Sep 10, 2025 · 1 hr 14 min · 12 segments
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Alex Komoroske, the co-founder and CEO of Common Tools. Alex has spent his career thinking about how individual incentives can add up to significant…
Alex KomoroskeGuest
Nick GrossmanHost
It's funny, this podcast, This Little Hunch, was based on Stephen Johnson's book, Where Good Ideas Come From.
And, you know, I hadn't known about that term until I read the book about 15 years ago.
So fun fact, that book actually is the thing that kicked me onto this, which I forgot until I was talking with Steven a couple of years ago.
Cause I did the slime mold deck about like organizations of slime molds and emoji flip book and about why companies get slow as an emergent process, as opposed to a specific like, and yeah, And it was viral outside of Google and it was viral kind of outside of it.
And in that conversation, I was like, wait a second, did you write that book on like complex systems? He's like, yeah.
And I was like, wait a second, does it, does it mention like slime molds and I was like, yeah, I was like, I think I got that frame from your book.
Um, that was like this emergent ant colony thing to like grab, grapple with the ideas and whatever.
I had forgotten it was Steven Johnson's book until, you know, I talked with him many years later.
But, um, to me, emergence is just, is that there is more than just the sum of its parts.
There is something that happens, uh, There's something that comes out of something larger than that.
I think emergence is obviously and straightforwardly correct, but we just forget about it because it's easier with reductionist toolkits to forget about it.
To me, the visual that makes this really clear, and I can see if I can find it somewhere, is there's this artist, I'll have to look it up, that takes a sprig of a pine tree or something And then he takes all of the pine needles apart separately and all the little sub branches and he aligns them in the structured, like, you know, by, by size or whatever.
And clearly there's something more when they're assembled into that assemblage than when they are picked apart into these individual little, like how, how like the length of the pine needles, like that's one characteristic of them.
It's funny, this podcast, This Little Hunch, was based on Stephen Johnson's book, Where Good Ideas Come From.
And, you know, I hadn't known about that term until I read the book about 15 years ago.
So fun fact, that book actually is the thing that kicked me onto this, which I forgot until I was talking with Steven a couple of years ago.
Cause I did the slime mold deck about like organizations of slime molds and emoji flip book and about why companies get slow as an emergent process, as opposed to a specific like, and yeah, And it was viral outside of Google and it was viral kind of outside of it.
And in that conversation, I was like, wait a second, did you write that book on like complex systems? He's like, yeah.
And I was like, wait a second, does it, does it mention like slime molds and I was like, yeah, I was like, I think I got that frame from your book.
Um, that was like this emergent ant colony thing to like grab, grapple with the ideas and whatever.
I had forgotten it was Steven Johnson's book until, you know, I talked with him many years later.
But, um, to me, emergence is just, is that there is more than just the sum of its parts.
There is something that happens, uh, There's something that comes out of something larger than that.
I think emergence is obviously and straightforwardly correct, but we just forget about it because it's easier with reductionist toolkits to forget about it.
To me, the visual that makes this really clear, and I can see if I can find it somewhere, is there's this artist, I'll have to look it up, that takes a sprig of a pine tree or something And then he takes all of the pine needles apart separately and all the little sub branches and he aligns them in the structured, like, you know, by, by size or whatever.
And clearly there's something more when they're assembled into that assemblage than when they are picked apart into these individual little, like how, how like the length of the pine needles, like that's one characteristic of them.
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