Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today's episode is one of our hallway conversations where we just riff on a topic for a bit. And the topic we're talking about today is the theme of complicated. And to give you more context for this, we have A6 and Z board partner, Steven Sinovsky, who has written in the past about systems where the back end is really complicated. And the front is deceptively simple and this tension is also a common theme in design. We have A6 and Z research

and deal team head Frank Chen who has talked a lot about AI and deep learning and that's relevant

here because those are complex systems that learn. And finally we have Sam Arban, who is a complexity scientist and who also got his

PhD in computational biology. And he has a new book out called Overcomplicated. So it all fits

together. All right, guys, let's just get started. I'm excited to talk about this topic. So Sam, I was

reading the book. And one of the first things that occurred to me is I wanted to ask you my favorite

product manager interview question of all time.

My question is, so how do phones work?

How do phones work?

Like an iPhone, smartphone, any phone?

You pick any phone, even the simplest landline and tell me how it works.

Oh, boy.

I'm going to show my ignorance probably really, really quickly. And yeah,

I know you dial. And then actually, I was going to say there's some sort of packet switching

thing. I guess it really depends if you're using kind of an IP phone or not. Yeah, and frankly,

I don't know. Well, and I think you hit on it. And frankly, I think most people do not know.

And we've been shielded from that complexity.

The reason I ask is because that's what really jumped out at me when I was reading the book, which is like we create systems that nobody understands.

And so it turns out like you can ask a million product managers how to a phone work.

Some actually do exactly what you did.

Well, you dial it.

And then the next question is, well, tell me about the electromagnetic stuff behind dialing and what is that or touchtones.

...