Make with Notion 2025: How to Build Tools That Shape Civilizations (Alan Kay & Ivan Zhao)

Before we start, I'd like to do a quick introduction about Alan Kay. So who knows what this is? Raise your hand.

A Macintosh.

Okay. What about how many of you have heard about or heard of Xerox PARC? Raise your hand. More people. Great. So this is Alan with that computer, Xerox Alto. Alto was the first personal computer in the world, and Alan created it in the '70s with a bunch of talented people at Xerox PARC. So Alan, with those people at PARC, not only created the first personal computers, Xerox PARC is responsible for most modern things we know of about computing. From graphic user interface, popularized the mouse, laser printer, Ethernet cables, to modern text editor, all come from this group of people from Alan's generation. Alan's my hero. When I was in college, I read the paper that he and those group of people published and it inspired a generation of people like me to start companies like Notion. It's about tools. It's about computing with creativity. It's about creating things that help you think, help you augmenting your imagination. And here's a photo that I took it, that I finally met Alan in person last year in London. And I also bugged him to sign the paper that I used to read from Alan. And now we frame those papers in our office in San Francisco and in New York. Thank you. Alan will be joining us live from London today.

Hi.

But today I don't want to interview Alan about the history of computing. There's plenty of videos and articles that you can read about how computers and software came about. What many people don't realize is that Alan is also a great philosopher about humanity, about tools, about technology. And that will be our focus. today. So shortly I'm going to bring Alan online through this monitor. Oh, Alan's here already. Hello, Alan. And I have Alan's permission to interrupt him so we can get the conversation going and cover some more ground together. Okay, Alan, let's get started. Ready?

Yep.

All right. So as a warm-up, last time we chatted, we discussed about people like Marshall McLuhan, and I think his ideas are very relevant for anyone building tools and technology today. There's a quote from him that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. It has been a quote that Notion references a lot. Allan, could you explain to the audience in maybe a few minutes what this means and maybe a couple examples?

Okay, so McLuhan was famously obtuse. So I'll give you some of my own interpretations of what he was saying. These are really important ideas. One of them is simple for techies who all know that radio programs are sent by making a carrier wave and then modulating the carrier wave, and therefore every radio receiving set has to have a model of the carrier, because it is like our nervous system, it is getting its information by extracting differences. And the second idea here is that if you take a baby at birth anywhere on Earth to a new place, then that baby is going to grow up as a full-fledged member of the new place, not from where it was originally born. And that is because we co-evolve with culture. We absorb the culture, and if we've done it from birth, we aren't even aware of our own culture. We're only aware of our own culture when we go somewhere else to a different place and everything now is different. But the people in that culture have gotten used to almost everything, and so what they think is going on is only a tiny part of what's actually going on because they've accommodated to it. So this is the thing that McLuhan realised about the Industrial Revolution, that when you make, for instance, in the Industrial Revolution, when you think you're just getting a thing, in sheep's clothing is an entire environment. So when you put a television into your room, then— So the The basic idea is we wind up accommodating to the actual environment that we're in and only pay attention to the differences. But what McLuhan and Thoreau and others pointed out is what's really important is what happened to us to do the accommodation. That's what makes the big changes.

I love you use the idea of a television, right? Oftentimes it's a tool that we created. When we created television initially, we thought it's just a packaged movie in your living room.

It's low-quality movies.

Low-quality movies on demand.

But it changed everything because people watched it because it was there, and they watched it much more than they went to the movies. And what happened with television, it acted like a culture. And so people started accommodating to what was normal on that. And one of the things commercial television did in the US was to renormalize downwards.

To renormalize which?

Well, yeah, because if once you— when I grew up, pretty much anything that was on reality television was just not done. It was unthinkable, it was ugly, it was impolite, it was uncivilized. But what happened is people gradually got used to it, and got used to it, and got used to it. And guess what? Our current president is a product of reality television. We're in the middle of a reality television show right now.

And the part that's really fascinating me when we talk about this, and a lot of people don't realize, when TV just started, people thought it's a movie in a box. And also people thought it's like a radio. People try to use TV to do radio show, right? McLuhan has this idea as when new media happens, usually dressed up like the old medium so people know what to deal with.

Exactly.

Could you explain that a little bit to the audience?

Well, I probably shouldn't spend more than a minute on it, but one of the most important things that happened along these lines was in 1938 on radio. Television wasn't really around then, and for Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles decided to do a fake news program about the Martians.

The Martian.

Yes. And the year before, the Hindenburg was a real disaster, which the audience of millions heard only by a radio announcer announcing it. It's— you can find it on YouTube. It's a terrible thing to listen to because the announcer is in complete pain. But his job is to explain what's going on, and people are being killed in front of his eyes.

That's definitely the one, right?

Yeah, so that was the Hindenburg. So the next year, they used exactly that style and an announcer who announced in exactly that style Martians coming out and beaming down humans in a heat ray. And millions of Americans took it seriously because It was the first time that a mass medium had been used to broadcast something as though it was in real time, and yet it was a hoax. And that is what we have to understand, because what McLuhan was really interested in is how scale changes when we try and imitate one medium with another. But if the scale is different, the results are gonna be completely different.

And the part that scale is very different with TV, radio, those mass media, and we don't realize that the nature of those technologies is very different from prints or other smaller scale medium before. That's one factor. And when we introduce the new medium to our lives, we're sort of, McLuhan has the saying that we drive faster into the future through the rearview windows.

That's especially true of management.

About which one?

We're going faster and faster into the future and steering only by looking in the rearview mirror.

Right.

Something for management to think about.

Thank you. I'll remember. I'll pay attention.

Well, you're not management. You're the—

Oh, okay. Oh, okay, right. I think this part also tells us so much about human nature, which is like you can only absorb the new thing, or you mostly absorb the new thing through what you understand of the past. The radio example or the TV examples, when TV just happened, most time people just had people speaking in front of the radio station, film it. That's the first half a decade or a decade of TV stations, right? It's like, why is that? Like, why don't we learn better? We know— like, I—

we both— Well, part of it, actually, Bing Crosby made a lot of money investing in Ampex to be able to record shows. The live stuff always preceded the Recording media. But another way to look at it— I mean, let's go back to this. Let's look at this really harshly.

Please.

And realize that every conversation you have with somebody else, you're creating both parts in your own head. Because all that's out there, as far as your eyes and your ears are concerned, are fluctuations of photons and fluctuations in atoms. Everything else, including what the person is saying to you, is being recreated by you, and you often don't get it right. This is why people are very unable to report disasters, or everybody sees things differently. It's because As far as your eyes and your ears are happening, nothing is happening out here except very low-level fluctuations. And in order to recognize anything, you have to already know what it is, right? And so this is really bleak if you think about it that way. So you're only— and you're not far, I think you're not far from Palo Alto right now.

I'm in San Francisco, right. Yeah.

Yeah, you heard it. So in San Francisco, they probably already still have isolation tanks. This is what people used to do instead of taking LSD back then. But it's where they— it's Epsom salt water that will float you on top of it. It's at blood temperature. They plug your ears and your eyes. And you're completely isolated. Your brain cannot get any signals from the outside. And in about 5 minutes— but your brain is working because it's the thing that's providing it. And so you'll first start doing something like dreaming while you're awake, and then you realize, well, we're always dreaming while we're awake.

Mm-hmm.

That is our normal thing. We're in a hallucination. Because we're pretending there's something out there in the world, but it's still inside of our head. And once you take away the feedback loop of what's out there, your brain is free to make up other things, because it really requires contact with the outside world to keep us halfway in sync with it. Once you remove that, you start going on something like an LSD trip, and you're— but you're— it's like a bad dream sometimes, sometimes it's like a good dream, but you're awake. And everybody should do that because it will— it will give you— it will make you be nicer to other people. And it will give you a much better appreciation for what we are actually as human beings. Because in our minds, we have this story about what we actually are. Most of that story is just made up.

I love you have this quote, or Marshall McLuhan has this quote that you often reference, that I don't know who discovered water, but I'm sure it wasn't fish.

Yes. We've spent some time trying to track down that quote. It is definitely in McLuhan's early writings. The fish that's only been in pink water won't have any concept for pink.

Mm-hmm.

He'll see other things. I've sometimes shown pictures of being inside the the Grand Canyon and just looking out, it's all kind of pink.

Mm-hmm.

It's only if you think to look upwards that you might see some sky way up there, but most people just look outward, and so they're unaware that they're basically in a pink environment, they're thinking pink thoughts. Every once in a while they might have an outlaw blue thought, But a fist comes down from heaven because they've gone to school, they've gone to church, they've got a home. No outlaw thoughts. But every once in a while, you're in a, you know, you're taking a shower, coming back from a run, and that blue shot thought will shoot up. And if the, what you're, the ground you're running on is pink, It's going to take you into a different plane.

Scientific discovery is kind of like that, right? You're always stuck in a plane and there's a new paradigm you realize. In some sense, humor is kind of like that, right? You have a joke, you think about, oh, the joke's gonna end this way, but joke—

Yes.

And turn a completely different turn. A lot of art is like that.

Yeah. And Arthur Koestler, in this book Act of Creation, for people who want to read about it, So he said, like, he said there are 3 reactions. We just talked about 3 different things of this. And he said, when it's a joke, your reaction is haha. When it's science, it's aha. And when it's art, it's ah.

That's awesome.

And actually, in science, you often laugh. Because there's nothing funny, because the universe didn't change itself just because we had a new idea about it.

Right.

So that's a joke. A joke is when you think you're going somewhere and you find out the story is different. That happens in scientific discovery also. So frequently scientists will start laughing when they suddenly see, well, it was there all the time, you stoop.

Like we thought the Earth is the center of the universe and solar system, and discovered it's a lot simpler, a lot more aha when the sun is the center.

Yeah. And so my saying for that is point of view is worth 80 IQ points. So you're much better. And Richard Hamming, I think, whose name that most people will recognize, had a great line. He said, It is much better to work on the wrong problem in a wrong— work on the right problem in a wrong way than to work on the wrong problem in a good way.

Yeah, that's so true.

Right? Because you're not going to get anywhere no matter how well you work on the wrong problem. So problem finding is much, much more important than problem solving. And unfortunately, schools are all about problem solving. Right. They don't teach the kids how to find new problems.

That's so true, because back then when they tried to calculate with Earth in the center of the system, they came up with such— so many elaborate calculations. I'm sure it's elegant and beautiful, but even more simpler and beautiful once you put—

So I've got a fun thing for you.

Please.

You know, they fixed up those orbits by— they believed perfect circles were the thing. And so they fixed up these bad orbits by adding little orbits on the orbit called epicycles. And here's the thing, when they changed over to the solar-centric system, they kept the epicycles. Because what was actually going on were ellipses.

Ellipses, right.

And it wasn't until Kepler, who relied on Tycho Brahe, who is a Danish astronomer. He relied on his measurements and his accuracy to finally figure out, 'cause the Earth's orbit is almost a circle, and it was just tiny little differences that got Kepler to figure out that it was an ellipse.

Let's go back to tools a little bit. So humans has blindness, Human has inertia. We see the world largely as we are, not as they are. And in some sense, creating tools and creating new perspectives help offset some of those human nature blindness, right? And some tools could be good at it, and some tools could be TBD, like TVs.

Well, let's mention, A real pioneer—

Please.

A guy we at Xerox PARC admired very much and learned a lot from is Engelbart, Doug Engelbart. And his— he had an observation about tools in his very first proposal in 1962. And that is that To most pragmatic humans, a tool doesn't teach enough when you use it. So if it's a hammer, it teaches hammering, and it teaches hammering as a solution to problems, and you could generalize it. You could hammer your baby brother or something like that. You could replace the hammer with a nuclear warhead. When you're an adult. So hammering is what you learn from a hammer. But he pointed out that it's just the nature of human beings not to learn reasonable use of a hammer from using a hammer. Because we're basically pragmatists. We try to get from A to B. We don't worry about C. And so he said every time we make a tool, like this new computer stuff we're working on, we have to insert between the human and the tool education and training. Otherwise, we're going to create informational equivalents of hydrogen bombs.

Mm-hmm.

Which are going to be used by people with the same kinds of brains that we had 100,000 years ago. So that's a big idea. We took it to heart at PARC, but when commercialization happened in the '80s, that was thrown to the winds.

Mm-hmm.

Basic idea is whatever we can sell is a good thing, and we will not train anybody or educate anybody. We will not— you know, we used to go around to schools and say, hey, you know, There are drawbacks to this powerful stuff. Like anything that's powerful, some people are going to use as a weapon. And you really have to get the kids to think about the ramifications of what's going on. And it's much easier if you get them to start thinking early.

That's so true.

Yeah.

Because if we think about reading and writing English or whatever language you use, It takes years. We take school education, this 5, 6 years, for granted. We go through so many years getting good at using this thing called language, which we didn't have 100,000 years ago. It didn't come with us out of Africa.

Yeah, you're right. I think this is a very important point. And to go along with it, You may be aware that modern theories of where— there's a puzzle, where did language come from? The way it was thought about when I was a kid was an impossible number of mutations, kind of like what creationists say about the eye, not knowing that every stage has existed. But one of the most interesting things that has happened recently, the last 20 years, in understanding where language came from was in— as a parallel to why every traditional society that has ever been discovered on Earth has fire.

Mm-hmm.

Not genetic, but preserved by the culture. And if you're able to throw away the idea of grammars as a primary idea and go to something more like teenage slang, which is constantly changing and getting into the culture, you could look at language as being very ad hoc and gradually regularized after the fact. And the best people I know who are thinking about language acquisition think of it that way. And that is a really interesting thing to think about because it brings home that we aren't human beings if we weren't brought up in a culture. We are like the poor little girl Genie who was brought up in a closet, or there were kids brought up by wolves. And they survived, but not mentally. They missed stages of learning and never developed, for instance, their full language facility.

So what you're saying here is humans started with a set of primitives that we're biologically born with, but at the same time we have the set of primitives in our culture and in our tools in our society, the thing that surrounds us that we happen to create a lot of them that we also carry with us. And it's the interplay of those that creates who you are. If you drop a brand new kid into a brand new culture, the kid will absorb what's around them. And if we create tools that modify our environment for the better, for the worse, it will create— it will modify us and the next generation of us. Well, that's what we—

exactly. That is exactly what ARPA and PARC thought they were doing in the '60s and '70s. It was not what commercialization did in the '80s and the '90s. Because nobody in their right mind would have created social media on— because it's not that social media is so bad, it's the Industrial Revolution that makes it into something It becomes something like an environment. It becomes an entire world, always available, and that means that it's going to be a new culture that people using it will acculturate into. That's what's dangerous about it, and I don't think any of the people who did it knew enough about how human minds work to realize they were creating something awful.

Mm-hmm. Because you sort of cannot— we're born to like sweet, salty things, and the things that lack in nature. And Industrial Revolution just created abundance of all the sweet and salty in terms of media and storytelling, all the things we love as a human biologically.

It's a thing every marketing person likes, which is a legal drug, right? You just take human universals that everybody is born with and are filling in, and then boost it to the skies with the Industrial Revolution, whatever it is. And we human beings don't have anything built in to keep us from eating too much salt and sugar because it always was scarce.

Mm-hmm.

So why not? More is better.

How do you— going back to tool creation, which is more on the pragmatic side, education is hard. People, you're born, you don't want to learn things. We have to sit through 6 years of school to learn how to read and write.

Yeah, we all want to be little cave people.

We do, right? Can people actually create tools then predict their consequences?

Well, I think to some extent. I mean, the wolf in the sheep's clothing is always a surprise. For instance, we were very, very familiar with McLuhan and Thoreau, and my minor in college was anthropology. So I knew all this stuff, and— But the problem is we were idealistic.

Hmm.

And we saw what McLuhan was— that our job was to create a richer environment for people to accommodate to, boosting civil— you know, like the one that reading did, and especially the printing press. But we didn't really spend enough— you know, if I had it to do all over again, I would I spent a fair amount of time visiting various educational deals back then, but if I had to do it all over again, I'd spend literally 10 times as much time trying to shout it from the rooftops, just what we've been talking about right now.

Mm-hmm.

Because as I said, as McClelland pointed out, what's important about all of this stuff is, we've normalized it into what we call reality.

Mm-hmm.

So we don't even think about it at all until somebody like me brings it up. 'Cause we're just going about our way, you know, we can pay attention to 5 to 7 to 9 things at once, and we're coping our way along and doing this and that. No public education curriculum that I know of for children or teenagers is a course of study in who we are as a species. That's crazy, isn't it?

It is crazy, yeah. Like the human nature's— I guess anthropology people study that, right? But it's just not as popularized. As a main—

Well, you have— so I think the thing is that once— if your attention is called to it— so I will confess that when I was in grad school, there was a professor that I admired greatly, and he did not like graduate students at all. But I found out that He liked McLuhan.

Uh-huh.

And I had tried reading McLuhan the year before, and I could not understand him. So that summer, I spent the entire summer reading all of McLuhan's books. And by the end of the summer, I got what McLuhan was driving at. It was one of the biggest ideas of the 20th century, because we are literally numb to it.

That's so true.

What is actually going on. And once, you know, it's like the difference between general common sense, like the sun goes around the Earth, and what science found out, which is anti-common sense. And it's still called sunrise and sunset.

That's so true.

And we're a long time past— Copernicus's treatise was written in 1543. It was the first book to be condemned by the Catholic Church. So that's a long time ago. But we still call it sunrise and sunset because Who we are day to day, we could think of as a— actually, I've got a good Buddhist story.

Please.

Which I went to a conference at a Buddhist monastery, which was fantastic, and the monks would do this maybe 20 times a day, like before a meal, and I finally got up my courage to ask, well, why do you do this? He said, well, the Hindus mean one thing by it, but we Zen Buddhists use this as, like, before we work, after we work, before we eat. We use it to spend just 10 seconds as a semicolon in our day, reflecting that the world is a complete illusion.

Mm-hmm.

And we are pretending the illusion is reality as an optimization. Because if we started thinking about what's actually going on out there, it's way too complicated. So we're actually living in the middle of this extreme simplification. But we use this as a way of reminding ourselves— this would be a good thing for everybody to do, right? 20 times a day, remind yourself that we're completely embedded in bullshit.

What are some best practices besides this?

I told you we would have fun.

So what are some tips? and best practices like this to remind ourselves of our blindness, to even increase creativity in some way, right? Let you see a new perspective. What do you use? Something you can share with the audience.

I think every— so the fun thing about anthropology is it gives us a glimpse into You know, the fundamental theorem, you can take a child anywhere, that we all share an enormous number of traits. But as far as advice goes, most people need specific advice because they're also individuals. And it's very tricky to give general advice.

I do.

So a thing I've found useful over the years is, it's hard to have ideas if you don't let yourself have ideas. So it's good to have a part in your brain— by the way, it's good to be somewhat compartmentalized in there, have a crazy room that has a door on it.

Right.

Because have a sane room, have a room you go to when you're Trying to think something through, have a crazy room where you want to let things rip. And so if you go into the crazy room, the thing to do there— and most ideas are mediocre down to bad, let's face it, because the organization of things that go into a good idea is very rare, whereas you can produce bad organizations at will. So one heuristic is find ways of not being attracted down the rat hole just because you had an idea.

Mm-hmm.

And so, for instance, one thing is I write things down in a notebook because I have to do something with the idea, but then I don't read what I— I don't go back to the notebooks. So I have stacks of notebooks of stuff that I've written. And another one is, don't try and give the thing a name, don't try to ask what it is. Instead, try writing 10 things about it.

Mm-hmm.

Because remember, we're thinking about, we're on the pink plane and the blue plane is vertical. So we— and we can't even really— we might be able to smell something up there. Smell is really good. We can hear around corners. So what we're doing is we're tuning in on stuff that is not orthodox. We're just letting crazy ideas happen. This is why For some people, taking a shower. Although there's a great joke about Einstein at the Princeton Tea, where the professors were talking about, what do you do when you have an idea? And the professor says, well, I have a notebook by my bed because I have my ideas in the middle of the night. And another guy said, well, I have a grease pencil in the bathroom because I have my ideas in the shower, so I can write the ideas on the wall. So Einstein was there and they said, well, what do you do when you have an idea, Albert? And he said, I don't know, I've only had 2. Absolutely untrue story, but it's a really great one.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, but the basic idea is to have as many ideas as you can, keep them at arm's length, Don't go— the basic idea is you're trying to put off the thing you've been taught your entire life, which is to solve problems, particularly to solve problems for money.

Mm-hmm.

And that really makes learning difficult because, you know, it's like the joke about peer review in NSF. Peer review in NSF for Where do they come from? And the joke is from East Dakota State. They're not peers. The review means nothing because they're going to review on how orthodox the idea is.

Hmm.

And this is why almost all the progress in computing was made by ARPA and not by NSF, because ARPA explicitly ruled out peer review. He said, we're just not going to do that. We're going to fund people, let them make mistakes, people we know are smart, and take our percentages, let them make mistakes. But anybody who thinks they can peer review a really good idea ahead of its invention is nuts.

That's so true.

So basically, this leaves out most venture capitalists.

There are probably some Some of them in the room today, right?

Yes, some of my best friends are venture capitalists.

Yeah, my wife is too.

So yeah, well, and I know she's really smart.

She is, yeah.

But, you know, in the end, they're looking to make money rather than to make civilization. So that is a real conflict.

That's— I think that's our aha.

Today.

Thank you, Alan, for dialing from London.