it and we should put quality controls around it. So literature starts to be seen as this practical tool and part of that is public access, right? The question arises, you know, well, information is powerful. Obviously, we can think of that in a number of different ways. It, it can help the individual from a skill set perspective, the more, you know, the more you can do.

Um and it's, it's got a power that just kind of storytelling by the fireplace doesn't have, it's, it's, you know, you don't have to remember all the details. If it's written down, you can keep referencing it. Um The more you can replicate it, the more you can share it with others. Not everybody has to be at the uh you know, at the, at the, at the bonfire to hear the story, right? Um So there's this power to it.

So, but because it's powerful, you know, the the the the politics come into that, you know, well, who's going to own it, who's going to control it and who should have access to it. So as public access grew, uh it turns out that books became less concentrated in the monasteries and more in urban areas because urban areas is gonna have concentrations of people. There's gonna be more people who want access to the education.

Those urban areas are gonna have professionals working in it and those professionals are going to start to use uh that information to do their job.

This is, you know, definitely true of, of, you know, doctors and lawyers and clergymen and uh and actually the the the clergymen and merchants using them for everyday practice is really what kind of uh brought the the the back pressure needed to put a focus on literature and and and reading and writing because it just became this very practical tool and eventually universities and colleges as well as cathedrals and churches became the main storehouses of books.

So whereas it was just these kind of monasteries uh you know, motivated by the Charlemagne of the world before and now cathedrals, churches, universities and colleges realize the power and the importance of storing information. And so those became the main storehouses uh also the promoters of public access to them. So what this makes you realize or at least ask is, you know, what is the purpose behind this? Right.

So we already started off with that kind of uh unification political force that Charlemagne was bringing. So already you know, the purpose of literature was not necessarily for literature itself, right? It wasn't this, this, you know, recognition that well, information is good and access to information is good and people should just be literate.

It was more, you know, the, the the realization that if everyone is kind of reading the same thing and speaking the same way and, and, and that information can be controlled, then there's some political benefit to that And, and the true, and this is true for other reasons as well. If you think about universities having storehouses of books, is that because they want the education of their students to be better or is it more of a kind of an elitism thing?

Ok. And I, and I would say the latter because the churches and universities chained a lot of their books. So it wasn't really about public access. It was very reserved. Only certain people could access, uh you know, the information, it wasn't easy. Um, obviously, systems haven't been placed hadn't been kind of invented or put in place like indexing and all that kind of stuff that you could um access books easily.

But, you know, really it was about limiting the access and, and it was kind of almost more for show and we'll talk a little bit more about this later, but a lot of, you know, uh the, the libraries eventually that got put together to store books, you know, the architectural considerations were much more important, uh, than, you know, what the books were or what was inside. It was really a show.

And if you had, you know, visitors to the state, you'd want to show off your testament to civilization and how civilized your country was. And the library would kind of be a way to do that. So there's this kind of access elitism tradeoff, right, where you have information, you're storing it, you want to provide access to that information, supposedly. But if you provide access to that, then, you know, the the quality might go down, books might get lost, things might get stolen.

And, and so there's this kind of, you know, well, it's not really about public access. I just want to have all these books here so we can show them off politically economically, whatever. So anyway, it's just, you know, we'll get into what is the true purpose of doing things that on the surface seem really good, right? Access to information people should have information. Oxford did not uh unchain its books until 17 92. Right. Oxford was founded in something like 10 96.

So this is hundreds of years after the founding of Oxford University. You know, they didn't unchain their books until 17 92. So it's interesting to think about what is the purpose of the library, right. Again, on the surface, it's this wonderful thing, it's public access, it's information, you know, and this is how we tend to think of information in general without putting too much deep thought into it.

It's just this, this, you know, everybody should have information, information wants to be free, right? But the use of it becomes very political, very quickly. And the reason people build these edifices to civilization, to these storehouses of information often have nothing to do with the public accessing that information. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. Um But if you do allow the access, there are often uh there are, there are definite benefits to that.

So again, the part of the downfall initially might have been, well, look, we've got these rare books and they're not easy to replicate. And if everybody can access them, then they're gonna, you know, get stolen or people aren't gonna return them, right? Which is still an issue. But, but in today's uh ubiquitous information, it's not that important. Um But access means growth and this comes from growth and variation.

So the chain of manuscripts and books makes sense to some extent when they're scarce, right? But with so few reading, then the public interest in things like libraries, you know, and even university starts to wane because wow, nobody can really get access to the information anyway.

But if you allow the public access, you get more input, you get more variation, more people are reading, the demand goes up, you get more ideas of what to stock inside those storehouses of information and this is true of any type of growth process. The variation that you allow in is good. I mean, if countries open their borders, at least to some extent, you know, history of the United States very much, right.

I mean, the economy in the US and, and, and a lot of countries can relate to this would, would not be what it is today if you did not open those borders and allow uh a lot of the immigration to come in because that adds variety and new ideas and, and uh and those of course, get converted into new uh businesses, new services and new products and, and that's absolutely required to build, you know, the massive economies that we built.

So it and, and you can say this for individual companies and you can say this even just for individuals, right? If I want to learn more and grow as an individual, the more variation that I allow in different ideas and different um you know, challenges and things that I need to adapt to the better I'm going to grow as an individual. So access means growth, you know, open things up.

Of course, there's a dosage to that doesn't mean just completely open everything, you know, that at some point that could become toxic and, and poison the growth process, right? Uh unrelenting growth that can't be backfilled by the ability to sustain it as we talked about in the wework example, right? Um is, is not good, but generally speaking, you want to open things and you want, you want to allow that variation to take place.

So variation as I'm calling it, which is really just more public access, getting into those books, reading those books, giving feedback, being part of that growth process has very much what led to the growth of literature and books and libraries in general. But let's go back to some of that incentive, right? So as you look through and, and they talked about this all in the the book, the Library of Fragile History, um you know, going through these different phases.

So you started with the monasteries and then you kind of got universities and you got the the bigger churches getting interested in storing. And eventually you had these renaissance book hunters who would travel to the monasteries and acquired as many books as they could. And so what this was is kind of this, this merchant push to get into book trading and getting into book selling. They realized that books were, you know, becoming very popular. Now, I kind of skipped over a lot of history here.

Obviously, we went from, you know, uh manuscripts to books, right? So there's this whole history of, of, you know, uh going from basically the skins of calves, right? To uh uh to actual paper technology, you know, going from these scripts that were rolled to books that were bound and you could hold a lot of information. So there's that whole history and I'm not going to go over all that, but you've got that.

But as books became, you know, a way to store information and it became much more, uh, transportable and, and we'll get obviously into the printing press, obviously, uh, conversation a little bit later. But you had these renaissance book hunters who would travel to the monasteries and try to get as many books as they could, maybe some of these were manuscripts as well.

But, um, and they were kind of hostile because they had this profit motive and they wanted to, to sell these books, they wanted to trade these books, they wanted to build their own business, right? Um, but despite the book hunter's motive, we owe much of the growth of the library to these renaissance book hunters.

And this is going to be a common theme throughout this episode where the growth of the library again doesn't have a lot to do with necessarily trying to proliferate information for the sake of information or, or making sure that, you know, the public has access to good knowledge, you know, and not to say that people involved didn't have some of those motives, but a lot of it was, was, you know, either a profit motive or a political economic motive going forward.

So you had these renaissance of book hunters who were, you know, taking a lot of the information on the monasteries and part of the history here is the monastery starting to fall to the wayside their importance in, in, in society. Uh We're kind of being replaced again. You've got universities popping up as centers of education and, and of course, you've got more secular movements that move away, uh to some extent from, from, uh, you know, the non secular religious movements of the day.

But of course, they're always going back and forth and then play with each other. Um You've got the humanists eventually moving in and, and being in, in interested in information for, for reasons other than religion and on and on. And so you've got this kind of mercantilism happening uh or these merchants rather um you know, trading books and doing things for profit motives as the demand gets higher and, and as the demand is there for reasons other than religion. And then you have technology.

So obviously, uh you know, the guten her, uh the Gutenberg printing press invented in 14 40. And so I'll just give you some example of uh you know, technology and its reach. So without the printing press, it would take a scribe about one year to produce two substantial folio manuscripts. OK. So, so think about just, you know, basically a script, right?

And you've got to write it out and if you wanted to get two substantial ones, a decent amount of writing, it would take you about a year to produce two with the printing press, the company could produce 1000 copies of the same work in about 8 to 10 months. OK. So, and of course, this is nothing compared to what we can do today.

But showing that now that technology comes into play, the movable printing press, you know, you basically can you have ink on these, these kind of molds or these, these, you know, uh uh solid objects that hold each letter right of the language and you can switch them around and and once you have what's written, it's still a very slow process compared to something like the digital revolution. But you can create uh many, many pages of the same text and you can replicate that.

Um so, so technology, so, so now we take information which again has already this kind of baked in reach to it, right? If you speak the same language and you can understand a written text and you can copy that text that already has this immense power to it. Now you couple that with a technology that allows you to replicate that going forward and things start to go to a very large scale. So, so replication and scale is is kind of baked into um information in general, right?

Because we've got technologies like the printing press and then we know as we get into the internet and the digital age that, that it's still about replication of scale, but just hyper charged to a whole different level. Um But of course, there's a cost to scale. So all progress comes with consequences, right? So 30 copies of the Gutenberg Bible uh Bible printed on parchment required the skins of at least 5000 calves. OK. So 30 copies of the Bible.

That was that, that was when it, when it printed on parchment required the skins of 5000 ca uh calves. OK. Um Also information instantly becomes ubiquitous. So you think, well, that's a great thing and there's information everywhere. But of course, there's a cost to that. And we could debate whether that's positive, negative or maybe sometimes neutral, you rarely neutral.

But if everyone has access to that information, you know, politically, you might think, well, maybe we're losing some control over things, right? And uh we want people to believe certain things. And so there's going to be a cost to not allowing the information because there's going to be this back pressure from the public who wants access to it. But there's going to be a cost to allowing people to think and believe whatever they want, right?

And, and of course, not everybody thinks that's a cost. But um there, there's always uh you know, good things and, and bad things to everything that you do. So informa information instantly becoming ubiquitous because of technologies that allow this new reach and scale to happen. Um calls new things into question and, and it forces society to start to consider you know what all this, what all this means, right?

And, and so often when we talk about technology and what it means, uh you know, often what we're really saying is, is the information that's being freed with that technology, right? And people now have access to things that they didn't have access to before and they can make different types of decisions and uh and, and, and the extreme end of things, we can think that's a wonderful thing. And the other extreme, we can think that's an awful thing.

And then somewhere in the middle is maybe there's a balance, right? So there are political, economical and religious consequences that come with the the massive replication of information. And so because of that limiting access to undesirable literature starts to play a very big role throughout history, right? So we've got this term expurgating texts and so expurgating texts to basically uh limit the access to literature through censorship. And this is still alive and well today, right?

This is always a part of the information conversation. And when you have technologies that scale things at a massive level becomes even more and more of an issue. And, and that's, that's sometimes for religious reasons and sometimes for other reasons.

But, you know, throughout history, the protestant reformation being uh you know, a good example where we saw the battle between the Protestants and the Catholics and both sides were interested in burning the works of others Right, because they were saying, um, some of some of the same things, but many different things and they had a different interpretation of, obviously what was written in the Bible and what that means and what you should be allowed to and not allowed to do.

And so, uh, as religion gets tied up with the politics and the control and the power, uh, you know, the burning of books, uh, was, was a common thing. It could be raiding of, of monasteries or raiding of libraries when, when certain areas were taken over and, uh, and, and burning the works or, or possibly taking it for yourself. Um, and either hiding them away or doing whatever, but massive amounts of information was lost all throughout history.

And so very much throughout this entire book when they're talking about libraries, you know, you've got these big beautiful libraries get built and then they would get destroyed or, you know, the, the countries would go to war and the victors would either confiscate all the books or they would burn all the books and we'll talk a little bit more about that later.

But this is something that, that is very much alive and well today and, and usually not always in the form of books, although there are some recent examples, right? Of libraries burning. I mean, there's, uh, one in L A not too, too, too long ago, um, where you still lose a lot of information of course, losing is not quite the same thing as it is today because we can digitally replicate uh things that will, but the censorship aspect absolutely is a major topic that comes up again and again.

Right. Um You know, who is allowed to say what different countries have different uses and of the internet, you know, China uses the internet very differently than we do, at least in terms of access and what they can Google, they kind of have their own version. Um But over time, there's always this great regret in society for the burnishing or banishing of books, right? Because the the the current political climate may suggest that certain censorship is valid.

But hundreds of years from now, the landscape will change politically, right? And socially and economically. And so, you know, hundreds of years from now, will it make sense if we, we take today and we look back in time, I don't think really anybody says, oh, I'm glad we burned all those books, right? We usually regret it even if it was, you know, really bad thinking or things that led, you know, just from a historical perspective, it's good to know what the thought was.

I mean, especially if you want to learn from history, you may sometimes want to repeat things, you may not want to repeat others either way. It's generally thought that, you know, historically, we should have access to the information that was from the past. So we can see what was being written about at the time. I mean, how else can we understand, you know, the evolution of humanity? So, you know, fast forward to today or any current time.

Um you know, when we start to limit access to information through censorship, there is something problematic about that, right? Because you know, we we we don't want to, we know that political climates can change and the landscape can change and, and, and we should be able to, to have access to things in the past. But, but again, there's a cost to everything, right? What does that mean to, to allow access?

Um But yeah, different countries take different stances on this and whenever information and power come together, uh there's this, this notion of what should be and should not be allowed. And of course, you, you've got different countries wanting to do this for, for reasons of, you know, promoting their own version of things, right? Uh Obviously, the US has a history of not wanting too much, um you know, communist type language coming in and then vice versa. Right?

You wouldn't want too much capitalist type language coming into a communist country. And so there's either a limiting or there's an all out banning or burning and, and, and I'll get to this in a bit, but I talked about banning uh of technologies in previous episodes, right? And how that just ultimately doesn't make sense because of this this kind of property of simultaneous invention. Like things are always going to reappear, they're always going to be come back.

There's nothing that has to happen at a certain point in history from an informational standpoint that, that, that can't then happen again. That, that, that doesn't make any sense. There's too much variation, there's too much possibility for discovery. Um It's always going to come back again. So the banning is already always going to be a temporary thing anyway, in terms of, you know, it is going to get rediscovered. So I'll talk a little bit more about this later.

How I don't think there's anything uh lost information actually doesn't really make sense. Although, you know, it can be problematic to censor at a given point in time. So let's let's continue with that conversation uh as we get into things, but um from the ashes.

So, so the libraries are just have this absolute, you know, kind of perilous journey of, you know, you've got these people who invest, you got, you know, rich people who try to build a library and build information for whatever their motives are.

And then, you know, things could just either not be popular because of political pressure and, and, or because the books are being locked up or, you know, the books are being burned or whatever it is and the library just has its up and down, up and down. Uh in the mid 16th century, libraries got a resurgence after so much was destroyed from the protestant reformation. This resurgence came from Europe's rising class of professionals who eagerly embraced the opportunity for book uh ownership. OK?

So now we talk about some of these incentives, right? You got political incentives, you got profit motives. Ownership is another big one. OK. This idea that um you know, maybe it makes sense to have my own library, right? Forget, forget, you know, the government or whoever just rich people, let's say, putting together their own, you know, storehouses of information. I kind of want to own the information. I want to own the book. And that's really interesting. That's a different take on things.

And of course, that's a big conversation in and of itself, right? Um The US in general as an example of the West world has been the western side of things have been uh big on ownership as being a kind of a core value. Right, right up there with, you know, freedoms and freedom of speech and all that good stuff. Um So ownership is another incentive. Now again, uh this isn't necessarily the same as, you know, just wanting access to information.

There's something about owning the information, there's something about displaying the information. If you come, you know, I'm a doctor and you come into my house, I want you to see a wall of books behind me, regardless of whether I have read them or not. But there are personal collections uh throughout history for lawyers, civil servants, doctors, professors, and ministers of the church who ultimately created the new book market.

OK. So, so this book market comes from people not just wanting access to the information, but they want to be able to own that information. And so there's kind of this, this is a little bit less about the the you know, the public library as we think about the library today and more about the personal library, but you need a book market, you need the back pressure of, you need the demand of people wanting to read and wanting to have books.

OK. So, so part of the resurgence of the interest in reading and books in general comes from these professionals who wanted to own their own, which is also kind of interesting. And so we take a look at these, you know, this history of the library where things are falling down and then things kind of Resurge you have this resurgence going on and, and like so many, you know, II I put this graph in almost every talk just because it's a very common pattern.

I'm obviously generalizing here, but there's this idea that things kind of grow a little bit slowly, right? And all of a sudden you hit this reflection point and it takes off and there's a number of reasons for this.

And in the case of, you know, books and information in general, you've got, you know everything from the evolution maybe of politics that think about information slightly differently to technologies that allow the massive replication to happen to a public that gets interested in things like ownership and the use of information for its utility in their profession. You've kind of got this critical storm, right?

Uh That has to, that, that has to happen like a critical mass where all these factors come together and then all of a sudden it hits an inflection point and then things just absolutely take off. And, and you know, you've got the technology, you've got the demand, you've got the type of thinking, you've got the awareness, you've got the political landscape, whatever it is.

And, and as an example, that kind of kind of proves this point is, is more books have been created in the last 100 years than in the the whole history of mankind. So in the last 100 years, more books have been created than the whole history of mankind, right? And obviously technology is playing a big role.

But again, all those other factors that I mentioned and this this growth inflection, this critical point uh and and self sufficiency that happens is true for, for any kind of thing that has the potential to grow. I mean, if, if it, if it reaches a critical mass, this will take off or you this will happen in your own life, this will happen in companies, right?

You get enough employees, you get enough market demand, you get enough, you know, product features put into your product, whatever it is, eventually enough comes together and then it becomes self sufficient and it, you know, it kind of has this feedback loop and then it just takes off this can happen for problematic things as we've talked about, you know, I've talked about in other episodes, right, where, you know, we, we, we think that something is necessarily not that bad because we're just doing little incremental things and all of a sudden enough bad things come together, you hit that critical mass and then it takes off on its own and nobody's at the helm.

And so many things in life are like this where, you know, we we we lose the ability to point the finger at anything because it just takes off on its own. And that could be a good, right? It could be a positive outcome, it could be negative outcomes. The point is is that you have to respect that this is how growth happens, right? You, you reach that critical point and it's not obvious when that critical point is going to happen.

It's definitely not obvious what the components need to be to make that criticality occur in, in in real world systems like this. But it is a common pattern. It is a common property. So the library saw this um when, when enough pieces of information and information technology quote unquote uh came together to make that happen. So, more books in the last 100 years in all of human history. So it's kind of neat.

Um, the World Wars, you know, we talk about book banning and censorship and exportation of texts. I mean, the World War is just kind of hyper charged all that, right? This, this notion that you haven't won unless you've erased your enemy from history. Right? So if you think about the library, if, if your enemy has their library and it's their beacon of civilization, right? This is us. This is our information. Look how civilized we are.

Uh And obviously the library is going to be stocked with books, especially around, you know, the times of World War One and two that are kind of tailored, right to what the government wants you to be reading in the first place. So it's, it's not just a beacon of your own civilization. It's the type of civilization that you're trying to build. It's a reflection of that. It's either filled with a lot of, you know, uh communist literature or maybe capitalist literature or whatever it is, right?

So if, if your enemy has storehouses of that types of information, then you kind of want to in war, wipe that out, right? You want to destroy that. So some, some interesting stats here, Russia alone lost um 100 million books to the war, right. England lost uh 60 million uh France. France lost 20 million in Poland, two thirds of its entire book stock. So these are just massive amounts of quote unquote information lost. Although debate that, right, a little bit later.

But, you know, still at the time, tons of information, lost books lost. Um, really tragic no matter how you look at it, even though again, I'll talk about some of the recover ability later. But, uh, and, and all because of what information represents. right? I mean, think about what and it's, that's always such an interesting thing because information is ephemeral, right? You can't touch it. It's, it's, it's, there's some something kind of always unreal.

It's, it's this ephemeral thing that you can't quite put your finger on, you know, what is information and yet it's the most valuable thing by far. And I think that's been true all throughout history because even in the industrial revolution, even when things that were very, uh you know, machine related cogs and pistons, very physical. And you think, well, that's where the efficiency and that's where the scalability comes from.

But it takes information, it takes ideas, it takes iteration, it takes collaboration to do all those things. So information is really what it's all about. It doesn't matter what it is, right? Politically, economically religiously, you know, uh it's, it all comes down to information, people's opportunity comes down to information, your ability to make something out of your own life and on and on.

Right. Um So when you see this massive destruction of information during war, it kind of goes to show what the real value is, right? People get that. That's, that's what it's about, right? Um So in war, you see this effort to erase the e the enemy, the enemy from history to erase their testaments to knowledge and, and civilization. Uh And it is an all book burning. Uh So, so you got like this carpet bombing and you got the Burma the burning that obviously destroys a lot of information.

Some of it is actually, and the Nazis did a lot of this was taking books from other countries and bring it back to their own country, doing whatever and, and so you've kind of got this almost reconciliation that has to happen years later where all these books have to get returned, but they don't always know who owns them and it's just this big mess and you know, the book kind of talks about this, this just disaster trying to like post war get books back to where they belong, you know, tens of millions and it's just a nightmare and, and sometimes you just have to say you can't do it.

So anyway, yeah, pretty interesting stuff. But the value of information is, is obviously huge, right? Again, everything that I'm saying in this, in this episode, think about present day, right? I mean, talking about some of the history here, talking about monasteries and scripts and printing presses and politics and war. But all of that is so relevant to the value of information, right? Censorship, um the library, which kind of, in some sense seems a bit antiquated, right?

When we think of the library, right, especially in the age of the internet, but what the library represents, which is a physical version of the value of information is just such a hallmark of, well, just that the value of information, what that means uh in terms of control and access and opportunity and all of the things that are still so relevant today, right? But so and the book talks about, you know, so you've got all this happening with libraries, right?

And you've got, you know, the wars and the censorship and the banning and the expurgation all throughout history. And at some point, you know, the world just kind of stops and says, look, are we so civilized, right? I mean, if you think about the library as being this, this kind of monument to supposed civilization, right? Like look at our knowledge, look at what we have achieved. I mean, how do you put all that in one place?

How do you point at something and say, look what we've achieved, you know, this is civilization. Well, the library is kind of that, right? And it has been throughout history, you know, and, and, and even the internet can't do that because you can't point at the internet, right? Because it's so distributed, you know, it, it's, and, and again, information is so ephemeral. So the more informational you get about something, um the, the, the less you can put your finger on it.

So the library is kind of the only to, to this day, the only way to really point your finger at something like civilization at, at something like knowledge at something like progress, right? How do you, because everything ultimately comes down to information.

So how do you put all that in one spot and say, look and that's why you have these, the the the emphasis on beautiful architecture with libraries because you want to wait to uh to, to point at something and say, look how amazing that is, right? It's kind of analogous to the to, to some of the um cathedral type churches, I guess, right? Because you know, uh religion, you could say the faith in, in uh in a God is, is ultimately ephemeral because you can't actually see the God.

So how do you point to something physical and say look, right, look what, look what it is that we believe, right? Look at the power, you do that physically and so just, just, just like you would do with cathedrals, you, you do that with libraries, right? And that's why a lot of the libraries. So history um you know, the the there there was an age uh especially from, you know, Andrew Carnegie where um libraries kind of got boring and utilitarian looking.

But for most of, of history, libraries have been architectural spectacles, right? Because it's the way to point your finger at something informational and, and yet so powerful. So, um but there's this question, right? So, so you're pointing at civilization and then you're saying, yeah, but we keep destroying them, right? Why do we keep destroying these storehouses of these hallmarks of civilization? Uh You know, as a, as a, as a human race, right?

We, we understand that people go to war and that, you know, we get why we're banning and book and burning and carpet bombing and censoring and it's not, nobody generally thinks that's a great thing, but we understand why that happens. But it makes you step back and say, well, are we so civilized?

And that's a good way to kind of kind of physically anchor that conversation if you want to get into a debate about, you know, the so-called civilization that we create, if that was true, why do we keep tearing down the hallmarks of civilization? Right. Um Are we so civilized? But now I want to talk about this, this notion that, you know, progress often doesn't look like progress. So in line with what I just said, you know, burning down, you know, obstacles are often the ways forward, right?

The conditions of war as an example, if we use war as a perfect example of, you know, just are we so civilized? It actually turned many millions into avid reader, avid readers. Uh And there's a number of reasons for this, you know, um everything from, you know, so many men going to war that put a lot of women into libraries and women had this massive influence over how the libraries would, would be, uh you know, structured and organized and run.

And so, so women play a very big role in history of the growth of the library. So there's that whole great story, there's the bringing books to the men in war. Uh So that when they weren't actually fighting, they had something to do. Obviously, a lot of this was before, you know, for much of history before anything like smartphones or internet or televisions to watch.

So there needed to be some form of entertainment, uh you know, fiction starts to, to play a bigger and bigger role where it's not just about, you know, access to nonfictional information, right, where you can reference, you know, how the world works or what you should believe and all that, there's this big fiction, um you know, stories of, of adventure and romance that starts to come up.

So, so conditions like war actually turn many into avid readers and, and there's, there'll be other reasons as well, right? I mean, war starts to rip away certain opportunities because of the atrocities or whatever that's going on. And so to get more opportunity, you typically need access to information and so on and on. There's all these reasons that the obstacle becomes the way forward in a lot of ways. Right. So there is a quote unquote upside to the frequent destruction of libraries.

There's, it, it's forcing them to constantly reinvent themselves. Ok. From turmoil comes progress. And again, this is not really just about libraries, is it, this is about life. This is about anything that you are creating, you should be destroying, uh the most, well, most of what you create should be destroyed on a regular basis right now. Hopefully that's not because of things like war and stuff.

But just as a general process, you know, you know, if, if you really want to know if somebody's gonna make a difference in the world, you should get them to show you the 80 or 90% of the things that, that are failing on a regular basis. You know, don't, don't ask them, you know, what's working and what's successful. Although that's a good conversation too. I mean, as the one isn't working, right? Because if, if, if 80% of the stuff that you do is not failing, then you're not doing enough.

So it's like a simple heuristic, right? Because because that failure is baked in to the process of growth and the reason is because, you know, and again, remember that image from, you know, I I use two times now and I a few episodes, the wrong structure to the right structure, right? You gotta be putting things forward, it has to break its break is the only way to coax out information. It's a way of dealing with the epidemic uncertainty, right?

To get past that causal opacity that's in our environment, you have to constantly be doing wrong things, right? Not sitting back and on a whiteboard and trying to draw up some great design. You need to just keep putting things in and seeing what survives. It's the only way to access the information, you need to build the right stuff. So the constant reinvention of the library, these hallmarks of civilization, the storehouses of information is, is, has been critical to its progress. OK?

As, as bad, you know. So, so when you think about things like exportation of tax and you think about, you know, the carpet bombing of libraries and the burning the down and why can't we just get civilization to work? Well, civilization probably does work because of those things, right? As well as it does not that it's perfect, but whatever does work in civilization is because so much of it has not worked. We have to remember that it's not just civilization cannot just be some singular idea.

Um You know, that comes from, from ancient philosophers that just needs to get implemented correctly. It's, it's something that constantly evolves and adapts. And so to get there, you've got to have a lot of destruction and that's true of anything that grows. So we talked about the critical mass, the criticality that's needed for growth processes. Part of that is constant destruction and reinvention. OK. Evolution of course happens like this, most species die.

Most aversions of things that nature creates don't work. And that's how nature finds and discovers what does work. So other interesting things, um you think about the resiliency of the library, uh you know, it's still here, it's still moving, it's still growing all throughout history.

You know, an obvious question is, is you think of the new forms of media like radio, when radio came along, that was obviously a challenge to something like the library because the radio could be just listen to and you could add, you know, layers that, that the book doesn't have directly, you know, we could bring sound effects in, we could do different voices, you know, I don't have to do all of that in, in my own head just from reading text like you, you could really bring a lot of that into the media and of course, television just totally supercharges that uh where you can create an entire, you know, three dimensional experience.

How do you want to think about that with the sound and the actors and especially when the sound came into television, but it didn't supply at the library. And a lot of that was because of crossover opportunities so that the the fodder for the radio and the television would be books, books would be dramatized into radio and television where you have to feed it somehow. And so this is the interesting thing about information. Right.

The technology is not really what it's about, it's not about the television. Uh, it's not about the radio. It's not even about the book, it's about the information, the thing you can't touch. Ok. And that's why books are so, so popular today because information doesn't go away And in and, and books is one way to, to put down the information onto paper, which could then cross over into things like radio and television and movies. You think Harry Potter, right?

Movies have made just billions and billions of dollars made the author billions a billion dollars. Uh You know, and, and she wrote books, right? That's where it all came from. She was not a moviemaker, she wasn't specializing in radio, you know, all the technology that, that replicated and scaled and grew. The story of something like Harry Potter came from a set of books.

So books are, are, are still insanely relevant because they, they, they feed into the informational paradigm and there's all these crossover opportunities. And so that's something to always think about, you know, in your own life as well. And, and any time you're trying to build or grow something you have this kind of beautiful redundancy redundancy that exists between systems. And I think a good way to think about this is actually transferable skills.

So you've got, you know, if you're one of those people where, you know, you're a little bit older and so people are always asking you questions and, and maybe you have some success in your life. So they're asking you questions about, you know, getting jobs and growing your career and, and you know, how do you do all this and, you know, the, the, one of the major things you can do and you hear this all the time, but I don't think a lot of people really understand it. 11 of the things you can do.

So, so let's say you're gonna go get a job or you're gonna go apply for a job and it's the interview and people tend to focus on, you know, exactly what the job description said and they always talk like, well, I don't know if I really have those skills and, you know, I don't have all that experience and sometimes they might not even go to the job interview because of that or they won't be confident on the job interview because of that.

You know, and I keep telling people look, it's not about having those specific skills. It's really about having transferrable skills. And some people will say they kind of hear that as a cliche and be like, yeah. Yeah, I know. I've heard that before. You know, we're supposed to have transferable skills. Yeah. But stop and think about that. I mean, what that means is no matter what your experience is, it bears strong relation.

I guarantee strong relationship to the specific skills that they're looking for and you have to become good at understanding what those crossover opportunities are. Right?

So if you're going for, for a job and, and maybe it's in, I don't know, maybe it's in product development, maybe it's for software, you know, there's, there's product development and you're gonna have, there's programming languages and there's different technologies you need to know and there's team dynamics that you're gonna be working on and tools that you're gonna be, you know, working with, you know, uh in intermixed with those team dynamics and facilitating those dynamics, you know, and you might be reading that job description.

Well, I haven't used that tool or maybe, I don't know that programming language that much or maybe look, you have all kinds of, you know, you, you have this rich life experience that has these strong overlaps to solving problems in a similar fashion to, you know, maybe you're not using that exact tool, but you've done it. You, you've used tools before and here's how you use it to solve a problem and here's how it relates to what you're looking for. And that's the reality of it.

That's the reality of it. In fact, it can be even more beneficial than getting someone with a direct experience because it's not about the specific tangible physical thing that you're using and anybody who runs a, a successful business knows this is true. Right? You, you, you, what you're hiring someone into because you can always train people on tools. You can always train them on programming languages. What you're looking for is something more intangible than that.

What you're looking for is that ability to take what's around you to solve problems with it, to communicate them effectively, right? To master a new tool when that tool comes into your realm, right to, to bring that into your own knowledge base and on and on. And so what you're trying to communicate on a job interview is your ability to do that.

And you should be saying that confidently because that's how information works just as the book can be written, but ultimately becomes so much more than the book itself because it all, you know, the the that's the way information works. It, it intermixes with different manifestations of the information. You know what I mean when I say that?

So, so what I mean by that is, you know, Harry Potter is not about the book, Harry Potter or the radio of the Harry Potter or, or the television series, if that becomes a thing or if it is a thing uh or the movie movies that get create, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what the physical ultimate manifestation of the thing is, what it's all about is the information that was laid down on paper. OK?

So, so what your skill sets are is your ability to, yeah, I, I use tools and I do solve problems and I do communicate them and here's how I do it. And if anything, it's a benefit that I've done it in a different domain than what you're hiring for because now I can bring that uh outside domain knowledge and, and look at what you're doing more objectively and, and add to the variation of your team and help you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. OK. So, so it's about the information.

So when people say things like, you know, you gotta get good about talking about your transferable skills. Yeah, you, you, you should get really, really, really good at that. It's absolutely critical and people who are hiring understand that, OK? You see this was a talk about libraries and we're talking about all this other stuff. Isn't that great? See, these are, these are fundamental patterns, right? Uh in, in life.

So transferrable skills and it's not just, you know, getting jobs, I mean, this is true of, of all all areas in life, right? Again, I talk about how there's only so many patterns in life, right? But it can take a lifetime to learn them well, that's, that's what, you know, that convergence that I talk about, the way information comes together and converges. That's because there's the information doesn't have borders, right? It doesn't have barriers, right? I mean, people might impose them.

But information itself doesn't, so, information doesn't care if it's on a book. If it's in a radio, it's on television. It doesn't care if it's in this country, this country or that country. It doesn't care if it's, you know, expressed through this tool or this tool or this tool. Right. It doesn't matter if you play music on this instrument, this instrument or this instrument. It's not about the instrument. It's not about the book.

It's not about the television, it's not about the country, it's not about the border, it's about the information, it's fluid, it moves in and out and when you really understand that it's very, very empowering because in one sense, things become quite easy because you realize there's only a few things that I really need to understand here. And as long as I keep converging all these different types of information on those same few things. Right.

That anchor that pattern or those few patterns, then there's nothing you can't do. And it's true. And I'm not, I'm not saying that to be motivational. I mean, there's, there's nothing you can't do by definition because it's not about those different manifestations of the thing. You know, I want to apply to that job. Yeah. So apply and talk about your transferable skills. Yeah. But I haven't done that exact thing. Yeah, I know. It doesn't matter because it's not about that thing.

It's not about those tools. It's not about that software. It's not about that program, it's not about anything specific, it's about the ephemeral. It's about the things that there are no words for. It's those informational patterns that you need to be good at. Not the specifics I talk about details being meant to die. This is all the same thing, all the same patterns, right? Details are meant to die. A job description is just a set of details. They don't matter, they don't matter. OK?

They, they, they're getting spoken about this is why younger people get intimidated because they're spoken about as if they matter. Well, we expect you to have it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever, whatever I mean, because people need to say something again, there are no words for what really matters. So they gotta use words and so the words are specific and so you think the specifics matters but they don't, it's the things that there are no words for that matter.

So you have to understand that you have to understand the patterns that are important, not the specifics that are important anyway. So crossover opportunities and trans. So that's why you know, the library going back finally to the library conversation is so is so critical is so important or why it grew and why it's so successful because information doesn't die, can't kill information, right? So it's gonna have different physical manifestations anyway.

So, so so these crossover opportunities all come uh you know, people in sales and marketing, probably know this from things like uh multichannel stuff, right? Like is that your omni channel and all this where you can like do different versions of the thing, right? You only have one thing, but you can manifest it in many different ways. If you really understand information and, and, and core patterns and crossover, you get this. So anyway, all good stuff.

Um So yeah, there's this exceptional resiliency to libraries, to information in general. Uh you, you could say it's kind of the, you know, books, maybe scripts even or the original information technology, right? And so they get manifested in different ways and because they can, they, because they can live in so many different forms is another way of thinking how something doesn't die, right? It's related to redundancy, right? Remember I talked about the circulatory kind of system of the heart.

If you look at certain pictures of this, I think I put that picture on one of my episodes, right? And it's got all this crazy redundancy. It's like, why don't you just have one path? Well, because one path is, is really dangerous, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. You wanna have that diversification, you wanna have that beautiful redundancy. Um So, so the here's the thing, I think this is important. OK? I know this is important to, to truly understand the power of something.

The the reason why fundamental foundational things are so critical to know is because they become universal, OK? There's this universality to them, OK? Um Because they, so so if you take a a specific detailed version of something it can only exist in that one manifestation, right?

Like that job description or like this particular tool, anything, it doesn't matter if you have a specific detailed description of something, it has no universality to it because details cannot be universal because it's a very specific implementation of something. But it the more you generalize something, right? The more foundational it is, the more it can live in many different versions of things, right?

So physically, whether that's, you know, the ipad and the iphone and the computer and, and all these different, right? Whatever it is. So resiliency comes from something that has this universality aspect to it because it doesn't matter if things get destroyed it, it's going to come back again because it can come back in so many different forms. That's what universality means. The ability to come back in so many different forms, the ability to mix and match.

I talked about this last episode with respect to language, right? You know, so, so the things that you focus on it should never matter what their physical mani station is. Manifestation is. That's a good way. It's a simple heuristic. If, if what you do requires a very specific implementation of something, it's it's going to be fragile, it's going to die very easy. But if, what you do doesn't really matter what job it's found in. It doesn't matter what tool it's found in.

It doesn't matter what customer base it need it, the less specific what you believe in and what you do requires the less specificity it requires the more resilient it's going to be because it can find many different paths. Right. Ultimately, this is a, a kind of computational argument. Right. And a very true one, you know, it's, it, it's just a, it shouldn't even call it an argument. It's just a truth, right? It's a fundamental truth. Uh So, so again, it's not about the specifics.

It's not about the thing that you can touch and feel. It's about the, the ultimate ephemeral truth of something because it will be able to reinvent itself and live in so many different things. So anyway, uh the resilience of the library and of the book, uh we see this. So, so the library has, has, has survived the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Uh the media change from manuscript to print the reformation, the enlightenment to carpet bombing, you know, countless attempts to limit access to unacceptable text, quote unquote, unacceptable texts and it keeps coming back and it keeps coming back and it keeps coming back because information is so foundational, the need for information is foundational. It's never gonna go away.

You can't, there's no physical thing you can do to stop information from happening it will find a different path, right? Information will find a way. Right. Just like life finds a way. Uh books, the library that it survived, the inventions that were supposed to spell its end, right. Um Microfilm CD rom E readers, the internet, of course. Right. I mean, this is we, we have the internet, we have access to just about any information we can imagine, especially in North America.

I mean, there's nothing we can't access. And yet we still got libraries, we still have libraries and we still have people reading physical books. Right. I always do the physical book for my, my podcast. So, uh, I want to talk about unrelated targets. Now. It's because we talked about a lot of the different uh incentives for the library. Right. So we've got information, we've got the importance of it.

We've got these beacons of civilization, all the good things that, that we think of with regards to information. But why was it done? Well, libraries and literature took off largely because of merchants in business, uh, that were flourishing. People wanted to sell books and trade books. They wanted to make money off it. Uh, we've got people showing off books. A lot of people buy books. I'll talk about this in a second just because they want to show them off. Right.

I mean, how many people who have these walls of books have even read the books on it? Right. They've got these walls of books and you kind of wonder, have you read those growth in important things is caused by unrelated targets. So I talk about this all the time. Right. My goals are not supposed to be met. You, you have to have them, but they're not supposed to be met. If you met your goal, you kind of failed actually because the goal is supposed to, your reach is supposed to exceed the grasp.

But anything good, the useful stuff comes as a byproduct of trying to achieve something unrelated. So the libraries were done for ostentatious, ostentatious purposes, right? They're done to show elitism to show intellectualism to show civilization, not because they're trying to promote necessarily literature for the sake of literature or to get more people to read. Or wouldn't it be great if people had education though? These were not the motives of the library.

And yet that's very much the byproduct of things like the library, right? Only afterwards did things like universities pick up on, on the importance of reading. That wasn't even the reason they started doing it. Right. Right. They wanted to show the force, show the elitism, show the intellectualism. So, so it makes me think of questions, you know, when people bring, but in fact, this is happening right now. So if you go on Twitter right now, it's kind of crazy, right?

I mean, Elon Musk just bought Twitter and uh so this whole kind of freedom of speech talk going on. It's, it's kind of fun on Twitter right now, actually. So I'm, I'm not taking a side on this uh on my podcast. But um uh because that's not the purpose of this episode, but um there's always this ongoing question, like, should Elon Musk be focusing on more important things and this was happening before he bought Twitter? Right?

Because he's, you know, world's richest man and he's got obviously billions of dollars and he could look at what, what he's working on. It's things like let's get rockets into space and let's try to land people on Mars, let's build electric cars and let's, you know, a lot of this kind of futuristic stuff.

And so it's easy to look at things like that and say, well, you know, if you got, you've got all this money, you know, we, we've got people in poverty and we've got, you know, people starving on the planet, you know, wouldn't, wouldn't it make sense to throw your money at more, um, good things or something like that? But I think it's a very shortsighted way of thinking about it, right?

And, and there's a whole kind of talk here we could get into about, you know, um, throwing money at things does not really solve the problems, right? Because you need to create a system that is self sustaining. If you, if, if you enable somebody or a bunch of people by throwing money at them, you might have a quick fix, but that's not gonna fix the problem because the solution has to come from some organic growth of a, of a system that can support itself. Right. So, money can't do that.

It has to be something that grows over time. But aside from all that conversation. Right. Um, we don't know what, what sending space rockets into space is going to accomplish. Right. We don't know what that, what's gonna, you know, the internet didn't come because people were focusing on the internet that they're working at CERN and they're doing something completely unrelated and all of a sudden the internet popped out and again, this is true of almost anything that's useful.

The target does not have to be, I mean, people who focus on, well, here I think on my next. Yeah. So I've got this a tweet that I, that I did before where I said almost all of science owes its progress to trade, commerce and profit. And that's true whether you like it or not, almost all of science owes its progress to trade, commerce and profit. Ok?

Because, because that is what made people go out and try to create things and try to build things and coax all kinds of information out of the environment and out of that came, you know, new theories about how things worked and, and models that came up. I mean, again, it's not really science laying a foundation that people go engineer things from science. I mean, I'm sorry that just pretty much never happens. That's such a false narrative.

It's people going and tinkering and messing around and trying to invent things and having motives like profit and, and trade and elitism and intellectual things and things that aren't on their surface really that great. But because for whatever reason that motivates the human to go forward and partake in society, you have all these things that come come off as a byproduct of that. Um And so, so when you, when you ask those kind of Elon Musk type questions, right?

Where you've got this really rich dude and he's got all this money. Why does he just throw it at obvious problems? And I, and I think that we have to realize that that's just not how things work. It's not good. You, you, the the it doesn't really make sense to, to, to pick a target directly and work at it because the solution to the problem is gonna come as a byproduct of being focused on something different, right?

If, if, if the trade and the commerce gets you partaking in the environment to try to create something for whatever your reason happens to be, there's going to be all this kind of off shooting technology and ideas and solutions that come out of that, which can then get repurposed to more useful outcomes. And that's just the true history. That is what we see. And if you understand complexity and systems that really should not surprise you.

Um So that indirect target, I just keep bringing up, right? It's a very important pattern. Now, I want to talk about this, this opinion that I have, which is that there's no such thing as lost knowledge and this gets into uh simultaneous invention. So I talked about simultaneous invention uh in a, in a previous episode with respect to um we're talking about technology, right? Technology is humanity, we're talking about banning.

It doesn't make any sense to ban because eventually that discovery is gonna come up again. OK. I talk about like, you don't need Einstein for relativity, right? You don't, sorry. It definitely, definitely, definitely would have been discovered. It's ridiculous to suggest otherwise. And that's true of any kind of theory. So we have all these burning of books and, and, and I'm not saying it's not tragic at all, of course. Right.

But the idea that you're going to, there is this kind of romantic notion that um there's lost civilizations, right? There's, there's civilizations that have been lost and who knows what knowledge they had. Uh I'm sorry, whatever knowledge they had either we've rediscovered it, which is probably 99.99% true. And, and if we haven't, it, it it's going to be discovered.

Ok. Now, that doesn't mean there's no tragedy there, but this, this romantic idea that like, who knows what information these civilizations had in the past. It's, it just doesn't line up to what we know about, discovery about creativity, about simultaneous invention. It's going to happen statistically, right.

The way information works, the way it can manifest itself in so many different ways means that it's, it's going to get discovered, nobody own no individual mind or even civilization or culture really owns a set of ideas. And I know that's gonna rub a lot of people the wrong way. But I'm sorry, that's just patently obvious if you look at the way systems work.

So simultaneous invention, this idea that, that, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't only occur in one place, any invention, any theory, any idea, anything from, from any culture anywhere is, is going to occur somewhere else, it might look a little bit different, right? And, and that might be a true loss, right? Because the way something is manifested can be beautiful from a cultural perspective like this culture came up with this particular idea in this way. And isn't that neat?

And isn't that great? 100%? Yeah, I totally agree. But the idea that the, the idea itself or the technology itself or whatever itself could not have come from any other individual or culture, that is just not true. So, even though, and, and I think there's a positive thing about that because when we think about all these libraries and these books being lost, hundreds of millions of books being lost it's, it's got an aspect of tragedy to it.

But as a human civilization, I guarantee you, we've recovered almost all that knowledge. Uh, and even if we haven't, it's going to come anyways in one form or another. And again, it might not be in the exact same form. And maybe there's a bit of a tragedy to that if you really like the form of something. Right? Because you, you think that interesting. But uh but the information itself is gonna get rediscovered.

So I don't believe there is such thing as lost knowledge and this kind of goes, you know, goes back to that pattern of convergence, right? I don't think there's that many things to know, right? It's actually, you know, through time we just learn the same few things again and again, they manifest in different ways. So, so, you know, again, you know, if Einstein had died before 1921 or whatever, you know, we would have absolutely had relativity, right?

Wouldn't have looked exactly the same, the formulation might have been a little bit different, but we, we definitely would have it, you know, we didn't need Henry Ford for the assembly line. We didn't need, you know, what, take your example, right? So I don't think there's such thing as lost knowledge. And I think there's a positive aspect to that because, you know, it means despite so going back to that question, which I had, you know, like, are we so civilized, right?

Um Again, you need that destruction, you need that rediscovery, you need that reinvention and, and, and even when things are completely destroyed, we know that they come back in one form or another. So no such thing as lost knowledge rediscovery is inevitable. Uh And I had a tweet on this recently, I said there is no such thing as lost or forgotten knowledge. There are no ancient civilizations with yet to be discovered, insights, such romantic notions are precluded by simultaneous invention.

The all too obvious fact that every possible discovery is guaranteed to happen somewhere as long as it's possible, it's going to happen again. So that's a good thing that's hope, right? Uh You must destroy to create, right? The library. So, so the the title of this book is the library, a Fragile History. But in a way it's it's a very not fragile history, right? If it was so fragile, it wouldn't be here still.

So the the quote unquote fragile history of the library shows countless incidents where libraries and their books were destroyed. But this is this is a required aspect of any type of growth where things must be killed off and reinvented, right? So, so the library's fragile past uh was not so fragile since adaptability comes from regular destruction, that's where the adaptability comes from, right? Humans are.

So because we like narrative, we think in these linear for fashion, we we think that something kind of gets, like, designed up front and then that's what was good. So, you either had a good design or you didn't try. It's just not how it works. Right. It doesn't, the thing doesn't matter. It's the process that matters and the library has gone through this process of constant reinvention. And that's why it's here today. It's very, you know, it's, it's, it's not about being fragile.

It's very, you know, anti fragile to moral Talib's term, right? It's, it's, it's part of survivability, it's part of adaptability, it's part of resilience. Uh you, you, you have whatever it is you do should constantly be destroyed and reinvented. That's a sign of survivability, right? So the breakable past of the library is what allowed it to take foothold and grow, right?

And again, that goes back to the fact that what the library really represents is information and information cannot be killed. Information can find many different ways to manifest itself. So you can keep killing it, keep killing it. And, and again, it's not just that it survives, it's that every time you break it, it learns, right?

It being the library or the, you know, the the people that are putting together the library, you know, whatever, however you wanna think about that you, you, that's how you coax the information out of the environment to figure out what something needs to be in order to continue to grow. Um the great. So, so I kind of talking about these indirect targets, right? So much of the history of collecting books had to do with showing them off rather than reading.

OK. And, and, and so many, you know, so many different ways to think about that. We go back to the Elon Musk question about what should be throwing his money at. We, we talk about the, you know, profit motive and political motive and all these different motives for the growth of the library. You know, uh II I it, it was about the ostentatious behavior and the portrayal of elitism and intellectualism that books portrayed that really kept people moving.

And that's what matters is what keeps you moving. You might not always like the targets that something comes out that, that something was used, but the byproduct can be really positive. And I think that's what we have to keep in mind uh in, in the battle between architecture and usability. Architecture always won. Libraries were not about making them particularly useful for reading. Yeah. Yeah. Again, there was that, that wasn't quite true. I think during uh Andrew Carnegie's time, right?

The industrialist who had so much money that he, he, he there's this whole, you know, the, the book talks about Carnegie really building a lot of what we think of now as, as the libraries throughout the US and public access and, and his were not necessarily as pretty and they kind of had more utility to them. But by and large architecture wins.

And again, that's because the purpose of the library, whether you like it or not was not really to be a place to access information, a storehouse of it was more to show off, right. Uh A city or a country's elitism is, it's, it's, it's intellectualism, its ability to house knowledge and, and look what we've created. So the architecture was more of a thing and, and we see that uh with libraries today, right? Um And another example of this, I guess, uh I think is a lot of people on Twitter.

Well, for people that I follow, I guess anyways, they like to take pictures of their books a lot. I see this a lot on Twitter. It kind of annoys me. Pe people just love doing this. They love, they love, they bought a book, they'll take a picture of it or they'll show their bookcase or they'll show their stack of their books and often it's before they've even read them, they say, like, look at all the books I just got, you know, and, you know, you gotta ask why are people doing this? Right?

Why are people doing this? Uh You know, like, well, I don't care what books you're reading. I mean, I do. It's interesting because, you know, book recommendations are good. I mean, I'm kind of doing that right now with my podcast obviously, but this, this idea that you're taking a picture of all your books, especially before you've even read them. I mean, who's to say you're even going to read them? That, that ostentatious, that elitism, that intellectualism.

I think we all kind of have that a little bit. Right. We, the, the, there's something about having a shelf of books or a picture of all the books that you're going to read. You know, as though that says something about your, uh, intellectual abilities or the knowledge, I don't know what it is. I don't have the words for it. Right. But there's something in that and I think that parallels what we see with libraries, right? It, it's not really about the reading.

Hopefully you are going to read those books and you get something out of it, but it's not really about the reading, isn't it? Is it when people take pictures of all the books and when people create big libraries, there's something else there. You know, it, it's a bit of grandstanding, right? Uh, a grandstanding incentive. So I had this tweet back a while back where I said, never show off your personal wall of books.

Unless you're ready to exhibit what you've built with all that borrowed knowledge, never show off your personal wall of books unless you're ready to exhibit what you've built with all that borrowed knowledge. And, and so I'm just kind of poking fun of this, this, this, this idea of, you know, people like to show off all the books but it's like, well, what have you built with all that knowledge?

Because if you haven't built anything with all that knowledge, what was the point of reading all that, you know? You know, and if it was just for your own entertainment, why would you be showing that off? I mean, it would make more sense to show off something that you've actually created some value that you've added to the economy based on all this borrowed knowledge. And again, it's borrowed knowledge. I mean, you didn't even write those books. It somebody else anyway. It just kind of bugs me.

And I had this, uh, this was in relation to another tweet. Uh, you know, don't brag about being well read, reading requires almost no cognitive effort, wanting to be respected for the mindless consumption of someone else's effort is embarrassing, is embarrassing. You know, when you build stuff you don't need to brag, you just point. So I, I've got this thing where, you know, it's really about creating, it's really about building. Don't get me wrong. I read all the time.

I'm doing a, you know, almost a book a week for this podcast, right? And you should consume. Consumption is important, but don't consume without creating is really what I'm saying here. And I had actually, I don't think I put it here. I, I had actually, uh, there, there was a thing where people were kind of doing this ongoing threat and they're trying to make it viral where everybody takes a picture of their top five or 10 books or whatever it is. And I said, OK, fine.

I'll take a picture of my books. But I said, I'll also show you, I forget, you know, three or five different things that I'm working on. And I tried to get that going and that didn't, that wasn't very popular. People didn't want, I was trying to get people to show the books, but also show the projects that they're working on because again, you shouldn't just consume, you should create anyway. Um That, that's kind of my take on it. So at the end of the day, it's borrowed knowledge.

It's, you know, if, if, if it's your books that you wrote, maybe that's a little bit different but, you know, go create something, don't just consume, right? Go build something. It doesn't really say much to say you read a bunch of other people's words, right? Go, go do something anyway. That's my take, probably offend some people but whatever. Um Yeah, so things happen for unrelated reasons, right? And so the big message here is don't impose the targets, right?

Don't look at the masks of the world and say you should be spending your money on this like you, you don't really understand where the progress is coming from. And and if you look at the properties of systems, positive benefits rarely come from aiming at the thing directly. I don't think you're gonna cure poverty by aiming at poverty. I think we can all agree. It'd be great to end poverty.

You know, and, and I think a lot of that goes to the argument of, you know, capitalism has lifted a lot of people out of poverty, whether you like it or not. And that's because the goal was not poverty. It's because, you know, people were doing other things, they were inventing things and coming up with technologies for whatever the reason was. But then out of that came a lot of beneficial things and that's just the way it works. So don't impose targets on people.

And that's why I'm against overs structuring by, you know, things like the government, you know, the government's needed, you know, uh for, for certain things, but any and this is in business as well. It doesn't matter what the system is. If you overt structure it, if you overs design it, you're imposing targets. And that suggests that if you aim at something that's what you're going to get out of it, but that's not the way it works.

So, so all through history, book hunters, merchants, whether it's about political gain, religious unification, elitism, uh the space race, right? The moon landing, people didn't land on the moon because they thought the moon was cool. I mean, or, or for scientific reasons, right? We did not land on the moon for scientific reasons. We being in the US uh, that's not why we land on the moon, right? Is it because there was a space race with Russia?

It was, it was political, it was politically charged. It was about elitism, it was about, right. Um, show, showing off technology and, and accomplishment. It wasn't about the moon. Now, people who were involved in the project undoubtedly had scientific interests. Right. That's the way it works. But so much of science is not done because of science, right? It has to have some other political economic reason. OK. Um, technology from war, we hear about this all the time, right?

So much of technology came, you know, after world war two. Right. Right. So, so it was done for, you know, arguably not great reasons, right? Although depending on a defensive or offensive position that you're taking, but, you know, war is not generally agree, that's not a great thing, but so much technology ended up coming from that. So we have these unrelated targets now to be clear, I'm not trying to justify totally. Doesn't matter what the target is.

Go do you know anything but, but at the same time, it's, it's too simplistic to look at something and, and say, well, you're not doing something for the right reason. Right. Again, properties versus reasons I talk about this all the time, right? Go back to the last episode or quite a few episodes of it. Properties versus you can't know anyways. So I'm not gonna get into that. Now, the point is don't impose the targets. Right.

Uh, the internet didn't come because people wanted to work on, you know, I mean, it was kind of related in some sense, they were working on communication but they weren't trying to, like, get the world talking to each other. Uh, the current space race. Right. Amazon and, and spacex. Right. Uh, you know, there's this kind of, in a way it's dumb on the surface where it's like, let's put billionaires into space, right? It's kind of sad on the surface, right?

We, we have people putting rockets into space and, and what's the, what's the ticket price? A few $100,000 a million dollars? Like what does it cost to go to space right now? A million dollars if you're just an average citizen? Right? Not, not, not average economically but average, you know, if I'm not an astronaut, how do I get to space? It's probably gonna cost me about a million bucks and it's only gonna be like just above the stratosphere or whatever. It's kind of like, well, what is that?

Right? I mean, that's, that's Ridic, you know, but even though that is stupid on the surface to many people out of that profit motive and charging people a million buck that's going to start something and eventually because this always happens, things get cheaper, things get more ubiquitous, the price comes down and all of a sudden you've got this this space tourism and then that turns into something maybe even more publicly accessible and that's how innovations happen.

So, so make it less about imposing the targets on people like this is what you're supposed to be working on, right? Um It has to be a specific purpose. It's just not how progress happens, it's not how things grow, right?

As long as people are doing things, um I had a tweet recently, those who create good in the world do so as a byproduct of their self-interests, those who do damage in the world do so by aiming their efforts directly at world problems, OK, maybe it's a bit strong, but honestly, I think this is, this is largely true, but again, those who create good in the world do so as a byproduct of their self-interests, hopefully their self interests are still positive. But, but that's what it is.

Can't get away from that. Those who do damage in the world are often anyways doing so by aiming their efforts directly at world problems. And that doesn't mean they're trying to do damage, right? A lot, a lot of people are doing things for good reasons. You know, like if you're trying to, if you want to make the world a better place, you might like aim at poverty, you might aim at disease, right? Um But that doesn't mean that's where the solutions are going to come from.

We still have to be realistic about how things happen. So, don't, don't impose those targets, ultimately. Why is the library still here? Let's go back to the library. Well, it's interesting, the library is kind of one of the few places where you're generally not being recommended to. Right. So if you think about the modern age, the library stands in stark contrast to uh stark contrast to the ubiquity of information, right?

It does, I mean, we have uh just access to anything we want pretty much on the internet. Why do we bother going to the library? Well, libraries are these slow thinking spaces, right? That are away from the hustle and bustle of every everybody of everyday life. And I think we really crave that and more to the point in the digital age, almost everything is done through recommendation algorithms, right? We we we can't get out of these echo chambers, right?

Whether it's you know Twitter or whether it's, you know, Facebook or some other social media platform, even things that get emailed to us uh e even within our own, you know, companies that we work for the information has this feedback loop and it's got this this echo chamber aspect to it. And because the technology so much of the technologies that we use have these recommendation algorithms behind them, so if I click on this, what's going to get surfaced to me is more of that, right?

And it's not, you know, whether it's an advertisement or, or anything, any, any part of the technology, it's like as soon as you touch it, it starts to give you more of what you touched and there's some benefit to that, I suppose. Right. But there's also this kind of really annoying, like, look just because I showed some interest in this doesn't mean I just want that, you know, I want, I want difference. I want something to be distinct.

So the library is the one place you can go and you can just browse, you can just browse, I mean, the interesting thing is you can't really just browse on the internet anymore. You can't, you can't really just, it's really hard to just browse on the internet even though that word browse. Uh we, we normally associate with, you know, browsers, right?

But, but browsers are not really for browsing because so much of it is being fed by recommendation algorithms that I can't get out of that echo chamber that I didn't even want to create as soon as I click anything. There's this reinforcing feedback loop that keeps me into those things that I, that, that I clicked that type of information, those types of people. Right. What if I just wanted to, to browse? Right.

Well, you kind of have to go to something like a library for that, a physical library to do that. I don't want to be recommended to, you know, if I go purchase a book on Amazon that doesn't mean, I want all those types of books being recommended from that day on, like, go away. I, I just want to browse, I want to be exposed to things that are surprising things that I don't know.

And so the library which has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and, and, and it looks kind of like a relic from the past in a way you've got these physical bound books, but I can just go browse in the library. I can get surprised I can be presented with something that I wasn't quote unquote supposed to be presented to, right? And uh and so away from the hustle and bustle and away from the record, it's, it's the place to go without being recommended to, which is super refreshing.

So if you haven't done it in a while, I would go walk around a library, physical library because a lot of people don't realize just how much they're getting recommend, you know, you're on your smartphone all the time. And, and we don't realize just how much we're getting recommended to.

We don't realize how much our experience has been kind of engineered for us, you know, not explicitly like, but, but you know, but, but there's this targeting of advertisements and, and because the algorithms that back all the, all the products that you're using are shaping what you see in here, right? And uh and there's not much ability to browse anymore to just be exposed to new possibilities and uh and it can change your life.

I mean, it can, I mean, it comes down to, you know, the the the statistical sampling from the possibility space, right? You need to go sample from the possibility space, you know, it go spin that telescope randomly and see where it lands in the sky, right? That's how, that's how tractability to complex problems works. That's how growth works. That's how opportunity really happens.

And one of the few places you can do that now is the physical library because it's, it stands in stark contrast to the connected echo chambered feedback looped technology landscape that we find ourselves in. So go to the library, go walk around, go, go, go sample some new possibilities in ways that you just can't do using today's technology. It sounds crazy but it's true. Ok. So that is it for this episode?

So I know that was about libraries maybe at the, at the beginning, some of you thought that was gonna be a little bit boring. I don't know, library sounds kind of right dated. And is that really interesting? But hopefully you saw that there are a lot of core pro uh patterns in there because it's about information because it's about control and censorship and a lot of things that are relevant today. Um So hopefully that all made sense. And you and you found that interesting.

I have a video that I'm going to show now uh I know that uh for anyone who is not on Patreon, you won't be able to see this. But for those who are on Patreon, you'll be able to see the video all. It's just a short compilation of some beautiful libraries. So I show the library uh I show where, you know what country it comes from. It's only about a minute and a half. I think it's no more than two minutes. Uh But you can see some nice libraries and you can see the importance of architecture, right?

Being much more important than the contents of the library. Uh It's got a little background music to it. So let's go ahead and watch that. Now again, with those with audio only, you'll get to uh just enjoy the music. OK? I hope everyone enjoyed that. So again, for those who like some of the additional media that I add to my nontrivial episodes, go ahead and head on over to patreon dot com slash nontrivial and check that out a little bit of money each month to get you some extra content.

But again, the audio is exactly the same. I've got some references at the Yan, some Wikipedia articles related to the concepts. Of course, the book itself, the library with Fragile History, got a nature article on there with uh uh publication related to some complexity stuff and just some additional reading. So thanks again to everyone. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Until next time. Take care.