This week’s interview with Anjan is about the primary way you and I interface with the world: our computers.
Anjan has spent seven years questioning and trying to build an alternative path forward—a dream of computing that takes us past the “messy medium” we’re in today toward a world where computers make us the best versions of ourselves.
I’ve included some favorite excerpts below. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Listen 🎧🎼: Dialectic Ep. 16: Anjan Katta - A Sunrise Over Computing
Anjan Katta (X) is Founder and CEO of Daylight, a new type of computer company.
Having a conversation with Anjan is a bit like trying reign in a wild animal: his horsepower, wide-ranging philosophical interests, and unbelievable depth in the areas he cares about make him one of a kind. Fortunately, all of that energy is being channeled into his life's work, Daylight Computer Company. Daylight's mission is to build a computer that amplifies our humanity. That starts with Daylight's first product: The DC1, a tablet that combines the power and functionality of an iPad with the screen of a kindle. Anjan has been building Daylight for seven years across extensive research on screens and hardware, many near deaths, and mission-driven motivation.
Anjan sees computers as a "magical medium" that we're in relationship with, unlike other tools. Unfortunately, "optimization of the means, yet confusion of goals" has led the technology industry to building hardware and software that sits in what he calls a "messy medium." With devices that can do anything and everything, they often fail to empower us toward the vision Steve Jobs called the bicycle for the mind.
Throughout, Anjan and I discuss a philosophy toward life, career, design, and creating meaning that I hope will inspire you, whether you work on technology or not. May we all aim to get closer to ourselves and our humanity.
This episode is brought to you by Hampton, a private, highly vetted membership for founders. Hampton makes entrepreneurship less lonely by matching you with a core group of likeminded founders along with community, events, retreats, and more. Visit https://joinhampton.com/community to learn more and apply.
Highlights:
Beyond the “Bicycle for the Mind”
“If computing moves more from a tool or appliance more into the realm of like an instrument or a medium, it is not just an augmenter of your agency.
It's an augmenter of your intellect. It's an augmenter of your creative expression. It's an augmenter of all of the aspects of being human. And that's what I mean when I say computing has its essence—truly in my perspective—in the human potential movement.
'Cause it's a recognition, whoa, this is a human, we're sort of average. You put us on a bike, oh much. Oh my God, what are all the aspects of our being that could be put on a bike and be so much more? And actually then the metaphor of a bike then lacks. And it's not no a self-driving car for the mind. The point is to move from being a vehicle to it, being a dance partner, to it being a medium that… I don't wanna get too technical, but like Gall's law or markoff blankets, basically its complexity matches your complexity.”
On not being paternalistic, but offering an alternative
“ The fact that it's black and white, I'm not paternalistic saying, don't use TikTok on this, or don't use YouTube… I love when kids are trying to watch reels on it and they just like stop. They're like, this sucks. It's so boring. It's boring, and I don't need to say anything about whether it's good or not. And it's not like I am taking away your ability to have a MacBook or a TV or an iPad, right?
It's—now you have a “fork” versus the “spoons” (of other things) versus a “spork” that tries to do everything. And so by being so simple, by being a tablet, by being a third device separate from your iPhone or MacBook or whatever, by having these new sort of associations, you can create a little piece of your computing relationship that has a very different set of qualities to it.”
Agency and baggage
“ At least the new generation is our chance to have a blank canvas and be a representation of today versus a representation of the past. That's the way I think about adults. All of us are representations of our past and the past, and therefore the highest form of agency is to decouple the past from the present and the future.”
Alignment is Pleasurable
“So adults will buy this because they will be able to read a paper and understand it so much better. And then adults will buy it for their kids or kids will ask for it themselves because now a computer can be endlessly entertainment and be fully aligned because you're using the dopamine system in the way it's meant to be.
And it's unbelievably pleasurable to be in your full curiosity and agency and wonderment.”
Steve Jobs, Receptivity, and Wisdom
“ My point there is like, it sounds like maybe [Steve Jobs] is brash or over confident or impulsive, but if you think about the mileage Jobs had in computing… you think about the mentors he had—people like Bob Noyce, the founder of Intel, Alan Kay, and some of these early folks, you think of the amount of smart people that he was receptive to.
I met some of these people. And when I asked them about him, they say he was so good at listening. Everybody knows him as being arrogant, but he was actually very sensitive and good at listening. You think of the sheer amount of receptivity, the machine learning model that was built over that time, the number of products that failed.
Think of Next. Think of the Lisa. Think of so many of the different Apple desktops that were created along the way. So many things failed. Right? He had such mileage of learning. This is why the Tony Fidel's of the world try to be Steve Jobs and totally fail. This is why so many of the young people try to be Steve Jobs totally fail.
They don't have the mileage he had. And early Steve Jobs failed a lot too. Right? But once you have built that machine learning model, when you can interact something with direct experience rather than cognition, there's so much emotional wisdom.
(Jackson: He had the receptivity of a child and the wisdom of somebody who spent a lifetime on it.)
Yes. And, the anger of a Khan.
Anjan and Daylight’s “Third Timeline”
“ And then [there’s this last bit], this overall move towards what I call the third timeline, which is not the first timeline of luddites and Unabomber and screw all this. And let's go back to the woods.
And not the second timeline of like the Marc Andressen, e/acc. Like go, go, go, go Nick Land accelerationism. We're all gonna lose anyway. We might as well just like go gungho into it and solve all our problems with technology, which I think ends up as Brave New World.
It's like you've rung up a really high, high score. GDP is high, life extension is high. You, you're a trillionaire, but you know you're dead inside. Timeline One, you're dead on the outside 'cause a tiger may eat you or you might get sepsis. Without antibiotics. But you're alive inside.
Timeline two, you're alive outside. It's like Brian Johnson. You look like a million bucks. You literally spend a million bucks on that. You're a trillionaire. You know, you got, you got a 12 pack, but inside you're dead. You're some way in which optimizing for all those metrics, your soul is dead.
And the third timeline is how we can sort of have a beautiful harmony between the future and tradition between the top down, the bottom up, the masculine, the feminine between the technological and the natural. Alive outside and alive inside.”
Accountability to Reality and Finding Meaning in Creation
“ I'm just trying to have fun. It's like my dojo. It's my little sandbox. I love gadgets. I love learning about humans. The psychology, the biology, the philosophy, the bigger story.
And here's my chance to try to make stuff based on my theories, based on my curiosities. And do people like it? Am I right? Am I wrong? I love that accountability of reality. And I think that's what the essence of investing or entrepreneurship or being a scientist is. You love and trust reality so much, you're willing to be held accountable to it. Because you assume the reverse relationship is reciprocal.
I just want a place that I can make awesome stuff for a long time to come, whether it be incense holders or new forms of computers. I don't know.
I love when you see a new parent and you ask them, how are you? And they're like, terrible. I've never been so sleep deprived. My eye is twitching. And I'm like, but how do you feel? And they're like, I've never felt more satisfied ever.
There's something about building things that is similar to this. It's like in each moment you're like, why the hell am I doing this? But it just gives you a, a sense of purpose and meaning and a personal dojo for your spiritual evolution that I think very little else matches.”
Integrity
“ But I think what integrity means is you actually are something other people can build on top of. And you are something your present and future self can build on top of.
Hitting snooze on something every time rather than just like removing it from your calendar to-do list in a way is low integrity. 'Cause now your future self can't trust that you'll actually then do it. And so integrity is literally physical integrity.
It's what allows other things structure. Structural integrity. You won't be in a building that doesn't have integrity. And so you sometimes don't notice it, that it doesn't have integrity until the earthquake comes in and everybody's dead. So there's a way if you're trying to build something for the long term, if you're trying to build something that scales integrity matters more and more as a function of scale and of length of time. And so I've started to realize what integrity means to me is owning your word.
Timestamps
(0:04): Hampton
(1:57): Anjan Intro
(3:54): A Bicycle for the Mind and The Computer: Tool or Medium?
(13:15): The Core of the Computer as a Magical Medium: Relationship
(16:39): The Waterslide/fall of Agency and Humanity as Nature's Generalists
(27:35): What drove Anjan to Computers
(33:00): Building the Non-Inevitable and Confronting Silicon Valley's "Optimization of Means, Yet Confusion of Goals"
(39:25): Wandering Toward Daylight: a Computer that Doesn't Feel Like Other Computers
(51:02): Is Daylight paternalistic? The messy middle and the Case Against "sporks" or Sh* tting Where You Eat
(59:51): The Ultimate Messy Medium: The Phone as Our Main Relationship to the World and Starting Over with a More Simple Tool
(1:08:04): A Magical Companion: The Primer, Dynabook, or "Hobbes"
(1:13:31): Starting with Light & "Lateral Thinking with
(1:17:32): Daylight as "basically Just a Screen" & Applying "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology"
(1:28:18): High Resolution Decision Making: Designing with Intuition and Developing the Right Kind of "Feel"
(1:40:24): The Four Dimensions of Daylight's Vision
(1:58:08): Growing as a Person and a Leader
(2:07:08): Growing Daylight the Company/Organism: Three Principles
(2:12:42): Competition, Scaling Daylight, Why Someone Should Work There
(2:17:45): Lighting Round: Paravel – Interactive Fiction App Developed for Daylight
(2:19:54): The Evolution of Books
(2:21:20): Most Influential Books on Anjan
(2:23:43): Is AI making Us More Human or Less Human?
(2:29:38): Boredom, Authenticity, and Integrity
(2:32:06): Faith and Spirituality
(2:33:04): What Anjan Has Learned from His Parents and What He's Forgiven Them For
(2:34:38): Lilo and Stitch
(2:35:50): The Most Important Thing
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