Sunday, 4 October

Two thoughts from John Galsworthy

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”

“Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.”

Monday, 5 October

Two thoughts from Arthur Miller

“No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.”

“A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”

Tuesday, 6 October

Two thoughts from Nathan W. Morris

“Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece after all.”

“It’s not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.”

Wednesday, 7 October

Two thoughts from Eliyahu M. Goldratt

“Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave.”

“An expert is not someone who gives you the answer, it is someone who asks you the right question.”

Thursday, 8 October

Two thoughts from Bertrand de Jouvenel

“Sooner or later, a society of sheep must create a government of wolves.”

“A people among whom custom is altogether sovereign endures the despotism of the dead.”

Friday, 9 October

Two thoughts from Virginia Woolf

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

Saturday, 10 October

Two thoughts from Charles Darwin

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

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This week: eleven people and a crane bringing the Alien Queen to life, a 20-page fan letter Iggy Pop actually answered, a second opinion on Ari Emanuel’s favourite villain, a girl raised to distrust schools earning a Cambridge PhD, and dogs playing poker hanging beside a Frida Kahlo self-portrait in George Lucas’s museum.

1. Aliens Expanded : Five Hours Inside the Making of a Classic

I recently watched Aliens (1986) with my 12-year-old son (the extended version, with the sentry turrets!). Forty years later, James Cameron’s sequel still holds up remarkably well. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out, of course, but what I want to recommend today is something else: Aliens Expanded (2024), a crowdfunded documentary by Ian Nathan that spends 282 minutes exploring how a 137-minute film was made.

Yes, almost five hours devoted to a single movie!

Nathan goes through the film scene by scene, with many of the people who worked on it: James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, producer Gale Anne Hurd, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, and many of the artists and technicians behind the sets, models, and creatures (sadly, Bill Paxton died in 2017). It’s great to meet the actors who play the marines and see how different they are from their characters.

I love the focus on why things were done a certain way. It’s an education in filmmaking.

One example: Cameron explains that the scene where Ripley enters the Alien Queen’s egg chamber came from a nightmare. He’d walked into a dark room and realized that the walls and ceiling were covered in wasps. If he moved, they’d attack. Cameron wanted Ripley and the audience to feel that same dread, so he slowed the scene down and stripped away the sound before revealing the Queen.

Then there’s the Alien Queen herself. Stan Winston’s team first tested the idea with a crude mock-up wrapped in black garbage bags. The finished creature was a 14-foot-tall puppet, suspended from a crane, with two stunt performers inside and nine more people operating its head, tail, arms, and legs using cables, rods, and hydraulics. Remember, there was no CGI cleanup! So Cameron had to compose the shots to hide all that.

After spending almost five hours learning how they made it, I kind of want to watch Aliens again. [Liberty]

• 🎥 Aliens Expanded (2024)

• 👽 Aliens (1986)

2. Letters of Note : The Things People Say in Private

In Jab We Met, Geet tells a heartbroken Aditya to burn the photo of the person who hurt him and flush it down the toilet. Some people deal with pain that way while others actually send their pain-filled letters to their celebrity idols. In 1995, a 21-year-old woman from Paris named Laurence wrote Iggy Pop a 20-page fan letter, never expecting him to reply. The letter had the grisly details of her parents’ divorce, the social workers, the lawyers and the rest. Iggy Pop not only replied but, in a handwritten note, chose to tell Laurence something as intimate as his memories of being miserable on his 21st birthday, being booed on stage, staying in someone else’s house and being scared. “I read the whole fucking thing, dear...find something to be that you can love…”

My heart was full when I found this letter on Letters of Note, a blog by Shaun Usher, who digs through museums, libraries, and archives for correspondence like that. It has now grown into a series of books and a stage show called Letters Live where actors like Benedict Cumberbatch read these letters out loud. There are Gandhi’s 1939 letter to Hitler asking him to prevent war, Virginia Woolf’s farewell note to her husband, and many others sent by people we’ve never heard of.

This is what E.B. White wrote to John Detmold on 10th February, 1953:

“As to your notion of an allegory, there is none. Charlotte’s Web is a tale of the animals in my barn, not of the people in my life. When you read it, just relax. Any attempt to find allegorical meanings is bound to end disastrously, for no meanings are in there. I ought to know.”

That’s what we lost when letters went out of fashion. A tweet, a forwarded reel, even a WhatsApp message or a Snapchat sticker cannot match the letter’s personality. In a letter, people say things they would only say to a single person. [Aashisha]

• 🌐 Letters of Note Substack by Shaun Usher

• 📘 Letters of Note by Shaun Usher

• 📕 Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

• 🎬 Jab We Met (2007)

3. The Men Who Would Be King : Jeffrey Katzenberg Deserves More Than a Punchline

Everyone seems to be reading Roll the Calls, Ari Emanuel’s new memoir, and I get why. It’s a loud, angry, very fun book. Emanuel, who co-founded the talent agency Endeavor and is now executive chairman of WME Group, writes about rolling hundreds of calls a day, and the pages are full of inside-baseball on how deals actually get done in Hollywood. He also has a favourite villain: Jeffrey Katzenberg. Ari calls him a “glad-handing phony,” lumps him in with Harvey Weinstein, and traces the grudge back to Katzenberg stiffing him on a packaging fee.

Regardless, I think Katzenberg deserves more than a punchline. He started at Paramount as Barry Diller’s assistant, ran Walt Disney Studios through The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, then co-founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in 1994. Later came WndrCo, his investment firm, and Quibi (a phenomenal failure). On September 23, 2026, he posted a long essay on X telling Hollywood that AI is not going away (which I made a short video about).

For a fuller account of Katzenberg, there’s “The Men Who Would Be King” by Nicole LaPorte, a former Variety reporter who covered DreamWorks. It’s the best account I’ve found of how the studio was built, and it is largely Katzenberg’s story, although it does feature Steven Spielberg and David Geffen as well. LaPorte isn’t gentle with Katzenberg either, but she shows you how he works. The two-to-three-hour Monday morning meetings where Katzenberg would rule over worker bees and aesthetes. 100 to 150 phone calls a day.

There’s also the line he told the Pixar team when they met him while he was at Walt Disney: “Everybody thinks I’m a tyrant. I am a tyrant. But I’m usually right. I will give you a chance, if you think I’m wrong, to change direction, but you’d better be right.”

If you’re into Hollywood, and the media business, read this tale right next to Ari’s memoir. It will become very clear that like all industries, Hollywood is built upon the dreams and passions of people who often sit at opposite ends of the table. [Rohan]

• 📘 The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks by Nicole LaPorte (2010)

• 📕 Roll The Calls: A Memoir by Ari Emanuel (2026)

• 🎬 The Little Mermaid (1989)

• 🎬 The Lion King (1994)

4. Educated : The Memoir That Set the Bar

A hallmark of the best books I read is that I’m disappointed when they’re done. Once you’re hooked, once a story has you in its thrall, you inevitably face the moment when the last page turns. With the rare book, something else happens: the disappointment sends me back to the first page. Not because there aren’t other books to read, but because the ride was so good that I want to go on it again.

That’s the rare air Educated by Tara Westover occupies. I came to this book later than all the adoring critics. I found it while I was working on When the Light Finds Us, the memoir I wrote with Judy Henderson, a similarly harrowing story of a life that had to be reclaimed. Westover set the highest possible bar for the form.

The book tells the story of Westover’s upbringing in the Idaho mountains. She comes from survivalist Mormons. They run a scrapyard, and they distrust doctors, schools, and the federal government, so much so that Westover doesn’t get a birth certificate until she’s nine years old and doesn’t enter a classroom until the age of 17. At home, she teaches herself enough to score well enough on the ACT for admission to Brigham Young University. She goes on to Cambridge, then a visiting fellowship at Harvard, before returning to Cambridge for her PhD. But every advancement is a step away from her family, one that couldn’t follow her and, in some cases, wouldn’t forgive her.

What brings it to life is the quality of the writing. You can tell you’re in the hands of a master wordsmith and storyteller. Every page has a line I circled or highlighted, and you can sense how hard she worked to make the prose come alive. The book screams care, and in our era of snippets and hot takes, it was refreshing to spend several hundred pages with someone who so obviously cares about the craft.

I was mesmerized by her story, and by how difficult it must have been to tell. It’s a book I can’t wait to read again, because I can’t wait to be back in the company of the mind that created it. [Jimmy]

• 📘 Educated by Tara Westover

• 📕 When the Light Finds Us by Judy A. Henderson with Jimmy Soni

5. George Lucas Built a Museum for the People’s Art

The tall ship cranes that stand guard over the Port of Oakland became the AT-AT Imperial Walkers. The dense redwood canopy of Humboldt County was the film location for the moon of Endor. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center inspired some of the architecture on Naboo.

George Lucas has spent a career turning the physical world into myth, and now his $1 billion museum — 17 years in the making, rejected by San Francisco and sued off the Chicago lakefront before landing in Los Angeles — is an attempt to explain why that impulse matters. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened in September 2026 in Exposition Park, and it’s been a surprising revelation.

It is not a Star Wars museum. It is the first museum dedicated to what Lucas calls “the people’s art” — visual storytelling across every form, from cave paintings to comic books to cinema. Norman Rockwell hangs near Banksy, who worked personally with Lucas on the fifth-floor murals. Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s 1894 Poker Game — the original dogs playing poker, possibly the most famous piece of “lowbrow” art in America — hangs five feet from a Frida Kahlo self-portrait that has been called “The Mona Lisa of Mexico.” That juxtaposition is the thesis of the entire building: narrative art has no hierarchy, and the stories humans tell through pictures deserve a museum whether they hang in the Louvre or above a bar.

Then there are the theaters which are a cinephile’s dream. Two 299-seat cinemas named after figures only film nerds will recognize: Robert Flaherty, the father of documentary filmmaking, and Slavko Vorkapich, the experimental montage pioneer who later ran USC’s film department. As Nathan Heller reports in Vogue, the theaters are soundproofed so that an action scene in one room won’t disturb a quiet film next door. The Vorkapich still runs 35mm film. Screenings are continuous and included with admission. Lucas built a museum that argues pictures are how humans decipher meaning. And only Lucas would one-up that story with two of the finest screening rooms in the world. [Taylor]

• 🌐 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

⭐ Explore the OSV Field Notes Archive ⭐

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Emma Camp, senior newsletter editor at The Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression, joins us to talk about why Gen Z is dating less and spending more time alone, how therapy culture and helicopter parenting can turn growing pains into permanent labels, why the fix for the housing shortage is more housing, and why she invites everyone she’s met to every party. She also previews her forthcoming book on Gen Z and risk aversion.

We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

Subscribe to The OSVerse to receive your FREE copy of The Infinite Loops Canon: 100 Timeless Books (That You Probably Haven’t Read) 👇👇

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Links

Show Notes

Emma Camp & Jim O’Shaughnessy

• Emma Camp: Senior newsletter editor at Free Expression, The Wall Street Journal’s opinion newsletter, and former Reason magazine editor. Read Free Expression

• Emma’s breakout essay: Her reflection on the 2022 New York Times op-ed that started her career. After My Big Break

• Jim O’Shaughnessy: Host of Infinite Loops, founder and CEO of O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and author of the New York Times bestseller What Works on Wall Street. Follow Jim on X

• Full transcripts: Transcripts and highlights from every Infinite Loops conversation. OSV newsletter

Books & Ideas Mentioned

• The Grim Old Days by Chelsea Follett: Emma’s reference for how hard life was for the average person before modern markets. Chelsea Follett

• The Genius of the Beast by Howard Bloom: Jim’s reference for what capitalism achieved that earlier systems couldn’t. The Genius of the Beast

• Jefferson Literary and Debating Society: The University of Virginia society where Emma threw a party every Friday. Jefferson Society

• Partiful: The app Emma uses to invite everyone to every party. Partiful

• Sally Rooney: The novelist Emma writes about in her essays on modern relationships. Sally Rooney

• Attachment theory: Emma’s frame for why a secure marriage lets her take more social risks. Attachment theory

• NAR 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers: The data on first-time buyers reaching a record median age of 40. Coverage

Highlights

On the housing crisis

I am concerned by the increasing popularity of socialism across all groups of people in America, but especially younger people, because I think what’s happened here is that a lot of up-and-coming socialists are very good communicators, and they’re very good at offering kind of simple, utopian-seeming solutions to what are often very real problems. The issue is that the solutions they’re offering, we know, will just make the problem worse. So something like housing is a great example. It is 100% true that we have a housing shortage. We have a huge housing shortage in this country. It is way too expensive to be able to rent an apartment. So many young people can’t afford to move out of their parents’ houses, definitely can’t afford to buy a home of their own.

The average age of first-time home ownership is inching higher and higher. And housing is one of the biggest purchases that people make. It is this huge problem if you can’t afford a place to live. And the socialist answer is: the reason why we have this problem is because of greed. It’s because of greedy landlords, it’s because of greedy developers. And what we need to do is stop them from charging you so much, and then you’ll be able to afford a place to live. When of course the problem is a housing shortage. And so you can artificially lower the prices as much as you want and you will not solve the underlying problem that we have, you know, nine houses for every 10 people or whatever the number is. That cannot erase the shortage.

And the solution is to build more housing. And on that rent control video, where I was sort of making this very basic Econ 101 argument, I saw people in the comments who were like, “Oh, what? So you want us to choose the interests of big companies over people?” And I’m like, okay, so who builds houses? If we need to build more housing, yes, we need to make the environment friendly for the companies who build housing. The people who build housing are housing developers. And if your primary interest is doing whatever will screw over housing developers, you will not get more housing. And so in this case, the interests of housing developers are the same as the interests of American people who need more affordable housing.

And so if your primary goal is just making big businesses angry because you have the sense that wealth is bad, you end up creating environments that hurt less wealthy people.

Don’t be a flake

Emma Camp
Flaking is a scourge. People should be put in the stocks for flaking, in my view. And this goes back to... I think it’s a combination of social risk aversion and this sort of therapy culture belief that you don’t owe anything to anybody, and your primary duty is to yourself, and doing what protects your peace and makes yourself happy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Very narcissistic.

Emma Camp
Which I think at its extremes it can be. But I think it is this sort of reflection of: you don’t need a good reason to do what you want to do. And I think that’s so backwards, because you have a duty to other people. And if you tell someone you’re going to be there for them, you go. Unless you are literally running a 102-degree fever, you have to go. And all the time... So last night, my husband and I went out with another couple that we’re friends with, and we’ve been trying to find a date for us to go out together for a long time. And I got back from work and I was like, “I am so tired. I just kind of want to take a shower and curl up on the couch and watch Slow Horses for three hours.” But…

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Great show

Emma Camp
I promised. Fantastic show. But we said we would do this. It would be a grievous social crime for me to cancel all these people at the last minute, even though I don’t really want to go because I’m exhausted. I’ll go. So I got dressed, got back on the subway, and went out, and we had a great time. This is often the thing that people do not realise: the you before the social event is not the same you that’s at the social event.

Every single time, I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe I agreed to do this thing after work, I’m so tired.” And I actually get there, I have a great time, and I’m so glad I went. And I’m like, “That was great. That was lovely.” So that, I think, is something important for people to remember.

Edited Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Emma, welcome to Infinite Loops. When I saw your video on rent control not being the greatest thing in the world, I was fascinated for a couple of reasons. Like, as an old... that is sort of like saying the sky is blue, or a variety of those things. But essentially you blew up with that video. But you’re primarily a writer, would you say, or...

Emma Camp
Yeah, yeah, I would definitely say that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Which do you enjoy more?

Emma Camp
I enjoy writing more. Writing is the only thing I’ve ever been really good at. It’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. I have the very stereotypical writer background, which is, like, I was scribbling stories in notebooks when I was eight years old, but that’s just 100% true. I went to a public fine arts magnet school in Alabama for creative writing. It was like LaGuardia, but in Alabama. I was an English major. It’s just what I’ve done. But as it turns out, I’m pretty good at making videos. I guess some years of community theatre paid off. I don’t know. I just have the right vibe on camera, I guess. And I do enjoy... So with writing, I’m often thinking about exploring ideas in a very deep, rich way.

And videos, I feel like, use the other side of my argumentative brain, which is: how can I make a point as simply as possible? And I have a minute to do it, but really I have half a second to do it, because if you don’t get the hook right, people just keep scrolling.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So what has the reaction been like? And by kind of generation... I mentioned, I saw it and I’m like, well, duh. But was your generation more shocked, or “Really? I didn’t know that”?

Emma Camp
I don’t know. I can’t really tell how old people are based on their very tiny profile photos. I’m not taking stock of this. So I think there are some generational stereotypes, which is people who are old enough to remember the Cold War and remember how awful communism was, or, like, “Yes, obviously Soviet-style controlling of our economy, having these super intense rent control regimes, obviously that’s not going to work, because it never works.” And I think for younger people, there can be a tendency to assume that this just hasn’t been tried yet, and to sort of forget the lessons of the past, which is: no, we did try it and it didn’t work.

And I think there’s just some partisan sorting as well, where it’s sort of a left-coded thing to be in support of rent control now. And young people are slightly more left-leaning. So there’s a little bit of that. But I don’t know, this sounds strange to say, but I found that for me, doing the work that I do, it makes the most sense for me to just do my thing and put it out there and not have Twitter on my phone and not really think that much about how people are reacting to it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, you bring up politics, and I mentioned, I read all your work, and you seem to me to be a very well-grounded, philosophical, highly literate person.

Emma Camp
Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And you wrote, I think your article was called “The Manosphere,” and it was about the various political divides. And I’ve always thought, you know, it’s a circle, right? When you go further and further to the extreme part, you go from socialism to communism and then you get to fascism, and it’s more of a circle. And you know, the old left-right distinctions, as you probably know, come from France. Before the revolution, the supporters of the king sat on the right and the supporters of the revolution sat on the left. And I think that labels are dangerous because, was it Wittgenstein? “When you label me, you negate me.” And I think that those old labels probably don’t work anymore. What would you think about newer labels like control versus freedom?

Emma Camp
Yeah, I don’t like to label myself. This is often something I’m asked. I don’t like labels because I think when you adopt a label, you implicitly sign on to this slate of viewpoints on different policy issues. And there are some labels where I agree with more of the stock policy positions than others, but none enough that I feel comfortable enough to hitch my wagon to that ideology. And I agree with you. I think the left-right dichotomy is not useful for people with a more sort of civil libertarian orientation. There you go, using labels. It is very small-l libertarian of me to think of it this way, but I think it’s so much more revealing where someone is on the authoritarian versus... control versus freedom axis than the left-right axis, because it fundamentally is a personality feature.

I think people kind of have either authoritarian personalities or small-l libertarian personalities, moderate personalities. Are you the kind of person who has whatever set of beliefs you have and thinks that the government really should try to coerce people into living your prescribed best life for them? Or are you the kind of person who’s willing to live and let live, and not have the government control people’s lives as much? And so because of that, I think people on the centre left and centre right have far more in common than they do with the extreme fringes of their, quote unquote, sides.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I think that the average American is kind of a go-along-to-get-along type person. And I always look at New York as not real America. At my old firm, I was in asset management, and every time I would have to travel, I would say to my wife, “I’m going to real America.” And the differences were pretty profound. I mean, places like Mississippi, Alabama, I met the nicest people, who I really didn’t expect to like because, you know, I was steeped in New York and all of the ways that New York thinks and does things. Have you found that, moving first to DC and then New York City?

Emma Camp
Yeah, I think I disagree with you a little bit that New York isn’t real America. I think every part of America is just as real as any other part of America. And being from... I’m from Alabama. I’m from kind of a smallish exurban town outside of Birmingham. The people I grew up around are just as real as the people in New York. And sometimes for me, maybe this shows that I’m in this sort of murky, not super politically categorisable area, but this sort of more conservative, very MAGA kind of stock person that you find in Alabama, I find their worldview just as baffling in many ways as the most strident Mamdani socialist. I don’t really feel fully at home in either place.

And I think they are just as legitimate and just as batty in their own ways. I mean, red-state-level politics are just as crazy as New York City-level volunteers.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I’ve always thought that if you could imply all of my beliefs from hearing one of them, then I am brain dead, and I have succumbed to the party line. And that is the thing that really concerns me, as one who lived in a different world, pre-internet, et cetera. And maybe it was the Cold War, but the parties, there wasn’t really an ounce of difference between them on Cold War strategy. But when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviets fell, we started to see this parting of the ways. What do you think? If I was going to say... and again, here we go, labelling... but younger people versus older people. In your piece you were talking about the different political opinions of older people versus younger people. Talk a bit about that in terms of...

Emma Camp
I mean, it’s very hard to make broad generalisations about groups with millions of people. I think there is somewhat of a misconception that younger men are more right-wing than... you know, Gen Z men are more right-wing than millennial men or even boomer men, depending on who you ask. As far as I’ve been able to tell, looking at a couple of surveys, younger men are more left-wing than older men, in the same way that younger women are more left-wing than older women, generally speaking. It shouldn’t be surprising that younger people are slightly more left-wing than older people. This matches with our long-standing cultural stereotypes. So in many ways that’s good news, because it’s like, okay, this current cohort of young people is not unique. They’re sort of like all other humans before them.

I am concerned by the increasing popularity of socialism across all groups of people in America, but especially younger people, because I think what’s happened here is that a lot of up-and-coming socialists are very good communicators, and they’re very good at offering kind of simple, utopian-seeming solutions to what are often very real problems. The issue is that the solutions they’re offering, we know, will just make the problem worse. So something like housing is a great example. It is 100% true that we have a housing shortage. We have a huge housing shortage in this country. It is way too expensive to be able to rent an apartment. So many young people can’t afford to move out of their parents’ houses, definitely can’t afford to buy a home of their own.

The average age of first-time home ownership is inching higher and higher. And housing is one of the biggest purchases that people make. It is this huge problem if you can’t afford a place to live. And the socialist answer is: the reason why we have this problem is because of greed. It’s because of greedy landlords, it’s because of greedy developers. And what we need to do is stop them from charging you so much, and then you’ll be able to afford a place to live. When of course the problem is a housing shortage. And so you can artificially lower the prices as much as you want and you will not solve the underlying problem that we have, you know, nine houses for every 10 people or whatever the number is. That cannot erase the shortage.

And the solution is to build more housing. And on that rent control video, where I was sort of making this very basic Econ 101 argument, I saw people in the comments who were like, “Oh, what? So you want us to choose the interests of big companies over people?” And I’m like, okay, so who builds houses? If we need to build more housing, yes, we need to make the environment friendly for the companies who build housing. The people who build housing are housing developers. And if your primary interest is doing whatever will screw over housing developers, you will not get more housing. And so in this case, the interests of housing developers are the same as the interests of American people who need more affordable housing.

And so if your primary goal is just making big businesses angry because you have the sense that wealth is bad, you end up creating environments that hurt less wealthy people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And let’s drill down on the “wealth is bad,” right? The real quote is “the love of money is the root of all evil,” not “money is the root of all evil.” Are these educational issues? Are these societal issues? Are these... I mean, if I was going to appoint you the czar of more housing, obviously, I think I know what you’d do, but how would you communicate that? Because what I love about you is your communication style. When I watched your video, I’m just like, oh, she’s going to be a big star. Because you really... That was 60 seconds. How long was it?

Emma Camp
A minute and a half.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I watched it on Twitter and I’m like, finally. So on the one hand, some people say, well, presentation, that’s meaningless. I think in our era, it’s kind of everything. So what would you build out to persuade people, not to just say, obviously, the big developers are going to be the ones to build that housing? What would you think about... take me through you blocking out a video on trying to persuade people this is really the solution.

Emma Camp
I mean, I think I would do that same kind of basic, logical argument, because I like to think that people can be persuaded with facts, certainly with kind of intuitive arguments. And so this is why I presented the rent control issue by focusing on the housing shortage, because I think everybody can understand, okay, if we literally do not have enough apartments for the number of people who want to live in New York City, that’s going to cause issues. And I don’t even have to bust out a supply and demand graph for people to intuitively get that. It’s like, okay, we need to build more housing, and going from there. You can make a more nuanced argument, because sometimes people say, “Oh, well, why doesn’t the government build housing?”

It’s like, well, when the government attempts to build housing, it takes way longer and it costs way more than when the private sector builds housing. Largely because when the government gets money involved in things, then the unions get involved, and legislators can place these really stringent requirements on the apartments built with public money. And so it just ends up costing much more, because there are all of these regulatory hurdles that private sector builders don’t have to face.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right, right.

Emma Camp
There’s also that. And if our primary goal is fixing the housing shortage, we should focus on allowing housing to be built as quickly as possible. And that also means getting rid of some regulations that make it hard to do that, whether that’s height limits or single... or having... I’m not being the most articulate right now, but you can only build an apartment of a certain number of floors if you’re going to have one stairwell, which is sort of a fire safety requirement. But it ends up keeping a bunch of houses from being built that would have been built otherwise. On and on and on. And it’s like, this is how... if the core problem is the housing shortage, here’s how we build as much housing as quickly as possible, and hopefully that would work.

And I think to your earlier point, it feels very counterintuitive oftentimes to make a moral case for why rich people should be allowed to exist. Even just saying that, I realise that people are like, “What is wrong with this person? She just loves billionaires.” And I don’t have this particularly romantic view of the ultra wealthy. But the thing is, when we have free markets in which people are incentivised by the possibility of getting wealthy to technologically innovate, to make better products... I mean, take something like Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos isn’t so... well, let me go back a little bit. I think this comes from a fixed-pie mentality.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes. I completely agree.

Emma Camp
This idea that someone has more than someone else, it’s because they took more than their fair share, when in reality, oftentimes someone has more than someone else because they made the pie bigger for everyone. So Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos is incredibly wealthy, but he created a product that people love. Most Americans are Amazon Prime subscribers. I love that if I need something, I can press a couple buttons on my phone and it’ll show up at my door the next day, cheaply, and I didn’t have to go to the store. There’s a lot of sort of consternation about whether Amazon is bad or not. But people, voting with their behaviour, love Amazon. And if Jeff Bezos could not have gotten wealthy from that, he wouldn’t have created this product.

And so I would much rather live in a world like America where, yes, there is increasing inequality, but the floor for people’s income is also getting higher. So I would much rather live in a world in which the rich are richer and the poor are also richer than live in a world in which there is less inequality, the rich are poorer, but the poor are also poorer. And I think a lot of leftists make these sort of equality-based arguments. They focus on inequality to hide the fact that free markets have actually improved the lives for the worst-off Americans.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And, you know, equality, right? So equality of opportunity is one thing; equality of outcome, same word, right? But the equality of outcome, we’ve seen, we have hundreds of years, thousands really, if you look at the kings too, of that not being the case. I mean, literally, for most of human history, the average conditions for the average human have been horrible. They’ve been atrocious.

Emma Camp
Oh, absolutely. I was just starting to read... I got an early copy of... a Cato fellow wrote a book called the... I think it’s called The Bad Old Days.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, no, I had her on the podcast. Yeah.

Emma Camp
Oh, amazing. Well, I was starting to read that book on my e-reader, my cheaply produced e-reader the size of a credit card, on the subway here. And yeah, she talks about how atrocious the lives of the average person used to be. And this is why I’m so passionate about free markets, at a time where so few people are, because I’m an optimist. When you look at how, 100 years ago, even the life of the average person on earth, even the life of the average American, was just horrendous, when you compare it to today... I mean, when you look at how the vast, vast majority of people lived in crushing, menial poverty, and very few humans today live at that level of poverty.

How did we go from 95% of all humans living in, you know, $2-a-day-level poverty to something like 15 or 20%? Free markets, technological innovation. That’s how we... huge advancements in medicine, that’s how we got there. And if we’ve done it before, then we can use those same tools to do it again and continue improving people’s lives.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Howard Bloom, in his book on helping capitalism with better PR... actually, it’s a very thoughtful book about how to reorient people around capitalism. But in the beginning of his book, he essentially says every major religion, everyone promised the promised land of milk and honey. And he goes, “I don’t care which religion you look at.” And we’ve had them for a millennium, and we got nothing. We got the case that you just made, everyone living in crushing poverty, et cetera. And then he goes, capitalism did in 300 years what none of these religions that ruled for thousands could achieve.

Emma Camp
Well, okay, I’m going to push back against that, because I’m not sure that major religions are promising prosperity in your earthly life, right? I know most about Christianity, because I am a Christian. But the promises are not that if you follow Jesus, you’ll be super rich, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Unless you’re a megachurch pastor...

Emma Camp
Right? Right. Maybe. Maybe some. Maybe something. But it’s that if you follow Jesus, you’ll have paradise in the next life, right? It’s about how do you come to terms with the suffering that you experience here on earth.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
But let’s talk about that for a minute. Because religious beliefs are, by their very nature, unfalsifiable, right? “Trust me, you’re going to have the best life after this one.” We can’t test that, et cetera. And then you see this religious attitude working its way into politics, right? By that, I mean, they’re appealing to emotion, to...

Emma Camp
I don’t think that’s unique to religion, though. I just think that’s a feature of ideology.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I agree. Right, right. But in the old days, when the Pope ruled all of Europe with an iron fist, it was only because he was vain that we got the printing press. If you look into the history of the printing press, he made beautiful Bibles, enjewelled, and basically bribed the Pope, because he knew the Pope was vain about having to wear glasses when he gave his sermon. So what did Gutenberg do? He made the Pope a Bible with letters that were this big, so he didn’t have to wear the glasses. And so he got the Church’s authority for the printing presses, and they didn’t know what they were unleashing.

Emma Camp
I mean, people respond to incentives.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly, right. And so my point is more along the lines of: I worry when people lose context, right? And by that, I mean, I have a lot of context because I’m 66 and I lived through a lot of that Cold War stuff, and I literally watched them tear down the Berlin Wall. And very familiar with the photos of the people, the guard jumping over to escape to freedom, et cetera. And so I worry that the younger generation, not having the context of that... here we’re going to go... I don’t know if you’re a fan of True Detective, but “life is a flat circle,” and we just seem to be going around and around again and again. Eternal recurrence, to good old Nietzsche.

Emma Camp
Yeah. I’m both someone who is concerned for my generation, if I can make such a broad claim as that, and I’m also sceptical of pronouncements that are too dire, that are too “these are going to be the people that ruin everything,” those kind of pronouncements. I think the sliver of this that I will agree with you on is that I think there’s a lot of reflexive anti-Americanism on the left broadly, but I think especially popular with sort of the young people most likely to be socialists. And I think some of that comes from the “wow, the Iraq war was bad, the Iran war is bad,” sort of somewhat reasonable pushback against certain policy that we’ve had.

But I think the problem is when reasonable scepticism of America’s choices becomes this belief that, okay, well, if it says that America’s bad, then it must be true. It almost becomes this conspiracy-level thinking of: everything that I hear that’s good about America is bad, evil imperialist propaganda, and everything that I hear criticising America must be true, because it’s the secret truth that they won’t tell you. And that, I think, is how you end up with young people who are smart enough to know better full-throatedly endorsing terrorist groups. It’s how you get... there was a trend a couple years ago. I don’t think this is representative of young people, but it was crazy that this even happened, of people reading Osama bin Laden’s letter explaining his hatred of America, being like, “Oh my gosh, guys, he’s so right, America’s bad.”

Leaving out the sentences where he’s like, “And also America needs to be destroyed because of gay people and Jews.” In the same way that it’s reasonable to criticise brain-dead reflexive patriotism that does not consider critically things that our nation has done, it is equally ridiculous to have this brain-dead anti-patriotism. And in some ways they’re both equally destructive.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
But again, it requires so much nuance, right? Because I think the short-form videos... your longer works allow you to elaborate much more. Another one of the things you talk about a lot, which I really resonate with, is that it seems that risk aversion is rampant.

Emma Camp
Yes. I will talk about this, because I have a book about it coming out.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I know. I think you’re really onto something there.

Emma Camp
Thank you. So when you look at all of these kind of discrete trends among people in their twenties, who’s mostly what I’m thinking about when I say Gen Z, because teenagers are a whole other ball game and most Gen Zers are adults... I think, to continue rambling in my preface, a lot of people say Gen Z when they mean 14-year-olds.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s actually Alpha.

Emma Camp
But the actual age band is basically people who are like 29 to like 17.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, you’re grown up.

Emma Camp
It’s mostly teenagers at this point. Or sorry, mostly young adults at this point. But you look at these discrete trends: people are dating way less, people are spending way more time alone. People aren’t getting married as much. People aren’t drinking as much. What unites... everybody is using AI therapists, everybody is self-diagnosing themselves with ADHD. What unites them, these trends? And I was thinking about this and it was like: it’s social risk aversion. I think people are afraid of rejection. They’re afraid of being perceived as weird, as cringeworthy. They’re afraid of being judged by other people.

I don’t want to blame too much of it on the phones, because I think that’s far too simplistic. But the threat of anything embarrassing you might do can be recorded, whether that’s you send a girl some messages on Tinder and she thinks they’re stupid and she takes screenshots of them and she posts about them on Instagram, or even just sends them to her friends, or something dumb you do at a party, there’s a photo taken of it. Or even something like you go to a college party and you’re 18 and you’re drinking and someone takes a video or a photo of it, and then you get kicked off the track and field team or whatever it is. This kind of digital panopticon, I think, causes people to sort of put their hackles up.

And I think this kind of temperamental trepidation is keeping people from living rich, full, connected lives. If you’re so afraid that someone will think you’re weird if you invite them to the party you’re going to have, or if you ask them to get lunch with you, it ends up meaning that you don’t take the opportunities for connection. And of course, most people aren’t actually walking around with this ready-to-judge view of other people. This was something I had to overcome, where I would be like, “Oh, I want to invite this person to this party, but, well, they’ll think I’m being overly eager.” And it took somebody, I think maybe it was my boss at Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward, who was like, “Emma, people love getting invited to parties. Even if they can’t go, no one’s ever going to be like, ‘Gosh, I can’t believe she invited me to that party. What a loser.’” Actually, yeah, you’re right. And now I invite everyone I’ve ever met to every party I throw, and the vast majority of them do not come. And that’s okay. I still get pretty good numbers. I’m more than willing to invite 150 people to a party, because it means I get 30 that show up. And a 30-person party is pretty good.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I love the fact that you’re doing that. And that’s one way. But parenthetically, what you’re speaking about, the panopticon, is very true. If social media was around when I was a teenager, permanently cancelled, because... obviously no phones, no internet, nothing. So we got up to a lot of pretty crazy stuff. And because we couldn’t intermediate through screens, right, we did everything in person. How did you find your friend? Well, you drove over to his house. If he didn’t answer the phone, you asked his parents, “Hey, where’s Greg?” And then you went there, and then you finally found your group. But I love the idea that you’re doing a lot of the throwing of parties, because that was the norm for all of human history.

And then the pandemic came along and we get, “I don’t want to go to that party. I might say something stupid,” or whatever. Have you ever had a party that just bombed?

Emma Camp
I’m going to say, well, yes and no. So my party-throwing journey started when I was in my fourth year at UVA. So this would have been right after the pandemic, fall 2021, spring 2022. And I was in a literary and debating society called the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society. It just celebrated its bicentennial. Oldest student organisation at UVA. It’s awesome. And it was founded in a Lawn room at UVA, which are these 1820s dorm rooms designed by Thomas Jefferson himself. It’s very cool. Very cool. And so the society had an endowed room, and they could basically place someone in this room. And so I was selected to be that person.

And part of the deal, it’s like, okay, you don’t have to pay rent, but in exchange you have to throw a party every Friday during the meeting, so people can drink during the meeting, which they can’t do because technically the room that we meet in is university property. There’s some reason why we couldn’t have alcohol in there. And so I had to throw a party every Friday from 5pm to 2am, and I did that. And I got the cheapest booze money could buy. Kroger had a four-for-$3 two-litre store-brand soda deal. So I got a lot of Dr. K, a lot of Citrus Mist-type fake sodas.

And I would get a handle of Dr. James Crow’s Old Crow whiskey and Bowman’s vodka and a 24-pack of PBR and a bag of Franzia Crisp White and a couple bags of chips, and we’d have a great time.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Shocking.

Emma Camp
It was shocking, yes. And then after I graduated college and I got a real person job, I was like, okay, I want to keep throwing parties, but I think I’m probably a little too big to continue having provisions... Also no ice, everything room temperature, warm, right? I can’t keep doing this. This is too much. And so at the time I was working at Reason magazine, and one of my colleagues there, Peter Suderman, is amazing. He’s a cocktail wizard. And I was inspired by him to start making cocktails. And so my signature thing, the reason why you should come to this party, is that there are very fancy craft cocktails there, and they’re free. And so I started doing that.

But the parties, what I mean, they didn’t bomb, is it started out with... when I first moved to DC, I had some friends from college there, but most of my college friends were a year younger. So not everybody had quite moved to DC yet, which everybody who attends the University of Virginia moves to DC. It’s just how it works. And so I would invite six people from church over. So they were hangouts more than capital-P Parties. And they sort of got larger as my social circle got larger. So it sort of grew over time. I will say the times I’ve been the most disappointed with how things have worked out have been when I’ve had a lot of flakers, which doesn’t happen that often.

It happens more in New York. This is my big complaint about the social scene between New York and DC: when I have 30 people telling me that they’re coming to my party in DC, 30 people show up. And when I have 30 people telling me they’re coming to my party in New York, 20 people show up.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
And that annoys me. It hurts my feelings when people say they’re coming and they don’t show up. And the party planning app I use has a “maybe” function, which I usually read as people who are not going to go, but they don’t have a good excuse, and so they put maybe. And that’s okay. I understand. That’s how that works. And flaking is a scourge. People should be put in the stocks for flaking, in my view. And this goes back to... I think it’s a combination of social risk aversion and this sort of therapy culture belief that you don’t owe anything to anybody, and your primary duty is to yourself, and doing what protects your peace and makes yourself happy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Very narcissistic.

Emma Camp
Which I think at its extremes it can be. But I think it is this sort of reflection of: you don’t need a good reason to do what you want to do. And I think that’s so backwards, because you have a duty to other people. And if you tell someone you’re going to be there for them, you go. Unless you are literally running a 102-degree fever, you have to go. And all the time... So last night, my husband and I went out with another couple that we’re friends with, and we’ve been trying to find a date for us to go out together for a long time. And I got back from work and I was like, “I am so tired. I just kind of want to take a shower and curl up on the couch and watch Slow Horses for three hours.” But…

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Great show

Emma Camp
I promised. Fantastic show. But we said we would do this. It would be a grievous social crime for me to cancel all these people at the last minute, even though I don’t really want to go because I’m exhausted. I’ll go. So I got dressed, got back on the subway, and went out, and we had a great time. This is often the thing that people do not realise: the you before the social event is not the same you that’s at the social event.

Every single time, I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe I agreed to do this thing after work, I’m so tired.” And I actually get there, I have a great time, and I’m so glad I went. And I’m like, “That was great. That was lovely.” So that, I think, is something important for people to remember.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I can’t remember which movie it is, but somebody’s talking about someone, like a shirker, like one of yours that says they’re coming and they don’t come. And he’s like, “We live in a society.”

Emma Camp
We do, we do. And I don’t want to be too harsh. I live in Brooklyn, and all of my friends live on the Upper East Side, and so it’s hard to get places. But you know what? I get on the subway for an hour and a half to see my friends on the Upper East Side. Come to see me in Brooklyn.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
When you’re inviting people to parties, do you intentionally try to mix it up? Do you intentionally try to get very different personality types?

Emma Camp
I think it depends on what kind of thing I’m doing. So if I’m just having a big party, there’s a wonderful app called Partiful, which is how I invite everybody. And I just check this box that’s “invite all previous guests.” And so I just kind of roll the dice. And so it’s this huge group of people: people I know from work, people that I know from college, people I know from the internet, someone at a friend of a friend’s party who I hit it off with and whose phone number I asked for. And I just send those out into the ether. I think if I’m having a dinner party where there is a smaller set of guests, or I’m just inviting a couple people over, the strategy can be different sometimes.

I’ve done dinner parties that are discussion-based. So I’ll give everybody an article to read before, and then we talk about it. So it’s like, okay, what people do I know who I think would have a good time discussing this topic? Or something I’ve been trying to do... and I think I’ve had to make peace with the fact that you cannot brute-force this. I’m really trying to have a friend group in New York, because my favourite thing about living in DC is that my husband and I had this group of friends, six or seven friends. We all had a group chat. We all knew each other from college, and we saw each other once or twice a week. And all you would have to do is go into the group chat.

There was this bar that we really like to go to called Galaxy Hut. We’d go, “All right, who wants to go to the Hut tonight?” And a couple people would show up. That kind of cohesive friend group, I feel like in New York... I moved in January. In fairness, I have a lot of great individual friendships, but that kind of friend group feeling, I really want, and I’m trying to cultivate. But I think I have to accept that I can’t just be like, “You, you: we are a friend group now.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Here’s the question. We give fellowships. So let’s say I gave you a $100,000 fellowship, and it was for creating, I don’t know, 10 social groups. How would you design that? And by the way, they would have to live on after you were no longer involved. What would the design look like? Would it look a lot like the way you’re doing parties, or would you do it differently?

Emma Camp
I don’t know. I’m just not really sure that the kind of thing I’m trying to do is... I don’t think you can buy it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
No, I agree.

Emma Camp
I don’t think that...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I agree. The hundred thousand would be just for you to be able to get the venues to set that up.

Emma Camp
I mean, I feel like there are a good amount of events sort of built to attract people with a certain kind of political or personality orientation. Whether that’s something, I guess sort of apolitically, like run clubs, or the salon where we’re going to have this public intellectual speak and then their fans will come, that can sort of create a social group. Or even something like a church, right? Where it’s people oriented around certain religious beliefs, and then it creates community from there. I just don’t know how I would create...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’re doing it right now. You’re designing it, right?

Emma Camp
Well, I just don’t... I think what I’m sceptical of is, I feel like whether or not you want to be friends with someone is so difficult to categorise. And I think that you can have events that might attract the kinds of people who might get along, and then maybe they will become... But I guess what I’m running up against is you can’t make people do things that they don’t want to do.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
No.

Emma Camp
It’s both that you can’t make people go to events they don’t want to go to, but you can’t make the people go to events... Here is the thing that I think holds people back with making friends in New York City. Okay, you and I are talking. We just met. We’re hitting it off. We’re having a great time. In order for this to become a friendship, in order for us to not just never cross paths again after this, one of us has to pull out our phone and say, “Hey, do you want to swap numbers?” And that is hard to do, because it requires kind of revealing that you like this person and you want to keep talking with them and you want to get to...

And it does open yourself up to the possibility of some kind of rejection, because the person will probably not say no, but you have the possibility that someone’s going to be like, “What is this overeager weirdo doing? Gross.” Right? That’s always a possibility. And I used to be the kind of person who was terrified of doing something like that. Even though I’m quite gregarious and extroverted, I still would not do that. At a certain point in my early college career, I remember having a list: what are my goals for the semester? Being “ask one friend to go to lunch.” It was that big of a difficult thing for me to do, because I was so... I just had this...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
What do you think was causing that anxiety?

Emma Camp
I just think I thought that I was just too weird. I think that I just hadn’t quite found my people yet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.

Emma Camp
And so I think some of this was the accurate perception that some of the people I was around thought I was weird. And I hadn’t quite gotten comfortable enough in my own skin to be like, “That’s fine. That’s your prerogative. I think I’m pretty great.” And I think that being rejected sucks, and it’s hard to pierce that film and just do it. And this is the thing with taking the risk. I didn’t used to do that. And I started doing it basically because I went, “I want to make more friends.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
So I started doing it, and now it doesn’t bother me at all. And I always do this. If I like somebody and I’m enjoying talking to them, I go, “Hey, do you want to swap numbers?” And then I invite them to my next party. And people are often shocked when they come to my parties, when they hear me talking about my plans or whatever. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, you’ve only lived in New York for a year. How do you have 50 people in your house right now?” Well, it’s called not caring at all what people think of me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
See, that is...

Emma Camp
And trusting that people will self-select.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
That is a superpower.

Emma Camp
Yes. I think it is so important for people to accept that they are not everyone’s cup of tea.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.

Emma Camp
And that how you actually find the people who are meant to be your friends is by accepting that the fact that not everyone likes you is a good thing, because it means that you have enough of a personality that people can react against that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly.

Emma Camp
And so being distinct in whatever way, just having your personality, will allow people to be like, “Oh, okay, this person has things that I like, I want to hang out with...”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah. And back to Bezos: when he was asked about this, what’s the one quality that people should strive for? And it was authenticity. Basically, be yourself, because some people are going to hate you, some people are going to love you, and that’s just the way it works.

Emma Camp
And I think it’s also easier to change certain parts of your personality than you might think, because being yourself is important. But also, what if you don’t have a pleasant personality? I think I genuinely have become more likeable as I’ve gotten older. And I think part of this is that I’ve just become... I don’t know. I think part of it is just growing up. I think for a lot of people, it’s important to not confuse temporary problems that basically stem from needing to grow up, and needing to stop being 17 and start being 23, with basically diagnosable mental health conditions. I think so much of the therapy culture... trend is people confusing...

Like, I’m in high school, and high school is really stressful, and I haven’t quite found the group of people that I like. And I’m feeling lonely and weird and out of place, and maybe because I’m 17, I’m also not being the best version of myself. This must be because I have whatever condition, right? Or because my mom, who I’m clashing with, must be a narcissist, or whatever it is. No, it’s just because being a teenager sucks, and because nobody is the best version of themselves when they’re 17. And you can always grow up.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, that is so true. When I was younger, I was basically an overbearing asshole. And literally, I proselytised. It was my way or the highway. And I realised, life punched me in the face repeatedly to say, “No, Jim, there are many other roads that people can take that are equally acceptable.” But I was very lucky to be blessed with really not giving a shit what people thought about me from a very young age. When I graduated from high school and they did the senior class poll, I was voted most radical. And literally, I’m like, I’m not a radical. I’m conservative. But then as you get old, you... at least for me, you begin to understand there is that fragility to a lot of people, yourself included, right?

And what worries me, and it’s something I wanted your view on, and I know you have very interesting views: this creep into making everything a therapy session or a new diagnosis in the DSM, right? Like learned helplessness. Is that real, learned helplessness? I happen to think it is. But is that coming from a place where they’re shy or afraid, or... I’ll let you tell me.

Emma Camp
I mean, I guess there’s sort of two different things here. One is the larger therapy culture, “every feature of someone’s personality is a diagnosable condition” kind of trend. I think something like learned helplessness is almost anti... people who, I think, are somewhat sceptical of the diagnose-everything movement sort of frame a lot of the emotional fragility, risk aversion among people to learned helplessness. I mean, I think on the learned helplessness question, helicopter parenting definitely has something to do with it. I think that if you reach adulthood without ever experiencing real independence, without ever living without adult supervision, yeah, of course that’s going to make you helpless. There was this viral TikTok video the other week, and I sort of had mixed feelings about it.

So it was this mom, and to be honest, she was speaking in a very condescending and grating way. She was like, “My daughter is 17, and she’s decided that she wants to move out when she’s 18 because she’s such a big grown-up, and she decided that she wanted to live in this student housing, and she came to me and asked for help, and I was like, ‘Figure it out, you’re 18, you’re supposed to know things.’” And so she was basically talking about how her daughter had this “I don’t know how to navigate this system, so I’m just going to freak out and assume that my parents should do it for me.” But I also was sitting there and I’m like, how does your 18-year-old not know how to do this?

On the one hand, yes, it is a problem. It is probably good parenting... I don’t have kids, I’m not going to... but it seems to me like good parenting, when your teenager is trying to figure out something that is totally reasonable for them to be able to figure out, to say “figure it out.” But she also was treating it as presumptively ridiculous that her 18-year-old would be able to live outside of her parents’ home, and sort of saw it as, “See, this proves what a big dumb idiot my kid is, that she can’t figure out how to navigate living on her own.” And I’m like, I’m pretty sure most reasonably intelligent 18-year-old girls could move out, right? I’m not saying they have to, right? But if they want to, they probably could. And if your kid can’t figure that out, maybe you’ve contributed to this problem. Why has she never had to figure out anything on her own before? You are the problem, right?

I mean, I don’t know. I went to... so this fine arts magnet school in Alabama I went to had a boarding option, and so I went there from seventh through 12th grade, but I lived there my last three years. And so I kind of left home when I was 15, and it was great. It was fantastic. I entered college knowing how to take care of myself and kind of secure in my own ability to be independent and figure things out.

When I see this sort of online discourse about parents doing things for their college students, I’m like... the idea of my mom emailing a professor, it’s like, are you from Mars? I almost struggle to think that this is a real thing. But I know it must be. Look, I love my parents and I respect them. And there were plenty of times in college where I had problems, where I was like, “Oh, I’m not quite sure how to navigate this challenge I’m facing,” and I would ask my parents for advice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Sure.

Emma Camp
About what I should do. But the idea of then my parents stepping in to solve it for me: absolutely mind-boggling.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s continuously infantilising your child, right? Well, I got married very young. I was 22. And we decided, well, what the hell, we got married at 22, we might as well be young parents. So our first child was born at... we were 24. And we talked a lot about how we wanted to raise our kids. And what we ultimately landed on was: our job is to raise great adults. And using that as a control line prohibits all sorts of behaviour. Like this woman, can you imagine that? She thinks she can learn how to move out on her own... And so we couldn’t say “because I said so.” We couldn’t say “my house, my rules.” That isn’t raising a great adult. That’s raising a compliant person. And so I loved your line about “figure it out.”

Because my kids used to use me as... before Google... I read a lot and I retain facts. And so when they had an assignment, they’d just come up and say, “Dad, who was the French representative at the Congress of Vienna ending the Napoleonic Wars?” And of course I knew it was Talleyrand, but I wouldn’t tell them. We had a big bookcase, and I said, “Look it up in there.” And so I was having a talk with my oldest child, who is the very famous podcaster Patrick O’Shaughnessy. And he said, “Honestly, Dad, I think the greatest thing you and Mom did for us was that, because we learned when you go and find Talleyrand, well, you’ve gone through a dozen other interesting characters too, and so you start going down those rabbit holes.”

But I definitely hate, because it really kind of started with my generation, this helicopter nonsense. When cell phones were relatively new, we had a lot of contemporaries that put spyware on their children’s phones.

Emma Camp
Oh, yes. Everyone has Life360.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
When I first saw it, I said, “That is obscene. You will destroy your relationship with your child, because you’re going to blurt out something when you see something that really freaks you out, and you’re going to destroy the trust that you have with your child.”

Emma Camp
Yeah, it’s pretty common to find on sites like Reddit college students who are like, “What do I do about the fact that... I’m an adult, but my parents have this tracking app on my phone, and they get mad if I’m not at my 9am class or whatever.” I’m like, oh my gosh. Look, I do have a hard time telling how common the extreme end of it is. Certainly when you look at surveys about at what age should a child be allowed to be left at home, I think there’s an indication that it’s gone a bit too far. And I think some of this is only possible for the most affluent parents. I had college-educated parents, a pretty normal middle-class family. But when I was 14, during the summers, my parents couldn’t... they didn’t hire a team of babysitters and tutors for us. We were just left alone. And my youngest sister was seven. And then I had an 11-year-old sister, a 10-year-old brother. And we were old enough that we would be fine on our own for the day. And I was 14, I knew how to dial the phone, and so if something went wrong, I could call them, or I could call 911 or whatever, and nothing bad ever happened. We mostly sat around watching YouTube or playing outside.

Occasionally... the closest it was like, “Maybe there should have been a little adult supervision here”: I was maybe 16, and my brother, four years younger, with one of his friends, were playing in the creek near our house, and they caught a crawfish, and they brought it back in a pot. They’re like, “Emma, Emma, can we cook and eat this crawfish?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure, why not?” And then I thought about it a little bit more, and I was like, “Actually, no, you cannot do that.” And I told them. And then my mom was driving home, and she saw them as they were walking down the street to put the crawfish back in the creek. They were like, “Emma said we could eat it, then she said we couldn’t eat it.” And she was like, “Yes, why would she let you do that?” But yeah, it worked out just fine.

And I think, entering college feeling confident in my ability to live on my own... my family was in Alabama, I was in college in Virginia. I don’t think I’m a homesick person by nature, but I was not always thriving at a 100% level in college. But the kind of basic “Can I pay my rent? Can I clean my room? Do I need someone to tuck me in?” That was not a problem I was having.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Let’s talk about your book.

Emma Camp
Okay. It’s a collection of essays on Gen Z and risk aversion called No Hard Feelings. It comes out with Ballantine Books, and I think August 2027.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
We missed it. We have a publishing division called Infinite Books. We would have loved to have published that book.

Emma Camp
Sorry, Penguin got it first.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, too late. Too late for us. Tell me about it. I’ve written four books, all nonfiction. I just finished my first fiction book, which... wow. Fiction is a hell of a lot harder than nonfiction.

Emma Camp
Yes. I don’t think I could write...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s fun. It’s fun. You’ve got to... if you start from first principles: I’m a baby, I understand nothing. I actually programmed an AI prompt to be one of the best and most well-read in the genre that I’m writing. But I also told the prompt that he hates me. Not only what I wrote: he dislikes me as an individual.

Emma Camp
Nice, nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
But some of the best criticism that I got for what I wrote came from that prompt, right? Because I’m like, you know, if someone I love said these horribly mean things to me, I wouldn’t forgive them. But this is a machine. And it fits in with the theme of your book. So how many essays? When is the book due? I think we’ve covered pretty much...

Emma Camp
It’s so close to being done. So it’s eight essays, and I’m supposed to turn in my third draft to my editor at the end of the month. So I’m locked in. But it’s so close. We’re basically in line-level edits at this point, which is so nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
But it’s funny. A year ago, I was on book leave doing the actual writing of the thing. So it’s very nice that the actual writing of the thing is done. But of course, with books, there’s a year between when you actually finish it and when it comes out. So we’re going through that now, which is exciting. I’m very much looking forward to the stage in which the book is done and all I have to do is hawk it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, the capitalist in me would tell you that one of the things Infinite Books, our imprint, does is we collapse that time. It doesn’t take a year when you’re done with a book.

Emma Camp
I don’t mind that it takes a year. That’s more time to hawk it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay, so what can readers anticipate? And who are you aiming the book at? Will I enjoy it?

Emma Camp
I hope you will enjoy it. So with the essays, I’m sort of trying to bridge the space between memoir and cultural criticism. I think of the book largely as cultural criticism, so I have essays focusing on stuff like therapy culture, AI boyfriends, celebrity worship, marriage, dating, that kind of thing. Both looking at what’s the latest op-ed from The Cut about this that went viral, what’s happening on TikTok, but also what’s happening in the novels people are reading. So I wrote a lot about Sally Rooney novels, because those are very popular literary novels that are focusing on these sort of contemporary relationships. What does this say? Also looking at older works of literature. I have an essay about sexual... in which I write a lot about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I would like my parents to maybe skip. It’s like, “You guys can... you don’t have to read that part.”

And then I’m also drawing from a lot of my own experience. So, for example, with the therapy culture essay: I went through a rough patch during Covid. I was 20, and I convinced myself I had autism. And that was sort of how I explained the problems I was having. I was like, “This is it. This proves that it’s not my fault, right? It’s not because of some deep deficiency within myself. It’s because of this lifelong condition that was going to be this way forever.” And both how I came to believe that, but also how I came to then start questioning whether that was actually right. So I glommed onto this label, and then almost immediately after, I hit my stride, and I found my people, and I was like, “Wait a second. This identity label was supposed to explain why I don’t have friends, and now I have a lot of friends. Wait a second, maybe something else was happening here, and I was giving this permanent name to a temporary problem.” So I was writing about that.

My essay on marriage obviously has a lot about how I came to be the kind of person who got married at 24, which is pretty rare among people of my age group, and has...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’re three years in, right? Your marriage?

Emma Camp
Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
How has that changed you?

Emma Camp
How does that change me? It makes my life better in every way. I know. It’s pretty great. 10 out of 10. I think always having someone there, and having the security of that, is so wonderful. I was almost thinking about attachment theory, which is sort of this idea that in order for children to explore the world and be able to take risks, they need to have a secure base, which is normally a parent. I think almost in my adult life, when you have a really rich, stable, loving marriage, I can take more social risks because my husband is always there. And in the same way for him with me. He’s always there at the end of the day for me to talk to. I can talk to him about anything. Whatever problem I have, he’s always there.

He’s always there for me to be silly with. Just having that person... And I think what makes marriage different from indefinite cohabitation or whatever is that you’re deciding to put the eject button further away. And that, I think, has been the big shift. The difference between how I felt about my husband when we were just boyfriend and girlfriend versus how I feel about him now that we’re married is that the whole operation just feels so much more secure and permanent. It’s like we have chosen each other forever. We’re doing this. That kind of team feeling, all the time. I’ll say stuff about “our family.” We don’t have kids yet, but it’s just like, even though it’s just two of us, we’re this family unit, and we make these kind of collective decisions. And that’s great.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, that’s so cool for me, because that’s the way I felt when I got married at 22. My wife and I have been married 44 years. And so, literally, you become one person, right? She remembers certain things that I have no clue about, and I remember certain things that she has no clue about. But again, when we were talking about it, in the same conversations about how we were going to raise children, we were like, okay. So at the time, divorce rates were soaring. Everyone was staying married for up to six to seven years and then splitting up. And I just sort of said to her, “I think we really need to say we are in this for good.”

Emma Camp
Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And there’s going to be a lot of hills and a lot of valleys. Do you agree? I mean.

Emma Camp
Yeah. I mean, I think I’ve been very lucky in that we’ve only been married three years. We haven’t really had any challenges yet. But I think that’s probably how it should be. On year three, before you’ve had any kids and you’re living your awesome life in New York, everything should be perfect. And that’s basically how it is. Everything is perfect. You’re the best person ever. Everything is amazing. But that’s good. But also, I think we have talked about this, where we know the happiness data... when couples have young kids, there’s normally a dip in their marital satisfaction. But we both know this.

And of course, I don’t want to make big proclamations about how I’m going to feel about having kids before I have them, but I at least hope that we will be somewhat inoculated against the worst possibilities of that, when we’re like, okay, we’re super-duper ultra happy now. And we know that when we have kids, we’ll probably be a little more annoyed at each other all the time, because we’ll suddenly be super sleep-deprived and we’ll have this other person to worry about. But that’s okay, because we’re at 12 out of 10 right now, so a brief dip would still be fine.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And also, you’re not...

Emma Camp
And we just love each other a lot. I don’t understand...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’re also not yet accounting for how much you’re going to love those children.

Emma Camp
Right, right. Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I was unprepared for that when I was 24 and held my son for the first time. I’m not a crier, okay? I literally had tears in my eyes, and I was just looking at him, and I finally understood what unconditional love felt like, because I really hadn’t felt that before. So, yeah, you’re right about the kids and the problems. And there’s a really funny skit from an ancient British show, Ab Fab, where these two women are living together, and they both have drinking problems, and they’re both really funny, and they don’t have kids... one of them does. Anyway, they have guests coming who were always the ultra minimalists, right? And so they’re running around their house, stowing all their junk in the closets and hiding it so that everything is absolutely pristine.

And then the gag is, they open the door and their couple has had children, and they come in.

Emma Camp
With a bunch more stuff.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
With all of the stuff, and everything, there’s stuff on their shirt, et cetera. And if you kind of lean in, that too can be fun.

Emma Camp
Oh, I’m sure. I have a half-brother who’s 20 years younger than me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, wow.

Emma Camp
Everyone should have a much younger half-sibling. It’s awesome, because you get all of the baby cuddles, none of the responsibility. And obviously it’s so different because it’s not my kid, but when I held him in my arms for the first time, I was like, “I would die for you.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s what I love about being a grandparent. Because the old joke was: why do grandparents and their grandchildren...

Emma Camp
They have a common enemy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. But it’s true.

Emma Camp
Maybe that’s how I am with my half-brother.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And within our family, there’s a span of 10 years between my oldest and my youngest. So the oldest got a little bit of that in helping his youngest sister. And now both of my daughters, who are the younger two, have young children. And everything you’re saying is a reality. And yet I was talking to my youngest, who used to be a stand-up comedian, and you remind me a lot of her. You’re very funny and you’re very smart. And so I was checking in with her, and she was like, “Yeah, certain days are kind of like travelling third class in Bulgaria.”

Emma Camp
Nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay, so for the book... I know we’re on a little time constraint here, but for the book that comes out in a year, in the meantime, what are you enjoying doing the most? Is it the writing for the Journal? Is it the videos? Do you have bigger...

Emma Camp
Writing for the Journal is pretty awesome. It’s the dream job, right? I get to write about whatever I want, and I can write longer things or shorter things. It’s really the dream job. So I’m very grateful to be doing that. I’m enjoying just making fun cocktails and serving them to people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I saw you had a toga party.

Emma Camp
Yes, that was our... So my husband and I were born exactly 14 days apart, so we have joint birthday parties every year.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Great.

Emma Camp
So this year’s theme was toga party. And so of course that meant that I made sort of Roman-inspired...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I saw the names of the drinks. I thought they were great.

Emma Camp
There’s some part of my creative brain that’s fulfilled by making drinks and coming up with new ideas, and “how do I get this flavour in this format?” That’s just very satisfying.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And are you finding that people who might have been a little reticent to kind of join in the fun at your various parties, as you’ve held them... is there a standout who came in kind of like a turtle, with the head in the shell, and...

Emma Camp
I don’t know. I’m not going to do any of my friends dirty like that. I’m going to say that everyone who shows up is a delight, who has a great time and is the life of the party just as much as any other person. They’re all equally lives of the party.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And back briefly to the video versus the books and the writing for the Journal. Harder time killing your darlings in the books and written pieces, or harder time killing your darlings in the videos? Was there a video where you had to leave something out, and you’re just like, “Yeah...”?

Emma Camp
I mean, I think with videos it’s harder, because you have to make such a simple point.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And the way I’ve been able to deal with the having-to-kill-my-darlings thing is that I’ve made follow-ups, where if there’s a common objection that I really want to respond to but I don’t have time to get to, making a follow-up is a way of getting to that. So I made this grocery store video, and the first one was just talking about why grocery stores show that free markets are the best way to get the most economic prosperity for the most people. And people were like, “What about the city-owned grocery stores? What about the city-owned grocery stores?” I was like, I was going to address that in the first draft, but I didn’t have time to. And so I made a second video about the city-owned grocery store.

Writing-wise, I don’t think that I am far enough in my career. I’m not yet successful enough to be able to afford being hard to work with. So normally, even if I’m like, “Aw, but I really liked that line,” I will just accept all changes from my editor. I think for this round I’m letting myself have two places where I’m like, “I would like to keep that line in,” but everything else I’m like, “Okay, yes, we can cut it.” And also, editors are very good at their jobs.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.

Emma Camp
I like editors a lot. I’m starting to edit a little bit for the Journal now, but I still think of myself as mostly a writer, and the people who live and breathe editing are so talented and are so good at helping me kind of see outside of my own brain. There have been so many times, especially with this book, where either my editor or my agent, who did a lot of editing on my book proposal, would say something about my argument, and I’d be like, “Oh, that is so obviously true. And for some reason, I could not see that until you pointed that out to me. You’re so right.” So I’m also very grateful to editors. So I... you just do what they tell me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
As do I, because it is a very different skill. And again, I was lucky in my marriage, because my wife graduated summa cum laude in journalism, and her talent actually proved to be editing. And the first time around, it did not go so well. I was writing my first piece for publication for Barron’s, and I was 33, I think, at the time. And I wrote it, and I thought, “Oh, that was funny,” and “Ooh, I really made... that was a real zinger there.” And I handed her the actual physical paper, right? A couple hours went by, and she walked back in, and all I saw was a sea of red.

Emma Camp
Oh no.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And we were coming into the city. We were living in the suburbs. We were coming into the city on the train, and we got into the biggest fight ever, until at the end of the train ride I realised that she was completely right.

Emma Camp
Yeah. I will say, I always want my husband to read my essays before I turn them in. But mostly what I want him to tell me is, “Sweetheart, this is the most brilliant thing anybody has ever written. You’re the smartest woman I’ve ever encountered. This is amazing.” And whenever he’s like, “Oh, I’m not so sure about this line,” I’m like, “Why are you persecuting me right now?”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
That was me. That was me on the train.

Emma Camp
So I don’t think I can take it from everyone else, but my husband is not allowed to say anything mean about my writing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
But I got incredibly lucky, because I did have that realisation early. Yes, she was trained to do this. She is really gifted at doing this. She’s gifted at a lot of things. She’s a street photographer here in New York. But that gave me the freedom to let her fix it, which made me a little lazy, to be honest. Do you find that you rely a lot on the editors?

Emma Camp
A little, I would say. I don’t know what a normal amount is. Not too much, I don’t think. It also depends on the piece you’re doing. So most of what I write for the Journal is not getting big, heavy edits. I write for a newsletter, so most of what I’m writing is between 500 and 800 words. So it’s not this big overhaul. With the book, most of the essays are between 8,000 and 10,000 words. So most of the editing is about structural arguments. And so I self-determine, do it myself, which is good. I’ve had a couple experiences writing for outside publications where at the end of it, I was like, “I feel like the editor wrote 30% of this.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
I don’t love when that happens. And thankfully, that isn’t there. I think there’s a good balance between getting the piece into the best shape it can be, but also preserving my voice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
Also feeling like I wrote the thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I think that was why I was so lucky, in that my wife got my voice. And so if she changed it, she just made it make sense. I went through a very early... I was way too academic in my writing style, even though I was not a huge fan of college and found most of it a waste of time, as far as the academics. I loved reading on my own. And I was punished when I was a kid for going all the way through the SRA reading tests in third grade, when you were supposed to wait, because they went all the way through eighth grade. And I went to Catholic school. And so they made me sit at my desk when the other kids were doing the SRA, instead of sending me to the library with a Christmas tree.

And I think that was what radicalised me, because I went home and complained deeply to my father. And he’s like, “Come here.” And he walked me into the library, and he pointed at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he said, “Read that.”

Emma Camp
Nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Which I did. But I definitely think that the ability to put your stuff out there takes a lot of courage.

Emma Camp
Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I just... from the first video that I saw of you, and then where I really got excited about being able to chat with you and get to know you was what you wrote. I am much more oriented toward the written word than I am to video or audio. And I think your writing is great. Do you aspire to write full time, to join the Journal as a journalist? I mean...

Emma Camp
I mean, I do write full time. That’s my job.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. No, no, that is what I mean. I mean, is there some sort of journalistic thing that you aspire to, or more book...

Emma Camp
I think I have the best of all worlds.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, you really do. You’re very Panglossian in your outlook.

Emma Camp
So I can write book-length stuff, but I can also write shorter pieces, and I can also make videos. I feel very lucky in that. And actually for the Journal, because I do really like writing longer-form pieces. I like being able to really investigate something and spend 4,000 words on it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
And working at Reason, I got to do that pretty often, because it’s a magazine. But with the Journal I’ve also been able to do that. If there is something that I think deserves 3,000 words, I’ve been able to pursue that and just publish that there too. So I feel like I have the dream situation, because any length thing I want to write, any format thing I want to produce, I can do it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that is very cool. Nick at Reason is a pretty good friend of mine.

Emma Camp
Yes, Nick is awesome.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, listen, thank you for giving me so much of your time. I think you are awesome.

Emma Camp
Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I live in a family of writers. Both of my daughters are writers. My middle has won a bunch of awards for kind of middle-grade fiction. She’s now into young adult.

Emma Camp
Awesome.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So I just love people who love to write, and then do it as well as you do. Because the other thing that I think you do really well, and maybe this is more in your videos, is you make it fun. People don’t want... you know, the busybody bluestockings to be telling you, “This is what you have to do.” I think if you make your point a little lighter and a little more entertaining, people are going to respond to it better. Listen, we have one final question that we ask everyone on here, and it’s pretty simple. We are going to wave a wand and we are going to make you empress of the world for one day. You cannot put anyone in a re-education camp. You cannot kill anyone.

But what you can do is, we are going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it, and you are going to incept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next morning is, they’re going to wake up and they’re going to say, “I just had two of the greatest ideas, and unlike all the other times, I’m going to actually act on both.”

Emma Camp
That is way too much responsibility. No. No. If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve. I am not doing this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’re just not going to...

Emma Camp
No. No, I am not. I am not touching that with a ten foot pole.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You are the first guest who’s refused. I love that.

Emma Camp
No, I can’t believe everyone isn’t refusing. I can’t live with... because what if it goes badly, right? What if whatever I say ends up horrendously, and then I have to live with that? No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So you’re taking the General Sherman approach?

Emma Camp
Yes. 100%. I am getting out of there. No way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know what, Emma? That makes me like you all the more. Thank you so much for joining us on Infinite Loops.

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Sunday, 27 September

Two thoughts from Peter Thiel

“Indefinite fears about the far future shouldn’t stop us from making definite plans today.”

“Reason tells us you should follow the wisdom of crowds. Revelation tells us you should beware of the madness of crowds.”

Monday, 28 September

Two thoughts from Jean-Paul Sartre

“I can always choose, but I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice.”

“We are our choices.”

Tuesday, 29 September

Two thoughts from Jim Rohn

“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”

“Your personal philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out.”

Wednesday, 30 September

Two thoughts from Ludwig von Mises

“Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.”

“In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.”

Thursday, 1 October

Two thoughts from John Steinbeck

“No one wants advice - only corroboration.”

“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”

Friday, 2 October

Two thoughts from Steven Pressfield

“It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.”

“If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.”

Saturday, 3 October

Two thoughts from Benjamin Graham

“Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.”

“Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.”

Follow Jim on Twitter for a daily dose of Two Thoughts!

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This week: Films & TV from the early Field Notes archive: a Japanese noodle western that refuses to behave, a British government held together by panic and insults, three men undone by a bag of cash, an ultramarathon designed to defeat its runners, and a high-wire walk planned like a heist.

1. Tampopo : The Ramen Western That’s Also About Everything Else

I came across a clip from this 1985 Japanese film, and it instantly piqued my interest. The poster described it as a “Japanese Noodle Western.” The sheer hilarity of that phrase was enough to send it straight to the top of my watch list. What even is a Japanese Noodle Western?

Turns out, it’s one of the most original movies I’ve ever seen.

The central plot follows a pair of truck drivers who, along with a ragtag gang they assemble along the way, help a widowed ramen shop owner master the art of ramen and turn around her struggling business. It’s equal parts earnest and absurd, driven by the same Japanese devotion to craft and perfection that Jimmy talked about in Jimmy’s earlier recommendation, of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This is not a world where mediocre ramen is acceptable. Ramen chefs here are ready to duel you if you leave broth in the bowl or dare insult their work.

But what makes Juzo Itami’s Tampopo truly unlike anything else is its structure. Woven between the main storyline are these vignettes, little short films really, depicting completely unrelated slices of human life revolving around food. They are funny, erotic (kinky food sex?), goofy, and so independently delightful that the lack of connection never bothers you. It’s like picking up a book and finding out it’s both a novel and a short story collection bound together, and somehow it works. I can’t think of another movie that pulls this off.

Nearly every scene exists because of food — even the death scenes, even the credits. Tampopo is a love letter to food, and to all the strange little rituals we build around it. [Vatsal]

• 🎬 Tampopo (1985)

2. The Thick of It : Real Politics Was Always This Stupid

If you know Armando Iannucci, it’s probably from Veep. Maybe from The Death of Stalin. But before either of those, Iannucci made a low-budget BBC series about the inner workings of British politics. And it might be one of the funniest comedies ever made.

The Thick of It follows a hapless politician and his team of advisors as they lurch from crisis to crisis under the supervision and wrath of Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications. The performance of Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker is so hilarious and outrageous that if there’s a Mount Rushmore of comedic performances, Capaldi’s face is right there.

The dialogue feels mostly improvised, delivered at a pace so breathless it blows your mind, and yet somehow winds up as endlessly quotable. True catching-lightning-in-a-bottle stuff. The whole cast were in some kind of flow state.

And hilarity aside, if the last decade or so is anything to go by, I’d argue it’s also one of the most accurate portrayals of politics ever captured on screen. Real politics isn’t House of Cards. Real politics is a comedy of errors.

Much like the two versions of The Office, watching The Thick of It alongside Veep is one of the best ways to understand the difference between British and American comedy. Veep is funny but entirely sanitized and slowed down by comparison. Although they share DNA, The Thick of It is a different animal altogether: meaner, faster, and much closer to the chaos of the real world. [Dylan]

• 📺 The Thick of It (2005-2012)

3. A Simple Plan : How Good People Talk Themselves Into Evil

Sam Raimi has been back in the news recently with the gonzo desert-island thriller Send Help (very fun). Best known for directing the still-influential Evil Dead movies and the equally influential 2000s Spider-Man trilogy, Raimi is beloved among cinephiles for his dark humor and kid-in-a-candy-store directing style, defined by extravagant camera moves, extreme close-ups, and gore. So much gore.

His 1998 thriller A Simple Plan was a blind spot for me, and occupies a curious place in his filmography. A swing for critical prestige in the vein of Fargo (Raimi was an early collaborator of the Coen Brothers), it sees Raimi abandon many of his favorite moves in favor of a sober, tragic account of three blue-collar Midwesterners - two of them brothers - who stumble across a duffel bag stuffed with cash and must decide how far they’re willing to go to keep it. It’s hardly a spoiler to say things turn bloody.

Great performances all around, particularly from Billy Bob Thornton as Jacob, whose childlike innocence proves ripe for corruption by his seemingly upstanding younger brother (Bill Paxton).

A great thriller on its own merits, and for anyone interested in the art of directing, a compelling example of a filmmaker putting away the toys to achieve something stylistically different. The ease with which ordinary people convince themselves they’re still good while doing terrible things can be darker than gore. [Ed]

• 🎬 A Simple Plan (1998)

4. The Barkley Marathons : A Documentary About Beautiful Failure

Every year in the muddy hills of Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee, a cigarette-smoking accountant named Gary Cantrell — who goes by Lazarus Lake — sends a field of forty ultrarunners into the woods to suffer. The Barkley Marathons is 100 miles through punishing terrain: five unmarked 20-mile loops, 60,000 feet of elevation gain, no GPS, no trail markers, no aid stations. Expect dense, prickly undergrowth, wild boar, snakes, poison ivy, and brutal temperature swings.

Runners navigate by map and compass and prove they’ve hit each checkpoint by tearing pages from books Laz has stashed along the course — prophetic titles like What Did I Do Wrong? and How to Survive and Grow Richer in the Tough Times Ahead. The entry fee is $1.60 and a pack of Camel cigarettes. The acceptance letter advises runners that their time before the race would be better spent updating their wills. Since 1995, only 20 runners have finished.

I first heard about Barkley from an ultra-runner friend, and then I found this documentary — which has become one of my favorite sports films. Filmmakers Annika Iltis and Timothy James Kane followed the 2012 race, and what they captured is less a story about running than a study of what happens when you strip a human being down to the essential ingredients: compass, willpower, and whatever’s left after forty hours without sleep. Laz himself is the film’s central character: part sadist, part philosopher, a man who pulls his own teeth rather than visit a dentist, and who once stocked the entire course with adult-themed novels. He looks like Edward Abbey and talks like the kind of character Cormac McCarthy might’ve dreamed up between novels, sitting on a porch in Tennessee, laughing at something no one else found funny.

What brought me back was a beautifully shot short film by Noah Reese recapping the 2026 race, which fielded one of the deepest talent pools in Barkley history. Not shocking, the race didn’t yield a finisher. The best runner only did three loops. Barkley won again, as it almost always does. And somehow, that’s the most inspiring thing about it. [Taylor]

• 🎬 Official Website for The Barkley Marathons (2014)

• 📺 The full film on YouTube (top comment: “I just love the irony of an elite ultra marathon event set up by an eccentric chain-smoking madman”)

5. Man on Wire : ‘An act justified entirely by its beauty and audacity.’

I have watched James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire more times than I care to count. It tells the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, and it unfolds with the tension of a heist film. Petit and his small band of co-conspirators spent months casing the buildings, forging IDs, smuggling equipment past security guards, all to pull off an act that was illegal, unprofitable, and by any reasonable measure insane.

Marsh structures the documentary around this preparation, intercutting archival footage with present-day interviews, and the effect is to make you lean forward even though you know how it ends. Petit survived. He walked for 45 minutes, a quarter mile above the streets of Manhattan, crossing back and forth eight times while crowds gathered below.

What elevates the film beyond spectacle is its interest in the question of why. Petit is charming and elusive on this point, almost allergic to explanation, and Marsh wisely lets the ambiguity stand. The walk had no cause, no sponsor, no message. It was art in its purest form, an act that justified itself entirely by its beauty and audacity.

Watching Petit describe that morning, you sense something that our culture often has trouble accepting: some things are worth doing precisely because they serve no purpose beyond the doing. The Twin Towers are gone now, which gives the footage an unexpected weight. But Petit’s walk remains, suspended in memory, a reminder that human beings are capable of the unnecessary and the magnificent. [Jimmy]

• 🎬 Man on Wire (documentary, 2008)

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Julie Fredrickson, Managing Partner of Chaotic Capital, rejoins Infinite Loops to talk about Montana’s Right to Compute Act, why verified human data may become one of the most valuable assets online, what nuclear power and the encryption wars teach about regulating AI, why chatbots keep recommending the same sunscreen, and what 2,089 days of daily public writing taught her about being wrong. It is her second Infinite Loops conversation, three years after Episode 181.

We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

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Links

Show Notes

Julie Fredrickson & Jim O’Shaughnessy

• Julie Fredrickson: Managing Partner of Chaotic Capital, an early-stage venture fund, and a former founder in e-commerce and beauty. Chaotic Capital

• Julie on X: Julie’s preferred way to be reached. Follow Julie on X

• Julie’s daily writing: More than 2,000 consecutive days of public writing, started January 1, 2021. Read Julie’s blog

• Jim O’Shaughnessy: Host of Infinite Loops, founder and CEO of O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and author of the New York Times bestseller What Works on Wall Street. Follow Jim on X

• Full transcripts: Transcripts and highlights from every Infinite Loops conversation. OSV newsletter

Julie’s Work & Projects

• Montana’s Right to Compute Act: The first state law protecting people’s right to own and use computers and AI tools, which Julie advocated for. Read the Right to Compute Act

• Valar Atomics: The small modular reactor company founded by Isaiah Taylor, where Julie invested. Valar Atomics

• Julie’s first Infinite Loops episode: Episode 181, “Circumstances change. Humanity doesn’t. Plan accordingly.” Watch Episode 181

Books & Ideas Mentioned

• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch: Jim’s reference for why no one in 1900 could have predicted the internet. The Beginning of Infinity

• Carlota Perez: The economist whose work on technology booms and build-outs shapes Julie’s view that AI is still in its invention phase. Carlota Perez

• Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge: The novel Julie cites for a future where people earn a living doing small tasks only humans can do. Rainbows End

• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: Julie’s reference for how ideas spread like a virus through programmers. Snow Crash

• Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson: The novel Julie describes, in which Americans mourn victims of a nuclear attack that never happened. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

• The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich: Jim’s reference on how long cultures take to adapt to new technology. The WEIRDest People in the World

• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell: Jim’s starting point for cognitive security and invented history. Nineteen Eighty-Four

• From Googlebot to GPTBot: Cloudflare’s report on the rise in AI crawler traffic that Julie cites. Cloudflare report

• The Vesuvius Challenge: The project reading the Herculaneum scrolls, subject of a documentary from Infinite Films. Vesuvius Challenge

• Agrippa’s trilemma: Jim’s reference for why chasing a claim to its source often ends in sand. Agrippa’s trilemma

Highlights

The daily writing practice

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. I really recommend a daily writing practice for everyone, if it’s at all interesting. Just start. Don’t apply too many rules. When I started, I thought I would be happy if I got a couple of paragraphs down, and I was aiming for 30 days. And now I’m on year five. I began it January 1 of ‘21, as a sort of mid-pandemic: what’s happening? What am I thinking? The world’s changing. And I tend to view writing as a thinking process. If it’s in my head, okay, not so bad, but I need to get it on the proverbial paper to actually understand where my understanding gaps are. And I’m so glad that I did it, not only because everything is tagged and there’s lots of useful metadata, and what my areas of interest are, how they’ve changed, but it’s also a wonderful way to discover where you were wrong.

And we have a tendency to think of problems as... the stuff we got wrong doesn’t matter, it’s only the stuff we got right. And I think that’s very much what I’ve taken from it: that I am wrong so often that it’s almost embarrassing. And I don’t ever want to let go of that feeling, because now I’m no longer embarrassed by poor writing or shorter writing or having a bad writing day. Part of the reason I do it is I want to discover the areas in which either my thinking is flawed or I haven’t really thought something through. And now that I’ve got such a large body of work, I can toss it into an LLM. And honestly, coming up with a duplicate of me would be pretty simple just based on my writing now, because there’s just so much of it. But it’s very helpful.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I think the thing that you said that I absolutely applaud, as one who has kept journals since I was 19 years old: the ability to identify where you were wrong is so important, because our memories overwrite, right, with what you’re believing.

Ask a Chatbot for Sunscreen

Julie Fredrickson
So I’m a huge skincare junkie. I love cosmetics and makeup.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You do have lovely skin.

Julie Fredrickson
In a former life, that was... I came out of e-commerce and beauty and fashion, so I still really love it. But when you search for skincare advice, you’ll get served up lots of information about what’s popular on Reddit, because Reddit is a really rich source of user-generated data on caring for your skin, different problems. And there’s a brand that is owned by L’Oréal called CeraVe that is very well represented in Reddit’s makeup and skincare forums, and that if someone can dethrone... CeraVe is currently the most popular drugstore brand, at least in America. I think it’s reaching kind of different peaks other places. But I encourage people to try this. Ask ChatGPT or Claude or Grok to suggest the best SPF sunscreen or the best retinol moisturiser. And the chances are pretty good it’s going to be CeraVe, because they have simply dominated on user forums.

And this actually gets to another problem. Well, that was organically generated in some places, but L’Oréal is quite a large cosmetics conglomerate, so they were able to do a lot of seeding of products with influencers who then wrote things on Reddit. And so Cloudflare has this pay-per-crawl service. They’re sort of security between you... when you search for a site, they are kind of the first line of defence, and they know if it’s a bot versus a human coming in, generally, and they can send a 404 to the bot and say, “No, you have to pay for this information.”

So datasets like Reddit that are really rich in user information about things like skincare, things that are a little bit more niche than general information, are actually now quite valuable. And the more valuable your specific professional information might be that you’re putting to people, the better off your sites and your businesses probably will end up being in terms of getting served by the large language models, because they’ve done a great job of, “Oh yeah, my absolute favourite sunscreen is CeraVe.” Now, there’s better sunscreens depending on what your needs are, but they have figured out a way to be the largest conversation on all of these forums. But what happens when those forums become synthetic, and there’s armies of bots creating the content? What happens?

Can anyone dethrone datasets that already existed with verifiably human content? Somebody launches something amazing... Korean brands are really hot right now, because this is the first time we’ve approved a new sunscreen in America in decades. So maybe that sunscreen and those new ingredients will dethrone them. So that’s just a whole mess right there.

Edited Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, hello, everyone. It’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I am delighted to welcome back Julie Fredrickson of Chaotic Capital. Julie, it’s wonderful to have you back. I was thinking it’s just such a shame that nothing has happened since the last time we talked.

Julie Fredrickson
It’s been a very quiet, calm couple of years. Nothing. No major world events, no investments going anywhere, no new technology. Yeah, totally normal couple years.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Same shit, different day. But okay. With everything, with the tsunami that has happened over the last two years, what is keeping you awake, what is really annoying you, and also what is delighting you?

Julie Fredrickson
Well, I’m definitely delighted by the direction that artificial intelligence has taken in my own life. But I think the unexpected thing that I wasn’t completely prepared for, in terms of shifting, was just how much it would affect the real world, like the infrastructure and brick and mortar. And so I spent a lot more time thinking about unpopular topics like data centres and energy production than I expected, which is both exciting and annoying at the same time. I also got a lot more involved in politics. I care a lot about something called the right to compute. It started out as a little bit of a hobby project, and now we’re talking about what rights we have around using our computers of any sort, whether it’s your phone or your laptop or large agglomerations of data. It turns out we haven’t really figured out how we treat compute as a subject.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And do you think that there’s a First Amendment loophole way into the right to compute?

Julie Fredrickson
It’s an interesting question, right? Because I think that in this era, how could you be said to be exercising your speech rights without using the mathematics that underpin all of compute? Because it’s really just algebra. We’re just adding up lots and lots of matrices. And I tend to think of math as a subsection of speech, not the other way around. So I think that the First Amendment does apply in Montana, which is where I’m based, although I’m not there right now. Otherwise I’d have beautiful photos of mountains and not a background like this. But we passed a law that was signed into law by Governor Gianforte called the Right to Compute, which is a bit of an amalgamation of the First, Second and Fourth Amendments, because compute is a little bit speech.

But it’s also a little bit property. There’s some cybersecurity and defence implications. So in Montana, we took it as a little bit of a strict scrutiny perspective, looking back at things like the browser wars of the 90s and the encryption wars in the 80s: how do we incorporate a new technology that rests on things that we actually already have a constitutional right to interact with? So that was the perspective I took.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, no, I like that perspective. Elaborate a little bit, because I hadn’t thought about it through that lens. I was around for all of the fights about browsers, for all of the fights about sites, cybersecurity. But this is just yet another extension of that.

Julie Fredrickson
No, I would think so. And maybe I’ll find out that other people really disagree with me, but, and I’m not a constitutional scholar in any capacity, I tend to think that rights are innate, and that we should have to come up with, they say, strict scrutiny as a standard, which is you have to make a case for why something should be banned, as opposed to why we would have the opportunity. There’s no reason, there’s no compelling reason to ban something. And we may already have laws. Fraud and violence are already proscribed. We already have a judicial body for that.

But it does seem strange that we should be taking something that is fundamentally speech and mathematical and deciding that it needs a whole new body of laws, that maybe we’d want it to build and have a better understanding of what areas of life it’s going to impact before we decide to write a whole bunch of new laws around how it can be used, who can use it. Obviously, regulatory capture was a big part of the concerns around the browser wars in the 90s. In terms of the encryption wars before that, America opened itself up to some troubles. It was more hackable because we put back doors into things, and that turned out to be a real problem, and we would never have enabled the internet as we know it today without strong encryption. And we almost banned it. And now can you imagine not being able to shop online, or being able to do e-commerce transactions, or take meetings safely? So we don’t always know how things will come together. And that’s part of the reason I think we should lean back on the systems we already have before deciding, “Oh no, we need a whole new body of regulations and moratoriums.” And I don’t know, it’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t panic.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
It reminds me of the Warren line: “It is a mistake to understand new things too quickly, for often we have misunderstood them and we end up killing them in their cradle.” Your reference to the cybersecurity or the encryption is the perfect example. I remember all of the passion on each side of that, but we didn’t know at the time. And that’s the problem. As I watch these wars going on online between the effective altruists and the e/acc types, it’s just like, guys, if you’re in favour of AI, that does not make you opposed to AI safety. You can’t say, if you are in favour of AI safety, then you must follow our manifesto. And I think that either/or is not an argument in good faith.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. And I’m actually a little perplexed as to how we came into that frame in the first place, because to suggest that wanting to bring forward benefits quickly is inherently more dangerous isn’t necessarily true. And we have seen... actually, I’m going to brag a little bit here, but in terms of production on energy over the last two years, we have moved on nuclear relatively swiftly, in ways that we have not done for decades. There’s now four new reactors that have been approved for use in the span of two years. And previously it would have taken a decade to get a new reactor to criticality, online. And this is just to say that just because something is faster, or we’re accelerating into something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t be safer. Sometimes you want to lean into the curve in order to make it out the other side. So I tend to think of them as not being either/or. Safe and fast actually is probably more likely than safe and slow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I think one of the other problems is we don’t know yet what problems are going to present themselves. If you’re imaginative, you can come up with all sorts of scenarios that get you to Terminator or get you to paperclips, but I don’t think that necessarily is the way it’s going to go. And so I find myself often in the very awkward position of being what I call a rational optimist. Of course there are going to be problems. We’re not denying that, but we think that we’ll come up with solutions to those problems as they present themselves. I mean, am I just naive here?

Julie Fredrickson
Well, and I’ve definitely asked myself that as well, because I have kind of strongly gone in favour of the... I think compute is as much a right as speech or property rights. And people will say, “Well, but there’s all these new ways that we could commit crimes.” Humans are very ingenious. They come up with new ways to commit crime all of the time. But we don’t necessarily need to have new punishments for old crimes. Theft is still theft, murder is still murder. And the idea that we can’t come up with solutions as problems arise just sort of flaunts a whole body of history in which the only way we actually solve problems is by experiencing them and mitigating them, because we couldn’t always imagine what those problems were.

I don’t think it’s naive. I think it’s actually just very practical. If we imagine a problem that’s too esoteric, we’ll fix the wrong problems, and then we’ll be blindsided by something as it happens, because we took too long to actually implement something.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I’m guided by the way David Deutsch looks at it. He has that great quote in The Beginning of Infinity, where he says: what were thinkers and scientists thinking and saying about the internet in 1900? Nothing. Nothing. Because it wasn’t around. And the whole idea that we can prophesise what is going... That is one of my things that really does trigger me, where somebody puts a completely speculative prophecy up. I mean, just think of all... And media loves it. They love doom. They love to scare the shit out of people.

Julie Fredrickson
If it bleeds, it leads.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly. And all those terms are all pre-internet, and newspapers did the same thing. Go all the way back to the Federalist Papers during the American Revolutionary War. Newspapers were incredibly biased, and they were propaganda sheets, essentially.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. Like, yellow journalism is from a war a hundred years ago.

The problems are almost comically human in nature. Any time I watch a new sci-fi conceit in which they’re saying, “Oh, we’ll have reproducing nanobots and we’ll be turned into grey goo for food for them,” okay, I mean, that’s going to require a lot of power that we don’t currently generate, a lot of compute that we don’t currently have made, a lot of chips. I love all of that science fiction, I really do. I’ve read so much of that kind of work, but I just don’t... And I think we’ve discussed this too: my attitude has always been that circumstances change but humanity doesn’t. Humans remain human.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, circumstances change minute by minute. Human nature doesn’t budge millennia by millennia. And that was always what I would say about investing. Your edge is arbitraging human nature, because it literally does not change.

Julie Fredrickson
Might be the only arbitrage that doesn’t change quickly. Everything else fades and can be moved. But humans are surprisingly stubborn.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So what would you propose? If we made you the AI czar, right, what would this current debate look like if you could say, no, okay, now we’re going to have a long discussion, an honest-minded discussion? If you were the czar, tell me who you would invite, why, and what you would hope to accomplish and achieve.

Julie Fredrickson
Well, I do think that leaning on what we know, because history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, would be very helpful. I think that bringing people in who have studied the encryption wars, the browser wars, because they’re with us, that history is not that far back, that would be an important construct to understand how we’ve integrated new technologies in the past, because we’ve got quite a bit of that. And that’s one reason that I just simply leaned on... I think the American Constitution is a wonderful experiment and has worked pretty effectively. We had a 250th birthday this year. Perhaps constitutional scholars would be more appropriate to bring to the table than every type of specialist.

But on the flip side of that, as much as we need to lean into the systems that we already have and understand and have worked well for us, there are types of risks we can predict. We understand that humans are prone to certain kinds of diseases. You want biosecurity. You would want to think about all of the security risks that we already deal with from cybersecurity. Just basic things, human error. So much of hacking is people testing the limits of your own human frailty, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the hardened walls of actual encryption. So I think being very precise about what problems we think are more likely, and then building the pipeline of specialists. But then also, I don’t know if we need a FINRA for artificial intelligence yet. How much business was conducted in America before we incorporated FINRA into our banking system? Quite a lot. It’s the same for the Securities and Exchange Commission. We did business for a long time without it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I would push back a little there. That’s my old world. And literally most of Wall Street pre some of the regulations, and remember, this is coming from a very free-market person, a lot of it was literally rigged, right? Bucket shops were rigged. Pools would rig security prices. They would get together a group of insiders on Wall Street, they would run the price of a security up to ridiculous levels, and then that rise attracted the attention of the naive public. They would all try to jump into that particular group of securities, and guess who was selling those securities to them? Those very same pools. So, well, I’m very sympathetic to: yes, of course, much of our country was built pre all of the various regulations.

I’m not opposed to just sensible regulation. But I also think that you’re making the case that we already have a lot of sensible regulations that could be applied to AI. What do you think about the idea, though, that this really is a step change in technology? We have our own on-prem hardware, software. We’re developing a series of programs that we think will be commercially successful. And being able to do business the way we are now doing it is literally very different than when I started my first company in 1987.

Julie Fredrickson
I do think that it is significant. I am, however, not sure that we’ve reached the significant portion of the developmental process. I’m a big fan of an economist, Carlota Perez, who writes about boom and bust cycles. I’m not actually sure that we’re in the deployment phase yet. The idea of the boom and bust cycles that she talks about is that there’s sort of two parts of build-outs. One is the innovation and the invention, and that step is then followed by a build-out. And I think we may actually still be in the invention stage and not the build-out of the success phase. I think there’s still actually quite a bit of innovation that we haven’t really figured out.

Not to say that large language models are not incredibly innovative, but I’m not convinced it’s the last step in how we’ll actually put together successful businesses, and what we’ll consider success might change rapidly as different areas of the industry either commoditise or become much more driven towards service and specialty. And what the bar of commodity versus specialty is, I think, is unclear to me still. And this is kind of speaking as someone who, I’m not invested in the labs in any capacity, but I care an awful lot about making sure that we have energy and chips to actually be able to run those things. So I do think they’re important enough that we obviously need more infrastructure, but I don’t think that they’re the end game.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I actually agree. I think that we are in the developmental stage now, but even with the tools as they exist today, you can develop some really interesting and pretty cool new ways of doing things that simply were impossible before. I do agree that you’ve got to be committed to pivoting. You’ve got to be committed to being really fast at updating your priors, and you need that kind of flexibility. So now put your investor hat on. What are you looking for now in terms of the entire... and it doesn’t have to be just the AI stack. You mentioned energy and data centres. What else are you contemplating in terms of investment?

Julie Fredrickson
The biggest problem that I’m starting to see is actually that the inputs are not as openly available as we might hope. And this is kind of a function of: the way humans browse the internet is not the way machines are browsing the internet, and the ecosystems, and frankly the economies, of the open web are changed simply by the scale. It’s actually, I think, kind of astonishing to me just how significant the scale changes. And I’m trying to pull up some notes I had on it, because what we’re starting to see in terms of Cloudflare is actually probably a great example. There’s an 18% rise in AI and search crawler traffic, they said in their blog recently, from May ‘24 to May ‘25, and then immediately after that it rose by 305%.

So if you compare the Cloudflare AI search crawler traffic in that period, ChatGPT traffic rose by 2,825%. I’ll send the links along, but the machine-readable web is an order of magnitude, orders of magnitude, larger than the human-readable internet. And I think the web itself just wasn’t built for agents and the level of speed that they operate on. And that’s probably going to put some real pressures on... National borders are part of it, where not everything is machine readable depending on what region you’re in. I’m actually in Prague right now, and the European Union has a fairly different approach to how they handle data and speech to how America does. There’s no First Amendment where we’re at.

And all of that problem of what datasets are machine readable versus human readable, I think, will probably really factor into what kind of products win, because the novelty of information is actually a huge component of how people build edge and actually build out businesses that can be sustained. And I’m really curious to see what those unique datasets will be, but also, how do we preserve access to the information commons? Because if you’re not actually going to the pages that were serving you information, but you’re just getting it from a chatbot, that’s a very different transaction of information than what we had previously.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I saw today that Amazon is shutting down the ability of Meta’s Muse to shop at Amazon. And it reminded me of, and I think I got my thinking wrong here actually, but it reminded me of when VHS came out, and the movie industry spent years and millions of dollars trying to kill VHS, without understanding that it would be the massive source of revenue for them that it became. Yeah. But what do you think about that? I know people who are using Muse. In fact, I had a conversation last night with two early users, and they were like, “It’s amazing, it’s magic,” in terms of the shopping. But my initial insight, seeing Amazon shut it down, was like, “Well, that’s not going to go well for you, Amazon.”

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah, actually it’s such a great example too, because it opens up a whole new stream of business. So I’m a huge skincare junkie. I love cosmetics and makeup.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You do have lovely skin.

Julie Fredrickson
In a former life, that was... I came out of e-commerce and beauty and fashion, so I still really love it. But when you search for skincare advice, you’ll get served up lots of information about what’s popular on Reddit, because Reddit is a really rich source of user-generated data on caring for your skin, different problems. And there’s a brand that is owned by L’Oréal called CeraVe that is very well represented in Reddit’s makeup and skincare forums, and that if someone can dethrone... CeraVe is currently the most popular drugstore brand, at least in America. I think it’s reaching kind of different peaks other places. But I encourage people to try this. Ask ChatGPT or Claude or Grok to suggest the best SPF sunscreen or the best retinol moisturiser. And the chances are pretty good it’s going to be CeraVe, because they have simply dominated on user forums.

And this actually gets to another problem. Well, that was organically generated in some places, but L’Oréal is quite a large cosmetics conglomerate, so they were able to do a lot of seeding of products with influencers who then wrote things on Reddit. And so Cloudflare has this pay-per-crawl service. They’re sort of security between you... when you search for a site, they are kind of the first line of defence, and they know if it’s a bot versus a human coming in, generally, and they can send a 404 to the bot and say, “No, you have to pay for this information.”

So datasets like Reddit that are really rich in user information about things like skincare, things that are a little bit more niche than general information, are actually now quite valuable. And the more valuable your specific professional information might be that you’re putting to people, the better off your sites and your businesses probably will end up being in terms of getting served by the large language models, because they’ve done a great job of, “Oh yeah, my absolute favourite sunscreen is CeraVe.” Now, there’s better sunscreens depending on what your needs are, but they have figured out a way to be the largest conversation on all of these forums. But what happens when those forums become synthetic, and there’s armies of bots creating the content? What happens?

Can anyone dethrone datasets that already existed with verifiably human content? Somebody launches something amazing... Korean brands are really hot right now, because this is the first time we’ve approved a new sunscreen in America in decades. So maybe that sunscreen and those new ingredients will dethrone them. So that’s just a whole mess right there. It might be better shopping to allow the bots on, but what are the problems?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. As I was listening to you, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be ironic if one of the biggest new job categories was you being a human, opening an account at Reddit and actually typing yourself, not having the AI type it? But I could see, if you were a large-scale company like L’Oréal or any of their competitors, why not hire 10,000 people?

Julie Fredrickson
An army of young people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
An army of young people. Give them a script, give variations, let them... or even better, don’t give them a script.

Julie Fredrickson
Just give them the product. Let it be.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. “Here’s the product. Say really great things about it and we’ll pay you.”

Julie Fredrickson
So I genuinely have one. There’s a fantastic mathematician who recently passed, Vernor Vinge, who writes science fiction novels, actually well known for his work on the singularity.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I know Vinge’s work.

Julie Fredrickson
So in Rainbows End, which has an interesting plot about deconstructing a library and the value of a dataset, a millennial grandparent is trying to make the transition with their grandchildren. And the grandchild’s profession was somewhere between an influencer job and a gig worker job, in which they were creating little bits of content, or little bits of things that the machines couldn’t touch, but only humans could touch. And I think that actually might be closer to what happens: that there’s going to be so many different things that are human mediated, that being very literate and very capable and interacting with real people, those skills probably do become more important, and we may actually care a lot more. There’s the joke, “You should have studied STEM and not English.” Well, I think there’s a good chance that people who are better storytellers actually do quite well in a world in which unique data, and human unique data, is the most important asset on the internet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Revenge of the humanities.

Julie Fredrickson
And I think it’s becoming a rather popular theory that actually being human is going to matter quite a lot, because synthetic machine attention is not the same thing as a human having seen it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. The other thing I wonder about is datasets. Again, given my old world, the dataset was the most important thing. When I was still at OSAM, before we sold the company, we did a three-year data cleanse, because people had no idea how dirty the data is. Literally. And I would give the example: pull up the best-known company, pull up at the time Apple or Amazon, and just look at the P/E ratio. Okay, this is what you get from Bloomberg. And now let’s go over to Reuters and pull up the P/E ratio, and it’s a different number. And any financial data stream you find, different numbers. So we elected to spend a lot of time and treasure cleaning the dataset.

But then when you talk about Reddit... I’m not on Reddit, so I’m naive about the quality of the posts and everything on Reddit, but it’s kind of the same thing, where you have a self-selected sample bias, and the type of people who spend a lot of time doing reviews, et cetera, you could probably map over to their Big Five profiles, et cetera. And that is something that I could see you building. You could build an algorithm that looked a lot like a human.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. Well, and how fast do we do that? How much is it going to cost to duplicate what, in marketing land, we would call a psychographic: the idea of the person’s life, and what their house looked like, what their family looked like, what car they drove, what brands they had affinity for? We’re already actually quite good at that kind of work in commercial advertising, and I imagine we’re only going to get better at that. But then, and this is where I think it’s going to be very hard, to decide what actually reaches a human at that point. And maybe we do have to have some verifications to suggest that it’s a real person at the end of it. And that presumably is going to involve any number of different kinds of checks. And I don’t know how much people follow things like know-your-customer rules and KYC-type problems, but proving your identity is going to become a much bigger problem over the next few years, I think, because of it. And given the cybersecurity implications, do you really want to be uploading your passport to a commercial website?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And what do you think about zero point proofs and things like that, where you can do it right on your device itself?

Julie Fredrickson
I think that’s probably our only real option. The zero knowledge is going to... And I would encourage people to actually learn about how they work and why it’s important, because the idea of trusted intermediaries is just... as far as I’m concerned now. And being able to have trustless systems. And this is probably where crypto goes, right? We spent so much time thinking about what are functionally financial products, when in the end... not to say that the financial rails and stablecoins and things of that nature aren’t huge and very important, but actually being able to do a zero-knowledge proof and say, “This is the entity you’re interacting with,” and be confident that you’re getting the person. I think we’re very close to needing that for almost everything we do.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I agree. And I also agree with the assessment about... and it illustrates the importance of being able to pivot, right? Crypto, blockchain, et cetera: that piece of it might be the most important thing to come out of it.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. Which, it’s so funny that we have gone through... It’s the same cycle of: things start looking like toys. You’re like, “Oh, this is so fun and so silly. Oh, those goofy pictures.” And then you realise that there are dead serious problems of making sure that who you are is who you are to the computer, and is readable to machines. And this is where I was going with the question of what do the datasets look like, and who is integrating information, and at what scale? Because the further we get from source material into digestions and summaries, the more likely it is that the abstraction doesn’t reflect what the material at the source says. And that’s just going to be its own other problem.

Because I do think we’re experiencing fragmentation at a geopolitical level. The internet in Europe looks very different than the internet in America. Russia and China have totally different sets of systems. And there’s even stateless data now, where we think of the fall of the Soviet Union as being so far past, but there are Soviet patents that are not technically owned by anyone. And have we done anything to bring them online, make sure they’re machine readable? What do we do for all of those types of cultural and heritage institution types of information? The Herculaneum scrolls are an amazing example of people coming together and saying, “Wow, now we can read this data from Pompeii and Herculaneum.” But what other datasets exist that are like that? And how do we make sure that everyone has open access to them? Because we see patent data as being an open-access problem. But what if the state that issued the patent is no longer there? The Soviet Union’s not there. It’s a set of Baltic nations and Russia and Balkan nations.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Our Infinite Films studio did a documentary on the scrolls, which I am very excited by, because to me at least, it is incredibly exciting to be able to finally make legible, through a particle accelerator, and then translatable, through AI, these ancient texts. And I’m also really interested in all of the papers, works, et cetera, that have not been digitised. For example, there is all of the works of William James. We actually have a project going right now where we’re at the libraries up in Boston, trying to digitise all of the works that are on paper that have never been digitised.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. And most information is in that process now, where UNESCO has been sounding the alarm for years that we simply have not digitised most of our historical artefacts, because they’re individual countries’. And how do we make sure that everybody has the credit and the lineage and information, while also still recognising that it belongs to the people of these nations, or the owners of the copyright? And perhaps there’s more value in them being broadly reachable. To use the VHS example, it might turn out to be whole new businesses that we haven’t even really seen.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And on that front, and we’re talking about datasets and everything, kind of back to the cosmetics illustration you gave: I myself might prefer a dataset where it takes every sunscreen, since that’s what we were talking about, sends them to a lab, has the lab results come back: “These are the most efficacious. These have these awful ingredients, you probably don’t want to buy these. These are the top three, based on the underlying ingredients and the efficacy that multiple tests or studies have shown.” I would trust that. If I was choosing a sunscreen, I would go to that rather than what a bunch of Reddit users think about it.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. Well, and people are building websites like that using user-generated datasets like Reddit. And I think that actually gets to be a little bit scary, is that we have to think about, okay, well, who owns the academic publications? Who owns the user-generated information? I love going PubMed spelunking, because you just never know quite what you’re going to pull out of the scientific corpus. And being able to make those distinctions of, all right, where did the data come from? What’s its national origin? Who owns it? Who paid for the studies? Because all of the context of the information is probably quite salient to making those choices. And it sounds a little silly, but this is totally how I think about cosmetics: what’s my Pareto-optimal routine? And if you want to spend... get that 80%, and it’s good enough. But maybe you’re a completist and you want to have the 100% most perfect skincare, because you don’t want skin cancer and you want to age gracefully, where all of that context might actually be really important to going from Pareto optimal to complete. And my guess is that there’s probably markets like that everywhere, and cosmetics is just an easy one to think of.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I would agree. But I also agree with the follow-the-money. You bring up the various studies and the spelunking you do at the various academic sites, and I was remembering, in the 80s, when homelessness all of a sudden became a huge issue. And I can’t recall the author, but somebody wanted to find where the papers that said there were... I can’t remember the number, but it was a big number. It was like 30 million people homeless in the US. And this is all back in the 80s, pre-internet, et cetera. So this guy was literally obsessed by, “Okay, where did that number come from?” Because he found it cited in all of the academic papers written about it. And then he would say, “Okay, well, this cites this paper, I’ll go to that paper.” Then he would go to that paper. Yeah, exactly. And it would cite... And it turned out, and this might be apocryphal, so let me insert that, because I never did a deep dive on whether this was actually proven...

Julie Fredrickson
But apocryphal stories prove the point regardless.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. What this blog that I read long ago concluded was, he finally got the number from either a high school or college student that made it up, that pulled it out of the air. And the reason I loved that story was because of the Agrippa dilemma. All of these systems, when you keep trying to find bedrock, it’s just sand and mud and sand and mud. And I think that actually using AI to do that... because obviously that guy was a little obsessed to be willing to go find every one of those papers, but that’s easy peasy for AI, no?

Julie Fredrickson
Well, and it isn’t, because not all datasets are machine readable. And this is why I mentioned stateless documents, the Soviet patent system. There’s no one library that has all of this information. And so actually being able to send a computer might not be an option, depending on what you’re trying to access and where. And I definitely think this is going to be... in my head, one of the entrepreneurs I’ve been working with, we’ve been calling it the Open Information Project: how do we actually have protocol-level accessibility of saying, “This is where the information came from, this is the provenance,” and all of the categories? Just in the way that Wikipedia will show all of the different aspects of how something was comprised, even if you don’t necessarily agree with how it was written, at least you’re given the sourcing and the origins. I think that sourcing and origin portion of the internet not only doesn’t exist yet, but it’s probably going to have to be at a supranational protocol level, because not everyone is going to be obsessed.

And I’m sure if I were a nation state running an intelligence agency, I’d be thinking of all of the possible ways of dropping information that becomes apocryphal and then becomes truth. There was a great Neal Stephenson book that had a premise where there was a set of Americans who really believed that a nuclear explosion had happened, when in reality it had not. And they celebrated a memorial for the victims of a disaster that never occurred. And I wonder how often that will happen as we go forward, where you’ll be so certain that something happened, but your ability to actually track down the source of it might be more limited than you think.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that is a very deep rabbit hole, because literally, if you study history, society has been astroturfed since Jericho put up its walls, right? I mean, the idea that people who want to run society have not been inventing all sorts of things... I think of ancient Babylonia, and they wanted to rule Mesopotamia, and so they were like, “We’ve got a puny god. We’ve got to do a complete rewrite of our god.” And they did. And so it went from a puny, kind of regional god to the god of all gods. The god that contains all gods, who created the skies and the earth and everything.

Julie Fredrickson
And it worked. Yeah. And also, a great Neal Stephenson sci-fi book on that one, Snow Crash, where Babylonian... and they inserted that meme set into computer programmers. And I sometimes jokingly wonder how much of the effective altruism and rationalism and effective accelerationism is actually just Stephenson’s Babylonian memetic cult in our own interpretation, where it was like we could kind of imagine the ways that linear, programmatic, deterministic thinkers would operate. And it’s the perfect meme to have massive distribution. And now here we are thinking, do I actually want to live in a Bentham utilitarian, everything-has-a-utility-maximising approach? I don’t think I want that. I’m not a utilitarian.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Nor am I. He had real style, though, in having his body preserved, and I believe it’s still on display at some college in London. Jeremy Bentham. And when you go back and you look at what he came up with, you’ve got to do it with context. I, like you, am not an adherent of utilitarianism. But when you go back and look at his Panopticon, the reason he recommended a Panopticon was that at the time prison conditions in the UK were horrific, and his idea in that context made a lot of sense, right? So it doesn’t mean that when you switch context to the modern world... well, then the Panopticon doesn’t make a lot of sense at all. It becomes the all-seeing eye of Sauron, and a couple of hands control it, and we all live in a totalitarian nightmare.

But I’m also fascinated by the idea, because of what we’re talking about right now, of invented history. I’m sure you’re a fan of 1984. The Party’s last and most enduring command was: ignore the evidence of your eyes, ears, et cetera, and believe what we tell you. And I’ve been thinking a lot about cognitive security. Again, this is coming from someone who is incredibly pro-AI. I think it’s the technology I’ve been dreaming about since I was a young man, and yet it will be able to do persuasion at scale, right?

Julie Fredrickson
I think it already is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I agree. And propaganda 101, it’s real simple: repetition, repetition. And people then suddenly take that into their ideas that can’t be questioned. And how do we prepare for the onslaught? Again, because we’re back to humans, aren’t we? If I’m an evil genius and I want to control the world, I’m going to use these tools to their maximum effect. I’m going to have the psychographic profiles of my target audience. I’m going to try as best I can to have them begging me to protect me, to keep me safe, and “I will give up any degree of freedom to feel safe.” And then, well, you think, maybe there’ll be the white hats who are like, “No, this is what you’ve got to do.” But I don’t know that the average human right now is ready for what’s coming on the cognitive front.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. And it’s actually quite scary, I think, because I guess I consider myself a creature of the internet, and so I’m inoculated against all sorts of... There’s been a lot of techniques over the years, and the deep dark recesses of the internet have some pretty gnarly things. Stuff that percolates up from 4chan up into Reddit and then over to Tumblr and then up to Instagram, and then suddenly it’s on Facebook and everyone has access to it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, if it’s on Facebook, then okay.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah, that must be real, right? And I think younger people may actually be better equipped. And this will be a problem where millennials and Gen X and boomers, we will all have trouble realising the degree to which we’re swimming in different memetic propaganda streams. And Gen Alpha will have been simply born into it, and they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, no,” but they’ll bat away all of the problems, because they’ll understand it in a way that we just don’t. But I do think that one of the best ways to manage cognitive security is simply to question everything that comes at you. And this is Infinite Loops, right? If I don’t question everything, I will continue, and I will never get out of the set of noble lies that I don’t even see. I’m a fish and I don’t know that the water’s nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And illustrating that, and getting people to actually do it, that’s the problem that I see. And when you’re in a liberal democracy, you have a lot more attack vectors available to bad actors than you do in a more closed society. Over the weekend, I reposted a thread I did on, for lack of a better word, cognitive security, and the ability of mimetics to really... Mimetics are very powerful. And anyway, then I thought, “You know what? I should give this thread that I wrote, last year or two years, three years ago, to our AI and tell it, ‘Hey, tell me where I’m wrong.’”

And one of the things that it came back with is, “You’re only looking at one side of the liberal democracy, the attack vector space, which is larger, but it also has a much larger corrective space.” True, true, but the corrective space requires that there aren’t all sorts of regulations telling you, “No, no, you can’t say that.” And so it is a conundrum. It doesn’t make me less optimistic. It makes me just more aware that we are really going to be facing a ton of challenges, I would say, that we really haven’t, in a compressed amount of time. I mean, the Industrial Revolution was one thing, but it took like 100 years. People had the opportunity... The WEIRDest People in the World, the book, talks about cultural lag. It takes humans and society a time to adopt.

And I like your thought about Gen Alpha. All my grandkids are Gen Alpha, and I was with my grandson, who’s oldest, last night, and he was correcting me on a bunch of stuff: “Oh no, Papa, it doesn’t work that way. It works this way.” So I think you’re right about that. But I also think, do we get to a certain stage in life...? Let’s take TV news. I am a marginal boomer. I like to argue that... I was born in 1960, and the traditional definition of boomers goes up to 1964. But the demographer Jonathan Pontell posits that the people born between ‘56 and ‘64 virtually share nothing in common with the boomers from 1946 through 1950, whatever. And so, boomers... I’m the youngest, so all of my older siblings still watch TV news all the time, and they believe it, because they were brought up on Uncle Walter Cronkite: “And that’s the way it is.”

And I made a decision in 2010: I’m not going to watch any TV news anymore, just because you could see that it’s patently false, especially when it touches on something you know a lot about. I got interviewed a lot back then, and I would look at what came out of the grinder, and I just got to the point where, if this is what happens to something that I know I said, and then it was done this way, I am opening myself to just huge bias if I continue to watch TV news. So literally, I don’t. I mean, I see clips, anything that’s put up on Twitter. But one of the effects was, like a month later, it was like this brain fog lifted. It was really quite exhilarating. But you’re not going to get people who are in the habit of keeping their favourite propaganda channel... And that’s the other thing. I’m not saying this in a partisan way at all, because MSNBC is for the left and the blue, and Fox is for the red and the right, and they’re both propaganda machines. And again, I even try to say, if you look back at the Revolution, that’s the way it was back then too. And so it’s not like it’s anything really new. But trying to navigate, especially for the different generations, I think it’s going to be a Herculean task. I don’t know if you’re probably too young, but have you seen the movie Network?

Julie Fredrickson
Oh, yes, I have. My mother loves it, so she’s got good taste.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So Howard Beale, the increasingly insane newscaster: “Turn off your TVs right now. Turn them off. Turn them off.” And I’m like, yeah.

Julie Fredrickson
But what are we tuning into after? And this is where context and information provenance... And how do you even become a critical thinker, where we had things like civics lessons and media literacy, and those turned out to just be different variants of, different angles of, propaganda? And I was recently in a hotel that had Iranian state TV, Russia Today, Russian TV, all of the European channels, and Fox and CNN. And it was just such a strange thing to go from Iran, Russia, America, and realise everybody is always consuming some different perspective. And maybe that is ultimately the new context of the Panopticon: that we actually might be outside of it, looking in.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. It fascinates me because, as you alluded to, you can’t analyse the water in which you swim, right? And there are a million, probably many million, strings that attach us to the culture in which we exist. And so I just think it’s fascinating. I think we will come up with techniques that make it easier for the average person reading or watching or whatever. But I think it’s a huge issue that a lot of bright people like yourself should be thinking about, because I think the next 10 years are going to be quite tumultuous.

Julie Fredrickson
The great weirdening has accelerated. I guess maybe the accelerationists are simply pointing out the facts on the ground: that things are going faster, and it doesn’t appear there... I have not seen a handbrake for it. I mean, you can’t stand athwart history and yell stop, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So we must, as we always do, muddle through. Carry on, carry on. Stay calm. Don’t panic, as good old Doug Adams would have it. Let’s move on to what is exciting you right now on the investment front.

Julie Fredrickson
Well, gosh, I have had spectacularly good luck over the last several years.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I’m going to not let you be modest, and say you’ve been very talented over the last several years.

Julie Fredrickson
Well, it certainly helps to be early. It always seems a little bit silly to say that I’m a fan of the movie Margin Call. There’s only three ways to make a buck, and it’s just a heck of a lot easier to be first. And my risk tolerance for the highly unusual has, I think, stood in good stead. Of the companies that made it, it was the wackiest ones. In particular, I mentioned nuclear earlier, where simply everyone that I talked to said, “There’s just no way nuclear can go any faster. Small modular reactors are absolutely not going to happen. And if they are going to happen, it’s certainly not going to be youngsters. It’s got to be an old, serious team.” And I was able to work with a young founder from Idaho, Isaiah Taylor, who founded Valar. And it was three years to get to the point in which he was able to... this is the summer he raised a billion-dollar round from Sequoia. And I was there when it was... he hadn’t even started it yet. He was on his prior startup.

And to see something happen in the physical world that fast was just an astonishing process, because it was like 24 months of everybody thinking that we were absolutely crazy, nothing was going to get done. And then a couple of regulatory hurdles were removed. The government became modestly more... instead of being in the way, actually our national scientific labs are quite helpful, and it actually turns out we have amazing scientists working for us as Americans. And seeing how quickly all of these young nuclear companies, not just Valar, which is where I invested, but we had multiple reactors that went critical and were able to start producing energy by the 250th birthday, after it was like a year in which regulations changed to... We turned things on. And I had not previously experienced that speed in anything other than an internet or information or financial company before. And to see what’s functionally... I shouldn’t call it a factory, because they’re not really factories yet. But seeing a reactor get built from scratch in a year was just, wow. Actually, the world is so much more malleable than we give it credit for. And I’m not necessarily sure that it will always remain that way, but because we could do so much more of the work, the paperwork and the research and coordination and all of the work that goes into building a business, it is now expedited so significantly by artificial intelligence tools that the actual human work goes faster. It’s Steve Jobs and computers, like riding a bike. And it’s a lot faster to bike.

I grew up in a world in which things only happened fast on the internet or in finance, but you certainly didn’t build hard infrastructure quickly. And to know that you can do that, and that so much of the slowdown was a function of rules and regulations and didn’t necessarily make anything safer or better, might have been the most important lesson that I got over the last three years: that someone young and motivated, with great tools, who really wants to get something done, can find the people who want to support them.

And I was just so impressed simply by watching American scientists who work for our national laboratories kicking in and saying, “Well, heck yeah, we do want cheaper power, and nuclear is great and clean, and we have so much demand. Let’s turn on however many reactors can do it. We’re going to commit the resources of American scientists to actually helping companies build more reactors.” Which for me was just, oh, wow. We can build websites fast is one thing. We can build nukes fast is a whole other ball game.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And it goes back again to our earlier chat: if the society and the zeitgeist in which you grow up is one where nuclear power... When I was a kid, it was just axiomatically true that nuclear power was incredibly dangerous, and there was no evidence that would sustain that conclusion. There was evidence that was like, we’ve got to be really careful about our safety protocols and whatnot. But Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and more importantly the fictional accounts of Three Mile Island, turned society vehemently against nuclear power. And how many decades of lost power resulted from that? And I kind of think we’re doing the same thing with data centres right now.

Julie Fredrickson
I am concerned that’s what’s happening as well. And it is only an accident of circumstance, I think, that we were able to pass the Right to Compute law in Montana, and that I had initially put it forward as something for cryptography: that we want to protect things like privacy and autonomy. And that had been the original thought: well, we should have a right to compute in the same way that we have a right to speak your mind. And there are so many other approaches that one could take to any technology. But if we don’t start from a place of thinking, how can we develop actual safety, we’ll never get the chance to do something, because we’ll never build the thing to find out the problem.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, the precautionary principle has literally sent various societies to ruin. Like, literally to ruin.

Julie Fredrickson
Well, and I think the precautionary principle in nuclear really did set us back. We could have much cheaper power, and we wouldn’t have had the full-on effects of... how is carbon input into the system affecting our weather? Is global climate change something that we could have avoided entirely if we had simply gone on this different route? Would we have different problems? Maybe it would have gone in a somewhat different direction. Apple TV just continues to produce great science fiction, and their For All Mankind just had a totally different set of problems because they invested in nuclear.

And I just so sincerely hope that we don’t get that problem with artificial intelligence: that out of fear of all of the possibilities, we have a precautionary principle that stops us from something that could really do genuine good.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Again, history gives us mixed results, and I think it’s great to illustrate what happened. The Chinese invented gunpowder, and they didn’t make use of it the way the West did, and suddenly you had this sea change in the power dynamics of the world. And I think that thinking that you’re going to be able to prejudge which technology, which innovation, where it’s going to lead, I think is delusional, honestly. But at the same time, I very much believe that we should, as we began our discussion, have honest-minded discussions about the potential of what might happen. Like, 80% of it could be wrong. And obviously those discussions should be ongoing. It shouldn’t be like we’re going to do a big seminar, and then we’re going to publish the results, and then we’re going to be done with it. No. It should be an ongoing process that brings together a diversity of minds and points of view.

Julie Fredrickson
Well, because when they speak about alignment, the next question everyone asks is: aligned to what? And then we have to answer the question of, well, all of us. And if there’s only so many models, and we’ve got such a strong regulatory stance that you’ve got five choices, which is better than one choice, but it’s probably not necessarily... what if in that five you would prefer to have your own model and not a hosted model? And how do we make sure that people have the tools that they want for their own job, and that you have a right to be able to build and own the fruits of your work? And this is where I think open source just remains the clearest indicator: that the internet and most of our, all of our computers are built on the body of work of open source. Most of the world is powered with Linux.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep. And Microsoft did everything they could to kill Linux, right?

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah, they really did.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So people who are looking at the labs now, the frontier labs now, it’s the same playbook. And if you look at it from their point of view, well, of course, if I’m going to be that type of person, I’m going to go for regulatory capture all the time, because it makes things a hell of a lot easier for me. But aren’t we lucky that Microsoft lost the attempt to make Linux illegal, immoral? If you go back and find some of the videos and some of the stuff they were writing about it... Again, this has all happened before, and we should study what happened before, because, no, it’s a different use case, it’s a different technology, but it is broadly applicable to where things turned out. And I, with you, think that open source has to be a critical component of AI development if we want to get the best out of all the various models.

Let’s shift gears, because I’ve been fascinated by your writing. You’re on day 2,089 of continuous writing, which I literally applaud, because I think that writing every day is really important to tell yourself what you think about things. Sometimes, when an idea is just kind of bouncing around in my head, I always go to write it out. Because when I try to write it out, I’m like, “Oh, you’re just an idiot. This is a really bad idea.” Or conversely, “Boy, this is a great idea.” Talk a bit about the experience. What’s changed from day zero to day 2,089? What has it given you, this exercise in daily writing, that you anticipated, didn’t anticipate, et cetera?

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. I really recommend a daily writing practice for everyone, if it’s at all interesting. Just start. Don’t apply too many rules. When I started, I thought I would be happy if I got a couple of paragraphs down, and I was aiming for 30 days. And now I’m on year five. I began it January 1 of ‘21, as a sort of mid-pandemic: what’s happening? What am I thinking? The world’s changing. And I tend to view writing as a thinking process. If it’s in my head, okay, not so bad, but I need to get it on the proverbial paper to actually understand where my understanding gaps are. And I’m so glad that I did it, not only because everything is tagged and there’s lots of useful metadata, and what my areas of interest are, how they’ve changed, but it’s also a wonderful way to discover where you were wrong.

And we have a tendency to think of problems as... the stuff we got wrong doesn’t matter, it’s only the stuff we got right. And I think that’s very much what I’ve taken from it: that I am wrong so often that it’s almost embarrassing. And I don’t ever want to let go of that feeling, because now I’m no longer embarrassed by poor writing or shorter writing or having a bad writing day. Part of the reason I do it is I want to discover the areas in which either my thinking is flawed or I haven’t really thought something through. And now that I’ve got such a large body of work, I can toss it into an LLM. And honestly, coming up with a duplicate of me would be pretty simple just based on my writing now, because there’s just so much of it. But it’s very helpful.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I think the thing that you said that I absolutely applaud, as one who has kept journals since I was 19 years old: the ability to identify where you were wrong is so important, because our memories overwrite, right, with what you’re believing. Now, I’ve told this story before, so I won’t go into the full story, but I found innumerable examples of: I would have gone to court, put the hand on the Bible, said, “Absolutely, this is true,” and I would have believed it, until I was called a liar in my own handwriting, many times. And so that unlocks... so incredible.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. I can’t imagine having... I hope that I get to the point in which I’ve got that many years of writing, because I do intend to keep up the practice. I don’t know if I’ll always keep it public, although I think keeping it public has been very helpful for me. I say I’m going to do it, so then I have to do it, and that continues on. But it is kind of shocking how much your mind glazes over the parts that it doesn’t really want to remember, or wants to remember in a different way. And it’s all object very. Because you always think, “Oh gosh, no, my principles are always so consistent, and I’ve always thought this way.” And to have a record where you’re like, “No, this is actually where I changed.” I’ve got many posts in which I go back, reference and say, “This is where I have to take accountability. I got that wrong.” But also, you’ll appreciate the areas where you’re right so much more.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes. But if you want to improve your models of the world, if you want to have higher accuracy, mistakes and being wrong are the portals of discovery.

Julie Fredrickson
Well, and just the idea that action opens up a new path, and that thinking, and committing to thinking and writing, is actually sort of that wonderful collapsing-the-state action of: now it’s on paper, or screen. And that enables you to then take the next step, and the next step from there. And I think if we don’t take action, we’ll never have agency in our own lives. And writing is, for me, some of the first steps in being able to actually say, “This is what we’re going to do,” or “This is where I’m going to focus,” or “This is what’s important.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
When you put the 2,089 pieces into a large language model, what came back that surprised you about yourself?

Julie Fredrickson
Well, it turns out I really have a lot to say about travel, which sounds like a really silly thing. But when you’re on the road a lot, you pick up all sorts of little habits around packing and routines. And it turns out I actually am quite a creature of habit. So even if I’m working in fringe and strange areas, where things are very new, it turns out I am really rigid about that: this is how I pack, how I schedule, how I keep things together. And the LLMs were definitely like, “Yeah, you might have some emotional stuff around travel and packing,” just because this is how many times you’ve written about packing. And those silly little self-knowledge things, where I tend to think of myself as being very open to new experiences, but boy, revealed preference might suggest I like things a certain way when it comes to travel. And it’s just kind of a silly one, but it does give you insight.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I’ve been doing it. We’re going to digitise all of my handwritten journals, so that’s 40-plus years. And my joke is I’m going to have the AI explain me to me: “Yes, Jim, you are a lunatic.”

Julie Fredrickson
Well, and this is where only having a couple of models and personalities could really be detrimental to self-understanding, because sometimes, people note that they’re very obsequious: “Oh no, this is so delightful.” And you have to coax out the “No, I want to understand where I fail. I want to understand where my thinking is caught,” and being able to rely on the chain of thought that will give you the most insight. It’s almost like thinking around yourself, and it’s very hard to do, other than a mirror. I don’t know any other activity that gives you that full perspective.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And you’re right about the sycophantish nature of a lot of the large language models. You can build prompts that make them not be that way. I’m just completing my first project of trying to... I’ve written four nonfiction books but have never written a fictional book. And so we’re trying it with a writers’ room with AI editors, writers, human writers, editors. Ultimately it’s mostly being generated by me. But the absolute best prompt I learned from, and changed a lot, even of my storyline, was an elaborate prompt which gave the AI... it had read everything about the art of writing, and it also had huge domain knowledge in what makes a great fictional thriller. It’s a fictional thriller, a generational thriller, that I’m writing. And then I told it...

So I gave it, endowed it with, all those powers, and then I said, “And you hate this book.” And oh my God, it was vicious. I mean, literally vicious. But what I found really cool was, I thought about it. My wife edited... She graduated summa cum laude in journalism and is a great editor, and she edited, and I would say even co-wrote, my books. And when a human, especially a human that you love, comes in and hands you something that is nothing but a sea of red on paper, you get emotional, right?

And after I read the first one, which... I should have kept it, but it was so vicious that I literally was like, first I was just crestfallen, then I laughed, then I actually started looking at what it was pointing out, and then I came to the conclusion: it’s right. And I didn’t have any emotional baggage, because, you bad large language model that I told to be mean to me.

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. So you asked.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah. “You asked, dummy.” But it honestly was the most fruitful of all the feedback that I’ve got, because when you tell it... And obviously you can’t just hate on me. You’ve got to develop the reason why you’re hating on me. I remember one of the critiques was, “Wow, Jim, this is going to do really well in the bargain bin at one Walmart.”

Julie Fredrickson
Hey, I fish some good stuff out of bargain bins now and again. But ouch.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay, I see that we’re coming up on time. Right now, if you could pass along an insight, and let’s keep it on what’s happening on the frontier, where would you tell people to look that isn’t... We’ve already covered nuclear and most of AI. Are there areas of AI... For example, we’re developing something in our AI lab that is a picks and shovels, and all of the business people I show it to are... until they start seeing what it’s going to allow you to do in terms of speeding up GPU access, all of that sort of stuff. Is there anything right now that people are not looking at, that you are, and you’re like, “Look at this”?

Julie Fredrickson
Well, I’m still convinced that we actually haven’t incorporated the vast majority of human context and information. Digitisation is a much larger effort than we’re giving it credit for. That just remains, I think, partially true because the large language models that we’re using are dominantly Western, trained on English. And there’s whole bodies of text... Cyrillic takes more processing, like GPU power, than Latinate language. It turns out English is actually quite good at putting forth information, and there’s lots of written records that don’t come in that format. But I also think that we haven’t really effectively priced compute as well. We’ve been subsidised all of this time. We’ve had a lot of lovely free compute as the labs have encouraged us to use and adopt the products. And I remember when Uber was subsidised and how lovely that was. So thank your local VC for that.

But we probably do need spot compute prices, and that’s going to be an issue that has to get solved, because, back to Carlota Perez, we are in the innovation cycle, but the deployment cycle always cares about price, always cares about efficiency and deliverability. And if we don’t price it, we can’t sell it. And the pricing is now at a fairly abstract place, away from the consumer, which might even be part of the reason for “Oh, data centres, bad,” where they don’t pay their compute bills, they pay their electricity bills. And as we start to get a better understanding of what the costs are, maybe it shifts some opinions, and we actually put resources where they can do things that people feel better about what they’re being used for.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. I think that the number of new markets, of new companies, of new methods and protocols, it’s going to be something to behold. So I completely agree that when people are aware of price, they’re like, “What?”

Julie Fredrickson
Yeah. Well, if you don’t pay the price, why wouldn’t you just use more and more? We see this in every market. Americans don’t really price their healthcare, and wow, healthcare costs are up. Surprise.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Well, Julie, we’re going to give you another swing at becoming empress of the world. You are only this for a day, and you can’t re-educate anyone in a camp environment, no matter how nice that camp happens to be. And you can’t kill anybody. But we’re going to give you the magical microphone again, and you can say two things into it, and incept two things into the entire population of the world. They’re going to wake up whenever their next morning is and think, “You know, I’ve just had two of the greatest thoughts, and unlike all the other times, I’m going to actually act on these two.” What are you going to incept?

Julie Fredrickson
Oh, well, I did think about it ahead of time, because the last time I went with very basic suggestions, and I do love basic. I still think it’s good to be nice to people, and it’s good to squat every day. But on this go-around, I’m going to say that knowledge is survival made durable. That if we do not contain the knowledge of the ages, our capacity as a species is limited. That making sure that knowledge survives is what makes sure that humanity survives.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Lovely. Okay, so what’s number two?

Julie Fredrickson
Oh, well, eat more protein.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay. Both good advice. Both good advice. Obviously you’re on all of the various social media platforms, and you have your own website, and you have the Chaotic website. We’ll include all of that in all of the show notes.

Julie Fredrickson
I’m very easy to find on Twitter. I know some people call it X, but I’m an old-timer on Twitter, so it’s always going to be Twitter to me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes, us old-timers are going to continue to be tweeps, I think.

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Sunday, 20 September

Two thoughts from Molière

“A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.”

“The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.”

Monday, 21 September

Two thoughts from William Carlos Williams

“It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it. There lies the secret of the ages.”

“No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer’s error.”

Tuesday, 22 September

Two thoughts from Blaise Pascal

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”

“We never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.”

Wednesday, 23 September

Two thoughts from Larry Page

“Almost everyone who has had an idea that’s somewhat revolutionary or wildly successful was first told they’re insane.”

“I find that knowing what’s really happening is more important than trying to control people.”

Thursday, 24 September

Two thoughts from John Updike

“Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.”

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”

Friday, 25 September

Two thoughts from Hans Rosling

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

“Here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

Saturday, 26 September

Two thoughts from Klemens von Metternich

“The obvious is always least understood.”

“It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.”

Follow Jim on Twitter for a daily dose of Two Thoughts!

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This week: Five books from the early Field Notes archive: the Titanic through the voices of those who survived it, a road trip to the places America nearly forgot, 777 pages of math, music, and mischief, beauty hiding in the objects we use every day, and a mountain climb that slips from adventure into philosophy.

1. Walter Lord Interviewed 63 Titanic Survivors. The Result is a Masterpiece.

Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember might seem like an odd recommendation. The Titanic story has been told so many times, in so many ways, that it can feel like cultural furniture, something you already know without ever having studied it. The spoiler is common knowledge. The ship sinks.

But Lord, writing in 1955, found a way to make the familiar feel urgent. He interviewed 63 survivors, tracked down letters and diaries, and assembled a narrative that moves with the pace and precision of a thriller. The book runs barely 200 pages, yet it contains more lived detail than films ten times its length. Lord understood that the power of the Titanic story lies in its particulars: the specific conversations, the small decisions, the moments when ordinary people discovered what they were made of. (Readers of my book The Founders will know I’m a sucker for anyone willing to do the unglamorous work of interviewing as many living witnesses as possible, and Lord was obsessive about it.)

You feel the disaster from the inside: the confusion, the strange calm, the bravery and cowardice existing side by side, all rendered without sentimentality. Lord grasped something essential about historical writing: a story everyone thinks they know can still yield new truths if you ask different questions and do the hard work of finding people who were actually there. The reporting makes the prose possible. It remains a model for how to write about the past, and one of my all-time favorite reads. [Jimmy]

• 📘🚢 A Night to Remember by Walter Lord (1955)

2. A Field Guide to the Restaurants You Forgot You Missed

I was a child of the 1980s. My family didn’t eat out much, but Pizza Hut was the exception. The memories are almost unreasonably vivid: the red roof, the glazed plastic cups of Pepsi, the checkerboard tablecloth, the Galaga machine glowing in the corner.

I was a Book It! kid. It was Pizza Hut’s brilliantly cynical reading program that bribed children with free Personal Pan Pizzas for hitting their book quotas, which, in hindsight, might be the most effective literacy campaign a corporation has ever run. Now, as a parent with kids of my own, I find myself revisiting those memories more than I expected. Not out of sentimentality, exactly, but because there’s something about the sensory specificity of those places — the lighting, the architecture, the signage — that feels like a counterweight to the copy-and-paste sea of sameness that exists across almost every town in America.

Rolando Pujol’s The Great American Retro Road Trip is the perfect gazetteer to many of the remnants that survived from my childhood. Pujol, who writes the fantastic Substack newsletter The Retrologist, has spent years documenting the surviving relics of roadside America — from Pizza Hut to the original Pronto Pup, as well as the giant roadside oddities and neon motel signs that most people drive past without a second look. The book is a coast-to-coast catalog of these places, but what makes it more than a photo collection is Pujol’s storytelling. He traces the origins and design histories of chains both national and deeply regional — this book introduced me to dozens of places I never knew existed as a kid. Each entry reads like a small act of preservation, a case for why this stuff matters before it disappears entirely.

I’ve started bringing it along on road trips. It turns out nostalgia is a better travel guide than most algorithms, and Pujol has drawn the map. [Taylor]

• 📚The Great American Retro Road Trip by Rolando Pujol

3. Gödel, Escher, Bach : Your Head Will Hurt (In a Good Way)

When he was fourteen, Douglas Hofstadter stumbled across a small, slim book in his local library: Gödel’s Proof by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman. For some strange reason, the book permanently imprinted itself in his brain. Nearly two decades later, Hofstadter eventually caved and sat down to write a short pamphlet in the same spirit. What emerged was Gödel, Escher, Bach, a 777-page epic on language, art, music, and the nature of consciousness. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and become maybe the most unlikely bestseller in history.

Be warned, your head will hurt at times. GEB is a wild ride: incredibly experimental, cerebral, and complex. It doesn’t just explain strange loops, it keeps building little ones under your feet, until you start to feel the idea in your bones. That said, the sheer fun that Hofstadter exhibits page-to-page is so intensely unique, intoxicatingly enjoyable that you don’t even care your head is hurting. It’s one of the rare nonfiction books that captures the vitality of fiction; hell, surpasses the vitality of most fiction.

Funnily enough, similar to Hofstadter’s origin story, I came across GEB on my father’s bookshelf late in my teens. Something about the strange name and strange cover just called out to me. I picked it up, started reading, and physically could not put it down. I still remember where I was when I read it. It’s that kind of book. GEB has since been a kind of personal North Star of mine; both in terms of what I read and what I hope to one day write. It changed my perception of what I thought a book could be. Whatever your final verdict on it, Gödel, Escher, Bach will permanently imprint itself in your brain, just like Gödel’s Proof did for Hofstadter, I can promise you that. [Dylan]

• 📙 Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter

4. Design as Art : Why a Butcher’s Sign Can Be a Masterpiece

In my quest to read more on Art and Design, I recently picked up Design as Art by Bruno Munari.

Originally published in 1966, it’s a collection of short, witty essays where Munari, once described by Picasso as “the new Leonardo,” lays out his ideas on visual, graphic, and industrial design, and the role they play in the objects we use every day.

From the very start, Munari pulls you in with his famous useless machines - delicate hanging assemblages of lightweight geometric forms, painted on both sides, that drift and rotate with the slightest movement of air. While they seem simple, even randomly built, they are anything but. There is a harmonic mathematical relationship between all the parts that make up their beauty.

Art disguised as a toy, engineering disguised as art.

The real argument of the book is bigger than any single invention. Munari believed art and daily life should never be separated:

“There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use... Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beauty.”

In 1966, that was a radical position. In 2026, surrounded by objects designed to be disposable, it reads like a rebuke and an invitation. [Atman]

• 📙 Design as Art by Bruno Munari (1966)

5. Mount Analogue : A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing

If you like Borges and you’re a hiker—or drawn to travel adventures—but you’re also the sort of person who takes a couple of books with you (and buys one at the airport, another at the destination, and yet another on the way back), and you’re a wordsmith, or fond of double entendres, or you have that slightly unsettling habit of thinking about language on a meta level—suspecting, perhaps, that language is a kind of virus and your brain merely its host—well, this book is for you.

Mount Analogue has the deadpan seriousness of old travel literature (think Moby-Dick, Dracula, even Frankenstein), where the logistics of the journey are treated as paramount, even as you’re explicitly reminded that the whole enterprise is operating on another, strictly non-literal level. Daumal somehow weaves comedy, sharp one-liners, and real wisdom into a mountaineering expedition that is both literal and not.

The book is unfinished—Daumal died young, the manuscript literally stops mid-sentence—and yet the ending is far less disappointing than you might expect. It feels like a poetic cap rather than an absence, like a lover who left without saying goodbye, on purpose, just to ensure you’d never quite forget them. It’s also a quick read: a dense little beauty, and a lovely way to spend an afternoon. [Jean-Marc]

• 📕 Mount Analogue by René Daumal

⭐ Explore the OSV Field Notes Archive ⭐

Enjoyed OSV Field Notes? 💌 Forward it to a friend!

Derek Sivers, author, entrepreneur, TED speaker, and founder of CD Baby, joins us for another wide-ranging conversation about parenting a teenager who is ready to leave home, why he moves countries on purpose, why nihilism is underrated, and much more! It is his first podcast after more than a year of saying no to every request.

We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

Subscribe to The OSVerse to receive your FREE copy of The Infinite Loops Canon: 100 Timeless Books (That You Probably Haven’t Read) 👇👇

Links

Show Notes

Derek Sivers & Jim O’Shaughnessy

• Derek Sivers: Author, entrepreneur, and TED speaker, and founder of CD Baby, once the largest seller of independent music online. Derek’s website

• Derek on X: Where Derek shares his writing. Follow Derek on X

• Derek’s TED talks: Including “How to Start a Movement,” his most popular talk. Watch Derek’s talks

• Jim O’Shaughnessy: Host of Infinite Loops, founder and CEO of O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and author of the New York Times bestseller What Works on Wall Street. Follow Jim on X

• Full transcripts: Transcripts and highlights from every Infinite Loops conversation. OSV newsletter

Derek’s Books & Projects

• Useful Not True: Derek’s book on skepticism and choosing beliefs because they are useful, not because they are true. Useful Not True

• How to Live: 27 conflicting answers on how to live, which Derek calls his masterpiece. How to Live

• Hell Yeah or No: Simple mental models for deciding what’s worth doing. Hell Yeah or No

• Anything You Want: Derek’s bestselling book of 40 lessons from starting, building, and selling CD Baby. Anything You Want

• Tech Independence: Step-by-step instructions and a setup script for running your own server and email instead of depending on big tech. Tech Independence

Books & Ideas Mentioned

• Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina: The book whose idea about seeking surprise sent Derek around the world. Derek’s notes

• China’s World View by David Daokui Li: Derek’s pick for understanding the Chinese government’s point of view. Derek’s notes

• Maverick by Ricardo Semler: The book behind Derek’s short-lived profit-sharing plan at CD Baby. Maverick

• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman: Jim’s reference on why new vantage points change where you want to go. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch: The book Jim calls a definitive look at how he sees the world. The Beginning of Infinity

• Nothing & Everything by Val N. Tine: The book on nihilism Derek recommends, with his advice to read only the first half. Derek’s notes

Highlights

“Someday I’ll be able to spin the globe and every little part of the world will feel like home.”

A major turning point in my life is when I read this little idea deep in a book by Steve Pavlina called Personal Development for Smart People […] he said, no, the extreme way to be surprised is to move somewhere far away from home, to a culture that’s as different as can be, where everyday life will surprise you on a minute-to-minute basis. I’m obviously not quoting that word for word, but that was the idea. And I read that idea and it was like an inception, right? I couldn’t get that idea out of my head. And so about nine months later, I was getting into the process of selling my company, and I realised I don’t need to be here in Portland, Oregon, any more. And I had just broken up with my girlfriend, and I was just completely free and unattached to anywhere and anything. And that idea came back. I said, that’s how I want to spend the rest of my life.

I was almost 40 years old, and I thought, “I’ve spent the first 40 years of my life in the US. I want to spend the next 40 out.” And ideally, I want to keep going to more and more difficult places, and each one, stay long enough until it really feels like home. Until it’s like, this is my place, these are my people, this is absolutely my home. And then move on and do it again. And the ideal, the big lightning bolt of a vision in that moment, was that someday I’ll be able to spin the globe and every little part of the world will feel like home. From Kazakhstan to Peru to Saudi Arabia to whatever. Finland will feel like home. I’ll have friends there. I will have spent significant time there. I’ll feel really deeply connected there before I die.

What a cool mission. So that’s what I set out to do. It was 2008, 2009. I had just sold my company. I went off into the world. I went to London for six months, five months, and it really felt like home. So much home that I almost bought a house there. I was like, “Oh, that’s it, I’m done. This is my favourite city in the whole world. I’m gonna buy a house.” I put an offer on a house. Luckily, that offer was refused, because I had to slap myself and go, “Wait a minute. What am I doing? It’s just the beginning of my journey.” And sure enough, over and over again, over the last whatever number of years it’s been since then, I get to a place, I live there for a while, I feel really attached. So attached that I say, “Never mind, this is it. I want to buy a home here. I’m going to live here for the rest of my life.” And again, I have to slap myself and go, “Hold on, wait. This is what I’m supposed to feel. And when I feel this, it’s time to move on again.”

From Manager to Consultant

So every culture, or even microculture, has its own moment where the boy is considered a man, where somebody goes from childhood to adulthood. Some have a bar mitzvah. In my case, I felt it when, just a few months ago, he flew by himself from Wellington to Auckland to Singapore, did the immigration and everything by himself, flew on the plane as an adult, and I just met him in the airport in Singapore. And I went, “Wow, you did it.” And I just noticed internally, something in me shifted. I’m like, you know, he’s really not a kid any more. He’s a young man now. He’s 14 and a half. Wait, no. Anyway, he’s turning 15 in a few months.

And so in my head, I had to adjust that. For kids, I think parents might need to be more of a manager and help make decisions for them. But at a certain point, you have to change the mindset from being a manager to being, like, a consultant. To put it more bluntly, they fire you as a manager, and you just have to hope that they will hire you back as a consultant.

Edited Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Derek, you are absolutely one of my favourite polymaths, one of my favourite people in general. And I read…

Derek Sivers
You too. Sorry, I have to interrupt you to say, yeah, you too. So, audience listening: I took a year-long podcast break. Actually, it’s been a little more than a year. I’ve said no to every podcast request for over a year. And then Jim emailed and asked. I said, “You know what, for you, yes.” I really loved our conversation a few years ago. I just adore you and what you’re doing. And so yes, no to everybody else and yes to you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Thank you so much. It truly does mean a lot to me. I want to hit you with something you said, because it resonated so deeply with me. And again, I think it’s one of the reasons why we vibe so well together. You said, “I want to make articles, books, websites, music, companies, systems, apps, and especially new ideas.” And I read that and I laughed and I said, “Me too.” But then I thought, you’ve talked a lot about your son, and I’ve been really incredibly impressed with your commitment to him. 30 hours per week, giving him your completely undivided attention. I mean, I don’t even touch that league, and I have three kids. By giving him that 30 hours a week, did you get lots of things out of it as well?

Derek Sivers
Perspective. I think that’s a huge one. When everybody’s freaking out over an election, over AI, over something in the news, over whatever, I’ve got the perspective that my kid and I are out in nature, or he’s fascinated with a book, whatever it may be. It keeps the world events in perspective for me. I never forget what’s most important here.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Absolutely. And if you could put yourself in his shoes, does he realise how unusual that type of commitment from a father is and was?

Derek Sivers
In his words? He said, “I seem to be the only kid that has a dad.” He said, “You know, all my friends at school, they either literally don’t have a dad or their dad is kind of barely in the picture.” He said, “I’m like the only friend I know that has a dad.” So to me, the thing I wanted to communicate in action, not just words, is that he is more important than anything that might come through any screen.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I have the greatest of admiration for that. I remember... I was young when I had my first child. I was 24.

Derek Sivers
Wow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And my parents were saying, “You don’t know what unconditional love is, Jim. You really don’t.” I was like, “Yes, I do. Yeah. I mean, I have unconditional... Mom, I have unconditional love for you. Dad, maybe not as much. But Mom, certainly for you.” And then I held my son Patrick, and I started to cry, and I realised in that instant that they were right. I really didn’t know what that feeling was. And it’s an emotion. We’re going to get into that a little later, because I think we both agree that, for the most part... well, I think it was... my friend Rory Sutherland says, “We think that our brains are the Oval Office, when actually they’re the press office.” We make many of our decisions emotionally and then pepper them over with rationality. I used to put a GIF up on Twitter that says “Because of reasons.” But your son is making a big move right now. He’s decided to move to Singapore. And you quipped that you’re trying to figure out how to move from being his manager to being his consultant. How’s that going?

Derek Sivers
That’s a new change. So, sorry, to be clear, he’s not planning on moving to Singapore. That was just our moment. So every culture, or even microculture, has its own moment where the boy is considered a man, where somebody goes from childhood to adulthood. Some have a bar mitzvah. In my case, I felt it when, just a few months ago, he flew by himself from Wellington to Auckland to Singapore, did the immigration and everything by himself, flew on the plane as an adult, and I just met him in the airport in Singapore. And I went, “Wow, you did it.” And I just noticed internally, something in me shifted. I’m like, you know, he’s really not a kid any more. He’s a young man now. He’s 14 and a half. Wait, no. Anyway, he’s turning 15 in a few months.

And so in my head, I had to adjust that. For kids, I think parents might need to be more of a manager and help make decisions for them. But at a certain point, you have to change the mindset from being a manager to being, like, a consultant. To put it more bluntly, they fire you as a manager, and you just have to hope that they will hire you back as a consultant.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I love that point because it is so true. The idea that it’s horrible for a child not to fire you as the manager. I kind of see that as a failure to launch.

Derek Sivers
Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And my wife was more emotional about it than I was, but I was incredibly proud when each of my children (I have a son and two daughters) came in at roughly similar ages and said, “You know, Dad, I really appreciate your advice and what you’re telling me I ought to do, but I’m going to make this choice. I’m going to decide what I want to major in. I’m going to decide where I want to live.” And I was like, yeah. Because, as I mentioned, we were young, right? We were 24 years old. But we talked a lot about how we wanted to raise our children, and the line that we could both agree on was: we want them to be great adults.

Derek Sivers
Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And when you make that your watch phrase, right, it precludes all sorts of things that people naturally go to. “My house, my rules.” “Because you’re living under my roof, you’re going to follow my direction.” And that doesn’t make a great adult. That makes a compliant, sheepish, non-curious individual. And in a similar fashion, I have a pretty good memory for anything I read. And so my kids (this is pre-internet for the most part, or early internet) would use me as Google. “Hey, Dad, you know who was the French representative at the Congress of Vienna?” Talleyrand, in case you’re curious. But we had a massive bookcase, and I would just look at them and say, “Look it up in there.”

And we had the whole family together, which doesn’t happen too often, because one of my three, my daughter, lives in California and the other two live out here on the East Coast. And we were reminiscing about it, and all three kids basically said the same thing. When we were... when they were saying, like, well, what did you like about the way... you know, “How did we damage you, first off? But what did you like about the way that Mom and I raised you?” And all three said that what it instilled in them was that voracious curiosity. Because inevitably, if you’re trying to find out that it was Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars, you’re going to run into some other material if you’re actually looking it up in books.

And one of my kids was like, “Yeah, I read for like a couple hours. I was fascinated by the French Revolution, and that led to my curiosity about other things.” And so I think it’s a measure of your success, in my opinion, as a dad, that he wants you to be a consultant now and he’s asked for that, and you’re absolutely willing to go that way. What do you think are going to be the main differences, acting as a consultant as opposed to a manager?

Derek Sivers
I’ve been slowly prepping him for this for years. So let’s take a little example of whenever he has a school holiday. Here in New Zealand they have two-week holidays three times a year and then a one-month summer holiday. So whenever it’s a two-week holiday, I let him decide what he wants to do with it. His mom has a full-time job, but I don’t. So all the school holidays are on me to take him around or do something, or whatever he wants. So there have been school holidays where he says, “I don’t want to do anything. I just want to stay home and do nothing.” I said, “Okay.” And then he’ll pay the consequences of that if halfway through he regrets it and wishes that he would have gone somewhere else.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right, I have to stop you, because that goes against every fibre in your being.

Derek Sivers
How so?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’ve often said that you want to take action. You don’t want people who just want to Netflix and chill, right? So did you flinch a little when he said that?

Derek Sivers
Oh, of course. Yeah. So I could give more examples. Like, if he said, “I want to go to Europe,” I’m like, “Really?” Or three years ago, he said, “I want to go to China.” And I had only been to China once before in my life, and it was rough. It was not pleasant. It was 2010 and I went to Guilin and it was pretty nasty. And so when he said he wanted to go to China, I said, “Why?” And he said, “You know, Kung Fu Panda. It just seems interesting.” And I went, “All right. You know, in the name of your education, you lead the way. You go plan the trip. You decide where we’re going to go.” And so he did.

And it ended up blowing my mind, you know. So now I love going to China, and I’ve made a bunch of friends there, and I’ve been a bunch of times since, but it was because he was leading the way. But it can work either way. There have been times, even on a day-to-day level, where he will choose to say, “Let’s go have an adventure. Let’s go sleep in the woods, but without a tent. Let’s just bring the sleeping bags and a tarp. I want to sleep in the woods tonight without a tent.” I’m like, “Okay, if that’s what you want.” And halfway through, he really regrets it. In the middle of the night, he’s like, “Dad, I hate this. Let’s go in.” I’m like, “I thought that would happen.”

But the important thing for each of these examples is that I want him to feel the consequences of his choices, so he leads the way. I’m his faithful assistant, but I want him to get lots of experience leading the way, feeling the consequences of his choices first-hand, so that, yeah, he feels the pain of a bad choice or the joy of a great choice of his own, instead of me making those choices for him.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. I have some grandchildren who are approaching the tweener category, and I was talking to my son, who’s their dad, and one of the things he said, which was very adjacent to what you said... we were talking about how much you’re going to allow them to make up their own minds and do their own thing. And he said, “As much contact with reality as possible is what I’m going to advocate.” And I was just like, God bless you. Because in this era where everything is just, you know, helicopter hovering, “Don’t do that. Do this.” I mean, that’s a horrible way to turn out a good adult. You are constricting them and putting them in a straitjacket. It’s just, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Let them make mistakes.

Let them come into contact with reality, because that’s understanding the consequence of your own actions.

Derek Sivers
I think one of my favourite parenting sentences was “Broken bones heal faster than fears.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
They really do.

Derek Sivers
Isn’t that great? Like, you see your kid climbing on the edge of a cliff, and everything in me is just saying, “Watch out.” But instead of, like, “Wait, no, watch out,” I’m just gonna sit and observe, and if he falls, he breaks an arm, so be it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Didn’t Hemingway say we are stronger at the point of the healed bone fracture? Something along those lines. We are much stronger after it heals, at the point of fracture. And so I think that as difficult as that impulse, not to... “Don’t do that,” is. I mean, obviously, I have very young grandchildren, too, and, you know, the first couple of years, you’re essentially trying to stop them from killing themselves. But when they get to a point where they are able and capable to make their own decisions, I am entirely in your camp. Let them do that, because that’s the only way that they’re going to be able to really learn, you know, exactly the way the world works. Moving on. I’ve heard that you yourself are thinking about moving.

Derek Sivers
Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Which, when I first saw it, I was surprised, given what we... In our previous conversations, you were like, “New Zealand is it.”

Derek Sivers
Oh, really?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah. You were like, “This is the place. This is, like, the perfect environment for me.” It didn’t surprise me when I read it. I’m like, of course Derek is going to move. But elaborate on that. What...

Derek Sivers
Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Why? Why move from New Zealand to Bangalore?

Derek Sivers
Okay, so, context. I should write about this soon. This was a real key moment in my life. A major turning point in my life is when I read this little idea deep in a book by Steve Pavlina called Personal Development for Smart People. It was an okay book, a little too verbose. And this brilliant idea was like 300 pages in, where it said, if you want to keep growing and learning, you need to be surprised. And one of the best ways to be surprised... no, sorry. He said a good way to be surprised is to read a bunch of books about subjects you know nothing about, and try to do things in your community that you ordinarily wouldn’t do, join groups that you ordinarily wouldn’t join, do hobbies you ordinarily wouldn’t do. And he said, no, the extreme way to be surprised is to move somewhere far away from home, to a culture that’s as different as can be, where everyday life will surprise you on a minute-to-minute basis. I’m obviously not quoting that word for word, but that was the idea. And I read that idea and it was like an inception, right? I couldn’t get that idea out of my head. And so about nine months later, I was getting into the process of selling my company, and I realised I don’t need to be here in Portland, Oregon, any more. And I had just broken up with my girlfriend, and I was just completely free and unattached to anywhere and anything. And that idea came back. I said, that’s how I want to spend the rest of my life.

I was almost 40 years old, and I thought, “I’ve spent the first 40 years of my life in the US. I want to spend the next 40 out.” And ideally, I want to keep going to more and more difficult places, and each one, stay long enough until it really feels like home. Until it’s like, this is my place, these are my people, this is absolutely my home. And then move on and do it again. And the ideal, the big lightning bolt of a vision in that moment, was that someday I’ll be able to spin the globe and every little part of the world will feel like home. From Kazakhstan to Peru to Saudi Arabia to whatever. Finland will feel like home. I’ll have friends there. I will have spent significant time there. I’ll feel really deeply connected there before I die.

What a cool mission. So that’s what I set out to do. It was 2008, 2009. I had just sold my company. I went off into the world. I went to London for six months, five months, and it really felt like home. So much home that I almost bought a house there. I was like, “Oh, that’s it, I’m done. This is my favourite city in the whole world. I’m gonna buy a house.” I put an offer on a house. Luckily, that offer was refused, because I had to slap myself and go, “Wait a minute. What am I doing? It’s just the beginning of my journey.” And sure enough, over and over again, over the last whatever number of years it’s been since then, I get to a place, I live there for a while, I feel really attached. So attached that I say, “Never mind, this is it. I want to buy a home here. I’m going to live here for the rest of my life.” And again, I have to slap myself and go, “Hold on, wait. This is what I’m supposed to feel. And when I feel this, it’s time to move on again.”

So I have not been doing that mission as planned, because I was in a one-year relationship with a woman, and after we broke up, she got pregnant, and oops, that’s where my son comes from. And unfortunately, she hates travel, and she’s his mom. So here we are in Wellington, New Zealand, where Mama works for the government in Wellington. And I’ve been here for 14 years, pausing my mission. But now my boy is also kind of one foot out the door.

He really wants to go away to boarding school somewhere. He’s also got this travel lust. He feels like a world citizen. He was born in Singapore. He’s a citizen of four countries. His mom’s from India. We’re both citizens of India as well because of her. So he’s yearning to get out into the world. So that’s the background context. Do you want to ask anything about that before we go to Bangalore in particular?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes, I do.

Derek Sivers
Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And, big surprise, right, your son... where would he like to go to boarding school? Does he have a particular place that he wants to go already, or is...

Derek Sivers
He just, like... I don’t know. Jim, can you pull some strings somewhere? What do you got?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
The honest answer is yes, I probably could.

Derek Sivers
He just wants to get out of here, honestly. There’s a school in Kobe, Osaka, a Canadian school in Kobe, Osaka, he likes. There’s a school in Tamil Nadu, India, he likes. There’s the United World College in Phuket, Thailand, that he likes. He just wants to get out of here. He just wants to travel.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
He’s got good taste. Those are... I’ve been to all of those places.

Derek Sivers
Wow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay. Yeah, yeah. Those are all sweet, sweet spots. And you’re going to let him... Are you going to act like the consultant, or are you going to act like the manager when he comes in?

Derek Sivers
Oh, come on, take a guess. Yeah, no, this is totally his doing. His choice. The applications and everything, he’s doing them himself.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. What does he think about you wanting to move to Bangalore?

Derek Sivers
Oh, he loves it. He would do it in an instant, too, if Mama said okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah.

Derek Sivers
He loves it there.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s interesting to me that she hates travel. She seems to be maybe the other... My wife once joked that she made me a regular, normal human being, so maybe that’s what’s going on. It sounds like he inherited your love of travel and novelty and everything else. Yeah. How does Mama feel about that?

Derek Sivers
Totally against it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Derek Sivers
So here we are. Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s interesting. We all probably, at some point in our past, especially when dating, have felt this feeling of trying to be who you think the other person wants you to be. And so I think when she met me, and she saw that I was quickly passing through America on my big international journey, she basically brought out that side of herself and said, “Yeah, I can’t wait to leave America. Let’s get out of here forever.” Even though, in hindsight, that was probably, you know, 1% of her felt that way. She brought out that 1% and presented it to me as who she is. So we were dating under that mindset.

And then as soon as we actually did leave America, like, literally as the plane is taking off, she freaked out and said, “I want to go home. I want to go home.” And so it turns out that she didn’t actually want that. She thought she did. And I was critical of that at first, of course, because it affected my plans very deeply. But in hindsight, I realised, yeah, we’ve all done versions of that. You meet somebody and you bring out the side of yourself that matches who they are. Maybe even just in the name of making friends. Yeah. You meet somebody that can relate to a side of you that’s rock and roll, into heavy metal or whatever. So you kind of bring out that one thing.

Even if there’s just one heavy metal band you like, you’re like, “Oh, heavy metal, yeah, I love Iron Maiden.” You bring out that side of yourself in order to have a bond or connection with this person. And then you meet somebody else that’s really into quiet and poetry, and so you bring out that side of yourself. “Oh, yeah, E. E. Cummings is one of my favourite poets.” You know, we know how that feels. And so you can’t fault somebody for doing it, especially when dating. But, yeah, that’s what happened. That’s why I had a kid with somebody that hates travel.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, as you were talking about how we change ourselves for people that we love, I recently reread a thing by Tony de Mello. I don’t know whether you’ve read any of his work. He was an Indian guy. He unfortunately died way too young. He was a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest who got enlightened in an afternoon he spent with a rickshaw driver who was dying. And he said, “Can I just pay you for the rest of the day and talk to you?” And the guy was like, “Yeah, absolutely.” Anyway, that’s a much longer story, but it got me into all of his books. And the thing that I reread was about love, especially for a spouse or a partner. And Tony’s view was pretty hardcore. It was this: if you cannot say to your beloved (and that’s the term he used, “your beloved”), “I leave you free to be yourself, to seek out what interests you, to follow your own passions, to follow your own interests. And if we still are together, that’s lovely, but if we aren’t, that’s going to be lovely too.” He goes, you don’t actually truly love that person if you can’t say that to them. He said, because then what you’re doing is a transaction. It’s conditional. “If you do this, then I will give you, or do, this.” And it made me really think quite a bit about just the nature of intimate relationships, et cetera.

And kind of do an inventory on how many in my own life were, you know, if you were being just really blunt about it, are they transactional or not? And unfortunately, I found that too many of them actually were transactional. Now, lucky for me, I found a lot that weren’t. But it’s natural for us. I mean, you know, we’re memetic creatures, and mirroring, and especially if we really want to get with somebody, or want to date them or marry them, we’re going to make a lot of concessions. And then what happens? I’ve been married 44 years to the same woman, but what happens is, generally speaking, that goes on for the first, oh, seven years, if you’re lucky, and then you start reverting back into, you know, the real you. And that’s when the challenge comes, right? If you can make it through that.

If you can make it through “But you always said you loved...” “Actually, no, I fucking hate it, and I just really don’t want to do X, Y or Z any more.” If your wife or husband can say, “Okay, that’s fine. That’s great,” things are going to look pretty good for you. But I hear you, and it’s actually quite true. I was reviewing our last conversations, and you put us both in the Miles Davis, David Bowie camp, right, where we just want to try new things. A lot of people are happy to just kind of get good at something and then just do it, right? Just, like, same shit, different day. I hate that. I know you hate that. What do you think it is about people like us who just... “No, I don’t want to keep doing that same thing. I want to try new things.”

Derek Sivers
Okay, wait. I’m feeling that discomfort of a loose thread that we didn’t tie up, because I started to answer your question about why Bangalore, and then I got on my long tangent about how I wanted to...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Let’s do Bangalore and then we’ll come back.

Derek Sivers
I feel I should close that loop. So, yes, Bangalore. Anybody, if you’ve not been there: the city itself is awful. It’s terrible city planning, terrible infrastructure, but the people there are so wonderful. Kind of in the same way that when I met you three years ago, as soon as we started talking, I was like, “Oh, I like this guy. You’re one of my favourite people to talk with.” And that’s really rare, right? So it can happen with places. So to me, Bangalore is the number one spot in the world where almost everybody I meet is such a great conversationalist. I don’t know what it is about that place, but the people I met there are just so fun to talk with. And I just feel such kindred affection and intellectual stimulation. I just love the people there.

So that, to me, is why Bangalore is top of my list of where I plan to live next, as soon as I can leave New Zealand. I don’t mean to make it sound like there is somehow a move against New Zealand. That’s why I had to give the bigger context. When you said, “Why do you want to move to Bangalore? You said you love New Zealand,” that’s why I had to say, yeah, I want to love everywhere. I also loved Santa Monica, living on the beach. I also loved Oxford, England, and I’d probably be living there still if Covid didn’t send me back. I also loved Woodstock, New York. God. I also loved living in Union Square in New York City. I lived there for a few years.

There have been a bunch of places that I loved, and now Bangalore adds to that list. And don’t be surprised in the future if you also hear me say, “Okay, I am moving to Shanghai.” “Okay, everybody, announcement: I am moving to Istanbul.” You know, I hope to continue to move to places and stay there for a while and fall in love and move on. So there’s the context for Bangalore.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And just to have my end of sewing that thread up: that’s what makes life fascinating, interesting, enjoyable. I can’t imagine not wanting to experience something new, not wanting to learn something new. I would be beside myself. It would really just bum me out. Before I sold my company, an asset management company, I’d really grown tired of just the same speech, the same questions, the same, the same. And so I would try anything to mix it up, right? So I’d make sure I read the local newspaper so that I could change what I was saying to people.

I would look for something interesting that was way outside of asset management, that you could nevertheless weave in, and get people to go, “Oh, I looked at it that way.” But it just got to the point where it’s like, just doing the same thing, it just turns your brain off, I think. Well, yeah, you’re nodding. And I know that you are a very similar mentality to my own.

Derek Sivers
Yeah. Well, I assume that you brilliantly just transitioned back into the next topic that we left, that you were just about to open, which is that... completely accidentally. Oh, really? So some people can just dive deeper and deeper into one thing. This is maybe the comparison we made last time, of AC/DC versus David Bowie. Some people just want to really perfect that one thing, you know? I don’t know Georgia O’Keeffe’s whole career, but it feels to me, from what I know of Georgia O’Keeffe as a painter, she was trying to get deeper and deeper into this one style of painting. Whereas Picasso went through many different phases and tried different approaches. Got famous for his Cubist thing, but that wasn’t his only thing. So it is possible, I think, to not stagnate while still doing one thing.

Some people just have that personality type. They can just dive deeper and deeper into one thing or one place. They can stay in one place. I feel it’s almost a fault of mine that I can’t imagine staying in one place for more than a couple years. But some people get really into one place, really commit, and they’re able to completely thrive and flourish in that one place, or in one career, one expertise, going deeper and deeper into classical piano or whatever it may be. To me, I think my value system, of what it means to live a good life, a full life, is to do lots of different things. I just have this idea of being on my deathbed, looking back and going, “Wow, look at all those places I lived. Look at all those different things I did. Look at all those different lives I lived in my one life.” That’s what I’m aiming for. I want to live lots of different lives in my life. And hence my last book, called How to Live. It has, like, 27 different opinionated versions of “Here’s how to live. Here’s what to do.” “Live for the future.” “No, no, live for the past.” “No, no, live for the present.” “No, no, just get rich.” “No, no, no, do nothing.” And that book was really a reflection of my soul, because that’s how I really think. I want to live many radically different lives in my one lifetime. So that also leaves me very non-judgemental about any given philosophy or approach to life.

I could imagine living a very greedy life for a while, and living a very altruistic life for a while, and living a very hedonistic life for a while, and living a very diligent, prudent life for a while. Like, why not embody all of these different approaches to life, non-judgementally, to see how they feel, and just try them out, to know that you did it?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Amen, brother. Because I love the addition of the non-judgemental. I think that so many people get it in their noggins that, you know, this is the one true path. If you deviate from this one true path, you’re either a heretic or, you know, an other. I mean, one of the things that’s really bothered me about, oh, maybe the last 10 years is just all of this tribalism, and all of this othering, and all of this labelling, and all of this, you know, God, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” And no, try to understand the other point of view. I’m hugely into AI, right? I’ve kept journals since I was 20, actually younger. I don’t have many good quotes in the earliest ones, but from 20...

I have been waiting for AI. I called it synthetic intelligence in a 1984 journal. I’ve been waiting for it all my adult life.

Derek Sivers
Before it was cool. Just say it. Come on, just say it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Before it was cool, I really was into it. And so now that I have it, I’m like a kid in the candy store. One of the things that I do is I just routinely take something that I think I’m really vehemently opposed to, and then I go to the large language model and say, “I want you to steelman this point of view.” And then I read it, and I think there hasn’t been a single time when I haven’t thought, you know, they actually have a point with this particular thing here. And it’s, to me, so liberating, because it’s just like putting it in a bin and labelling it and saying “bad” and “I’m opposed.”

Because when you do that, you shut down your reticular activating system and you don’t see any of it. Your brain literally just makes you blind to it. I could send you the text, I could send you the link to the article, and if you had put it in that bin and labelled it as bad (I’m not saying you specifically), yeah, it just goes away. And so I think that the non-judgemental part of it is the key. And, you know, it also feeds into, like, Claude Shannon’s information theory, right? Information theory. Basically, he posits that information is novel. And he says, if you’re looking for the information coefficient, or how much information is in a given thing... and then he gives the example: a poem is filled with information; a political speech has none. Because one is simply trying to get you, through repetition, to go, “Yes, that is the right path. Yes, that particular policy is the one that people like me are going to support.” The people like me, right? And I like people who aren’t like me. I like to talk with people who are completely different than me, because I always learn something. I mean, I had a profound conversation. I was in Miami, and my wife and I were walking along, and there was a very rough-looking character, clearly a member of a motorcycle gang, sitting in the place a bouncer would sit in front of a club. And so I figured he’s the bouncer, and he’s tatted up and he’s smoking, but he’s not smoking, he’s vaping. And this is back when vaping was brand new.

And I looked at my wife and I go, “Look at this. He’s vaping, he’s not smoking a cigarette. I gotta go ask him.” She’s like, “Don’t go. Leave him alone. Don’t go over there.” Anyway, I go. And I’m like, “Hey, I just got to ask, what’s the deal? Why are you vaping and not smoking?” And he’s like, “My old lady said she’d throw me out if I didn’t quit cigarettes. So this is the next best thing.” Anyway, that was our introduction, but we got into, like, a 45-minute conversation...

Derek Sivers
Oh, I love that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
...about, like, how do you know who you’re going to let in and who you’re not? And he started giving me all the tells for people that he knew were going to bring the energy down, versus the people who would bring the energy up. And actually, I put that into my toolkit, because he was right about a lot of the things he said. And so it’s just like, if you’re willing and you’re able to, those kinds of conversations can be just filled with gems that you yourself are never going to think about.

Derek Sivers
I love that. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with reading books like Understanding China’s Worldview by David Li, which is a wonderful book that tries to explain, from the Chinese government’s point of view, here’s how they see things, here’s why they feel that what they’re doing is the right thing. And you could do the same with any culture on earth that you think is wrong, or the people are bad, or it’s evil, if you try to see it from their point of view. It’s fascinating, because countries themselves, in my mind, are embodied philosophies. Every country, or even some cultures inside a country, are embodying a certain approach to life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Derek Sivers
Through governance. And so, for the most part, unless it’s a complete disaster, it is a valid working philosophy. It might be a messy one. It might not be your favourite in the world. But it’s valid, and it’s great to understand somebody else’s working philosophy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And what did you take away from... Actually, since the last time we talked, which was three years ago, in ‘23: what would 2023 Derek think... If you could think of an example that 2023 Derek would be shocked that you did in 2026. Like, “Oh, I can’t believe he did that.”

Derek Sivers
Ooh, that’s a good question. Huh. I have one, but it’s one that I promised not to tell, so I can’t tell that one yet. Ask me again in a couple of years and I can tell. But let me think of what I can say. Actually, let’s go back just one year, to 2025 Derek.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay.

Derek Sivers
All right. I don’t know if this doesn’t need to be secret. I really want to live in China, partially for a few reasons. Wait, have you been there? Or where have you been in China?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I’ve only been to Hong Kong. I’ve not been to the mainland.

Derek Sivers
Wow, okay. Oh, Jim. Okay. Such a huge difference between Hong Kong and even just... you could walk across the pedestrian bridge and you’re in Shenzhen, and it’s just a night and day difference. Amazing. So I really, really like the quality of life in Chinese cities. I haven’t been to the countryside much, but the cities are so nice. It’s almost like the way that we used to think of Switzerland, this kind of top-of-the-Human-Development-Index kind of quality of life, where everything’s amazing, everything’s perfect, everything’s beautiful, everything’s clean, everything’s great. That’s what the Chinese cities are like now. So, number one, comfort. But number two, the kind of thing we’re talking about, you talking to the bouncer: trying to really deeply understand somebody else’s contradictory worldview.

Contradictory to the one that you grew up with, the one that comes naturally to you. Trying to deeply understand that different worldview. As I said earlier, I want to do that by living in places. Not just visiting, not just reading the books. I really want to try living there until it feels like this is home. So China, OMFG. Hell yeah, I want to live in China. So one of the best ways to do that, besides going and hoping that some company hires me to get a work visa, is to incorporate a company. While I was there, I met a Serbian woman who was in the same position. She moved to Shanghai to work for a Shanghai company, but then when Covid hit, the company fired her. But Shanghai was home at that point. She has a husband and a son in school. She didn’t want to leave. And so she found out that you can (this is what I was getting to) incorporate a company in Shanghai for just a few hundred dollars, and pay a local agent to take care of everything, all of the annual filings and renewals and taxes. Total price will cost you about $1,000 a year. And now you, as the owner of a Chinese company, can sponsor your own work visa that turns into a resident visa. So I now...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Loophole!

Derek Sivers
Yeah, I now have a Chinese name. My Chinese name is Shen Si Wen. And my Chinese company is named, like, Shen Si Wen Consulting Company, where I’m the owner and director. And again, as soon as I am able to leave New Zealand, I will also be moving to Shanghai to live there as the owner of my Chinese company.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Very cool. Are you going to split time between there and Bangalore, or...

Derek Sivers
That’s my plan.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, that’s the plan. I think that for a lot of people listening to this, one of the things that holds people back is this, in my view, sort of irrational desire for certainty, right? The way I look at the world, only a madman is entirely certain, right? I was talking to a colleague before we jumped on here, and he’s like, “Well, there is the sun rising tomorrow.” And I said, “It’s a probability. It’s a very high probability.”

Derek Sivers
I’ve said the exact same one. I love that. I’ve told people before, you know, “It’s not certain that the sun’s rising tomorrow.” And they’re like, “Shut up.” I’m like, “No, I’m serious.” Yeah, okay, thank you. I love that you just said that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
He goes, “You take things just too far.” And I went, “No, I mean, it’s true. It’s true. It’s a very high probability.” I don’t get worried about it because, again, if it doesn’t come up tomorrow, I won’t be around to feel that anxiety, right? But I think this illusion of control (and I use that term specifically, it is an illusion of control), I think people cling to it and become almost desperate when they can’t feel a sense of certainty about things. And I think that has caused more problems, in my opinion, in a variety of human societies than almost anything else. This idea that... well, you express it very well in your books. Like, is it true? What’s true? Right?

And I have conversations with people who are super bright, super switched on, everything, and then I hit that wall, what I call the wall of their certainty.

Derek Sivers
Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I make an effort to try to chip away, but I think it almost is an emotion rather than a rational belief. Am I just babbling here?

Derek Sivers
No. Okay, I want to try to join you in this topic. I’ve never talked out loud about this, so I hope I’m able to communicate this. Okay. I’m picturing one of those little sliders. Say you have a bar graph that’s a set width, and say two thirds of it is blue and one third of it is orange. But you can move the little slider over so it becomes, say, three quarters orange and one quarter blue. Right. Okay. So, to me, let’s say that orange and blue are a desire or a need for certainty, and the other one is the need for uncertainty. I think some people, in their nature, have a desire for more certainty than other people. And I think that’s just a DNA nature kind of thing. Who knows where it comes from?

But just like you have three kids... if you’ve ever had two pets, you know that even little pets have different personalities. Even if they’ve never been more than a few inches apart their whole life, there is this nature. And some people do just have a nature that wants more certainty, and some of us have a nature that wants more uncertainty. But the reason I’m thinking of it as a slider is it can move. In times where, say, you’re feeling sick, like, you get really sick and you don’t want any uncertainty right now. “I don’t want any adventure. Cancel those plans. I just want to be home in my comfortable bed. Never mind this whole adventure. I’m sick.” I’ve felt that, too.

I was off adventuring far away, and then I got Covid while travelling, and suddenly I was just curled up into a ball. It’s like, “I want to go home.” And it was interesting to feel that. I didn’t want to meet anybody new. I didn’t want to try anything new. I just wanted to go back to my familiar, because I was feeling so helpless or weak.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Derek Sivers
But then that gives me compassion for people who feel that way a lot of the time. And some of them I’ve been very close to, that just their whole outlook on life is like, “I’m barely hanging on here. I’m barely making it through the day. I don’t want to hear any of your crazy big ideas, Derek. I don’t know. I do not want to go to China. I do not want to go to India. I want to go to my favourite restaurant, and I want to watch my favourite show, and I want to go sleep in my bed. That’s all I want.” You know, maybe because they’re feeling weak, they’re feeling a desperate need for more certainty. And okay, I can understand that now. I have felt that myself.

But some people go through life like that. Maybe their slider’s over at 90%, that they want 90% uncertainty, and just a tiny little bit of, you know, “Two weeks a year I’ll go to Europe for a holiday” kind of uncertainty. That’s enough for me. Yeah. But we can’t fault somebody for having that slider in another place, because it might be their circumstances. You could imagine, like the movie Trading Places, that if suddenly they were flipped into a different position, they suddenly win the lottery of life, they’d feel full of confidence. They wouldn’t feel helpless any more. They’d feel full of daring, risk and adventure. And they’d say, “You know what? My slider has moved. I know I used to be that way, but yeah, let’s go to Afghanistan. Give me a rifle. Let’s see what happens.”

You know, they might be full of adventure, the same person, same DNA, but their circumstances can change them too.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So I actually love that, because you’re absolutely right. Having been there, getting Covid... I was lucky enough to get Covid. I was one of the patient zeros. I got Covid before anyone knew that it was called Covid.

Derek Sivers
Once again, before it was cool.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, this is an area where I was desperate to not be cool, because, literally, I was alone in my apartment in Manhattan, and I called my wife, and I said, “I’ve got the worst flu I’ve ever had. My temperature is 105, and I haven’t eaten anything. Will you please come take care of me?” And she was like, “Let’s see how you’re doing in a couple of days.”

Derek Sivers
Wow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And it’s funny that it’s the same illness, because I felt exactly like you did. I was like, “Oh, man.” Normally, if I’m sick, I’ll read a bunch of books, I’ll watch TV, I’ll do something, watch a movie or documentary that I never got to, et cetera, to keep my mind occupied and to, you know, learn something new. Man.

For the first four days of that, nothing. All I had to drink was water. Didn’t eat anything. The fever ultimately went down, and obviously I got better. And then, of course, when I re-emerged, then the lockdown starts. I’m like, “Oh, great. I just spent 14 days on my own, and now we gotta do it.” At least I’ll have other people. But I do... In fact, I think you could take that even further, right? People who are in very chaotic circumstances. I have some people who work for me who are from the Ukraine, and they still have family in the Ukraine. And it’s hard for me to conceive when they tell me the average day of their parent who’s living in Kyiv. And I just tried to model that in my own head.

And I’d be like, I would be so out of there. And so that’s an area where I would move my dial over to “I want much more certainty.”

Derek Sivers
Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. So I like that distinction. I think that makes a ton of sense. You know, the last time we talked, we were also talking about the idea that ideas were wonderful multipliers, but execution is where you create the value. Now, now we have AI. Okay.

Derek Sivers
I hadn’t thought about this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And one of the things that I’ve thought about is, we can now get a competent first version of a company, of an app, of anything. And then where do we find the scarce part of execution? If we can press a button and have it one-shot a beautiful website that meets all of our specifications, right, so it’s our taste, it’s everything that we want... where is the scarce part that execution brings? Is it in judgement? Is it knowing the audience that you’re making it for? Is it taste? What do you think?

Derek Sivers
My only real answer is, I don’t know. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s a great answer, though.

Derek Sivers
I had not thought about this at all. So I could spout some crap off the top of my head, but it would not be worthy of your audience’s intellectual...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
One of the things I’m actually proudest of from my prior asset management career: I had a guy come up to me as I was leaving the firm that I sold and starting my new adventure. We were at a party, and he said, “You know what I really like about you?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “You’re one of the few guys that I ever saw on CNBC who said ‘I don’t know’ so many times.” He goes, “One time I was watching you, and you said ‘I don’t know’ maybe three or four times.” And he goes, “I turned to my wife and I said, ‘I trust this guy.’”

Derek Sivers
Nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Because we all feel so compelled, right, to have an answer. Right, right? And for the most part, Derek, we don’t know yet. The honest answer, if you’re going to be completely candid: “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

Derek Sivers
Do you think it’s related to this? The stereotype of the quiet person that’s sitting at the table full of opinionated people, that hasn’t said anything the whole time, and then when they do speak up, we pay attention, because, “Oh, really? Now they’ve got something to say?” I think pretty universally across the world, people admire the person that only speaks when they’ve got something important to say. But isn’t it interesting that the algorithms reward content creators that spew constantly, whether there’s something to say or not? And I, of course, rebel against that idea. So that’s why people on my mailing list... I have an email list. One of the problems is, if I don’t have anything to say, I don’t say anything. So sometimes they don’t hear from me for 10 months, and then I send out the first email in 10 months.

And sometimes people go, “Who are you?” Like, “Oh, you signed up to my mailing list a year ago. Sorry, I had nothing to say for the last 10 months.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, I find that is inconceivable to me. It would be inconceivable that you would have nothing to say for 10 months.

Derek Sivers
Well, nothing public to say. I don’t know. I’m still working on my stance on this, but, you know, there’s a bunch of stuff, like I brought up earlier: “I don’t know. Should I move to China? Should I move to Bangalore? Should I start a company in China? Should I do this?” Decisions around building my house. I mean, there’s obviously lots going on in my head the last few years, but it just didn’t feel like it had any public value. You know, it felt like it was all just really internal stuff, and I hadn’t yet distilled or extracted some universal life lesson from it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Well, and, you know, I was thinking about it too. We are a lot alike in so many regards, but if you have a company, like I do and you did, where you had employees, it can make it a challenge for the people who work for you. By that I mean they’re seeking direction, they’re seeking stability, right? And I’m willing to pivot on a dime, and a lot of people really resist that. And so I wondered, maybe I’m just a horrible leader. Because in many respects, who gets elected, right? And this isn’t just a phenomenon in the United States. It’s kind of everywhere. The person who gets elected is the one who seems the most certain. He or she is the one who... “Yes, of course we’re going to do this and this. This is my programme. And I will never back... I will die on that hill.” Again, I was talking with my colleague earlier, and I personally take the George Patton view of: I want the other poor dumb bastard to die on his hill.

Derek Sivers
Nice. I hadn’t heard that. I like that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I don’t want to die. Every time I see “I’ll die on this hill,” I’m just like, “Oh, what a waste. Why? What if you’re just completely wrong?”

Derek Sivers
I like that. You know, if I could do it all over again: at my last company, I was also a bad leader. And I’ve thought a lot about this. I was experimenting and exploring, but still, quote unquote, leading. Okay, sorry. I picture the classic 1800s British explorer with the pith hat on, going in with the machete into the jungles of Africa to go to some land that the British had never been to before. And that’s all about the exploring, right? “Let’s go up here. Let’s try this. Oh, let’s go in that. Oh, that’s a cave. Let’s... no. Okay, we’ll come back out of that. What if we go up here? Nope, that’s nothing. What if we go over here?”

So you and I have an exploratory approach to life, which is fine and wonderful and valuable and fun, but what a pain in the ass to follow an explorer. Imagine the troop of people carrying the chests, following that British explorer into every little crevasse and then back out again. “Oh, no, that’s quicksand. Reverse.” But the way I think it would happen is that explorer would find a great harbour through, you know, exploration number 97. He finally finds something valuable, and so he notifies the Queen: “Hey, we found a great harbour. I think this would make a great port.” So then the Queen appoints a bullheaded leader with blinders on. He goes, “Right, we’re going to that port. Here’s why. Here’s the benefit. Here’s the outcome. Here’s where we’re... let’s go.”

And it’s a straight line that’s easy to follow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Derek Sivers
So whereas it was a drag to try to follow the explorer, it’s actually kind of fun to follow a straight-line leader. You know exactly what you’re in for. You know exactly where you’re going. No surprises. Hey, it’s like that certainty-uncertainty thing we talked about, right? Most people want more certainty. So you get a lot of certainty by following the straight-line guy. And then he just goes straight to that harbour and sets up the port there. That’s it. If you tried to say, “Hey, you know what, what if we tried going this way instead?” he’d say, “Shut up.” Yeah. Okay. Now, in hindsight, if I could do it all over again, knowing that I have an explorer, experimenting personality, I would keep my explorations and experiments private. I would not tell my staff about them, because your staff are not your friends.

I mean, even if you’re friendly, they’re not... you know, there’s a conflict of interest.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. The agent principal problem.

Derek Sivers
Right. So I would keep my explorations private. And only when I had, metaphorically, found a harbour that could be a great port, then I would publicly play the straight-line leader to my staff and say, “Everybody: made a decision. This is where we’re going. This is how to get there. This is why. This is what you can expect at the other end. It’s a straight line. Let’s go.” I would have to delineate that side of myself. Yeah, I’d make straight lines for my staff to follow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I did that ultimately with most of the companies that I founded, just because it worked, right? It works much better. It didn’t stop me from being me and doing all of the above. And I didn’t keep it entirely private, let’s be honest. I shared it with several of the people I knew who could handle it. But yeah, that was one of the things that I learned. And then when you put it on yourself, well, of course you don’t want somebody up there: “You know what we’re gonna do? No, wait, no, we’re not gonna do that. Wait, hang on. No, actually, we’re gonna...” You’re gonna go, “Get the fuck out of here, man.”

Derek Sivers
“I read this interesting book last night. What if we tried this?” I get the feeling you’re laughing out of recognition, because, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, totally. Recognition.

Derek Sivers
I did that too. It was literally like I read the book Maverick and I was like, “Hey, what if we had profit sharing?” “What if we just split up the company equally between the number of employees? I just read this book last night. What if we tried that?” And like two months later, I’m like, “Never mind, change my mind.” They’re like, “You fucking asshole. You asshole. You told us that the company was part ours.” I’m like, “It was a good book.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I changed my mind.

Derek Sivers
Changed my mind. There was nothing... that was quicksand that way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
The other thing that we talked about last time was the barcode biz. And essentially, just to refresh your memory and our listeners’ memories, that is something that can be very difficult for an individual to do. In the instance of our conversation, it was musicians and barcodes, if I’m correct. But when somebody comes together and collectivises, it becomes very easy for that individual to get what they need. What do you see today as a barcode opportunity?

Derek Sivers
Ooh, I’m biased, because it’s the thing I was literally working on yesterday, this morning, and today after we hang up the phone: my page called Tech Independence. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. The URL is sive.rs/ti, as in Tech Independence. For 30 years I’ve had a very anti-corporate approach to technology. I kind of... I have a punk approach to this. Very anti-business. I hate it when big businesses try to turn tech into something very corporate and over-engineered and awful, full of formalities. Oh, to me, the spirit of the mid-90s, the brand new World Wide Web invention, was this rebellious...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Punk rock anarchy.

Derek Sivers
Yes, it was, it was like punk tech.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
It was amazing.

Derek Sivers
And so I want to keep that punk tech approach. I like it, and I think a lot of people don’t even know about it. They don’t even know that this is a possibility: to take a punk approach to tech, and to use it as the antidote to the corporate formalities that you’re usually surrounded with. So Tech Independence, at a shallow level, is just teaching people how to get off the cloud. How to delete your Gmail account and run your own mail server. How to delete your Dropbox account, because you just don’t need that if you have your own server. Just get your own domain. It’s 5 bucks or 15 bucks to get a domain. Point it at a server that costs you a few dollars a month.

Here’s how to run your own server, so that all of these, quote unquote, “we’ll do it for you” services can be kicked to the curb and ignored, because you can do it all yourself with a little server for $4 a month. So I ended up writing all of these instructions onto a page on my website called Tech Independence. And version one was a long, detailed “Do this. Here’s exactly what to do. Type this, go here, click that, copy, paste this, put this into the command line. Now make your SSH keys and do this.” And it was like a hundred steps. But if you follow these hundred steps, you’ll have your own server. Version two was me putting 50 of those steps into a script that you could run on your server.

So now it’s 50 steps, and copy this script and just run the script, and it will set up your mail server, your web server, your con... your calendars and contacts. What else? Your Dropbox-style file thing. Anyway, just the last two days I’ve been working on version three, which is taking care of even more of it for you, but giving more education at the same time. So the script will do it for you to save the typing, but it will also give you a plain-text description of what we’ve just done, to copy and paste, so that you can paste it into an AI now and say, “I am running OpenBSD 7.9, using relayd and the HTTP server. I’ve got an SSH account that’s locked in for my user only. The server is hosted here. I have root on this server. And now my problem is that the SMTP mail server is not relaying mail.” So it lets you copy-paste some context for your situation. And then you could ask the AI to either solve the problem, or even, “Can you teach me some more about what I have just created?” Because all I wanted my Tech Independence script to do is to quickly give you the experience of having your own server. I didn’t want to lay out a hundred different options. It’s just very paint by numbers. Go exactly here. Go to vultr.com, get a domain. We’re going to set up the OpenBSD 7.9 server. We’re going to use this web server, this mail server, this concert calendar... I keep saying “concert” by accident. I mean contacts and calendar server.

And just, bup-bup, do exactly this, and within minutes you will have your own server, so that you can be tech independent and shut down your Gmail and whatnot. But I also want people to understand what they’ve done. So I think it’s interesting that AI can make us more dependent on it if we’re not careful, but it can also make us more independent, because with the exoskeleton of AI to strengthen our abilities, we can replace things like Gmail, or replace things like Dropbox, that we were previously dependent on. You can learn how to set them up yourself.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I like that idea, and I completely agree with you. I have this idea that almost everything is a dual use, right? Like, you know, we discovered fire. Amazing, amazing things fire did for us. We started to cook our meat and we got the prefrontal cortex that we hadn’t had before, and that was, yeah, yay, prefrontal cortex. But fire is also incredibly dangerous, and used the wrong way can be incredibly destructive. We didn’t ban fire. We invented fire alarms, fire departments, fire warnings, fire extinguishers, fire everything. And so whenever I hear either of the extremes, right, like, “No, AI is going to bring us into a utopia”... no, it’s not. Nor is it going to turn us all into paper clips, right?

We will learn. When bad things happen (and bad things will happen; they happen with any new and powerful invention or technology), we will learn. “Oh, huh. We better put up, you know, much more of a strong firewall, so this can’t just escape through from its sandbox.” And so I definitely agree with your notion that, depending on the way you use it, it’s either going to dumb you down, because you’ll just say, “Oh, all I got to do is press this button and I get everything I want,” or teach you. And all of a sudden you take all of these... Ken Stanley wrote a great book called Greatness Can’t Be Planned. And he basically talks about the fact that once you get to a certain place, you see things differently, obviously, right?

Because you’re changing your location, you’re going to see things differently and experience things differently. And when you get to that new space, it’s good that you see things differently, because you’re like, “Well, I had intended to go up there, but now I see, oh yes, that’s very inhospitable up there. There’s a lovely meadow over this way. Let’s go this way.” And so I think something where people, like you’ve just described, can use it in a fairly easy-to-use manner, but also learn... Oh, because guess what? The minute you learn that new thing, you’re like, “Hey, wait a tick. I could also do this and this.” And that’s how you grow. That’s how you get new things. Thank God for the tinkerers, in my opinion, right? Because... yeah, no, go.

Derek Sivers
And it’s also just so fun. I’m so glad that you could relate to the punk tech thing I said earlier, because what I’ve had so much fun using AI for lately is to teach me how to replace the bits where I was still dependent. So, okay, since you said the tinkerers, that’s why I had to interrupt here. Imagine this. You have a domain name. Is it osv.llc, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, that’s right.

Derek Sivers
Okay, so osv.llc. You registered it somewhere, at a domain registrar. And DNS is the name of the thing at the registrar that makes it so that when somebody types osv.llc in their browser or their email client, it knows to send the web traffic to IP address number 123.45.67.8, and to send the email traffic to mail.google.com, or whatever you’re using for mail. So that’s called DNS. And I’ve been online for 30-something years, and I’ve always just used the DNS that was built into my domain registrar. So recently I started moving my DNS to a separate DNS server called bunny.net, which I was very happy with. It’s a company out of Slovenia. I’m very happy with them. They’re great.

But along the way I said, “But I’m still using some external company to do this thing. It’s just low-level tech. How hard could it be?” So I was like, “Dear ChatGPT, teach me how DNS works and how I can set up my own DNS server.” And so it guided me towards creating something that is actually more secure than using some other company, which is called the hidden DNS master. So on a private server that has nothing pointing to it, that’s secret, but at a data centre, I built my own DNS server. Sorry, I’m using a standard, secure OpenBSD DNS server, but basically it’s super low-level, doing it myself, running the same software that these other providers run, but I learned how to administer it myself. So now, for all of my domains, I am the DNS master.

And then I use a company called ClouDNS that just pulls from my master, and they’re like the public CDN, firewall type thing. So the public gets it from them. But I’m the sole source of DNS, so doing it this way, it’s actually way more hack-proof. Worst-case scenario, if somebody hacks into my account at ClouDNS, I go... it’s just a shrug, because I’ve got the secret hidden master that nobody can get into. So that was an interesting low-level thing to learn, because along the way I learned how DNS is working at a very low level. And it was so educational. Same thing with running your own mail server, running your own web server. Instead of just going, “I don’t know, it’s at WordPress somewhere,” you can have the AI... “Hey, show me at a very low level how I can create, like, a hello world type basic service here, and do it myself.” And what I love the most about this (and I just found that I was elated for days while I was working on this) is that it is so non-commercial. I’m just there in a black terminal with the code, and nobody’s pushing, you know, upselling at me, or whatever. It’s just so beautifully non-commercial that it reminds me of that punk tech joy that I got out of this in the first place.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I love it. I love it. You know, as far as the whole punk thing goes, I look at the scientific method as kind of pure punk rock anarchy. And by that I mean, take no one’s word for it. “No, no, that’s not the correct answer. I think there might be a better answer, and we’re going to keep looking until we find a better one.” I think that it’s a function of just the insatiable curiosity which... back when the whole Age of Reason began, the Enlightenment, there was this thing called the Republic of Letters. Are you familiar with the Republic of Letters?

Derek Sivers
No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So it’s really cool. Back in, you know, the 1700s, educated people all around Europe were discovering all these interesting things, and they would write very long letters to one another that got passed on. What would happen is, I would write you a letter and you would think, “Oh, this is a pretty good idea. Oh no, Jim really screwed the pooch on this one. This is not a good idea.” And you would annotate. You would say, “Derek here. No, I don’t think this one works, and here’s why.” And the one you liked, you’d say, “Yes. And what you forgot to mention was this.” And then you’d forward that to another friend who also had the interest. This was a real thing, and that’s how a lot of the news of when calculus, for example, got invented... You know, Leibniz was saying, “I invented calculus,” and Newton was saying, “No, I invented calculus.” And part of that controversy was because all these people were sending letters back and forth to each other. “See what Newton did?” “Well, yeah, but did you see what Leibniz did?” And so that was this explosive, almost Cambrian-like explosion of knowledge, from this interaction in the Republic of Letters. And then the Royal Society institutionalised it. Institutional capture. They formed the Royal Society. And guess what? Societies that want to go on and have authority and all that, well, they’re going to have a lot more rules, they’re going to have a lot more protocols, they’re going to have a lot more “This is acceptable. This style is not acceptable.” And it’s not that at that time it fell off a cliff.

But much of, say, peer-reviewed science today, it’s just so incremental. It’s so... “Are you kidding me?” And so I think that the true scientific method is very much of the ethos that we’re talking about here.

Derek Sivers
I love this. I’d never thought about that, but I think you’re so right. And Richard Feynman is so punk.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
My favourite physicist.

Derek Sivers
But think about it. He was really outspoken in saying, like, “I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what your degree is. You verify your work against the experiment. Show me your work. I don’t even care how beautiful your theory is. Do the experiment.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s all. If your theory is the most beautiful theory in the world, it’s more elegant than any theory that I’ve ever seen in my life, and the facts say it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Get over it.

Derek Sivers
Yeah. You know, I’ve tried... I want to dive into this punk subject. Anybody listening to this, if you please, email me if you have any insights into punk philosophy. Because whenever I’ve tried to look into it, I just keep getting steered into punk music. And I’m like, okay, well, I don’t like the music. I like the ethos, the ethics, the mindset, the rebellion, the something, the lack of formalities. And I love that you just brought science into this. Science as punk. That’s a beautiful example.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, because it is. And that’s what true discovery is. And, you know, whenever you get an institution that wants to capture attention, wants to capture value, wants to capture all of that sort of stuff, a lot of that fun stuff, the stuff that got them there in the first place, stops happening. And that’s a mistake if you want to forever learn more, expand more. You know, I’m a huge fan of David Deutsch. I don’t know if you’ve read his book.

Derek Sivers
Yeah. Okay, wait. You know what? We’re deep into the podcast. Who knows if you... I dated his goddaughter in Oxford. And so every night after our dates, I would drop her off at David’s house. And so...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, my God.

Derek Sivers
I didn’t meet him, because we broke...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Not an envious person by any stretch of the definition of the word, but that makes me envious.

Derek Sivers
I just assumed that... I thought we were going to keep dating. I liked her a lot. I thought we were going to keep dating, and I just assumed that I would meet him. But then we broke up and I didn’t meet him, and then Covid hit and that was that. Another reason I loved living in Oxford. Sorry, I just have to smile with sweet memories when I hear the name David Deutsch.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
His book The Beginning of Infinity is a sort of a definitive look at how I look at the world.

Derek Sivers
Nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I read it when it came out in ‘12, and then I reread it in ‘23 or ‘22. I can’t remember. I got so much more out of it the second time.

Derek Sivers
Oh, good. I should read it a second time. I really also loved it the first time.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s worth the second read. Let’s do something fun. I’m going to put you on the spot, for once.

Derek Sivers
Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I love the fact that you take... I am, right now, just to give you context, I am writing... I’ve written four books, but they’ve all been non-fiction books. So I thought, you know what? I’ve always wanted to write this, and this is true. I’ve always had this idea for a fictional thriller-type novel, for the last 35 years, and now I’m writing it. And the first thing I learned was fiction’s got hands. By that, I mean it’s a hell of a lot harder than non-fiction. And I always admired you for the care you gave each sentence, right? You would write a sentence and then you’d write it 10 different ways. Can I put you on the spot?

For our listeners and viewers, give me a sentence, and then show me all the ways that you got to that sentence from other ones. If you could do it from memory.

Derek Sivers
Ooh.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Because you’re so good at this.

Derek Sivers
I wish I could. I don’t remember the final sentence. Damn it. In my book How to Live... I just don’t have it right here, man. If I was one of those guys that... if I was sitting at the computer while we were talking, I would just pull it up. But okay. But I remember there was this one idea that was a combination of something I read in a book, that then was combined with a conversation with a friend, and then enhanced by a conversation with a different friend. And all these sources together had this big idea. Kind of like you and I have talked around a few ideas, like straight-line leadership, or punk tech, or the scientific method as punk. We’ve talked around an idea.

But for my book How to Live, I was writing so succinctly, like poetry, that I just kept... I took a paragraph and made it four sentences, and I took those four sentences and made it three. And I took those three and I made it two. And then I took that two and I made it one, but it was still too long. And I cut out all the unnecessary words. And finally, what I was left with was this one sentence. It was like ten words. And I looked at that going, “God damn, that really does sum it up.” What a nice feeling. And even the choice of words: I’m constantly reading things out loud and choosing the words that sound nice in the mouth, that roll well off the tongue.

Because ideally, I still have this songwriter in me that wants things to be catchy. So with my newest book, Useful Not True, the goal was to make it so catchy that, in theory, if I were to practise for just, say, a few weeks, I would be able to stand up on stage and, word for word, tell you the whole book from memory. Because it’s only 88 pages. The average chapter length is 22 sentences. And I should be able to memorise that book word for word, and stand on stage like one of those people that puts on a one-man show on Broadway. I should be able to do that book word for word.

And, audience, we paused for me to go find the sentence that I was so proud of: “Pain’s power relies on surprise. If you expect it, it’s weaker. If you choose it, it’s gone.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Wow.

Derek Sivers
It just made me so happy. That was, like, hours of conversations and rambling ideas. Yeah. “Pain’s power relies on surprise. If you expect it, it’s weaker. If you choose it, it’s gone.” And that’s in the context of the chapter called “Pursue Pain”. So the whole idea is, if you decide to deliberately follow the painful path, because you know it’s better for self-improvement, or learning, or greater rewards, then the pain is gone, because you’re choosing it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s like Jung saying that as long as you try to fight your demons, you will only strengthen them.

Derek Sivers
Oh, and Oscar Wilde said, “The way to resist temptation is to yield to it.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yield to it. I love Oscar Wilde.

Derek Sivers
Yeah, he’s always good for the classic quip like that, reversing the expectation of the line. But, I mean, so, writing fiction: are you following any structural best practices, like an outline that they say makes a great story? Or are you just fully immersing in the...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I read Joseph Campbell at length. I read a lot about how to write good fiction. I have kept journals forever. I’ve been a writer all my adult life, so... But I’m not following the hero’s journey. I’m immersing. I’m immersing after having read, or in many cases reread, those books. And I figured, since we have the publishing company, I’ve got an amazing group of writers working for me. So we’re also using a writers’ room, and we’re putting AI editors and writers in the writers’ room. We want to give the whole thing a whole different take. We’re going to try a very different way to get a really cool story. And it’s been ridiculously fun, because when you start, you’re just an idiot. I would have my colleagues say, “Well, what do you think of this?” And, you know, they try to be nice. It’s like, “Well...” So what I finally did... we also have our own AI stack. We have our own hardware, our own software, everything. And so it’s not nerfed. It’s much more helpful than some of the commercially available ones, because you’re not lobotomising it. Anyway, what I found the AI was best at was actually criticism. So I would put a chapter in, and it would give me all the pluses and minuses. And then I’m like, AI is... even our own AI is a bit sycophantish. So I wrote a very long prompt that created one of the best-educated, most erudite critics, who is going to hate every chapter that I write. And Derek, I gotta tell you, that was the best of any of the feedback I got. Because it was vicious. It was beyond vicious.

And at first, you don’t get mad, because it’s a machine.

Derek Sivers
Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
If a human being that you were fond of sat opposite you and said those incredibly vicious things, you would be so hurt that you just couldn’t function, right? When it’s a machine, you just read it. You’re like, “Well, that’s kind of picky. That’s kind of...” Then you read it again, and then you’re like, “It’s absolutely right. I’ve written this character completely in the wrong tone. I’ve got to completely rethink the way I think about this.” And then it just started getting better and better. So my vicious critic prompt in AI proved to be, like, the absolute best feedback I got anywhere.

Derek Sivers
I love this. I wonder how the AIs... I could totally imagine them having the structure frameworks in mind. I’ve never written fiction, but I find it fascinating. I’m a film buff. I didn’t even realise this about myself until a film composer told me what a film buff I am. I’ve read maybe three or four of these books now that talk about story structure and film structure, and how to make a plot that keeps you hanging and keeps you involved and makes you feel like you’ve arrived in a different place than where you started. And who is the protagonist? The protagonist is the one that changes the most. You know, things like that. And I find them fascinating, even though I’ve never used them. But I have written over 120 songs with the same approach. You could call it formulaic, but it’s taking the lessons from what have made the best songs so good, and using those techniques to write your own song, using them as inspiration. And so my favourite phrase about this is “Restrictions will set you free.” If you’re just given a blank page and someone says, “Make something. Go,” you’re stuck. But if somebody says, “Okay, start here, then after this change to that, but then double-time it in the middle, and then go to this, and then end higher. Use these three instruments and these six notes. Go.” Well, now those restrictions set you free.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Absolutely.

Derek Sivers
Because now you’ve got so many ideas sticking within the structure. So if I was to write fiction someday, I think I would probably get so inspired to write, like, 10 different stories using some given framework, that ideally nobody would see the framework underneath.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, definitely. And I’m lucky, because we’re using this writers’ room approach. I have some great people for structure, just as you’ve been outlining. And they’re reading it now, and they’re like, “Okay, what you... you had a... the cortisol spike. That’s a thriller. And then it spiked again in a different thing, and it’s the same chapter. No, no, no, no. You got to let each of those spike independently. You got to make this two chapters, not one.” And basically, I was saying the same thing, except in one chapter it was two cortisol spikes, and that was somehow less jolting than the big one in the first chapter and the big one in the second chapter. So I’m very lucky to have a very talented team that can give me that kind of feedback.

But it’s fun because, you know, it’s something that I had wanted to do since I was in my mid-30s, and now I finally got a chance to do it, so that’s exciting.

Derek Sivers
I love this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Another thing you did for your book Useful Not True was you studied philosophy for two years, and I love that. I love philosophy. I took a few classes in it, but I’ve read most of the major philosophers. And what I wanted to ask you is: after you studied the philosophy, what could you be confident in saying... that you were fairly confident of an idea before you started studying the philosophy, and then after you did, you’re like, “Yep, that one doesn’t work at all”?

Derek Sivers
I actually have an anti-answer for you, because it made me less confident about my definition of true. I’m still a little surprised that I only agree with the nihilists. And nihilism has such a bad name. It’s used as almost synonymous with Satanism or something. When people say, “Well, you don’t want to be a nihilist,” you know, they just use that as the worst thing that anybody could be. But there is a beautiful little book called Nothing & Everything. Actually, sorry, the first half of the book is beautiful. The author uses a pseudonym, Val N. Tine. And the book is split into two halves. I don’t know what happened in the second half, but the first half is so beautiful and so well written, and just had me yelling out loud as I was reading it, like, “Yes!” And then it’s like, “Part Two,” and I’m looking at this, like, “Ew, what spilled on the page here?” Anyway. But this definition of true that I find most useful... because of what you said earlier, your biggest problem is other people’s certainty. When they get so damn certain, their mind is closed. “That’s it. This is a finished matter, not up for discussion. That’s it.” To me, you should reserve that only for things where there really is no other answer. A square has four sides, and that’s that. There is no other answer. That’s certain. That the sun is going to come up tomorrow, you know, like you said...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Highly probable.

Derek Sivers
Not certain. Let’s reserve the things we call true for only the things where there is no other answer. And unfortunately, even pragmatism, which a philosophy professor steered me towards... I described it to her, and she said, “It sounds like you’re talking about pragmatism.” So I went and read five different books about pragmatism, and unfortunately, no. I wish that my thoughts would have fit into the philosophy called pragmatism, and I would have said, “This is the school of thought I subscribe to.” But no, it also wasn’t quite right. So, sorry, the only answer to your question is that it made me more uncertain. Which I guess was ultimately my point. I think that Useful Not True is ultimately a book about scepticism. It’s about doubting everything.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, sure. And I wrote a thread on Twitter about my own journey there. And I said, when you go through all of the thinkers, the philosophers, et cetera, most people end up at nihilism. And one of the things that I learned, at least in my life, was you’ve got to walk across the bridge of nihilism. And by that I mean, you get to the other side and you realise, if life has no external inherent meaning, if there is no truth with a capital T, how lucky are you? You’ve got a blank canvas. You can paint your life on that blank canvas. You can make an incredible life, with meaning, with purpose, with all of those things that you decide. It’s entirely bespoke to you. But you gotta walk across the bridge.

Derek Sivers
I love that. You might, you know, even just for the smile and the joy... I don’t know if it’ll teach you anything, but this little book called Nothing & Everything, by...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I wrote it down. I’m gonna get it.

Derek Sivers
Okay, good. And just stop at the second half. When it gets to the second half, just call it done. But yeah, it’s the only book I’ve ever found that fully dives into what you just said.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I just love talking to you. I hope I can hooks you on yet again, because I didn’t get to half the things I wanted to talk to you about. You are such a wonderful conversationalist. I always really enjoy talking with you. It’s just so much fun. A lot of people... I don’t know if this happens to you, but a lot of people sometimes look at me and they’re like, “What?” Yeah, we’re weirdos. Yeah.

Derek Sivers
I think last time, didn’t we do a Part One and Part Two right away? So I’d be up for that, if you’d like to.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, I would love to. I will have Ena send the invitation for the second one, and we’ll get this one out as quick as we can.

Derek Sivers
All right, audience, we’ve just turned this into a Part One, Part Two to be continued.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Part One, Part Two to be continued.

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Sunday, 13 September

Two thoughts from Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

“Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”

Monday, 14 September

Two thoughts from Federico García Lorca

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”

“I know there is no straight road

No straight road in this world

Only a giant labyrinth

Of intersecting crossroads.”

Tuesday, 15 September

Two thoughts from Fernando Pessoa

“Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I’ll build a castle.”

“Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.”

Wednesday, 16 September

Two thoughts from John Toland

“It is human nature that repeats itself, not history. We often learn more about the past from the present, in fact, than the reverse.”

“It is easier to start a war than end one.”

Thursday, 17 September

Two thoughts from John Trenchard

“The terrible tendency of publick corruption to ruin a state, exemplified in that of Rome, and applied to our own.”

“Good governors do not consider their people their prey.”

Friday, 18 September

Two thoughts from Algernon Sidney

“Liars need to have good memories.”

“Men lived like fishes; the great ones devoured the small.”

Saturday, 19 September

Two thoughts from Eugène Lonesco

“It isn’t what people think that’s important, but the reason they think what they think.”

“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”

Follow Jim on Twitter for a daily dose of Two Thoughts!

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This week: Side doors into worlds you might otherwise miss. A cinema through a peephole, a Soviet spy becoming a little too American, chess after the board finally starts making sense, a film that nearly disappeared, and Mozart through the ears of the man who envied him most.

1. Peepholes, Backrooms, and the Smallest Screens in America

In 2013, an animator named Laurie O’Brien drilled a hole in the exterior wall of her home in San Francisco’s Mission District, mounted a tiny screen behind it, and started playing silent films 24 hours a day. No sign. No admission. Just a dime-sized peephole in an alley that rewarded anyone curious enough to crouch down and look. She called it Peephole Cinema. When O’Brien eventually moved to Brooklyn, she brought the concept with her — opening a second peephole at 97 Wilson Avenue in Bushwick, behind a door labeled “Mr. Manual Wilson, Bureau of Deacceleration.” The original SF location went dark during COVID but reopened in 2025.

Now the idea is multiplying. SFGate reports that Sam Goldstein and Glenn Black are building custom-made hole-in-the-wall TVs — Glenn engineered a CAD-modeled, 3D-printed peephole system — and working to expand them across San Francisco. These whimsical moving picture projects are a fun way of creating a treasure hunt that allows people to explore neighborhoods in new, analog ways.

But the peephole is just the most charming expression of a broader movement: Micro-cinemas. These single-screen venues with fewer than 40 seats, often tucked inside bookstores, coffee shops, and video stores are booming in New York, proliferating across Los Angeles (where Vidiots’ 36-seat MUBI Microcinema and a VHS backroom in Echo Park called Whammy! are leading the charge), and IndieWire declared last year the dawn of a “golden age of microcinemas.” I once had a film screen at a festival in a tiny town along the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, where the local micro-cinema called itself the “Minema” — a name I still love.

What connects all of this is something older than cinema itself: the desire to gather a small group of people in a dark room and show them something worth seeing. Before multiplexes, before streaming, before algorithms decided what played next, there was just a screen and an audience. The micro-cinema trend brings us all back to that. In a world that keeps making screens smaller and more private, these spaces insist on making them communal again — even if the theater only seats a few. [Taylor]

2. The Americans : When the Cover Starts Becoming Real

Actor Matthew Rhys is fresh off a historic night at the Emmys, winning two lead-acting awards in the same night, so it seems fitting to recommend the earlier show that first exposed me to him: The Americans, in which he stars alongside his longtime partner Keri Russell. I never understood why this show didn’t have a bigger following, or maybe it did and I just came to it late. I think it’s fantastically rendered, and it draws a portrait of spy life and the Cold War that is too often overlooked.

Russell and Rhys play Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, deep-cover KGB agents the Soviets called “illegals.” They are operatives inserted into a foreign country with fabricated biographies, no diplomatic protection if caught, and no way home. The Jennings run a travel agency in suburban Virginia. They raise two children who initially have no idea of their parents’ double lives. They run missions for their handlers by night, and an FBI counterintelligence agent lives across the street. The show has all the gripping spy business you’d expect, but what it really shows is how difficult that double life becomes. Their characters have to become Americans, and what is appealing about America can’t help but seep through.

In one of the show’s best threads, Philip starts attending EST seminars, the self-help movement that swept the country in the 1970s and 80s, and you watch him begin to chafe against the Soviet restrictions he grew up with. He enjoys American life and freedom. And it is fascinating to watch him wrestle with that against the mission he and his wife have sworn to uphold.

The show deserves a wider audience. It is two enormously talented actors at their very best, and a spy story where the cover gradually becomes part of the person. [Jimmy]

• 📺 The Americans (2013-2018)

3. There’s Never Been a Better Time to Learn ‘The Game of Kings’

You may be thinking, “Am I really being told to learn chess on a media newsletter?”

Yes. Yes you are.

If you’ve already studied the game, then consider this your reminder to start playing more. For those who have never attempted to understand chess’s beautiful complexity, I’m begging you to give it a shot.

The real reason is the feeling you get when you finally start putting it all together.

The tingle you feel when you see checkmate in three moves for the first time is electric. The smugness you have to hide when an opponent takes your bait of a sacrificed rook... there are a thousand different ways you will feel excitement when you realize you are playing with strategy instead of moving blindly.

It’s been the best way for me to exercise my brain and I’m actually getting better!

The good news is that there are free and easy ways to learn the game in bite-sized pieces.

Did you know Duolingo has chess lessons? That’s where I started for most of this year. Then I discovered Chess.com, which also has free lessons and daily puzzles that have helped teach me actual tactics to use on the board.

Then, when you’ve got a tiny sense of how to think through a game, start playing strangers on the internet. That’s where the real thrill lies. In the arena. You will get smoked many times, but that’s ok. The losses only make the first win feel that much more valuable.

You could study for 5 minutes a day and find out you’re better than any of your friends in less time than you’d think. Sudoku and crosswords are fine, but nothing stimulates my mind like head-to-head combat on an 8x8 grid. [Jameson]

4. The Fall : The Film No One Could Find

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave it four stars and said one might want to see it for no other reason than because it exists. For years, the problem was actually finding a way to watch it. The Fall premiered at TIFF in 2006 and received a limited theatrical release in 2008, but after its licensing deals expired it vanished. In 2024, eighteen years after the premiere, MUBI finally brought it back with a 4K restoration.

Director and producer Tarsem Singh shot the film across 24 countries and took 4 years to make it, largely financing it himself. The story is set in silent-era Los Angeles where Roy, a paralyzed stuntman, tells an elaborate fantasy to a six-year-old girl named Alexandria to manipulate her into stealing morphine for him. The places where the film was shot (with minimal CGI) included Rajasthan’s Chand Baori stepwell, Jodhpur’s blue city, Namibia, Bali, Fiji, Prague and other stunning places. One of the interesting parts was when Roy says “Indian,” meaning a Native American from a cowboy film, while Alexandria pictures a South Asian worker from her orange groves back home.

Catinca Untaru, who played Alexandria, was an actual six-year-old Romanian girl who had never acted before. She didn’t speak English when filming began, so she learned her lines phonetically. In fact, she was led to believe that Lee Pace, the actor who played Roy, was actually paralyzed. Talk about being in character.

The film can be slow in places but I believe certain stories need a degree of leisure for the effects to sink in. This was one of those. Even though the film made $3.7 million against a $30 million budget (some did call it self-indulgent), I found the story was a character of its own. That, for me, is a redeeming act. [Aashisha]

• 🎬 The Fall (2006)

5. Amadeus : Imagine Competing With Mozart

I recently rewatched one of my favorite films, Amadeus (1984), with my kids. It was their first time and my... fourth? I lost track.

The movie is really Antonio Salieri’s story. Mozart says at one point, “I’m a vulgar man. But I assure you, my music is not.” That’s basically Salieri’s problem in one line. He’s a successful composer himself, and he has enough musical taste to recognize that this giggling, childish, vulgar guy is producing something he never could. He can hate Mozart all he wants, but every time he hears the music, he knows.

One of my favorite scenes is when Salieri remembers hearing Mozart’s Gran Partita for the first time. He walks us through it: a low pulse from bassoons and basset horns, then an oboe above it, then a clarinet takes over. And while he describes what’s happening, we hear exactly what he hears. F. Murray Abraham is incredible in the role. The guy who hates Mozart is also the guy teaching us why Mozart’s music is so good.

Watching Amadeus when I was younger sent me exploring Mozart and other composers. I hope it does the same for my kids.

The story began as a 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, who also wrote the screenplay for Miloš Forman’s film. Shaffer wasn’t trying to write a biopic and took some pretty big liberties with history. There’s no evidence Salieri tried to murder Mozart, and while they may have been rivals, they weren’t mortal enemies. They even collaborated on a piece. But Shaffer used the two composers to tell a story about talent, genius, envy, and a man who decides to pick a fight with God.

The other scene I love is near the end, when a dying Mozart dictates part of the Requiem to Salieri. Mozart is hearing the whole thing in his head and throwing out one part after another. A half-delirious Mozart is composing faster than Salieri can get it onto paper. [Liberty]

• 🎬 Amadeus (1984)

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This summer in Naples, Brent’s team presented results from three sealed Herculaneum scrolls, including the first read end to end. Their announcement was covered everywhere from National Geographic to NBC News to The Guardian.

Brent and his work are the subject of The Vesuvius Challenge, an upcoming documentary from Infinite Films and Scott Free, in partnership with Calliope Pictures, narrated by Guy Pearce.

We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

Links

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Show Notes

Brent Seales & Nick Tawil

• Dr. Brent Seales: Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science at the University of Kentucky and co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge. Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky

• Vesuvius Challenge: The open competition Brent co-founded with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to read the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls. Vesuvius Challenge

• The June 2026 breakthrough: The announcement in Naples of new texts, titles, and authors recovered from the scrolls. The day the Herculaneum scrolls began speaking again

• Nick Tawil: Guest host and head of Infinite Films. Connect with Nick

The Scrolls & the Discoveries

• The Herculaneum library: Roughly 1,800 scrolls carbonized by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the only library from antiquity that survived. Vesuvius Challenge: the scrolls

• Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8: A title and author read from a sealed scroll, establishing that the work ran to at least eight books. CNN on the discovery

• The En-Gedi scroll: The burned Torah scroll Brent’s team read without opening, containing one of the oldest known copies of the first two chapters of Leviticus in the canonical Masoretic text. Vesuvius Challenge on En-Gedi

• The $1 million prize: The open competition to fully unroll and read one of the remaining sealed scrolls. Current prizes

Films & Coverage Mentioned

• The Vesuvius Challenge: The upcoming documentary from Infinite Films and Scott Free, in partnership with Calliope Pictures, narrated by Guy Pearce. Deadline announcement

• Secrets of the Dead: The Herculaneum Scrolls: The PBS episode following Brent inside the Villa of the Papyri. Watch on PBS

• Cost of Glory: The Roman history podcast Brent and Nick reference while discussing what might still be buried. Cost of Glory

• Dead Poets Society: The source of “carpe diem,” one of the two ideas Brent would give the world. Dead Poets Society

Highlights

Why Brent Launched the Vesuvius Challenge

The acceleration that we were going to get from just going open source was going to far exceed... it was going to far outpace our own ability to just get there. And what everybody wanted was to just solve the problem. It wasn’t so much about owning it or getting sole credit. It was really about delivering these things back to humanity. And we thought that we were right on the edge of being able to do that. And so I think the excitement of being able to get over that cliff, that marker of being able to say, “We’re going to do this,” that put us over the line we needed to be over to be able to say, “Okay, it’s worth opening this up.”

The Authors Are Coming Alive

So I feel like my part... not that it’s completely done, but it’s substantially done. We achieved this moment. And now the people who can read the language are not talking about the technology anymore. They’re talking about reading language, understanding the world. So I think there’s been a kind of change where I’ve completed the technical work, substantially complete, let’s say, where I don’t have to make the case anymore that this is possible. And of course, we’re going to refine the methods so that everything can be faster, everything can be better. But the conversation now is really about the works themselves, and the scholars who can read those works, and what we’re going to learn from the ancient world. You know, until the tech worked, we weren’t learning anything about the ancient world. We were learning about synchrotrons and virtual unwrapping. Now we’re actually reading the words, and the authors are coming alive. And that’s an amazing and a remarkable moment.

Edited Transcript

Nick Tawil
Hey, Brent. Good to have you here today. It’s so good to see you in person again. You’ve been incredibly busy and productive this summer. You are in the news literally all around the world, certainly here in the United States, but also in Italy, Germany, England, France, for the work you’re doing at Herculaneum in Naples, Italy. We had a big June announcement.

I’m privileged to know a lot about this because, you know, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, we’re literally doing the film on you guys. It broke on Deadline a few weeks ago. But I wanted to start my time with you now with an excerpt from an article in Scientific American.

So here it is: “How do you read a book you can’t open? That’s precisely what Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky, has spent his career trying to figure out. And on Thursday, his life’s work reached a pinnacle. Seales, alongside a huge group of volunteers and scientists working as part of the Vesuvius Challenge, has helped develop the technology to see inside books and scrolls that we can’t open without destroying them.”

Now, use the word... “Your life’s work has reached a pinnacle.” So I don’t think that’s hyperbole. I also don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that what you’re doing here, and what you’ve been able to do with AI and the X-ray tech that you’ve devoted your entire career for, is probably a watershed moment for understanding our own civilization and our own history, our own civilizational history.

So I guess just to start, how has the summer been? And how has your work changed even in the last couple of months, just in terms of attention you’ve gotten around this? And I want to talk about the actual discovery as well.

Brent Seales
Well, thanks for that introduction. What a great piece. It is astounding, and to hear it read back... you know, every time we think we’ve found a pinnacle, there seems to be a new place. And this summer has been fantastic. The June press event in Italy kind of brought it all back home because, you know, we’re standing there talking about reading these scrolls for the first time using virtual unwrapping, and we’re looking across the bay at the actual volcano. And the time scale is crazy, right? 2,000 years. So it was a very high moment.

And we’ve had a series of those over the last five years. In fact, in 2020, which was the anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, I proposed to my research team, “This would be the year.” And you know what happened in 2020. Soon after those words came out of my mouth, the entire world, you know, goes upside down.

So from there really to now has just been this constant climb, and to get to the top... I mean, I think you’re right that the word “pinnacle” kind of captures being pretty high on this mountaintop of having solved the problem, and turning from the technology really more toward the lost voices that we’re restoring by reading these manuscripts. It’s amazing.

Nick Tawil
So talk to me about where these manuscripts actually live in Herculaneum and how many there are. Give me a sense of scope and scale.

Brent Seales
Sure. I did not know about this collection as a student, and it wasn’t until we started developing this particular technology that I started searching around for likely candidates. And Herculaneum came to the top immediately because it’s iconic. I mean, it was formed... The library at Herculaneum was formed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

Most people are familiar with the story of Pompeii. Pompeii is maybe the birthplace of modern archaeology, and it’s also this fantastical ancient lost city that was uncovered by humanity. Well, the reason why it was lost is the explosion of Mount Vesuvius.

What’s unique about Pompeii is the architecture, the scale and scope of the city. What’s unique about Herculaneum, which is where the scrolls were found, is that it’s the only library from antiquity that survived. We have all the history in the medieval copies of written material that tells us there was a library at Alexandria. People were into books. Books were traveling around the ancient world. But we don’t have any of the actual libraries left, and this is the only one.

So you’re talking about 1,800 scrolls, maybe a couple thousand books. They were all discovered in the realm of 1750 to 1760, when the Herculaneum site was first excavated, and many of them were badly damaged at excavation. But because they were being excavated by the royal family, King Ferdinand and others who were reigning in that part of Italy at the time, they were carefully kept. Some of them were gifted to other kings as diplomatic gifts, but for the most part, the collection stayed in Naples, and from 1750 until now, we have what we have.

And the state of affairs is that the scrolls were badly carbonized, which means that the volcano spared no expense in basically turning them into what looks like charcoal. So you have the only ancient library that is in existence in the world from antiquity, and then you have this profound physical problem that you can’t really unroll or very easily read any of the material.

Nick Tawil
So over the years, the easier scrolls were read and have been read and researched, but there’s just an entire portion that’s unreadable. And so that has basically stayed untouched until now.

Brent Seales
Yeah, absolutely. The ones that could be opened were. Some of the ones were pretty readily able to be unrolled. The volcanic ash and mud that covered up the library varied in how it impacted the collection. So early on, you had some that were just immediately opened. You have a lot of them that were destroyed because as they opened them, they just scraped it away and they made sketches, and now all we have are the sketches. The worst of the worst are the ones that remain. And for some reason, I latched onto that as the problem.

And I don’t know... looking back, you say things like “your life’s work,” but when your life is playing and you’re doing that work, you’re never really sure what’s going to become your life’s work, right?

Nick Tawil
Yeah. Well, what were you doing before this, before Herculaneum got onto your radar as a challenge? What were you doing before that?

Brent Seales
Well, I’m a computer vision and imaging specialist, and I did my PhD work at the University of Wisconsin in the field of computer vision. Computer vision can be defined as making computers and cameras work together to be able to either imitate what humans can do visually or to solve problems in the world autonomously.

So you see computer vision now every day succeeding with facial recognition, autonomous cars, all of the remote sensing that happens. The early days when I started that work led me into applications like manufacturing, autonomous navigation, space exploration. So I was doing work toward those applications. We were doing welding inspection, for example, where you’d have a camera help you watch a weld being made, and then the control loop would help you improve the process of doing those welds. It doesn’t sound super exciting, and I decided that it wasn’t that exciting for me. So I moved through some of those applications.

The thing I was doing immediately before Herculaneum and a lot of the heritage work that I started doing was medicine. You might be familiar with laparoscopic surgery. This is where surgeons will never actually open the operative field. They’ll do an entire procedure through scopes that have been inserted into the body cavity. And it’s incredibly hard to do that work, so the visualization part of doing that work is super important. So I was working with surgeons to try to help them better visualize not only the operative field live as they were doing the surgery, but all of the preoperative stuff that they were doing. You might X-ray a patient in advance to see what you’re dealing with, and then the surgeon would, what, memorize that preoperative stuff so that they have an idea of what they’re going to face when they go in.

Well, all of those things actually fed into what I eventually started to apply to virtual unwrapping, because the X-ray, right, I hadn’t had a lot of experience with that. But it actually became one of the key things that we’ve used to see inside of these books without opening.

Nick Tawil
And not just any X-ray. It’s, what’s it called?

Brent Seales
Computed tomography.

Nick Tawil
And where are these machines at in the world?

Brent Seales
The medical version of computed tomography is everywhere. Every hospital has one. In fact, tomography won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1979. The two inventors.

Nick Tawil
What about the X-ray machines you’re using for this project? You’ve had to travel to use these particle accelerators, haven’t you?

Brent Seales
Yeah, the X-ray for Herculaneum... We’ve settled on a synchrotron, and... that’s a very, very unique X-ray source that comes from a particle accelerator. And there are 40 or 50 of these worldwide. We’ve used a few of them in Europe and in America. There’s one at Oxford. It’s called the Diamond Light Source. We’ve also used one in Grenoble, France. It’s the European synchrotron light source. And what’s interesting about the synchrotron is that it produces a very carefully controlled, extremely bright X-ray beam. And brightness with X-ray means that you don’t have to wait as long to collect the images, because you have so many photons going through the sample that you can take a really, really quick snapshot because it’s so bright. So we can do an entire scroll at very high resolution very quickly.

Nick Tawil
What do you mean, quickly?

Brent Seales
Well, the kind of resolutions that we’re talking about now, which have really unlocked the problem, are kind of astounding. You know, the size of a red blood cell is bigger than the resolution that we’re getting to see the interior of the scroll. Every one of the little voxels that represents the scan of this...

Nick Tawil
A voxel?

Brent Seales
Voxel, which would be the 3D version of a pixel. You add that third dimension, you call it a voxel. The size of that little sample is astoundingly small, and that’s what lets us see everything that’s going on inside the scroll, including the ink.

Nick Tawil
Including the ink. And this is the key. Once you can lift the ink, the ink signature, I’ll say, off of the burnt scroll, then you’ve got something to work with. But it’s still tightly wrapped in this sort of cylindrical form. So now you need to... this is where the virtual unwrapping happens.

Brent Seales
That’s right. The X-ray gives you a model of everything that’s going on inside without having to open it, just like it does on the human body. But it’s still all wrapped up and compressed, and not in a form where you can actually do anything. So all those software steps that take you from that scan to the final readable thing, that’s the thing we invented to be able to do it.

Nick Tawil
And this is the Vesuvius Challenge.

Brent Seales
Well, before the Vesuvius Challenge, that was the research problem, which we essentially had solved to the point where we believed we had the formula. The Vesuvius Challenge took us over the finish line because we threw the contestants in there, broke through on the first-ever scroll, and then with the attention that we gathered and more funding, I mean, we just ran at the finish line after that.

Nick Tawil
And so this is co-founded between you and Nat Friedman. The Vesuvius Challenge is an open-sourced AI engineering challenge, so open source, like, presented and set to the public. Anyone could contribute to this project. And you weren’t really sure what you would be able to find when you opened it up like this. And how did your partners in academia, or other researchers and other lines of work, maybe the papyrologists, how do they all... Were they all involved in this at the very beginning? How did they react to this? Is this just helpful to them?

Brent Seales
Yeah. You know, the Vesuvius Challenge was not a no-brainer for me to jump into. It kind of evolved from an invitation that Nat Friedman sent me to just attend a conference into what became the contest. The conference was the chance where I could meet Nat and his colleagues. And in meeting him, I found out that it probably wasn’t going to work to just ask for investment, because there wasn’t that level of interest in the colleagues that he had gathered together for the meeting. But Nat himself was incredibly interested. And of course, he’s a really smart guy and very connected.

So he sat down after the conference, before I went back to the lab, and he pitched me this idea of a contest. And Nat’s an open-source guy. And what I knew that would require is for us to open up all of our research, including our data. So, yeah, I was sent packing back to the lab with this idea from Nat: “Hey, why don’t you just open up everything you’ve worked on for the last ten years, and we’ll do a big contest.” And you can see that maybe that isn’t a no-brainer, because you have to think, who’s been supporting me? What are they going to think about this? Can I just do this on my own? And maybe I should just do that, maybe just put everything on hold and do it on my own.

But we soon decided, as I talked it over with the folks in my lab, my trusted team, that the acceleration that we were going to get from just going open source was going to far exceed... it was going to far outpace our own ability to just get there. And what everybody wanted was to just solve the problem. It wasn’t so much about owning it or getting sole credit. It was really about delivering these things back to humanity. And we thought that we were right on the edge of being able to do that. And so I think the excitement of being able to get over that cliff, that marker of being able to say, “We’re going to do this,” that put us over the line we needed to be over to be able to say, “Okay, it’s worth opening this up.”

But, you know, I’ll be honest. Once in a while, we’ll see, even now in the press, an article that says a teenage college kid solved this problem. And while that might be true in a sense, it’s also monumentally not true, because we have this whole research program going, and then we had this entire Vesuvius Challenge happening. So all of that is the mechanism that has helped us be able to have that kid do that work.

Nick Tawil
Well, we were also talking about this before. You set up the challenge, and people that contribute to it in a meaningful way do get prize money for it. But what ended up really happening was it became a selection... it became an identity signaling, almost talent recruitment, function for you and your team, because the people that ended up contributing to it ended up becoming a part of the team, at least for a period of time. Correct?

Brent Seales
That’s right. And I love that we got the interest that we got, and I love that it became this huge recruiting tool. A much bigger funnel than I could have ever cast on my own. A combination of Nat’s network plus the notoriety of what happened with the Vesuvius Challenge and just the buzz. You know, we had two, three, five thousand people on a Discord channel talking every day. You can’t even... so many messages, you can’t keep up.

Nick Tawil
This is from around the world.

Brent Seales
From around the world. It’s global.

Nick Tawil
And so it’s still going today, the Vesuvius Challenge.

Brent Seales
That’s right.

Nick Tawil
And you run the team still. What’s the next challenge? Well, first, let’s maybe talk about what happened in Naples this past summer, because I think then the question becomes, what’s next? So tell me about the scrolls that were presented in Naples this past summer.

Brent Seales
Yeah. The moment that we signaled this summer in Naples was that we can do a complete scroll. So you give me a scroll, it’s never been opened, I can make a scan of it, and then the software process is now good enough that whatever’s inside, we can unroll and unwrap and present in a kind of complete way.

So we did that in Naples for three scrolls, and we were able to show also what we found in those scrolls. One is an extensive work of at least 140, maybe 150 columns of text. And I mean, that’s going to keep the papyrologists busy for a long time. This is all ancient Greek. It’s very dense.

Another scroll itself was partial, but everything that’s there we were able to unwrap and read, including the title and the author, which is kind of amazing. And a third scroll also gave us another title and an author, Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8, which means that there were at least eight books on gods by this guy, and no one knew that Philodemus had written those books.

So again, that can start more speculation about what’s in the books, what’s in Book 8 we’re going to read. So we unpacked that in June, and what I think it did is it shifted the conversation now from the technical, because we presented the complete technology that can do the whole thing, to the lost voices that are now going to be restored. So there may be 400 of these scrolls left that have never been read. They’re the hardest ones, and we’re reading them. And that is ecstatic.

Nick Tawil
You’ve gone from pursuing history to now actually reading history.

Brent Seales
That’s right.

Nick Tawil
So there’s a sense of completion now that you have around this project.

Brent Seales
Well, I’ve never been able to read any of the ancient languages because I haven’t had that training. So I feel like my part... not that it’s completely done, but it’s substantially done. We achieved this moment. And now the people who can read the language are not talking about the technology anymore. They’re talking about reading language, understanding the world. So I think there’s been a kind of change where I’ve completed the technical work, substantially complete, let’s say, where I don’t have to make the case anymore that this is possible. And of course, we’re going to refine the methods so that everything can be faster, everything can be better. But the conversation now is really about the works themselves, and the scholars who can read those works, and what we’re going to learn from the ancient world. You know, until the tech worked, we weren’t learning anything about the ancient world. We were learning about synchrotrons and virtual unwrapping. Now we’re actually reading the words, and the authors are coming alive. And that’s an amazing and a remarkable moment.

Nick Tawil
How do you refine the process that you basically pioneered here with your team? How long does it take today to read one scroll, and how long do you want it to take?

Brent Seales
I’d love for it to be an instantaneous thing, completely automated, that doesn’t take much longer than the scan time. We’re not even close to that right now. But imagine that you go to the scanner for your receipts from travel, and as long as it takes for it to scan is how long it takes for you to get the OCR and the thing to be uploaded. That happens right now for receipts and things like that. OCR, optical character recognition, was one of those first finally solved computer vision problems, and we would love for the scroll to be the same.

I don’t think that we’re that close to that right now. I think we’re still several years away from that kind of performance, because the technologies that we’re using are not that robust yet. But the computer vision and the machine learning that we’re using constantly improves. And we’re in this era now that is remarkable in that computer vision and machine learning, with more data, can get better. And so we actually see the ability to read the scrolls with the technology we’ve created as something that is going to create versions that get better over time as we read more scrolls. That’s never really been true with any other technology. Like, photography doesn’t get better the more photographs that you take. But because of the way the machine learning works, the more things that we capture, we learn from that, and then we get better at actually revealing the text.

So rather than time to text, which is one thing that we talk about, it’s quality of text, readability. We want to make the job of reading this ancient language the easiest possible. And overcoming the damage is really hard. I mean, this stuff is peeling, it’s fragile, so it’s kind of a miracle that it works at all. And then to say we want it to be pristine.

Nick Tawil
And instantaneous.

Brent Seales
And instantaneous.

Nick Tawil
So American of us.

Brent Seales
Yeah, well, it is. It’s always got to be better, right?

Nick Tawil
Oh, no. Actually, for the machine learning piece and the AI of it all that you and your team have been using to accelerate this process, in order to get it digitally unwrapped and handed over to the papyrologists, it comes across in the film in spades. But it also is something that other tech and VC investors have noticed, and even starting to make a little bit of waves in Hollywood, which is traditionally lukewarm towards AI. But in the film it comes across very, very cleanly, I think, and very authentically, that this is a great use case for AI, a positive use of AI, to further understand humanity. And I think it’s currently presented in the national conversation as either/or: you’re either for AI and against humanity, or for humanity and therefore you have to be against AI. And this is really a nice kind of marriage of the two in terms of a use case.

Brent Seales
Yeah, I see that. I think there’s irony that AI is so forward-thinking and premised on such modern and current technology, and yet we’re using it in this case to look backward. But it’s kind of a rescue mission, if not a sort of redemptive story, right? We’re kind of redeeming these lost works using AI as the tool to do it. And in fact, I like that message, right? That every new tool, including AI, that comes into human purview can be used as a way to redeem what’s around us. And so I think that actually is a really good story, and it’s one we should focus on.

Nick Tawil
So now that you’ve digitally unwrapped these three scrolls, is there a backlog of more scrolls, specifically from Herculaneum, or other labs or other researchers from around the world calling you up, saying, “Hey, you know what? I’ve got this parchment here that I can’t read. What do you think?”

Brent Seales
Well, it’s true that that is happening, and I’m glad that’s happening, because, congratulations, we have the technology to be able to look at some of that material. For example, there are scrolls in Amman, Jordan, from Petra, and they haven’t been opened. They’re carbonized. So there’s more material in the world that this could work on. But there is a backlog of just the Herculaneum stuff. I mean, we haven’t plowed through that. There are 40 scrolls that we’ve already scanned, and that’s 10% of what we think actually remains. So that’s a decade’s worth of work right there.

Nick Tawil
And the full villa hasn’t even been excavated.

Brent Seales
And that’s the next thing, right? The villa hasn’t been excavated. And I think people are a little bit naive about that. They think we have what we have and that’s it. But if you go down to the villa, which is not even open to the public... The villa is a part of Herculaneum that’s separate from the publicly available part of the town of Herculaneum. You go in there and you realize they really just sort of tunneled along the foundations of the villa, and that’s how they infer what the actual architecture of the villa was, and they just happened onto the artifacts that they have, including the scrolls, by doing that tunneling. It’s not fully excavated. And, you know, I’m not an archaeologist, but I would love to see, now that we know we can read the material, full archaeology happen there, not only to find the scrolls, but really to just better understand the villa and the scrolls we already have.

Nick Tawil
Well, it’s also, like you said, it’s the only ancient library that we know of. And what does that say about the authenticity of all these scrolls compared to maybe other artifacts that exist out in the world that academia or the research community currently has and uses?

Brent Seales
I love that you bring that up, because the provenance of scrolls from Herculaneum is unassailable. I mean, you can’t fake the carbonization. You can’t fake something being in this collection for 200 years.

Nick Tawil
So the carbonization actually creates an authentic fingerprint on this thing that cannot be exactly replicated.

Brent Seales
Exactly. Think about the Dead Sea Scrolls and how that all went down in the ‘40s. They were parted out by the Bedouin, so there were no archaeologists on site when they were found. And then you end up with advertisements in the New York Times for, like, a scroll from Israel. And what has happened since then is that we’ve seen a lot of fakes, where somebody will say, “I have a Dead Sea scroll, a scroll from cave number nine, Qumran, whatever.” And it’s really hard to prove sometimes that that’s true or not true. Not true with Herculaneum at all.

The other thing that’s amazing about a library from antiquity is that it’s not been copied by medieval scribes. So you have the original book that was actually on the shelf. So, fully authentic, verifiable, and the original book, not filtered through medieval scribes. And you know that a lot of the philosophy and the religion was tinkered with when the scribes of the medieval period recopied and preserved those works. And the tinkering is not always obvious. Sometimes scholars have to spend a lot of time to figure out, how did this change? They don’t have the original work, they just have the copy. Every book that we’ve read from Herculaneum has been a unique work. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the canon, and it’s uniquely from antiquity. So it’s really a very, very compelling kind of collection.

Nick Tawil
So how long will it take you to do the next 40, 45 scrolls that you have in backlog?

Brent Seales
Right now we have a new competition that’s been announced, a $1 million prize through the Vesuvius Challenge, and that is for someone else, a competitor using our software, using their own, to do what we just did: read a full scroll from one of the 40. And we’re hoping that that’ll push our techniques forward. It’ll engage the community. Somebody will win $1 million for doing that. I think those 40 are going to be processed this year. That’s my hope. And then we’ll go after the remaining 360, the other 90% of what remains. A lot of those are fragmentary, so we know that we’re not going to have a whole book, we’re going to have a piece. But the game then becomes, if we can read all the writing, how do we put these works back together?

Nick Tawil
Why not grab a frontier lab here to just say, “Hey, we’ll just do this”?

Brent Seales
I’d love that. How do we do that?

Nick Tawil
We should have that conversation.

Brent Seales
We should do that.

Nick Tawil
And then let’s say these scrolls get scanned. How long does it take the papyrologists to analyze them?

Brent Seales
Papyrology is not fast, because what a papyrologist brings to bear when they look at the text is all of the other knowledge about the ancient world, because these texts are dense. Sometimes the texts aren’t fully...

Nick Tawil
You keep saying “dense.” What does that mean? A lot of text in a column, or the messaging is dense?

Brent Seales
Yeah, I mean, sort of intellectually dense. So you’re talking about parachuting into the middle of a book that is probably in the middle of a philosophical argument that a scholar is making, and they’re fully embedded in their time. So they’re talking about a person you don’t know whose name is maybe missing from the text, and about an idea that is only partial. And the game is to try to figure out, from the limited words, all of that stuff, all the context. And it can be really, really tricky and take a long time. Sometimes it ends up just being a mystery. It’s like, we don’t actually know what’s being talked about right here. We have all the words, but it’s really hard to know what the story is.

We’re hoping that most of the virtually unwrapped texts that we can provide are good enough in terms of readability and quality that the scholars will be able to unpack that density and figure it out. But the extra knowledge that the papyrologist has in their head, besides just the vocabulary and the structure of the language, is immense. And that’s what they’re applying, sometimes as a group and not just individually. Sometimes they have to work on it together.

Nick Tawil
So I want to talk more about the tech, and the tech throughout the entire workflow, to include what participants were doing at the Vesuvius Challenge and the challenges that they faced, either individually or as a group, in mapping out aspects of the scan, but then also the actual scan technology, the synchrotron you mentioned a few times. Give me a sense of scope for what a synchrotron is. Maybe start there, because that has to happen first, before you even engage people, your lab and other third-party participants through the Vesuvius Challenge, to even look at this stuff.

Brent Seales
Yeah, that’s right. We started by using a bench source. A bench source is one that you can move around. A bench source for X-ray would be one that you’d find in the doctor’s office or the dentist’s office. And so the first scans that we made, way back in 2009, the first time I ever scanned a scroll, it was done with a source that we took to the place where the scrolls were. It was just so much easier to have access if we were within the perimeter of where the scroll lived, at the library in the Institute of France in Paris. But what we discovered was that that source wasn’t going to give us some data that was good enough to do all the rest of this stuff.

So we quickly moved to the synchrotron, which is a source that isn’t movable. A synchrotron is an X-ray beam that comes from electrons that are running around in a ring at the speed of light. And the ring is like a kilometer across.

Nick Tawil
Just for this one scroll?

Brent Seales
Well, so the ring creates the electrons that run around in a circle, and then when you manipulate those electrons, it creates all of the different beams that you can use from this instrument. So it’s actually a huge campus around this ring, and one of those beamlines would be used to do the work on the scroll at a certain point. And you can tune what that beam is going to be in terms of the intensity of the beam and the energy that it has, all of the things that you think are needed in the characteristics to be able to elicit what you want from the scan. Way more controllability than something that you can take to the library.

Nick Tawil
So you have a lot of control.

Brent Seales
So what it created, though, was this problem of: now I have to take the material to this facility, and I have to guarantee the custodial holder, the people who own the scroll, the institution, that that’s going to be okay, that the scroll will be cared for, it won’t be damaged. So there was a time period where we had to shift to be able to use the synchrotron, but we hadn’t convinced anyone who actually had a Herculaneum scroll that we could do that. So you can imagine kind of going a little bit nuts, knowing that we could get better data, but we have to be able to convince the institution to let us do this thing. Once you get the scroll into the beam at the synchrotron, at that point, it’s really all about how do you capture the best possible scan, how do you optimize over a bunch of different parameters.

Nick Tawil
Which was a learning process.

Brent Seales
Which was a learning process. And the first time that we did it, we got what we got, and eventually we converged on a way of capturing the [unclear].

Nick Tawil
How much does this cost?

Brent Seales
The synchrotron cost, if you’re not being gifted the time, and typically we weren’t being gifted the time, would be $10,000 per shift, where a shift is eight hours. So, you know, a thousand, $1,500 an hour, and add inflation to that over the last two decades, and imagine how much.

Nick Tawil
And it’s the first time you’re doing it. You’re definitely going to have to learn off of that.

Brent Seales
Yeah, sure. And you’re not able to do the scan all in one go. So typically we do what’s called grid scans. You do a small section of the scroll, and then another adjacent small section, and then another adjacent small section, and you do these sections individually and then have to assemble the whole thing. So it’s its own thing to just capture the data and then manage the sizes and...

Nick Tawil
And not ruin the artifact.

Brent Seales
And not ruin the artifact. In a way, we were lucky, because these artifacts are completely inanimate. They’re completely desiccated, and they’re basically carbon, and you almost can’t do anything to carbon with X-ray. It just goes through.

But it’s also the worst case for solving the problem that we want to solve, because the X-ray doesn’t show the ink very well, or at all. There was a period of time, I don’t know if you know this, Nick, that people told me we would never be able to solve this problem, because it would be impossible to see...

Nick Tawil
Who told you that?

Brent Seales
Colleagues.

Nick Tawil
You don’t have to say their name.

Brent Seales
High level other professors, who felt like I was the guy tilting at the windmill, and they tried to sit me down and say, “You know that you’re never going to be able to see the ink using tomography. Carbon is invisible. You won’t be able to see the ink on top of this other surface.” And we refused to believe that, because we felt like there would be evidence. We just didn’t know how to tease it out.

And the two miraculous things that occurred that let us tease that out in a pretty non-obvious way: the synchrotron first. Super high resolution, so you can see the effects at a microscopic level.

Nick Tawil
How microscopic? Down to what?

Brent Seales
Well, a couple microns. A micron is one one-thousandth of a millimeter. So at one micron, you have a thousand slices in the space of one millimeter. That’s tiny.

Nick Tawil
So the two miracles that happened...

Brent Seales
The second miracle was AI, machine learning, because the evidence that is there is subtle. And so you need a tool that lets you amplify that evidence, embedded with so many other signals, because there’s a lot going on inside the scroll at that scale. There are fibers going everywhere, and there’s damage from the carbonization itself, and there are rips and tears and folds. And then somewhere, you know, the ink is actually on the surface of this ancient paper, which is not like normal paper. It’s not a composite that’s really uniform. It’s fibrous everywhere.

And so you have this really weak signal, and you have a pretty diminished modality, which is this X-ray modality. You would love to have visible light, but you can’t. And then along comes this incredibly sophisticated and powerful tool of machine learning that lets you find needles in haystacks, and boom.

Nick Tawil
And this is where actually the human comes in, too, because now you’re focusing AI engineers onto this problem, the Vesuvius Challenge. What are some of the obstacles that they had to overcome?

Brent Seales
Well, we had this huge labeling problem.

Nick Tawil
Labeling what?

Brent Seales
To break through... you couldn’t see the ink in the scans that we were getting with the naked eye, easily or at all. But when we trained the AI based on ink we knew was there... and we did that by using open fragments that had writing visible on the open layer. And then we would scan those with the same tomography, and then we knew where the ink was. We would label it “ink,” “no ink.” And then we could see that the machine learning would learn the evidence of the ink, even though we couldn’t see the ink with the naked eye in the scan. So all of that was scientific control, to be able to prove to ourselves there is evidence of the ink. The AI is learning it, the machine learning is learning it, but we have to label it for it to learn.

Well, how do you label the ink in a completely closed scroll? This was where the competitors gave us a huge boost, because now we have 2,000 people working on this problem, and they’re trying to create labels. And what they would do is they would run a fairly diminished machine learning effort on an open section of the scroll, virtually opened, and they’d see a response, some letters coming out of the mist, and then they would relabel. And iteratively, as more text gets exposed, they get more labels. Now amplify that across the 2,000 competitors...

Nick Tawil
24/7.

Brent Seales
With people sharing stuff, because we did inspire sharing through progress prizes. And so now you have the acceleration that we hoped we would get. The techniques weren’t substantially different than what we had already been doing, but the scale of what was happening, and iterations in terms of innovations were happening too, for sure. People were building tools that were helping. And so then eventually you’re solving this bootstrap problem by doing this kind of one-way ratchet, everything sort of getting better slowly.

And by the end of that year, I think it was 2023, maybe, we were headed toward the final submissions of the Grand Prize. Things were just accelerating like crazy. I mean, people sharing, and text obviously being detected from inside the scroll was very exciting.

Nick Tawil
And that’s when we got wind of it. And so at that point, you have something digitally unwrapped, then passed off to the papyrologists. And that’s a whole flow of work.

Brent Seales
Yeah. And we’re trying to improve that, actually, because it’s not really a one-way street at that point. Papyrologists just have a lot of insight into what looks legitimate and what might be an artifact. An artifact, for example, or even a mistake, might be what we call a sheet switch, where the virtual unwrapping actually gets off of the layer that it’s on and it descends to a lower layer. And the text, if you can read it, is going to tell you that that happened.

Nick Tawil
There’s, like, a break in the narrative.

Brent Seales
There’s a break in the narrative if you’re reading the words, or you can see sort of an obvious artifact that’s not going to be in a normal open scroll. And so we can actually go back and fix those things if they’ve happened. And usually the papyrologists are the ones who pick it up.

Nick Tawil
Oh, wow. So they’re actually involved pretty early on in the process. They’re not just waiting for you to hand them something.

Brent Seales
That’s right.

Nick Tawil
Cool. And then could you tell me a little bit about the scroll En-Gedi?

Brent Seales
Yeah. Before we were making such good progress with Herculaneum, this scroll from En-Gedi came to us through the Israel Antiquities Authority, and in particular the director at the IAA, who at the time was Pnina Shor. She’d heard of our work... we didn’t even know that this was happening, but she’d heard of our work and had found in their collection a scroll from En-Gedi that had been looked at by a number of professors, but no progress could be made because it was too badly damaged, and no one wanted to take on the formidable task of trying to open this little scroll physically, because it just looked like it was in pretty bad shape.

So she’d gotten that scroll back into the collection and then made a scan of it, and she used a bench source, not a synchrotron. And then she gave us the data and said, “Give it a try. We can’t do anything with this, and we can’t see any obvious writing, but I’ve read your work and maybe something can happen here.”

So it didn’t take us long, because this scroll was actually the perfect candidate for the moment in the development of our technology. It was animal skin and not papyrus, so in that way, it was less challenging. And then, as we did the virtual unwrapping, we found out that the ink... it must have been some kind of metallic ink, because the density of the ink in the X-ray was different from the density of the animal skin. So we weren’t looking at the same kind of really, really subtle effects of Herculaneum, where there’s no density difference at all. I mean, it showed up. The ink showed up in the En-Gedi scroll as a very bright signal sitting on top of this damaged animal skin, and boom, the text just appeared.

Nick Tawil
And what did it say?

Brent Seales
Well, that...

Nick Tawil
This text that had never been previously seen before, even by the owners of it.

Brent Seales
The scroll still remains wrapped up. It’s never been opened. But we could read everything inside because of these effects, using virtual unwrapping. And what we found is that it was a Torah scroll. It was the first remnants of the first two chapters of the Book of Leviticus from the Old Testament.

Nick Tawil
Wow. So how old was the scroll that you were given? How old was that expected to be, versus the text you found on the scroll? Is that the right question to ask? Like, “We don’t know what this is. We think it’s this old.” And then you find this. What does that change?

Brent Seales
The text definitely helped to date the scroll. They had carbon-dating evidence that put the scroll second, third century. But it had been found at an archaeological site that was Byzantine, so a couple hundred years later. So those results didn’t make perfect sense. There was disparity between the carbon dating and the archaeological evidence, which... they knew this site is Byzantine, so it’s probably fourth or fifth century. Once we read the text, it made more sense, because they could see the writing. So paleography, which is the analysis of the handwriting, dated it to an earlier era. So it was probably a scroll that they’d had in their collection at this synagogue for a hundred or a couple hundred years.

And as such, it was probably sacred. Something likely catastrophic occurred at that archaeological site, because normally none of the remnants would be in the Holy Ark. I think it was tradition that, the genizah, you would dispose of these artifacts, because they’re holy. And you wouldn’t just bury them or leave them partially burned for others to have. So this was the first time in a synagogue that they had ever discovered Torah. And it also became known as one of the oldest copies of the first two chapters of Leviticus.

And from the text, the scholars were able to tell that it was the canonical version, the Masoretic Text. And it’s a really early example of that settled text, so hadn’t changed. So, pushed the date for the settled Masoretic Text way back. They do have examples in the Dead Sea Scrolls collection itself of variations from the settled text, but this one was dead on the settled text of Leviticus. Pretty exciting.

Nick Tawil
Well, as we talk about this era, and we think about the papyri at Herculaneum, we know that the eruption happened in AD 79, but the scrolls in this villa could be much, much older. Because it was... I don’t know, you tell me, is it the sort of melting pot of a library that was collecting wisdom and scrolls from just around antiquity at the time? Give me a sense for what you would hope to find, or what a historian would hope to find and hope to see, in the remainder of the library.

Brent Seales
I think that the library probably was a place where they had an archive, so they had older texts. Typically, the way I understand it is that resident philosophers would write new works, but they would premise those new works on an archive of other works, often quoting them, extending the arguments in the earlier works, debating with each other, and then writing. So I think it’s very likely that there was an archive of much older works. And if that’s true and we discover those works, you could have literally anything.

It was a Roman villa, so it’s a little mysterious that there’s so much Greek and not as much Latin. So a lot of people have postulated that that’s just an archaeological feature, that it hasn’t been fully excavated. If we were to excavate it, because it’s a Roman villa, we would find much more of the Latin work. And I mean, that opens up all kinds of possibilities. We know of so many things that have been lost from the ancient world.

Nick Tawil
Let’s speculate. Let’s start speculating. I’m not going to hold you to anything, but I want to know.

Brent Seales
Livy’s History of Rome, for example. This would be for Alex Petkas, right? Because he knows everything that’s lost and found.

Nick Tawil
Cost of Glory great podcast.

Brent Seales
Yeah, exactly. Incredible. And then you have all of the literary and philosophical traditions of the Greek schools, so there could be much more of that. It’s thought that this particular philosopher, since we have Philodemus, was primarily an Epicurean. And there were also the Stoics. They argued with each other, and other schools.

If you ask me what I wish we could find, because the first century was such an amazing point in human history, I’d like to find early gospel material. Anything Christian at Herculaneum would instantly become the oldest witness that we have to early New Testament Christianity. I mean, even the fragmentary stuff from the New Testament is second century, for the most part. We have almost nothing from the first century, symbols only. But we know that this is Rome’s backyard. And we know the Apostle Paul was flitting around the world writing letters to the churches, which became part of the New Testament. So you have more than just the synoptic Gospels, which of course would be amazing. I mean, AD 79, right? This is just shortly after the life of Christ. So if there were writings that documented anything about his life that didn’t make it into the synoptic Gospels, those writings could potentially be in a library like this.

In, you know, the recent results corner of the library. I mean, most people who are academics and scholars would argue that it’s far-flung to think about anything that’s really gospel-y, because these libraries facilitated the ancient philosophies, and Christianity was new and hadn’t really taken hold. And I get that, nascent things at that time hadn’t made their way into the canon, the library, the archive.

But on the other hand, it’s fun to think about what could be there. The lost books of the History of Rome by Livy would give us a window into so many other events that would be better than just a philosophical tome. So rather than somebody talking about what it means to live a pleasurable life like an Epicurean, you could have somebody telling you about all of the events that happened as Rome rose and fell, and imagine how that would be. I think the historians would want history books, the philosophers want philosophy books, and the Christians want Christian books.

Nick Tawil
That’s great. Well, here’s to discovering new human knowledge. Thank you, Brent, for your time.

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Sunday, 6 September

Two thoughts from Denzel Washington

“I say luck is when an opportunity comes along and you’re prepared for it.”

“Nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.”

Monday, 7 September

Two thoughts from Herman Kahn

“Risk-taking is the essence of innovation.”

“I’m against ignorance. I’m against sloppy, emotional thinking. I’m against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment.”

Tuesday, 8 September

Two thoughts from Ram Dass

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.”

“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”

Wednesday, 9 September

Two thoughts from Immanuel Kant

“I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”

“Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding — that is the motto of the Enlightenment.”

Thursday, 10 September

Two thoughts from James Madison

“The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.”

“The truth was that all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”

Friday, 11 September

Two thoughts from Euripides

“The wisest men follow their own direction And listen to no prophet guiding them. None but the fools believe in oracles, Forsaking their own judgment.”

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”

Saturday, 12 September

Two thoughts from Paul Simon

“All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school; It’s a wonder I can think at all.”

Follow Jim on Twitter for a daily dose of Two Thoughts!

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This week: things reveal another layer when you look closer. An AI town that starts developing a social life, Star Wars with the mythology stripped away, words for feelings that were already there, the classical music inside Billy Joel, and movie theaters that turn out to be community infrastructure.

1. Smallville: What Happens When 25 AI Agents Live Together

I’m three years late, but the “Smallville paper” is incredibly cool.

In 2023, researchers from Stanford and Google published “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior.” The paper describes fusing large language models with interactive agents to produce believable simulations of human behavior.

These ‘generative agents’ are designed to behave like believable people, drawing on ideas from cognitive science. The architecture has three main pieces: a memory stream that stores each agent’s experiences, a system of reflection that synthesizes those memories into higher-level conclusions, and a planning module that uses all this information to decide what to do in the current environment.

And to visualize it all, they put 25 of these agents in a small 2D sandbox environment, inspired by games like The Sims. They named this tiny town “Smallville.” Give one resident the idea of throwing a Valentine’s Day party, and the news starts spreading: agents invite each other, make new acquaintances, ask each other on dates, and eventually coordinate to show up at the party. Incredible.

As GPT-6 launched on September 3, my timeline was filled with people building all sorts of interesting toy prototypes in Blender and other game engines. I was reminded of this paper and finally read through it all.

The footnotes are the best part. The researchers cite everything that shaped the work: prior simulations, human psychology, game theory. I’m putting aside a few weekends to go through it all, starting with the talks of Will Wright, the creator of The Sims.

Joon Sung Park, the lead author, now runs Simile, a startup based on these ideas, where companies can use simulated environments to ‘rehearse earnings calls, model litigation outcomes, and test policy changes’.

Fun fact: Park and his team clearly respect the lineage of thinkers around simulations. The company meeting rooms are named after people like Jean Baudrillard, Will Wright, John Conway, Robert Axtell, the Wachowskis, Allen Newell, Sid Meier, Vernor Vinge, and Thomas Schelling. [Rohan]

• 📄 Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior by Joon Sung Park, Joseph C. O’Brien, Carrie J. Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang and Michael S. Bernstein

2. Andor : Star Wars Without Jedi or Chosen Ones

If you’ve been a Star Wars fan for a long time, you have a complicated relationship with everything that came after the original trilogy. Could anything match it? Why spoil a perfect thing by demanding more of it? And honest to goodness, what could they possibly have been thinking with Jar Jar Binks?

Which is why I make this recommendation gingerly, with all the usual caveats and asterisks attached. It’s Disney. It’s a series. It will never be Return of the Jedi. And Andor is exceptional.

It’s the best thing to come out of the post-trilogy profusion of content, and by a long shot. Diego Luna is terrific as Cassian, a thief and a cynic who has no interest in a rebellion until the Empire leaves him nowhere else to stand. Stellan Skarsgård plays the man who recruits him, and their scenes together are the best writing in modern Star Wars. The relationships are complicated and rich. The drama is riveting. It doesn’t have the sealed-off, virtual-set feeling of some recent Star Wars. Tony Gilroy, one of the main writers behind the original Bourne trilogy, leaned heavily on enormous practical sets and real locations, and you can feel the difference in every frame.

It’s understated and dark in a way that echoes the best of the original trilogy, without trying to recreate it. There are no Jedi here, no chosen ones, no prophecy. Just people deciding, one at a time, that they’ve had enough. [Jimmy]

• 📺 Andor (Disney+, 2022-2025)

3. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows : How Do You Invent Words?

I first came across the word ‘sonder’ when I was starting to dabble in spoken word. It refers to the realization that every passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as ours. It was a beautiful thought and I’d had it so many times but no word to express it. After that, I somehow found fellow bloggers adopting unheard-of names like ‘avenoir’ (the desire that memory could flow backward) and ‘kenopsia’ (the eeriness of a now-empty place that used to be bustling). The words had spread and how.

My favorites are chrysalism, the tranquillity of being indoors during storms, and ellipsism, the sadness of never knowing how history turns out. The idea of allocating words to feelings is fascinating. John Koenig, a college student at Macalester, started doing it when he was trying to write poetry and found the language lacking in the feelings he wanted to express. It was then that he came up with The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It started as a blog, graduated to a YouTube channel and became a book in 2021. What can you say, poets are inventors!

Many of these words borrow from Latin, Germanic, and Greek origins so they sound like words that actually existed but were somehow forgotten. I found vemödalen pretty interesting. The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. Remember the countless sunset pictures we click on every vacation? I like how these new words evoke unknown sensations in us and sharpen the feelings we always had but couldn’t name. Sonder alone has been borrowed by a bike brand, a therapy company, a video game and a few albums. So, yes, words are literally for sale! But they do something far more important, they make versions of loneliness and awe feel collectively understood. [Aashisha]

• 📘 The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

4. Billy Joel: There’s More Than ‘Piano Man’

Until recently, I knew very little about Billy Joel or his music. I watched his interview with Rick Beato because I like how Beato gets musicians talking about their craft, and Joel was interesting enough that I then watched HBO’s two-part documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes.

Music was his escape from a life he didn’t want. He decided fairly young that music was going to be his life, and he threw everything into it, sticking with it through years of little reward.

Knowing little about his music except ‘Piano Man’ going in, I was surprised by the variety of styles and genres he explored. They’re very different artists, but that variety reminds me a little of David Bowie. You could never be sure what the next album would sound like.

His classical music roots come out everywhere once you know what to listen for. At one point, he plays “Uptown Girl” at the piano as if it were a Mozart piece and points out Tchaikovsky and Beethoven melodies in his work. But unlike most classical musicians, he learns classical pieces by ear.

His personal life is complicated enough to fill another documentary, and we learn how autobiographical many of his songs are. His ex-wives are there to tell their side, including Elizabeth Weber, who also managed his early career. I was interested in how often he seemed to get his life together and then run into trouble again, with self-destructive phases and relationship troubles. He had worked so hard to become a successful musician, but fame brought its own problems. Careful what you wish for…

The documentary sent me to The Stranger to start exploring his albums, and I’ve added a dozen of his songs to our family playlist. [Liberty]

• 📺 Billy Joel: And So It Goes (HBO, 2025)

5. The Last Picture Shows : The Theaters That Refuse to Go Dark

You’ve heard of food deserts. Rustin Thompson’s new documentary introduces a term that might haunt you longer: cinema deserts — vast stretches of the American West where the nearest movie theater is fifty miles away, if it exists at all. Thompson, a Seattle-based filmmaker and National Emmy winner, drove 10,825 miles across ten states and visited 123 theaters to find out what’s left of small-town cinema in America. He shot, wrote, edited, and directed the film almost entirely alone — just a camera, a tripod, a shotgun mic, and a slider. No crew. No lights. No lavalier mics. It’s filmmaking as lean as the towns he’s documenting, and the intimacy shows in every frame. It’s a technical approach that more filmmakers should embrace.

What he found was a complicated narrative. Some theaters are abandoned, their marquees dark and their lobbies exposed to the elements. Others are barely hanging on — one owner profiled in the film has lost more than $100,000 two years running. He keeps projecting anyway. But the most compelling stories belong to the theater operators who have reinvented their spaces as nonprofits, turning movie houses into community centers that host live music, graduation ceremonies, Met Opera broadcasts, and yes, still films. Thompson originally intended the film to be a black-and-white elegy in the spirit of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 The Last Picture Show, whose clips he weaves throughout. But meeting the owners changed the tone. They were, as the New York Times put it in naming the film a Critics Pick, “a feisty bunch” — willing to name the studios that bully them (A24 and Disney among the worst offenders, threatening to cut off film access for months if a small theater dares to break from their schedule) while still showing up every night to keep the projector running.

There is something about a glowing marquee on a dark Main Street, framed against a western sky, that makes you want to buy a ticket to whatever’s playing. Find a movie house playing it while you can. Bonus if you can drive there. [Taylor]

• 🎬 The Last Picture Shows (directed by Rustin Thompson, 2026)

⭐ Explore the OSV Field Notes Archive ⭐

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We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

Links

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Show Notes

Ryan Resch & Jimmy Soni

• Ryan Resch on LinkedIn: Former Suns Assistant GM and VP of Basketball Operations, now leading data and AI at 1949 Capital Partners. Connect with Ryan

• Beyond the Dashboard: Ryan’s Harvard Business School interview with Boris Groysberg on optical tracking, dashboards, and AI. Read the interview

• Shore Capital Partners: The private equity firm founded by Justin Ishbia, where Ryan helped roll out AI tools. Shore Capital Partners

• Jimmy Soni on X: Guest host, bestselling author, and editor-in-chief of Infinite Books. Connect with Jimmy

Teams, Leaders & Data Discussed

• James Jones: The 2020-21 NBA Executive of the Year, whose Suns rebuild started with raising the floor. Executive of the Year

• Scott Drew: The Baylor head coach who answered Ryan’s cold email and later had him build lineup data. Scott Drew at Baylor

• SportVU: The camera system that brought optical tracking to every NBA arena in 2013-14. SportVU and the NBA

• Second Spectrum: The machine learning platform that turned tracking data into tagged plays and dashboards teams across the league use. Second Spectrum and the NBA

• Hawk-Eye: Sony’s 3D tracking system, used across the NBA since 2023-24. Hawk-Eye and the NBA

Books, Shows & AI Tools Mentioned

• Moneyball by Michael Lewis: The 2003 book on the Oakland A’s that frames how analytics moved from baseball into basketball. Moneyball

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons: The first book in the sci-fi series Ryan is reading, and a window into how earlier writers imagined AI. Hyperion

• The Founders by Jimmy Soni: Jimmy’s history of PayPal and Silicon Valley, which Ryan handed out at the Suns. The Founders

• TBPN and Dwarkesh Podcast: Two of the tech shows Ryan wishes he had more hours for. TBPN | Dwarkesh Podcast

• Claude Code and Codex: The coding agents Ryan uses in a workspace built for agents to read. Claude Code | Codex

Highlights

When Does Peanut Butter Become a Meal?

Ryan Resch
I got in trouble by the NCAA for buying honey roasted peanut butter.

Jimmy Soni
What?

Ryan Resch
Because I had no idea. So the NCAA was extremely strict pre NIL. And the meals, what classified as a meal, was extremely strict as well. And so we could not provide food under certain conditions to guys because then it would be considered a meal. If they get a meal, it’s an impermissible benefit.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
Oh, it was a whole bureaucracy. I mean, it still is a bureaucracy.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
But on a different level. And so, look, according to Baylor compliance, adding honey to peanut butter made it a meal at that time.

Jimmy Soni
Adding honey to peanut butter that a player was going to eat...

Ryan Resch
Yes.

Jimmy Soni
Made what you did impermissible.

Ryan Resch
Yes.

Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow.

Ryan Resch
It’s absurd. Absolutely crazy.

Jimmy Soni
That is bananas.

Ryan Resch
It is. And you talk about, you know, you go back to your previous question about data and logic entering sport, the human component. The bureaucracy of it all is what removes the human component. Whereas the player needs this. Not like, let’s put aside the fact that people just love peanut butter. Like, it’s amazing and I can’t have it in the house. Players need this to recover. They need the sugar, they need the protein, they need the fat. Right? So you are instead focused on this arbitrary definition of impermissible benefit instead of what’s best for the players.

Jimmy Soni
Right. That’s right.

Ryan Resch
Yeah. I think that’s what’s actually removing it.

The Coaches Take the Blame

Jimmy Soni
Oh, okay. You know, during your tenure, they were really starting their climb. So what did you see in that culture? Like, what was it that made Baylor stand out from other comparable programs?

Ryan Resch
I will say one of the things that I understand now that I did not understand then was the coaches always shouldering the blame for the players. Always. And behind closed doors, you know, publicly as well, that one’s more obvious. Like, a lot of coaches do that. But even behind closed doors, a lot of the conversations would center around, okay, if this player is turning the ball over, how do we teach them not to do that? How do we put them in a position not to do that? And I think that’s notable because obviously sport is extremely emotional.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
It is very volatile. You’re going to lose three games in a row at some point.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And you have to really have this stability in order to ride that. And the easy thing to do there is to get all pissed off and start blaming the players. Say that you need better players, you need more talent, whatever. And maybe that is objectively true. If you are going up against a Duke that has the top five guys in the class, like, whatever, like, you still need to figure out how to beat them. But to see a coaching staff led by Scott Drew, Jerome Tang, a lot of the folks that are still there, shoulder that blame. And then they would always tell them, they would tell me, they would be like, “It’s our fault.”

Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow.

Ryan Resch
And I would say, “I don’t understand this. We’re not the ones turning the ball over.” Because I was so, like, petulant. And then I get it now, like, having gone through everything that I went through at the Suns and everything that’s come after. Like, I understand now that when you ask about the culture of that space, you need to create a teaching culture, like an actual learning culture, where somebody can make a mistake, like turning the ball over or missing a shot, and then know that it’s not going to result in punishment, it’s going to result in a lesson. Maybe that lesson is hard, right? It’s tough love. But there is going to be a lesson involved in it.

Edited Transcript

Jimmy Soni
Welcome to Infinite Loops. My name is Jimmy Soni. I am the editor in chief of Infinite Books and I am guest hosting for Jim O’Shaughnessy. My guest today is Ryan Resch. Ryan spent nearly a decade with the Phoenix Suns, where he started as an intern and left as the assistant general manager and VP of basketball operations, running everything from roster strategy and data science to scouting and health and performance and everything in between. Ryan Resch, welcome to Infinite Loops.

Ryan Resch
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jimmy Soni
Of course. So, just so listeners have a bit of context and background, you and I have been friends for a number of years, but when I met you, you were the vice president of basketball operations for the Phoenix Suns, the assistant general manager, and you reported directly to the head of the Phoenix Suns. And you kind of gave me and a number of other people we were with a behind the scenes view of the Suns organization and how it operates. But just so people listening have context: first of all, you were in an NBA front office at, like, a ridiculously young age. You were chief of staff to the head of the organization when the Suns went to the Finals and when they won 64 games.

Ryan Resch
Franchise record.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And then you become this kind of, you’re like one of the go to people on sports and data and where they intersect, and now sports data and AI and where they intersect. And right now you are at 1949 Capital Partners and you’re leading the firm’s work on data and AI. So the thing that interests me most, I mean, among other things, is, you know, you’re not six foot four, right? So walk us through kind of like your early life. You were a military brat. But I want to go from, to, before you get to the NBA, let’s figure out how you got to the NBA. So you started out in life and you’re a military brat, you’re moving around a lot. So walk us through: where’d you grow up? How’d you live?

Ryan Resch
Son of two Air Force parents. We lived in seven places before the age of 18 years old.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
Which I always kind of surprise myself when I say that. So, born in New Jersey, lived on effectively every coast. Went to high school in Germany. So I went overseas for high school. It was a military base, on Ramstein Air Base. So still kind of an American experience there, but we did live in a German village. And so it was, you know, a bit of an international time. Came back and moved to Texas to go to Baylor University, where I had family in Texas, in Florida, from my parents’ sides. And Baylor was the first school to accept me. And I’m not the most patient person. And so the fact that they did accept me so quickly did help while I was waiting on other schools. Did enough research into Baylor, their political science program, which was my first, I would say, passion and first love growing up, was political science. Probably from being around the Air Force and the military and learning that side of it. And enrolled in the... would that have been the fall of 2010?

Jimmy Soni
Got it.

Ryan Resch
And I was a campus tour guide my sophomore year. I’m still very good at walking backward and talking. And I had this weird desire to go into sports journalism, which I don’t...

Jimmy Soni
Were you a sports fan growing up?

Ryan Resch
I was a huge NFL fan and I was a big basketball fan.

Jimmy Soni
Okay.

Ryan Resch
But it’s hard when you’re a military kid because you don’t really have a home. So whenever I’m asked, “Oh, where are you from?” I have to give this whole long explanation around it. And when you don’t have, like, a hometown, it’s hard to really pinpoint what you’re a fan of. And I got into basketball when we lived in Florida. So I became a Miami Heat fan at the time, right around when Dwyane Wade was drafted, which was then ironic, that my future boss, James Jones, was on those Miami Heat championship teams. And my dad was a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan growing up. So I grew up as a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan and I loved watching sport. I loved the competition of it, the game of it. And I had no, as you mentioned, I’m not six four. And so I had no... I’m deeply... I have no coordination, no hand...

Jimmy Soni
To be clear, Muggsy Bogues, like, broke the mold, right? Like, when I was growing up, because I was short and I loved basketball, so in the brief period in which I held these, you know, dashed dreams of becoming a basketball player, I would just turn to Muggsy Bogues. Like, Muggsy made it work.

Ryan Resch
There you go. That’s all you need. You just need determination and grit and hope that your jump shot... And I, for a very short period, decided to double major in journalism, which I quit. And then decided one day, it’s like, I am just going to cold email Scott Drew, who is the head coach of Baylor men’s basketball still to this day. And testament to him that he responded right away. So right after my summer, after my sophomore year, I sent a cold email to Scott, said, “I respect your program. I admire what you’re building. If there’s ever anything I can do to help, let me know.” And he replied that same day, if I’m remembering correctly. And he said, “Come be a student manager.”

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
And I said yes. I had no idea what it meant.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And I show up maybe two or three days later, and I am an equipment manager, folding towels and doing laundry for Baylor men’s basketball.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
And it’s very... they just throw you right in. And so you’re in the locker room, like, getting everything ready for the guys before practice, after practice, for games. You’re on the court helping, you know, rebound and pass balls and those kinds of things. I was so bad at passing a basketball. When I threw, it was so bad that Scott Drew called me into his office. He probably remembers this. And he taught me how to throw a chest pass with spin on it. Like, how embarrassing is that?

Jimmy Soni
So just so I have this clear. So you were, you’re there and you’re passing basketballs. Did the players say something? Did they know something? Or he just installed...

Ryan Resch
How bad... Coach Drew. Okay, this is Coach Drew. This is why he’s a national championship coach. Because he sees these things and he fixes them.

Jimmy Soni
Right. Even in his student manager.

Ryan Resch
Exactly. Exactly. And that, I think it says a lot about him, but it also says, I guess it’s like an early lesson...

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Like the nature of detail.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Sport and winning, these things. Because if you throw a knuckleball, if you throw a ball without any spin, you can break someone’s finger.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And jam their finger. Right? God forbid it’s on a shooting hand.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Wait, is that true? Sorry, is that true in... So you’re saying in basket... Knuckleballs are a baseball term, right?

Ryan Resch
But it is, yeah. So a ball with no spin.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
So I wasn’t putting any spin on my chest pass. I was just literally chucking the ball. I was accurate. Like, accuracy was not the issue. This is actually getting spin and rotation on the ball, which the best shooters can tell you about, because you have to put backspin on the ball in order to actually guide it to the target that you’re launching. Don’t ask me about shooting. I’m not...

Jimmy Soni
Not the expert. Okay, so just out of curiosity, if we take a step back in the story... I mean, I want to go a bunch of different places, but let’s talk about living in seven different places before the age of 18. Right. Because that is not an experience that I had. I’m assuming actually most listeners are pretty geographically... As a kid, you know, your parents do tend to want to stay in one place by design. Your parents can’t, right? So what was it like being the new kid all the time? Right. Like, was that... I mean, I’m sure this shaped your life. I’m asking, how did it shape your life?

Ryan Resch
Yeah. I think the most obvious is what I’ve already mentioned, where you don’t have a sense of home in the traditional way that people think about that. Where I’m just now learning, so we still have a house in Phoenix. Love Phoenix. Very actually attached to that house. And that is the first kind of time that I’ve felt that I can call a place home.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And that has been a very kind of transformative experience for me. The other aspects of it, you become very adaptable and you become very malleable. You could enter any space and be comfortable. I’m also an only child, so I have no brothers or sisters. This was just me and my parents running around the country and then over to Germany. And you’re able to talk to people and you’re able to introduce yourself, maybe not so comfortably when you’re 12.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
But you know, you start, you get reps at it.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
I think probably the more important thing is I was forced into situations where I had to get reps at introducing myself and telling people and showing people who I am, as I’m also trying to figure that out throughout the rest of my life.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Or growing up, rather. And it does leave you with kind of a few things. One of them is I’m always moving. Like, not moving homes necessarily now, but I am always constantly in a new place. So it’s very hard for me to stay still.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
This is why sports was so good for me. Because you’re on two week east coast road trips and you’re playing in Toronto and then tomorrow you have a game in Philly and you’re just kind of moving around a lot. And then it also leaves you just with this sense of confidence, if you’re kind of maturing into that space, where you can just enter spaces.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And be okay.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
In a way that maybe somebody who hasn’t had that experience just needs more reps at it.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah. So this ties to my next question, which connects to the time with Baylor and with Coach Drew. You know, there are a lot of people who watch sports as casual fans or as kids kind of admiring athletes from afar, and there’s a certain impenetrability to the world of sports. You think, well, if I don’t have that level of talent, there’s no way for me to get involved in sports. Right. And so for you, you do this extraordinary thing, which is, like, as a sophomore, you take a gig that puts you at the very, very bottom rung of the organization. When you sent that email, like, if you can think back that far, that’s a pretty extraordinary... Like, I’ll give you an example. I’m suddenly sitting here so jealous that you did that. Because I went to Duke and basketball’s a religion.

Ryan Resch
They have a whole manager program.

Jimmy Soni
And I would have been like, I would have been applying if I had known that was even a possibility. Right. But I never knew it was a possibility. And so my question is, how did you... Was it in that moment, was it a desire to be closer to sports, or was it just kind of on a whim? Like, what motivates you to do that? Because it really does shape the rest of your trajectory.

Ryan Resch
It did. I think it’s all of those things that you’re saying. The idea came to me because my boss, actually, at the campus tour guide center...

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
She had a Baylor basketball poster on her wall in her office, and we would always talk about the games and Baylor basketball. It’s an excellent program. We’re still excellent. And this was kind of the first period of, like, Scott Drew’s excellence was those, like, 2010 to 2014, really.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
When I was there.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Those years. And so we...

Jimmy Soni
That was a nice subtle wave. And, like, you know, I might have had something to do...

Ryan Resch
Well, they won the National...

Jimmy Soni
Once I fixed those passes I was passing back to the players, everything got better.

Ryan Resch
And she, we would just talk about it so much, and I think I maybe just said offhand, like, “I wonder how you even begin to get involved in that.”

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And she was like, “Just email Scott Drew,” or something like that.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And this was, it’s so commonplace now. If you want to reach someone, it’s their company name, their first initial, last name, or their first name@company name.com, or whatever it is. I think that was still a bit of a foreign concept back in, whatever it was, 2012.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And so I was probably very nervous to send it.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
But it also, like you said, it sparked all of this. And it’s why I have this rule that if someone reaches out to me...

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And wants advice on how to get into sport, then I will at least talk to them one time so that we can go through this process of, hey, you’re in college, you want to figure out how to do this. You need to find the director of basketball operations for your team, send them an email saying that you want to be a student manager and ask if they have that program. And the reason I do that is because I didn’t have that guidance. I did it. And it’s cool now because there’s actually a few people around the league that were undergrads that reached out, that became managers at Tennessee and other schools that are now in the NBA.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
Because of it. But I think I’m a bit of a venturer now, is how I can describe it. And in order to do that well, you just have to have the agency to send the email. Right? Just send the email. If they don’t respond, everything’s okay.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Find the next thing.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And then keep going.

Jimmy Soni
That’s great. Okay, so you did mention this, but Baylor was a serious, and it’s still a serious program. I mean, you went to the, I think it was a 2021 championship, right?

Ryan Resch
Yes, it was Covid. It was the Covid tournament. Because I did not get to go, unfortunately.

Jimmy Soni
Oh, okay. You know, during your tenure, they were really starting their climb. So what did you see in that culture? Like, what was it that made Baylor stand out from other comparable programs?

Ryan Resch
I will say one of the things that I understand now that I did not understand then was the coaches always shouldering the blame for the players. Always. And behind closed doors, you know, publicly as well, that one’s more obvious. Like, a lot of coaches do that. But even behind closed doors, a lot of the conversations would center around, okay, if this player is turning the ball over, how do we teach them not to do that? How do we put them in a position not to do that? And I think that’s notable because obviously sport is extremely emotional.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
It is very volatile. You’re going to lose three games in a row at some point.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And you have to really have this stability in order to ride that. And the easy thing to do there is to get all pissed off and start blaming the players. Say that you need better players, you need more talent, whatever. And maybe that is objectively true. If you are going up against a Duke that has the top five guys in the class, like, whatever, like, you still need to figure out how to beat them. But to see a coaching staff led by Scott Drew, Jerome Tang, a lot of the folks that are still there, shoulder that blame. And then they would always tell them, they would tell me, they would be like, “It’s our fault.”

Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow.

Ryan Resch
And I would say, “I don’t understand this. We’re not the ones turning the ball over.” Because I was so, like, petulant. And then I get it now, like, having gone through everything that I went through at the Suns and everything that’s come after. Like, I understand now that when you ask about the culture of that space, you need to create a teaching culture, like an actual learning culture, where somebody can make a mistake, like turning the ball over or missing a shot, and then know that it’s not going to result in punishment, it’s going to result in a lesson. Maybe that lesson is hard, right? It’s tough love. But there is going to be a lesson involved in it.

Jimmy Soni
Can I ask you this? This question is a bit more just personal perspective. But, you know, when you’re a college student, sometimes you have a too healthy sense of your own importance, right? And I’ve got to believe, like, you’re a very smart guy and you’re studying political science, you know, and you’re at Baylor and you have a good head about you, and now you are folding towels, right? Like, how did you put your ego to the side? And was it a rude awakening? Like, you get in, you think student manager is going to do all kinds of interesting things, and now you’re folding towels and you’re learning how to pass better. What was that like? Like, is there a part of this that was just, you already knew what you were getting into, or was it now the proximity of the game was the payoff? Like, it was just you wanted to be a part of this and you figured this was the way to do it.

Ryan Resch
I did not know what I was getting myself into. It’s funny that you asked that, because one of my fondest memories is on Sundays at Baylor, people are at church and Ryan was cleaning the gym. I was cleaning the practice gym. And I loved it because you had to get this big pole out, put towels on it, and, like, drag this pole all the way across the court in order to clean it. And it was just a very cathartic, like, meditative. Meditative, that’s exactly what it was. You would turn on a podcast or music or something, and you would just do it, and then you would clean the gym. And I don’t remember having kind of an adverse reaction to any of it, although I probably did at some point, years, when I was head manager my senior year. Right? Did I act probably some way where it was like, you know, now this is beneath me, the young manager can do it? Probably.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
But what you learn in doing it genuinely, when you are the person putting out the loops that have all of the jerseys and the shorts and the socks and everything on the player’s chair, it’s behind a locked door, so if you’re not doing it, player can’t get dressed, player can’t practice. And so you’re able to actually experience, like, the operational chain of how we go from this nice idea, all right, let’s run a basketball team, to, no, these are all of the dirty steps and the details that it takes to get it done.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And I think that was a huge payoff for me, especially my last year at the Suns when I did run the daily operations of the franchise.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Where it was like, I knew what our equipment manager was going through.

Jimmy Soni
Okay.

Ryan Resch
Where he’s dragging these trunks around constantly, him and his assistant. And how do we lighten that load for those people who are extremely important to get this done.

Jimmy Soni
So at some point during your tenure at Baylor, you become the guy who has the data, who has the numbers. So what’s chapter two? In excruciating detail, describe, like, you know, spare no story there. How do you go from towels to analytics and spreadsheets? And you’re helping the coach think differently about the game. When does that transition start to happen?

Ryan Resch
So I was head manager my senior year, and political science was my passion. Basketball was my hobby. Like, that was kind of the differentiation that I put there. That’s really the only two things I had, outside of friend group, obviously. But we would be at the gym till 3am scouting the next opponent, and, like, at crazy hours.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
Still, even in the NBA, crazy hours. And I graduated, I went to go get a PhD in political science at the University of Missouri. There was a professor there that I wanted to study under for American Political Development. And around, was it my sophomore, it was either my sophomore or my junior year of undergrad, I was introduced to data science and statistics through econometrics and political science. And when I kind of dug deeper into that world, I realized, oh, my brain is actually extremely logical. And, like, coding came naturally to me. Data came naturally to me. I still love theory. I still love philosophy, liberal arts, all of those things, for sure. How do we blend these two things? I go to Mizzou for a year and we’re working on these papers and this research, and I just have this feeling that’s like, this is just not it for me. This is not right for me. Different than when I, you know, quit campus tour guide to go to basketball. This was like, no, this is fundamentally not the place for me.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And I think what I ultimately settled on, which is kind of a principle that I now carry throughout life, is I don’t want to study problems. I want to actually solve the problem. Now that requires you to study them in order to solve them. Yeah, but we’re not going to actually solve it if we are just kind of writing papers and going about our day. I want to actually do. I want to do all that, and then I want to do it to see if we’re right or not about it. And I decided that I was going to leave the program, so I quit. And I did not know what I was going to do. I had absolutely no idea. It is probably the scariest period of my life because I just had no concept of what else I could be doing. Right.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And I happened to go to the Big 12 tournament, which is the conference that Baylor, I think they’re still in.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
I can’t keep up with the conf...

Jimmy Soni
I know. Neither can I. It seems to change on a dime.

Ryan Resch
It’s, yeah, wild. And I went to the Big 12 tournament, spent a few days with the team again and realized, okay, I think I just missed the team environment. So I called Scott Drew again, and he answered again. And I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but do you have any advice for me?” And he was like, “Well, I just got done talking to Tom Izzo at Michigan State,” who’s a good friend of his.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And legendary coach.

Jimmy Soni
Legendary. Yeah.

Ryan Resch
“And he just hired someone to do data science and statistics for them. Can you come do it for me?” I said, “Sure.”

Jimmy Soni
That’s amazing.

Ryan Resch
And that was amazing. Probably a month leading up to... Well, first we had to get me into a grad program because this was very late. It was like April at this time. Thankfully, that all worked out.

Jimmy Soni
And why did you need a new grad program? Because he couldn’t hire you unless you were a student?

Ryan Resch
I was going to be a grad assistant. Yeah. I was going back as a grad assistant.

Jimmy Soni
Got it.

Ryan Resch
So there’s, like, the student manager program for undergrads. There are grad assistants. Typically grad assistants are going to follow the coaching route, although more and more commonly it’s video analytics and whatnot as part of it. And I guess GM now for these colleges. And so I go back to Baylor in, whatever was that, 2015. 2015, spring of 2015. Yeah. And Coach Drew’s like, “I want lineup data.” Okay. And lineup data did not exist at this time. Like, there was no easy accessible, like, public form of lineup data that you could also trust. You know, it was a whole kind of amorphous concept still.

Jimmy Soni
And just for context, like, I remember, I think Moneyball came out in 2003. The movie is like 2011, something like that. So we’re not in the... we’re still, we’re post Moneyball, but we are pre, like, the digitization of everything, sports especially.

Ryan Resch
Probably at that level. And it also started in baseball. So Moneyball is the baseball book, obviously. And then it kind of slowly made its way across football and soccer and, you know, obviously lacrosse and those other ones. And then basketball was also really starting to take off. Daryl Morey popularizes, you know, threes and layups only with Moreyball. And that’s kind of the launching of the analytics movement in the NBA at, like, a popular level.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And Moneyball kind of joins along those lines. So the mid-2010s was, I would say, really where teams and people took it more seriously in basketball.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And so there was just no lineup data for college basketball that we could rely on. And to this day, I don’t know how I had this idea. But in basketball, all sports, you have the play by play.

Jimmy Soni
Yep.

Ryan Resch
That says, okay, you know, your point guard is subbing in, your shooting guard is subbing out. Point guard made a two point shot, assisted by your small forward. Along those lines, in text.

Jimmy Soni
Yes.

Ryan Resch
Pre AI.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah, pre AI.

Ryan Resch
Early days of machine learning and AlexNet and those things. And I scraped those play by plays.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
And from the text, I turned it into a box score and so we could build the... And I’ll never forget this. This all hinged on two things being true. The sub ins, sub outs had to be on the play by play.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Else this wouldn’t work.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And the starters, there had to be a connotation of who started the game.

Jimmy Soni
Huh.

Ryan Resch
So typically that would be the first five players listed. Not always, but thank God there was an asterisk next to the starters.

Jimmy Soni
Just so I have this right, so I’m understanding this correctly. There was no box score data for Baylor or maybe even men’s college basketball at circa whatever year this is, 2015. Nobody is tabulating these and putting them on ESPN. Wow.

Ryan Resch
For individuals, yes. Yeah. Like, you can go to College Basketball Reference, amazing website. They have the individual box scores and whatnot because that comes from the scorer’s table, the statistics from the game. This was, no, okay, now we want to know five man combinations. So for those who don’t know, a lineup would be your point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, center.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Five man combinations. How are they performing together?

Jimmy Soni
Got it.

Ryan Resch
I’m not going to say it’s like a brand new concept. Right. Getting that data at scale so we can have it for Baylor and our opponents.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Was a novel problem to solve.

Jimmy Soni
Okay. So you scrape the data and you build something to scrape the data, and then what happens after that?

Ryan Resch
We converted the text into the box score. Yeah. So point guard made two point shot. That becomes two points, two point field goal attempt, two point field goal make. So each of the little traits that you can, the variables that would make up that action, you can now register and log it in your box score. And then you sum it all up and you aggregate by lineup. And then, you know, I think, and this is what AI I think is teaching so many of us, is once you have the data extracted and structured, you can do so many different cuts of it. And so now we have five man, four man, three man, two man. Like, what about these different combinations of guys? Like, it just kind of exploded in that way. And coach was happy with it and it started just kind of influencing rotations and substitution patterns and those kinds of things.

Jimmy Soni
So, yeah, this is where I want to go a bit deeper. Because, I mean, famously, the scenes in the movie in Moneyball, but then also as described in the book, is there’s a graft versus host problem. Right? Like, you have a person who’s very smart with this kind of stuff and there’s an allergic reaction from people who believe it’s going to sully the sanctity of sport. Right? You’re going to add an impurity, which is like logic and reason, in something that ought to be subject to competition and fate and individual effort and all these other kind of more, call it more ethereal, things. Right? And into that you’re introducing, like, logic and regression analyses and actually looking at data. Did you face any of that when you were starting to pull these things together? Like, were you sheepish? Was the coach resistant? Was there any part of the organization that was like, “Ryan, we love this stuff, but we know how to play the game and you don’t. You couldn’t even throw a pass until he coached you to throw the pass better.”

Ryan Resch
Maybe that’s why it worked. Because this coach knew that I wasn’t trying to front as though I knew how to do these things. I definitely have run into that resistance. Yes. But I’ve also been extremely fortunate that the principals that I have worked for, so Scott Drew, James Jones, these are people who are very rational thinkers to begin with.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And so they want this data, they want this information. And so that helps, number one. But what it does teach you is this incredible lesson of, like, and I think that this is important for data folks and maybe more, like, rationally minded folks, is there is a difference between being effective and being right. And this is something that I had to learn at the Suns. And it came from kind of exactly what you’re describing, which is if sport is this constrained, bounded game that we have all of the rules for, we know exactly how it’s structured, there is a very clear scoring and reward system, we can apply game theory, we can optimize it for strategic and tactical choice. If that’s true, then why are we not doing it, right?

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And the answer in my mind always came back to what I called the communication problem, which is we are fundamentally lacking the ability to communicate why these insights matter to help you make better coaching decisions, or you make better playing decisions, or you make better executive level decisions like who to put on the roster and who to take off.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And I think there are a host of ways to solve that. The language that you choose, the tone in which you speak to people, like the more maybe ephemeral concepts that are qualitative, maybe more quant driven folks don’t naturally move toward. But I think also, and this is where I hope it goes in sport, is team building is a beautiful art and a beautiful science. Like, there’s really a blending of it to do it well. It’s the cultural aspects that you asked about earlier, as well as, if you think about kind of a two by two grid when you’re making team building decisions, whether it’s a roster or your staff, you know, for a job somewhere else, you have to focus on the person and you have to focus on the professional. So instead of person, for sports it’d be a player. So player and professional. You have to focus on the league’s perception, so kind of the in a vacuum perception.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And you have to focus on, for my team, what is that going to be? So this player X might be an excellent three point shooter in the league standards. Absolutely excellent. But they can only get their threes off of very specific actions. Those actions are not good for our team because we don’t have the person to create those actions. And so I objectively believe that you are an excellent three point shooter, but you’re not going to help our team right now. You have to kind of hold this balance, and that’s a very human thing, is to hold these conflicting and competing views in your mind. And I do think that where data helps is quantifying and telling that story of player, professional, person, professional. How are they viewed kind of in a vacuum within their entire cohort, and then how are they viewed for our team specifically under our conditions? And if we can get the data, with the help of AI, if we can get the data more down that more human story...

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Then I think it becomes more easy to apply it. And once it becomes easier to apply, it’s more helpful.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And once it’s helpful, it’s valued.

Jimmy Soni
What’s an example from your days at Baylor where, because you’re really creating this stuff from whole cloth, right, and there’s not anybody feeding you this, you don’t have APIs you’re plugging into, you’re doing this largely on your own, I assume. What’s an example of something that shifted because of something you found? It can be small, it can be big. But, like, what’s an example of when you had an insight and you said, this is, I’ve generated new knowledge here, and then something shifted in the organization as a result?

Ryan Resch
At Baylor specifically?

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
I think one of them, we had a forward who, absolutely excellent scorer. Yeah, absolutely excellent. Six eight, six nine, you know, very smooth scoring the ball, and he didn’t get a ton of minutes. And part of that was because, like, he wasn’t the hardest worker, did not kind of present as, you know, like, a cultural anchor of the team, those kinds of things. And I’m not saying that is a deserved reputation or not, but when you looked at the numbers and you said, okay, when this player is on the floor, like, per minute, the impact that this guy is having is actually extremely high. Okay, how do we fix these things that are going wrong so that maybe he shows up on time? Or how do we put a better environment around him where he’s playing with certain guys who are going to get the most out of him, because his per minute efficiency is so high? Let’s not turn a blind eye, but let’s focus on fixing those things that we really dislike, that we want to vent about, so that we can unlock this for the team.

Jimmy Soni
Got it.

Ryan Resch
So that we can unlock this scoring prowess for the team. Because it’s really easy, again, sports is extremely emotional, it’s really easy to be focused on, we just lost, you were late to shoot around.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
You’re one of the reasons that we lost. I’m not saying that’s not true.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
But the payoff of unlocking that...

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
We can now see what that looks like.

Jimmy Soni
Got it.

Ryan Resch
And that’s where, you know, we talk, I think that data is a mechanism to create focus. Yeah. That helps you focus on, if we can fix this set of issues, we unlock this.

Jimmy Soni
That’s really interesting. Was this common in college basketball at the time? Like, I know you said Tom Izzo is what turned Scott Drew onto it. Had it become commonplace for coaches to hire somebody on their team to do this kind of data science?

Ryan Resch
I wouldn’t say it was common. I think Coach Drew was definitely ahead of his time. Tom Izzo, ahead of his time. Ken Pomeroy, who’s still a big name in college basketball data, had been around for a few years and he was kind of the one that was known. But this was pre NIL. So this was pre all of the money.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
I’m like, you want to talk about pre NIL? I got in trouble by the NCAA for buying honey roasted peanut butter.

Jimmy Soni
What?

Ryan Resch
Because I had no idea. So the NCAA was extremely strict pre NIL. And the meals, what classified as a meal, was extremely strict as well. And so we could not provide food under certain conditions to guys because then it would be considered a meal. If they get a meal, it’s an impermissible benefit.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
Oh, it was a whole bureaucracy. I mean, it still is a bureaucracy.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
But on a different level. And so, look, according to Baylor compliance, adding honey to peanut butter made it a meal at that time.

Jimmy Soni
Adding honey to peanut butter that a player was going to eat...

Ryan Resch
Yes.

Jimmy Soni
Made what you did impermissible.

Ryan Resch
Yes.

Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow.

Ryan Resch
It’s absurd. Absolutely crazy.

Jimmy Soni
That is bananas.

Ryan Resch
It is. And you talk about, you know, you go back to your previous question about data and logic entering sport, the human component. The bureaucracy of it all is what removes the human component. Whereas the player needs this. Not like, let’s put aside the fact that people just love peanut butter. Like, it’s amazing and I can’t have it in the house. Players need this to recover. They need the sugar, they need the protein, they need the fat. Right? So you are instead focused on this arbitrary definition of impermissible benefit instead of what’s best for the players.

Jimmy Soni
Right. That’s right.

Ryan Resch
Yeah. I think that’s what’s actually removing it.

Jimmy Soni
Right. You know, it’s a bit of a detour, but I am curious, because there are very strong opinions on what the NIL changes have done to college sports. And I’m not well versed enough, so if you could give a little bit of a brief on what has changed. But my own sense as a fan from afar is that today’s, particularly college basketball, because that’s the one I follow, but today’s collegiate athletic environment, it feels like the Wild West. Like, there was just a lawsuit in Colorado that allowed an additional year of eligibility for a bunch of NCAA players. And now all of a sudden men’s college basketball for the year ahead is, it’s scrambled. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know who’s going to come back, how they can come back, how long they can stay. If you get an appeals court to say one thing, it might change the decision. This could rise to the level of the Supreme Court. What do you make, as everybody who’s been there, what do you make of contemporary college athletics?

Ryan Resch
I find it very hard to keep up with, for all of the reasons that you’re describing, which is there are institutions involved now that we would have never considered. Like, at our time, we’re not thinking about, okay, what is the Supreme Court going to decide on this case? And will that affect whether my player is eligible or not?

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
The rules there were very clear and I think we appreciated the time. I think that the positive side of it is that these players who have this unbelievable gift and these incredible talents, both skill wise, physically, athletically, all of it, they are now receiving compensation for these things. I think that is, like, an economic benefit and a good thing that is occurring. Where it has gone poorly, I think most importantly where it’s gone poorly, is the continuity of teams. And transfers were a problem pre NIL.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
So NIL is name, image, likeness, where you are now paid for your name, image, likeness. And there’s a host of rules around how you can receive your money. But it has led to NIL plus what they call the transfer portal in college, where players can now basically leave teams and schools whenever they want to, put your name into the transfer portal, sometimes in an effort to maximize your NIL.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
It has led to rapid turnover with teams and makes the coaches’ and the now college general managers’ jobs harder. That job did not exist when I was in college.

Jimmy Soni
There was no college GM?

Ryan Resch
There was no college GM when I was there. We were just scraping play by play.

Jimmy Soni
Exactly. Doing it in the Stone Age.

Ryan Resch
Exactly, exactly. And the turnover of these teams is just so high now, where players are leaving, going to the transfer portal, maybe trying to maximize their cash, whatever they deem the most important. And you lose, like, Duke does lose this period of where you guys had Christian Laettner for years, or, yeah, Jahlil Okafor and those guys only stay, Tyus Jones only stayed for one season. But you still had those faces on the team that you recognized year over year. Baylor was the exact same way. You don’t really have a lot of that anymore. And I think that loses, again, back to the human side of sport, that loses, when everybody’s kind of in the foxhole together playing this zero sum game every night, it’s win or lose. Yeah. That is where those bonds are really formed. Where I can still call the coaching staff at Baylor, or the grad assistants at Baylor, or some of the players at Baylor, and we’ll talk about, you know, what the 20, whatever it was, 16 Sweet 16 at Madison Square Garden, where South Carolina completely dismantled us. Like, we still, you know, talk about that. Right? And you just don’t have those memories, that experience or this camaraderie.

Jimmy Soni
I do have one question on this one. It’s interesting. I think about this just as a casual fan, but also kind of the challenge here is, on the one hand, there were always going to be people who were going to be one and dones, right? Who were going to come in, light college basketball on fire, do their year and then go off and play in the NBA. Even before that, you could skip college altogether and go straight to the NBA the way Kobe and others have done. At the same time, you now have money that’s available to you to be paid to stay in college. Right? So isn’t the argument against what you just said, well, yes, it’s true, people can job hop effectively, or college hop, right, and go from one school to another using a transfer portal to maximize their winnings and earnings. But on the other hand, they’re actually getting paid while they’re in school and thus can stay in school longer, right? And then it’s on the program and on the coach and on the university to make that both worth their while financially and make sure that they feel like it’s a place where they want to call home for X number of years. Right? So isn’t there a little bit of, this actually took some of the, it created the safety valve for the pressure to leave for the league, like, too early or skip school or, like, to be a one and done, because now you could be a two or three and done, right? Or a four and done and still get paid for your time. I’m not well versed enough, but does that argument have any weight?

Ryan Resch
I want to say yes, more so in football. Like, I don’t know exactly what that would look like, but anecdotally it feels like I’ve seen more of those stories of someone choosing to stay in college football. Yeah. And NIL money is larger in college football than it is college basketball. Unless you are at a Duke.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Or a Kentucky. So I think it’s more true in football. I could be wrong on the basketball side of things. I don’t know if it has yet reached the NBA side where, yeah, like, the contracts in the NBA are fundamentally different than the NFL, than the Major League Baseball. Each of these leagues has a very different economic structure. Yeah, the NBA’s is extremely player friendly.

Jimmy Soni
Okay.

Ryan Resch
Very, very strong players association, especially back in the 2010s when they were negotiating those really core CBAs. And the players will get, if you’re drafted in the first round, two years guaranteed, two year team option. But you’ll usually look at all four years guaranteed at some point, and then from there, if you’re a good player, you’re making 20 plus million dollars a year now. So the payoff for college basketball may not be there yet. Or I do think your argument has a lot of merit, is that the onus is now on program building. Right? You need to build a program.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Which is where the Baylors and the Dukes and these other schools who have done it are benefiting, with, like, these brand name institutions who have built actual programs. There’s now a value on that, there’s a premium on that.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
At some point this will all be, as things always are, regulated to some degree. There will be more rules in place about how much you can pay under what conditions. Like, some kind of salary cap system. Yeah. So I do think that there is a premium that’s now placed on building an actual program. So if you do have one of these brands like a Baylor or a Duke, there is a lot of value there. Once we have some form of a salary cap system, where I think that’ll happen at some point in the future, marry those constraints with what you’ve described of that program culture building, now you’ve got a more professional sport environment there. How do you build an Oklahoma City Thunder in college basketball? How do you build a Pittsburgh Steelers in college basketball? You kind of need both the economic constraints and the recognition of how valuable those programs are.

Jimmy Soni
Right. Ironically, these deals could lead to people, like, completing their degrees, right? The great irony of this might be that so then every worth the student athlete, right? It really could. Because if you think about it, at some point, all other things being equal, if there is a salary cap system and you are constrained on the economic side, then you would just have, you know, all schools would probably reach, like, theoretical limit of whatever those caps are, then program design and, call it, like, student retention matter a great deal. And if you are a coach that has a history of winning and producing NBA level talent and a culture that people actually want to be a part of, and you are at a school where people want to stay to finish their degrees, you as a player, you’d have serious, if you’re not a superstar, if you’re not a one and done, right, you’d have a serious reason to stick around for four years and earn a degree.

Ryan Resch
Incentive alignment. Yeah, that’s right.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah, I like that. And I don’t know, I’m speaking about it in a total vacuum. I don’t know how these decisions actually happen, but it seems to me to be one of the kind of, I know that there’s been a lot of coverage on it and a lot of back and forth on it, sure, but actually I have found this to be one of the most interesting things to be happening in college sports. That is an economics question and a psychology question and a culture question. Not even a, what does the law say and doesn’t say. Because right now what’s interesting is the law isn’t clear. Congress is being petitioned 20 different ways on it. There are already cases underway. So it is interesting to me to think about what is a player who’s good but not good enough to leave and, like, kind of likes where they’re at, but sees that the grass might be greener on the other side. Right? Like, I wonder how people are thinking about this.

Ryan Resch
I do think that you’re probably onto something there, where it is, incentive alignment will happen at some point, it feels like, in this space. And it probably does benefit everybody in the end. I think right now it’s already so hard to recruit in college sports to begin with.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
That it has made the jobs of these head coaches infinitely harder. Yeah. Only because there aren’t the economic constraints that are specific right now. And because it’s made it so hard, that’s probably where some of the negative, like, publicity and whatnot comes in. It is interesting, though, to think, like, we’re sitting here today and we don’t bat an eye on college basketball players or football players making millions of dollars.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And that was, I mean, unheard of.

Jimmy Soni
Just a few years...

Ryan Resch
Absolutely unheard of. Recruiting visits had very strict budgets and, yeah, you could only do certain things.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
It is, it’s wild.

Jimmy Soni
It’s wild. It’s also, I remember when I was a freshman at Duke, when by the time I got to my junior year, senior year, they did a deal with Apple where all the freshmen at Duke for a given year got iPods. And I remember being so mad that I had missed the free iPod window. If I was a college athlete who finished up at Duke after these deals went into effect, so the deals weren’t around when I was around, yeah, I’d be livid. I would be livid because the size is actually significant, life changing amounts for these players.

Ryan Resch
It really is. And that’s why the transfer portal is so active.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
It really is.

Jimmy Soni
Right. So now we go, you’re at Baylor and you’re a grad assistant and you are furnishing analytics and insights for the team. How long are you at Baylor? And then tell us how the story gets from there to the Phoenix Suns.

Ryan Resch
I would be at Baylor for two years in chapter two, post PhD. The summer after the first year, I got an internship with the Phoenix Suns analytics department on the basketball operations side. So every NBA team, every professional sports team, more or less, is split between sport operation and business operation. So business operation would be tickets, sponsorship, sales, media, kind of everything you’d think under the business banner. And then the sport operation is building and managing and operating the team. Yeah. I was sent by a classmate this analytics internship in Phoenix. I did not have a plan about what I was going to do, and I told myself, probably the only path forward is in the NBA, because, again, it’s not a huge thing in college basketball. Coach Drew would eventually, like, consider bringing on this position, but he would also push me out and say, “You have to go to the NBA,” when that opportunity presented itself, which I’m very grateful for, because it would have been easy to stay.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And I got this internship.

Jimmy Soni
So how did that... Well, walk us through it. How, you know, sometimes these internships don’t just happen. Did you just apply? You applied, you interviewed?

Ryan Resch
I applied.

Jimmy Soni
That was it.

Ryan Resch
Applied and interviewed. And I think, you know, again, it’s funny, it comes back to the communication side of it, I think.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Where when I was interviewing with the individual who would hire me, the then director of analytics of the Suns, there was a question around, so the Phoenix Suns were really bad.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
At this time. So one of the worst teams in the league. There was a playoff drought, and the league was just starting to play faster, shoot more threes, have more space, and the Suns were not doing these things. And the Suns were still playing two centers at the time. And I was asked, like, “What would you look at to show the coaching staff not to play two centers?” Very interesting question.

Jimmy Soni
That’s very interesting.

Ryan Resch
Very specific question. Yeah. And I’m sitting there just thinking about it, and I said, “Is the transition defense really bad?” And the response was, “You’re the first person to answer that.”

Jimmy Soni
Huh.

Ryan Resch
And I said, “Well, we can just show them that, like, where do we rank in transition defense? This combination, when they’re together, is very poor.” Yeah. But it has to come back to the why. Well, the why is that, you know, it’s very difficult to play two centers because they’re, you know, the tallest players typically on the floor, the heaviest players on the floor. And they’re usually not the fastest, they’re usually the slowest. And if you’re playing both in a league that is increasing in pace and speed, and they’re just going to outrun you at some point, like, that’s what’s going to happen. Yeah. And the data was showing that.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And so my understanding is that answer helped get that internship. And I was very grateful to get the call.

Jimmy Soni
Just out of curiosity, they had not discovered this on their... You didn’t discover it. You knew the answer? Because that was a very...

Ryan Resch
Well, I mean, it was a guess. Yeah, because I didn’t see the data. I didn’t have anything in front of me. I was just proposed the question.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And they had the data. They knew the answer.

Jimmy Soni
Got it.

Ryan Resch
I think what they were looking for, which is a very interesting data interview topic, is, can this person creatively identify something? Can you think, I guess, outside the box of whatever the, I don’t know what other answer there might be.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
But I get the internship and I do the three months, maybe three or four months over the summer. In the NBA, so the NBA calendar is July 1 to June 30 every year. So the salary cap resets on July 1. So that’s when you can start signing players again. That’s why the draft is at the very end of June. It’s the Finals and the draft at the very end of the NBA calendar. And I started, I believe, right before the draft. Yeah, it was right before the draft. I did a little bit of work on that.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Where it’s just basic, hey, interpret these statistics for these draft prospects. This would have been the summer that the Suns drafted Marquese Chriss and Dragan Bender at 4 and 8 in the lottery. That led into Summer League. I’m sorry, free agency, where we’re just doing, again, what would you value, like, this player’s contract at based on what they’ve done in the past? And I was just sitting in my cubicle, which was just doing that work by myself. And went to Summer League, had a good time. August is completely dead. And that was the end of the internship. And I was fortunate enough that they kept my database access on. So for whatever reason, they decided that was worth it. And I just kept producing work when I went back to Baylor.

Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow.

Ryan Resch
So I was still working at Baylor and I was still doing, like, little side projects.

Jimmy Soni
Oh, that’s great.

Ryan Resch
For Suns analytics, eventually building out the web application that they used in the war room, which is where the draft is held, in Phoenix in 2016. No, 2017. And probably because I just kept doing work, they’re like, “We just feel bad. We know we have to hire this guy.” And they hired me as the coaching analytics person, which effectively meant that I was hired to sit with the coaches, sit on the bench during games, and interpret statistics and data for the coaching staff. So, be that communication bridge that looks at the numbers and then is able to relay what exactly is going on.

Jimmy Soni
Got it. Out of curiosity, because having somebody like you in the background makes a lot of sense to me. Game’s done, the week is long, there’s nothing happening, your day job is looking at the analytics and helping to come up with insights. What does someone like you do in that role when you’re on the bench next to the coaches? Are they asking you specific questions? Or is it just, you know what, Ryan? Yeah, this makes you feel real good. We’ll have you here. It’s really just window dressing. You’re gonna have a clipboard. It’s not gonna have anything on it, but when the camera pans to you, you’ll have a clipboard there.

Ryan Resch
I mean, there are clips of me clapping on my clipboard. I laugh because it’s a little bit of a loaded question in that there is no purpose. Like, you kind of realize it, too, when you’re in the moment where it’s like, all right, it’s first quarter. Team’s taken eight shots.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Smallest sample size you can possibly imagine.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
I can tell you where it may go. Yeah. If we shoot enough shots, it may look like this and, right, regression to mean may occur. There’s a lot of qualitative maybes and, like, we’re kind of theoretically thinking these things. Yes. It’s not helpful in game. Like, it’s really not. And it goes back to something that I used to talk about with one of our coaches at Baylor, Coach T, where we would talk about, what is the best way to prepare for a game?

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Because I think maybe FiveThirtyEight, back in the day, did a study of how many decisions an NBA coach makes in a game. Some absurd number. Exactly what you would think. And you can’t, no human can process all of this information in real time. In real time, manage the players, manage the emotion of it all, manage your staff. Like, there’s so much going on in the moment. And what we eventually came up with was, like, you have to have plan A, which is we’re going in with this style of play, we’re going to do this offensively, defensively, our team knows how to do these things. And then you have to have plan B, which is, if plan A fails, we’re moving to plan B. Yeah. And then if you get to plan C, guys, we’re probably done. We’re probably losing. And, I mean, on the data side of it, it goes back to, like, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative information, your preparation needs to be there pregame.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Before that ball goes up at 7:07pm. Yeah. You need to be prepared. Right? Like, you need to have a coach or someone behind you that taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey, our goal was, you know, a three point attempt rate of 40% and we’re only at 35%.” Right? But then a good coach, their next question will be, okay, what’s wrong?

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Like, why are we so low?

Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And you’re saying this is happening at halftime? Or, well, after the game is over? Or you’re saying after the game’s over, before the next game, to understand what went on?

Ryan Resch
I think that you have to prepare definitely before. Yeah, no doubt. I think at halftime you have to have a very structured process that you go through. Basically you have, like, 15 minutes. Yeah. Some percentage of those minutes must be devoted to talking to your guys. That’s the most important thing. Some percentage at the beginning must be devoted to, okay, let’s review our strategy and our tactics and our style of play. Yeah. There’s a lot of value that can be done there if you can really refine that process. Obviously the pregame prep is extremely valuable. Right? Postgame debrief, hit or miss. Because it’s so emotional after a game. Like, you are coming off of an adrenaline high, whether you win or you lose, everyone is. So it’s really not the best time to chat right after your game.

Jimmy Soni
But as evidenced by any number of press conferences that go so badly awry.

Ryan Resch
Exactly.

Jimmy Soni
Right? And actually it explains the monotone, monosyllabic responses that a lot of players give to questions. Right? There’s no room for creativity after that kind of thing.

Ryan Resch
There’s not. Like, you’re emotionally depleted. Right? And there’s just, you don’t want to talk, you certainly don’t want to talk in front of the camera.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And it’s the in the moment data assistance that I think is, having literally done the job, I don’t think that there’s a lot of value that it’s going to create, because what you should be focusing on instead is training your coaches and the people making decisions in game how to think this way.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
So instead of me being like, “Hey, we’re not shooting enough threes”...

Jimmy Soni
Your coach, who is in church: “Get back to your cubicle.”

Ryan Resch
Right, exactly. Instead of saying that, you have a coach who says, “Hey, my job is the offense. I know what our threes should look like. I know how they’re generated and know what quality looks like. We are not getting enough off ball screen threes.”

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
We’re just not.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And that is useful information that helps the coach and helps the players. Whereas, “Hey, we’re not shooting enough threes” is not useful information. That’s a fun fact.

Jimmy Soni
Great. That’s a super fun fact. When you come into the organization, you know, as you mentioned, the Suns were coming off a bad stretch and there was a leadership change. There was also an ownership change. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like being a part of that? Because, so you finished up another year at Baylor, you’re doing all the side hustle work for the Suns. That is what it was. They hire you based on the strength of that side hustle work and then you join them. But you’re in the middle of chaos. Right? I mean, it was, the GM changed and the owners changed. So it was...

Ryan Resch
That changes constantly.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
I can tell you that it was the exact opposite of what Baylor was, which, I mean, Scott Drew is still the head coach at Baylor. He’s been there for, I mean, my goodness, 25 years now.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
And Phoenix was on, I believe it was the second coach in two years, and it would go on to be the third and then the fourth. Like, there was a whole host of change on the coaching side. We did go through a basketball operations executive change. So our general manager changed when I started full time. James Jones started, who was the player that I mentioned earlier from the Miami Heat. He had just retired, seven straight NBA Finals appearances, played with LeBron James on all of those teams. And LeBron publicly called him the greatest teammate of all time.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
And I can now attest to why. I love James dearly. And he starts full time the time that I start full time. He starts in the role that I would finish in. So there’s a bit of a, like, a bookend here.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And he’s coming from winning championships. I’m coming from Baylor basketball, where we’re second weekend NCAA tournament teams. We didn’t win the Big 12 yet, but we were in the championship game in the tournament quite a bit. And you go to losing.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
You go to losing.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And it is culture shock.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
James, I believe in his 17 year career, however long it was, missed the playoffs once. I’m coming from spoils and riches at Baylor.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And we just kind of bonded over this.

Jimmy Soni
Wow.

Ryan Resch
This weird culture of losing.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And there’s really no other way to say it. And I give him so much credit in that he had the perspective when he took over that, it’s very easy, you hire a GM, you hold the press conference: we’re going to compete for championships, we’re going to play hard, we’re going to do all these things. So easy. Like, you can win a press conference. It’s very easy to win a press conference. It’s not easy to win the game.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Like, those are two very different things. And James came in and his very first strategy, well, on day one, he did, you know, change over quite a bit of the staff.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Which I think was necessary at the time. And we became a very small, lean operation. I call this now the Startup Suns, for that period of time.

Jimmy Soni
Why were you not part of the changeover? Because you came in under the old management. Yeah. So how did you manage to stick around?

Ryan Resch
I mean, truthfully, I didn’t have an office. I didn’t have a desk. And James, being who James is, told me, like, “Sit on the other side of my desk and work.” Okay. So we just had a really strong relationship from that. He’s also a very rational thinker. He loves data, he loves technology. But he also understands that human component to such a degree as well. And he’s an unbelievable teacher, I think, too. And if you’re willing to learn from him, then you can become one of his people.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
But the first strategy that he implemented was raising the floor. It’s not championship ceiling, championship expectations. It was, no, guys, we’re going to raise the floor. Yeah. The floor is way too low. Like, the competitive floor, the talent floor. And this is not just players. And this is the beauty of having a former player as your lead executive.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Which I think is so important. Is the individual who has been in those championship games, who has won the title, who has made the threes, who has, you know, defended the best players in the league...

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Who understands what these players are going through. They will hold the rest of the organization to that same standard that the players will hold themselves to. And it’s so important. And he literally, he was like, “It’s not sexy, but raise the floor.”

Jimmy Soni
So how did you do that? Like, what are some of the key, both the data and analytics components in your job, but then also just organization wide. How did that happen?

Ryan Resch
You look at age first, and the Suns were extremely young. Yeah, it’s very popular in the NBA to tank. This is another huge thing in sports, is if we lose, then we’ll get a higher draft pick. If we get a higher draft pick, we will maximize our chances of getting an All-Star or franchise player. Yeah. Not incorrect. You know, if you get the number one pick in the draft, then, yeah, you’ll have a much higher chance of drafting an All-Star franchise player from that class than anyone who comes after you. That’s basic logic. Right? What the tanking debate fundamentally misses, because the Suns were publicly tanking and we were there at the very early days and went the exact opposite... What they were missing, the tanking proponents, I should say, are missing the, again, we come back to this, the human factor. Sports is an extremely unique environment. It is the only publicly played zero sum game in the world. I mean, literally everything’s public and there will be a winner, there will be a loser, and it is also time bound. So every year you get one year and then we’re resetting, go again. There’s no rollover effect. You don’t have to carry things over, any of that. When you think about that on a macro level with games, it’s true. But on a micro level as well, where these players, like, we’re drafting the replacements.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
It’s crazy when you think about, like, the cycle of this, and it’s arguably, like, deeply unfair as well. Where it’s like, someone who is an NBA player will get pushed out because we’re bringing in this 18 year old high potential. Yeah. And when we talked about, like, James raising the floor, it was finding the value in the older guy. Again, like, finding the value in the four year player, like Cam Johnson, who we drafted at 11, James’s first draft, and we got panned for it.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Cam has since gone on to have an incredible career. He’s a great person, he’s a great player. Like, fantastic.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And it’s things like, I mentioned the age. It’s also things like teaching the front office staff what the player is going through when you talk about tanking. Because they hear, “You want to draft my replacement.”

Jimmy Soni
Oh, interesting.

Ryan Resch
“You want to bring in the guy who’s going to take my job away.”

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Or the coach hears, “You want me to lose so that you can fire me.”

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And then we can continue. And you just can’t, like, it’s so hard to win a championship to begin with. Like, your odds are so infinitesimally small to do this to begin with, that if you don’t realize, like, the consequence of these strategic choices that you’re making, yes, you don’t have a chance.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And this is why, like, Oklahoma City, for example, took you to the tanking process extremely well. I don’t think that they ever publicly called it that, but...

Jimmy Soni
Of course not. I mean, this is one of the curious things about tanking, is you can’t say you’re tanking. If you’re tanking, you’ll get in trouble. Yeah.

Ryan Resch
The integrity of the game. But Oklahoma City, they did an amazing job of keeping their culture so strong. And I give Sam Presti all the credit to that. Like, he is a fantastic executive. Absolutely fantastic. And they built this, you know, this program where it’s, hey, we all know what we’re going to do for the next couple of years and then we hope that we’ll be champions on the other end of it. Yeah. And I think if you do it in that deliberate manner, right, then you definitely increase your chances of success. Yeah. It’s when you do it in kind of the manner that’s, I think we’re supposed to do this because we’re told that you should tank if you’re not good because you don’t want to be in the middle. Right? Like, you know, it comes down to, you understand the strategic consequences of the strategic decisions that you’re making.

Jimmy Soni
Interesting. So when you’re in the day to day of this, how is, I guess, how is the Suns job different than the Baylor job? When you got to that grad-- in both cases you’re looking at analytics, you’re looking at data. What were the differences between those two environments?

Ryan Resch
At face value, the roles were very different post James taking over the Suns. So that was when I became his chief of staff, director of strategy. He would then go on to win the 21 executive of the year. I believe it was 2021. And so the role was more expansive, for sure. Helping out in operations, salary cap if that was needed at the time, traveling with the team quite a bit to basically be a front office presence for them if something happened. Yeah. Whereas, it’s funny now that I say it, it sounds a little bit closer to the manager role, where it was kind of like the catch all situation and just being around to do these things that need to get done. Whereas the Baylor data roles and even those early Suns data roles were very, as you would think they are, behind a computer, looking at numbers, looking at spreadsheets. Thankfully, at that time in the NBA, well, that’s another difference, is the NBA had a much richer data set. So optical tracking data came online right around the time that I was an intern. A company called SportVU, which had installed cameras in all of the arenas, and they could track, I think it was 24 frames a second from six cameras at that time, the XY coordinates of the players directly using the ball. And now it’s XYZ coordinates with Hawk-Eye, which is the new camera provider. And so we were extremely data rich. And so we would spend a lot of time kind of playing in that sandbox of the XY coordinates.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And then as the role increased in scope, it was less of that hands on coding and more of program building, I think, is the way to think about it. And I kind of bounced around. I was very lucky that James trusted me so much. And over the course of my time at the Suns under James, led or managed everything except players and coaches in basketball operations. So scouting at one point for a couple of years, health and performance for a year, operations strategy, so data science, salary cap, those things. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni
So you go from Baylor and doing the data stuff to the Suns at a period of real transition for the Suns. Like, what is different about the job that you were doing in one, you know, in both cases you’re working with data and you’re trying to find insights that are going to help the team. What are the differences between the role in the NBA and the role in college?

Ryan Resch
Kind of at the top level, the NBA is a much richer data set. So when I joined the Suns, this was right around when optical tracking was taking off. So optical tracking was introduced to the NBA through a company called SportVU, which installed, I believe it was, six cameras in the arena, the rafters of the arena, at 24 frames a second, where we could track the XY coordinates of every player, the ball and the referees. And now they can do the XYZ coordinates with the latest technology, which is pretty cool. And so we would spend just quite a bit of time in those early Suns days, not dissimilar to what we did at Baylor, where it’s like, okay, we have our hands on all this data, now let’s build something. And the optical tracking data could produce really cool new metrics. Like, okay, let’s measure how far the screen defender is from the screener, and does that matter if our center is 6ft behind the screen versus 2ft behind the screen? Why does this question matter? Well, at that time, if you’re trying to invite the mid range shot and take away threes, which was the popular style of defensive play back then as teams are shooting more threes, then you want to know, can my seven foot center play at the level of the screen? Does he need to play back? If we do play back, are they going to pull up? Is he going to contest? And there’s a whole kind of, like, chain of thought that goes into that. That’s really interesting. The role itself, though, it grew very quickly under James, and I’m really lucky that he trusted me as much as he did. And I eventually would go on to lead or manage every team within basketball operations outside of the players and the coaches directly. So health and performance for a year, which was athletic training, strength, conditioning, nutrition, sports science, those kinds of things. So keeping the players healthy, getting them stronger, helping them play better from a physical, athletic standpoint. Scouting, which is obvious, professional scouting, amateur scouting, so college basketball. Data science. The salary cap side of things as well, which is super interesting. Kind of ran the whole gamut there. And then eventually my last year ran operations. Yeah. Which was the true day to day of being in it.

Jimmy Soni
So I want to dive in, because, and we’ll link to it in the show notes, but there was this really interesting interview you did about sports and analytics and AI, and you talk a little bit about what happened when data first arrived at the NBA, where you finally have optical tracking data. And then, as I understand it, a company came around and built dashboards. And for the first time, I guess, in the league’s history, this data that, you know, would have had to be cobbled together and, you know, hacked together before is now easily visible to teams. Talk a little bit about that moment, what happened, and kind of what you saw as that happened.

Ryan Resch
Yeah. When SportVU came in and they introduced optical tracking data, it delivered as all nascent forms of data deliver, which is, you know, structured to some degree. But you need to know how to write SQL and you need to know how to write Python or R at a base in order to actually interact with these numbers and make them mean anything of relevance.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And, you know, around the mid 2010s too, in the data science community, the tech community, machine learning is really starting to take off. So Facebook algorithms, AlexNet, mentioned previously. You know, it’s insane to talk about it now like, AlphaGo. Right? Like, the things that would then go on to truly change the world are coming into the public conscious. And a company called Second Spectrum, and they did a great job with it. They solved the problem of needing to have technical coding chops to interact with this optical tracking data by building machine learning algorithms to track the actions of these coordinates. So instead of me having to now figure out, okay, a middle pick and roll occurred at 7 minutes and 15 seconds in the second quarter by our players, Second Spectrum built the algorithms, the machine learning algorithms, to actually identify this. And then from there we could split that and filter it into a host of different metrics, whether it’s on the left side of the court, the right side of the court. Basically you’re able to summarize and assess the game at a much more granular level. And they tied film to it. So that was also a huge innovative side of it that again goes towards solving the communication problem. So now coach sees, my middle pick and roll is 1.20 points per possession. And then here’s the 30 clips of our guys doing it. You can reinforce, okay, why is it 1.2? Let’s watch the film to find out.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And super helpful. Yeah. Extremely useful. Very advantageous when you are one of the few teams that has it. But as with all things, it becomes democratized and everybody has access to this data and this information. And something that started happening my last few years in the league was this constant conversation around, is everyone playing the same way? Is there a homogenous style of play?

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Is everyone running middle pick and roll, trying to shoot threes and either switching ball screens or playing in the deep drop on ball screens? Where is the innovation in our style of play?

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And I think it’s a fascinating conversation.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And there’s been some studies that say it is happening, some studies that say it isn’t happening. This is one of those topics where, if people are talking about it, if the perception is that it’s happening, then it’s probably important to figure out why that perception exists. Yeah. And it occurred to me one day that we really did all have access to similar data. Right? The same data.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And, you know, you think a program would get, you know, ridiculed if they didn’t shoot, you know, 30, 35, 40 threes. You know, your coach doesn’t have good shot selection, blah, blah. What kind of behavior does that drive?

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
That the coach now is like, okay, what does the data say I should do?

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
But if you’re basing it off of just what a dashboard says, you’re looking at lagging indicators. You’re looking at what others are doing to win.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
You’re not drilling down and saying, no, what is it for our team? Back to that two by two. What is it for our team’s context, for how we win? And so when you have this kind of democratized dashboard, instead of proprietary questions, proprietary data, or proprietary metrics built on publicly available data, right, is really the way to do it. With the optical tracking data, you do end up in this kind of path dependency. Okay, middle pick and roll seems to be the most efficient action.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Switching ball screens is extremely efficient as well. And then it’s kind of this race toward some kind of false optimization, in a way.

Jimmy Soni
The opposite problem is what many people read in the Moneyball book, right? So on the one end of the spectrum, you’d be like, data is useless. Right? That’s over and done with. Most team owners at this point are going to emphasize the numbers. Right? Now you go to the other place where, because the numbers are the same numbers everybody else is looking at, you get, like, a homogenized style of play, right? Or you’re all doing the same things because the numbers suggest the same things. So that’s an interesting thing to square, whether you’re a GM or a coach, to say to yourself, okay, how do I make sure I’m not captive to the metrics that everybody else is benchmarking against? How did you think about that internally? Like, how did you make the most use of the dashboards that, you know, a company provided, while not then allowing it to drive the same conclusions that everybody else is going to draw, so that you’re basically playing the same game as everybody else?

Ryan Resch
I think it follows a path of what you kind of described, where the information that’s readily available is great for education. It’s great to tell you what is going on. It’s great to tell you what happened. It’s great to tell you, okay, under these conditions, this existed.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
It does not tell you moving forward, if we face those conditions again, will this outcome still occur? And I think if I could go back, then I would probably emphasize this point stronger with the analytics team, and I would have us just spend more time asking better questions to get us back into the mindset of XY coordinates. How do we build the model that shows whether our center should be 6ft or 2ft or 5ft? Can we get that on what’s available? Yes, but this is different because of how we teach our defense. Like, if we are able to define our shift defense, our help line defense, and we know where these guys are supposed to stand, then we should also be able to code out that logic and get those metrics that are more Suns proprietary or more team proprietary than just taking what is available on the dashboard. Because they don’t know our defense. Right? Nor should they.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And in this, again, it comes back to, I think, like, data is not a holy grail. Like, it is not a panacea for all of this stuff. It is another area where you can find competitive advantage if you know how to use it, just like any other tool. As cliche as that argument is, yes, it is a tool. Yeah, you know how to use it, then you can find advantage with it. And if you do talk to these leagues where it has become kind of more pervasive, like baseball, for example, it’s really hard to find the next differentiation lane of data in baseball, because there’s been 20 years, tons of money, and you’ve had an owner class in Major League Baseball that comes from these more rational worlds that use data in their private equity shops or whatever they’re doing in their business life. And so they almost, like, optimize it to the point where if you don’t have it at an A plus level to begin with, like, you’re just behind. Right? You’re not even talking about eking out advantage at that point. You’re just like, we have... It’s a model that I would use at the Suns, was like, what is the negligence line? Like, if we are below this negligence line, then we must focus everything on getting above it. And if we are above it, now we can start talking about, okay, what are the cool, unique ways that we can differentiate ourselves from this? So you think about, let’s say if we talk about basketball, for example, style of play. So style of play is just literally, how are you going to play offense? How are you going to play defense? What are you going to focus on? Basketball, at the end of the day, just like all sports, is a possession game. You want as many shots on goal as you can get. Field goal attempts plus free throw attempts, you want that number to be higher than your opponent, not in a reckless way. Like, don’t cross half court and just throw the ball up, unless you’re Steph Curry. But you want to just maximize that number. Yeah. So what are the ways to do that? Well, rebounding is one of those ways, and turnovers is one of those ways as well. So either you don’t turn it over, you get your opponent to turn it over, or you grab the ball offensively and defensively, so your opponent cannot grab the ball. It’s really that simple. If you don’t have rebounding and turnovers dialed in, like, if you’re not top 15 in those areas, negligence line would say, focus on that. Focus on defensive rebounding and how you’re going to get better from a roster perspective, from a coaching perspective, from a front office perspective, culturally. How are we going to become a better rebounding team?

Jimmy Soni
Interesting.

Ryan Resch
Before you try to be like, let’s get cute by shooting more threes, like this.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
You have to get above the negligence line for your style of play. And so I think that is kind of a helpful model to think about all of these things being tools. When do we start making strategic choices that genuinely differentiate us instead of just having fun with...

Jimmy Soni
Right. Fun with the data.

Ryan Resch
Yeah, exactly.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And did you find that, in a way, what you’re describing is the opposite of what the fiercest critics about data in sports would have said, which is, they’re like, it’s going to make the game boring. It’s going to get the game over to eggheads. It’s going to be, you know, bean counters making all the decisions. What you’re actually saying is, no, like, the more information you have, if you’re a bad team, you’re going to lapse into homogeneity anyway. Right? But actually having more information gives you an ability to tailor your particular style of play to your particular opponent or to the group you have. And there’s room for a ton of innovation, even when every movement they’re making has been dissected to the nines.

Ryan Resch
That’s what I believe.

Jimmy Soni
Okay.

Ryan Resch
And I think that is, you know, if humans are just modeling the behavior of other people, at the end of the day, like, teams do the same thing. Programs, institutions, they all do the same thing. So Golden State is going to win all these championships. How do we play more like Golden State? How do we get smaller? Because they’re playing small ball.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Well, one of the most important factors of their small ball is they have Draymond Green, who is arguably the smartest defensive player in NBA history. Like, someone who just redefined what it meant to be a small ball center.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And if you don’t have Draymond Green, probably not the path for you to go down. Right? And so, again, if we return to this, like, negligence line model. Basketball is played in a vertical plane. The scoring goal is 10ft above the ground. It’s not like soccer, where it’s, like, low to the ground, you can kick the ball in there. Height and size and jumping ability will always have some level of advantage. So you can’t build a small team in pursuit of playing small ball.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
You’re below the negligence line here. Unless you have that defining factor, a Draymond Green type person. And it is exactly what you said, where it’s, okay, if we can get all of this information, as soon as we establish our floor and our foundation. Again, it goes back to James’s model of raising the floor.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
If we can establish a really high floor here where all of our fundamentals are taken care of. The best coaches will preach fundamentals. Read any John Wooden quote out there. He’s only talking about fundamentals and, like, first principles. Like, you see this in the best tech founders, all of this.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Where it is this, like, set the floor really high.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Get it there. And then you can start, like, branching off and doing these things. Where you have Steph Curry, who is fundamentally the greatest shooter of all time.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
You have Draymond in his role, Klay in his role, Andre Iguodala in his role.

Jimmy Soni
Okay.

Ryan Resch
Now we can start, you know, bringing in these people who can differentiate from there. Or these styles that can differentiate.

Jimmy Soni
So you transitioned at some point from the Suns to your role now in private equity. Walk us through kind of that latest iteration in your career.

Ryan Resch
Like you asked earlier about an ownership change. Yeah. And I like to joke that my NBA bingo card was full except for winning a championship, which is the worst part.

Jimmy Soni
You got to the championship.

Ryan Resch
We got to the Finals. We did lose, unfortunately. And I did go through an ownership change as well. And part of that ownership change, I got to meet Justin Ishbia, who is the founder of Shore Capital Partners. And I spent a lot of time with Justin and with Shore from 2023, when he and his brother bought the team, his brother Mat bought the team, through May of 25, when I did leave Phoenix. And I came to just really appreciate how Shore was built and how Shore was operating. Extremely process driven, very data heavy, very much a sports culture.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
In that sports are very much a part of what they’re doing day to day. And I learned so much from them in such a short period of time. Nine years in the NBA is a lifetime. We had done the whole, you know, start from the bottom, get to the top line again. I think one of the through lines of my career has been, like, incessant problem solving. So it is like, just solve the next problem in front of you. And I just wanted a new problem. Like, I wanted a new challenge. And I was very fortunate that Justin gave me an opportunity to join Shore for a year and then recently moving over into 1949 Capital, which is also part of Justin’s world. And it’s been a fascinating look at the difference between the zero sum nature of sports.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And the non zero sum nature of everything else.

Jimmy Soni
Right. And that’s exactly what I was going to ask you, which is, in your prior world, there are winners and there are losers, there are wins and losses. And now you’re in a world, private equity, where there’s still winners and losers, but it’s not zero sum. There are partnerships to be made, there are deals to be made. How have you thought about that transition from one to the other?

Ryan Resch
I would tell you that I miss the games. Yeah. In the sense of, there’s nothing quite like being a part of a winning team in sports. Like, the ride of that.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
The opposite is also true. It’s extremely hard to be part of a losing team. Right. But what I have really enjoyed about kind of the non zero sum world is what you mentioned, which is, like, you get to finally live out what game theory would tell you, which is cooperation will oftentimes lead to the best outcome.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And you get to take these lessons from sport about team building, about setting and raising the floor, about how do different personalities work with each other in the best way, and try to form those partnerships and get the most and the best out of, like, the unit instead of just the individual person. And I’m also very fortunate that, you know, Shore and Justin are very data driven and very AI focused as well. And so the overlap has been that Shore and Justin, in that environment, is very data heavy. Yeah. And very AI forward, I would say, for sure. Shore started an AI team very early. I think it was early 2025 that they started hiring AI specific people to go into the portfolio companies and implement these solutions, which is incredible to think about how early that was. And it was having the opportunity to go to an environment that is that forward looking.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
That excited me. And helping them roll out a lot of their AI enterprise tools over the last year has been an unbelievable learning experience. Like, tech deployments are one thing, but rolling out frontier models to an entire private equity firm is a whole nother beast. And learned a ton there and have since gone deeper on the AI space and the sports space.

Jimmy Soni
And, you know, there’s that line, like, prediction is always hard, especially about the future. But I’m curious what you make of AI as it has been adopted in sports. Like, where are we at? Are we early innings? Is it far enough along? Because a lot of the things you’re talking about with, like, sabermetrics and all this, did that pave the way for AI use? Is it still kind of where the rest of the world is, which is, we’re figuring ourselves out in this moment? Right? Like, what is the interaction or intersection between sports and AI in 2026?

Ryan Resch
From what I’ve seen, absolutely early innings and absolutely still in this formation of, where are we? Like, what exactly is the impact that this is going to have? So, not dissimilar to what is going on in every other industry. And I think when you zoom back out and you say, okay, who is using AI the best? What can we learn from them? At least in my experience, it’s been, if you think about AI transformation as operations transformation. So operations being, how do we take this unbelievable amount of information that we are receiving, synthesize it and then make a decision on it?

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And that can happen at a very small level, such as, how are you going to stock the snack bar at your office? All the way up to a very, very high level of, where are we going to move this capital so that we can invest it? If you think about it in that way, then you can start to identify places where having this, I don’t want to call it a logic machine, but this ability to extract structure and synthesize information and pattern match at a scale that we have just never seen. Once you can start finding, like, the links in your chain of operations, be like, okay, this looks like data extraction for the snack room, because we need to have a better sense of how much money we’re spending on whatever, you know, yogurt or whatever, structured in that way. And then AI can help you there. I think that sports is still trying to figure out what that operations chain looks like.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And do I think that there are coders out there who are using Codex and Claude Code?

Jimmy Soni
Of course.

Ryan Resch
And they absolutely should be doing that. How do we now take that capacity and get us back to getting our hands deep in that raw optical tracking data so that we can build new novel metrics, so that we can just answer more novel questions? Like, my whole thing on tanking, where, you know, I think that there is probably a paper waiting to be written by someone who can examine, you know, the kind of perverse incentives of tanking as well. Where, if you were only considering it from the perspective of the general manager trying to acquire an All-Star, yeah, sure, you might have found, like, an equilibrium there. When you consider it from the perspective of players and coaches and owners who need to look good in the community, yeah, maybe it’s a very different calculus. There’s not enough time or attention within a sports team to do that because it moves so fast, because we are on a clock. Every year it restarts. But now that you have AI, like, a good ownership group should be asking, okay, you think that we should tank? Model that for me.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Like, actually run through all of the different scenarios of where this could go well and where this could go wrong. All the way down to, when you think that we’re going to be contending for the number one pick, who’s in that class? And are they Victor Wembanyama roles of generational talent?

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
Because that is a different proposition than, you know, if you’re just some kind of run of the mill class.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
But my hope is that is where AI and sports will get back to, is now that we have the ability at a much lower cost to ask these deeper questions instead of just trying to win the game in front of us. Yeah. We can just produce more novel insights and more interesting ideas.

Jimmy Soni
It’s one thing to be in the front office and doing this. One of the things that AI has done is it’s democratized the ability to ask these questions without knowing how to code in Python or in R or whatever. Do you think that we’re going to see the first generation of players who dive into their own data or into sports data to understand the game?

Ryan Resch
You know, it’s funny, we traded for Chris Paul.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And he was a heavy user of Second Spectrum. And I was very impressed by that when I saw that. And it makes sense when you think about how Chris plays. And I have an immense amount of respect for him. He was incredible for us. And some of the best players, you think about James and his career, these players understand themselves. They understand truly their strengths and their weaknesses and they understand what to focus on in practice, what to focus on in warmups. It is very dialed in to a degree that it teaches you the importance of specificity and detail when you watch how these best guys work. And data can help them with that. Yeah, it absolutely can help them with that. Where it’s not, you know, it’s not so much, okay, the front office may use it against me in contract negotiations.

Jimmy Soni
Or somebody’s forcing somebody, like, Ryan, kid Ryan shows up with his glasses and whatever, he’s got his spreadsheet and he’s got his clipboard that has nothing on it, but we let him hang out at the game. He’s telling me something about my spacing when I’m doing a screen. This is like the, you know...

Ryan Resch
Yeah.

Jimmy Soni
It’s more that the player could own this conversation.

Ryan Resch
Exactly. I think that’s what, if we’re moving toward kind of this democratization of information and intelligence, then I hope that is where it goes.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Is where the players really understand how they can benefit from it.

Jimmy Soni
Right. So if we take ourselves outside of the work context, and, you know, I want to be respectful of your time, want to wrap up. When you’re thinking about AI right now, what have you personally been most impressed by? Right? Because you came of age in a profession and in day to day work where you were taking huge amounts of data and trying to wring insights out of them. So what’s most exciting to you, or what tools do you use? What’s your day to day interaction with AI like?

Ryan Resch
I don’t know if this will be an exciting answer, but I think the thing that I am most interested in right now is using these coding agents with my workspace. Workspace I would have previously called a working directory.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Someone can call it a repo, whatever they want to call it. But having my workspace now be designed not for me to read.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
But for agents to read, for agents to navigate.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
It’s been such an interesting problem to solve. Okay, Ryan is not navigating this as much as he otherwise would have been, like an old Dropbox setup. Right? Ryan is building agents who need to read the work of the other agents, or what they’re producing and what they’re writing to this workspace. Yeah. And that is two very different things.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And I have torn it down, last month I think I’ve torn it down four times and rebuilt it. I have more copies of a working directory than I ever thought I would have. But I think that speaks to kind of the age that we’re entering also, which is you do have to change your perspective of how you used to approach work fundamentally.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
And I think it maybe makes me a better manager of people, to be honest, because you have to be so much more specific in what you’re looking for and asking for. Maybe not five years from now when these models are even better.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
But again, not an exciting answer. But I think, like, redesigning what your literal workspace digitally looks like.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Fascinating. And then day to day, it’s really become an operating system, where I love to write. So, yes, I will still open up Word or whatever, but I don’t really type my writing anymore. I will hand write writing, and then I will build, like, work product writing.

Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow.

Ryan Resch
With Codex or with Claude Code or something like that.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
It’s very interesting where these worlds are diverging, where professionally I am living very much in these tools as an operating system, and in my personal life, going back to, like, this analog...

Jimmy Soni
The old school.

Ryan Resch
Yeah, back to the analog. Very interesting.

Jimmy Soni
I think that divergence is only going to become sharper. Right? I think it’s going to be, you have this world that you step into that’s almost quasi like the Matrix. But unlike the Matrix, you can pull the cord out of the back.

Ryan Resch
Exactly.

Jimmy Soni
And you do daily, because it’s the only way to stay sane.

Ryan Resch
Yeah.

Jimmy Soni
Right? It’s the reason, we talked about this a little bit earlier, before we were recording, but it’s the reason live events, like the premium on live events, is going to go up. I think it’s ironically the race to the new in AI is going to race many people back to the old. Right? And, like, the things that may have been under indexed in the social media era, I think, because of AI, are going to be over indexed in the next wave. Because I think what’s going to happen, you’re going to be too digitally plugged in. And the relief that you feel when you’re not... Right? The relief I feel now when I read a book, it only rivals what it felt like to read as a kid. And I think that’s entirely because so much of my day is spent in different AI modes that reading a book feels like Christmas. Like, it’s incredible to have the analog experience again.

Ryan Resch
I completely agree with that. I mean, I’m sitting here wearing a $20 Casio watch from Amazon because I did not want a smartwatch. Right? I did not want to wear it and be constantly hooked into these AI tools. Yeah. And it’s interesting because I think I could not have vocalized this in sport, but I can vocalize it now, which is, I love any work where you have to perform. Sports is that, where there’s a performance every night. Hospitality, restaurants, hotels, you have to be on. You have to perform. Broadway, here in New York, where we’re recording this, you have to be on. And I think that element of, someone is going to rehearse, rehearse, practice, practice, and then the curtain is going to go up, the ball is going to go up, the restaurant’s going to open. What an unbelievable thrill that was going to be for, I mean, for people to attend it, to see it, to see that level of talent, but then also to do it, do that work. I don’t think I could have explained that when I was in sports, but I feel that way now.

Jimmy Soni
Right. I think the premium on it goes up because fewer things will become unpredictable. My theory of the case would be that because you don’t know the outcome of how the night’s going to go in a show or how the game’s going to go. Yes. And I can give you very good predictions about most everything else.

Ryan Resch
Right.

Jimmy Soni
Like, it’s going to work from the available set of human data and restrictions and come back with an answer. The sheer unpredictability of some of these things is what’s going to drive the desire for them. Right?

Ryan Resch
Yeah.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
Randomness is good for us. Right? It turns out.

Jimmy Soni
Right. Exactly. What are some of the, and I promise we’ll finish here, but because we could do this for another three hours, this is basically like what we would do anyway. What are some of the books or podcasts or kind of other media or intellectual influences that this year have helped you, particularly as you’ve made the transition from out of sports to private equity?

Ryan Resch
I read a lot, so I absolutely love to read. Like you, whenever I am reading, I am extremely happy. From a fiction perspective, a mutual... Tyler, a mutual friend of ours, recommended on his website when Dan Simmons passed away, the Hyperion series. And so I did read Hyperion and then I am in the fourth book now, and it’s fascinating to read that, to go back and read some of the other science fiction classics and see how they talked about AI at that time. Deeply philosophical. Not an accident that Silicon Valley in the tech space right now has that slant and that bend to it as well. But I think that has helped me in a way contextualize, maybe societally, like, not so much where it’s going and, like, oh no, things are going to go so poorly, but where things are, like, culturally. Has been really interesting. I am still a huge fan of memoirs and biographies, as you know. So I gave your book out to many people at the Suns. Jimmy came and visited and saw stacks of The Founders. I would give out to the team. And I continue to find myself drawn to those stories more and more. I don’t know, I’m kind of processing this now as we’re talking about it, but I think it’s like reading these stories of these people who accomplished such unbelievable things pre AI.

Jimmy Soni
Pre AI.

Ryan Resch
Yeah. Like, how did they think about these problems before we had the ability to, like, drill down or synthesize all of these random things? Like, how did Steve Jobs approach that? How did, you know, past presidents, how did historical figures solve their problems in an era where it was just much more difficult to see the board clearly with the information that you had access to?

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
What I do really enjoy is the podcast and the media landscape that this industry has birthed, with shows like TBPN. Yeah. And just how much fun people are on space. Or even things like the Dwarkesh podcast, where it’s, no, we’re going to go super deep on these... Kind of 10 years ago we’d have been like, what are we all talking about? But now that we have direct application to KV caches in our life, like, I do want to watch a whiteboard session.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
It’s at the point now where I wish I had two more hours in a day...

Jimmy Soni
Same.

Ryan Resch
So that I could read or listen to a show or any of that more.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Because the issue is that a whole new category of media has opened up.

Ryan Resch
Exactly.

Jimmy Soni
And it’s so different from the media I had when I was growing up. And it’s so rich, it’s so protein rich, and I just don’t have the time.

Ryan Resch
I agree.

Jimmy Soni
And I do not know from where I will find the time.

Ryan Resch
Exactly right.

Jimmy Soni
And the truth is, it’s like, I don’t know if you felt this way, but I know people have their different opinions about AI. I have found it to be just the most exciting thing to me since I kind of, like, first got on a dial up Internet, to make sure my parents didn’t pick up the phone by accident, interrupt that phone signal so I could interrupt the Internet. It’s that exciting. Because I think, especially if you’re in any kind of creative space, or if you’re in any kind of space where there’s a lot of flux, like what you’re in, where things can go one way or they can go another, AI just, it opens up the universe of possible questions you could ask and begin thinking about in a way that I have never seen. Like, I find myself, what it’s done for me, in addition to, I think, making me a better manager, it’s also made me ask better questions now, because that is just good training for the LLMs. It’s good training for life.

Ryan Resch
I completely agree with all that. There is, like, a default optimism, I think, that I have on these things. Recognizing the risks that exist, obviously. But I think the story of humanity and society is one of progress. And, you know, when you really look back at all of the technological change and the progress and the way that we spoke about those things at the time, there are a lot of overlaps there. I just feel so lucky to be in this. You tell me, when I was, like you said, I consider myself lucky being probably the last generation of millennial that did experience the analog to digital shift. So I did have a CD player. Despite how young I look, I did have a CD player. I also remember Napster.

Jimmy Soni
Yep. Napster was, that was the whole ball game. Finding out ways to download those MP3 files.

Ryan Resch
iPod with the click wheel.

Jimmy Soni
Right.

Ryan Resch
God.

Jimmy Soni
Really dating ourselves here.

Ryan Resch
This is funny. I know.

Jimmy Soni
The funniest interactions I have on these is, I have an 11 year old and she doesn’t realize the digital bounty that she’s been given. Right? She has no idea. So I remember one day we were talking and we were, she was like, we were watching one of our shows we like, and she said, “Oh, let’s go to season two, episode three.” And I stopped in that moment. I said, “Do you know that when I was young and I wanted to watch a show like Sonic the Hedgehog, I had to wake up, like, every Saturday to make sure that I was in front of the TV when that show came on, otherwise I would miss it. You’re done. And you have the ability to just pick a season, episode. This is extraordinary.” And she looks at me and, perfectly seriously, with, like, true pity in her eyes, she goes, “That is so sad.” Like, felt deeply bad for me that the challenge of my life was not being able to pick the season and pick the episode.

Ryan Resch
Amazing. Next time you’ve got to show her how to record it using a VCR, but there has to be something on the VHS tape, so she has to erase that first, and then she has to record it.

Jimmy Soni
Oh my God, that is too funny. So one of the ways we like to finish out Infinite Loops is, Ryan, you’re emperor. You’re named Emperor for a Day. And you get to basically incept two ideas, messages, themes, concepts, quotes, into everyone’s mind in humanity. So they’ll wake up and have these two ideas in their head. What two ideas or thoughts would you want people to carry forward into their lives?

Ryan Resch
There was a quote in my office in Phoenix. I don’t know if he actually said or wrote it, but it is from Voltaire.

Jimmy Soni
Right. Voltaire gets a lot of credit for things he didn’t say.

Ryan Resch
But you know what? Like, good for him.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah, right? Like, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” I mean, maybe that was Voltaire that said that.

Ryan Resch
Maybe he’s living big in the age of AI. And he allegedly said, “No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” And I love that because it goes kind of like a core principle of mine, which is, just solve the next problem. Just solve the next problem. And if you do that, then you’ll win the game. Or you think about basketball, the defense is going to change. We’ll solve for that defense, because guess what? They’re going to change again. And then you’ve got to solve for that one, and then just keep solving.

Jimmy Soni
Yeah.

Ryan Resch
And I think that it also goes back to the default optimism point, where it is, if we believe that we can solve these problems and we can get around this, we can get around the risks that these, you know, AI tools may or may not pose, for example, I think that would be one. And then the second, and again, it goes back to, I think, a realization that I’ve only had recently, which is try to do work that has to face some form of reality. And what I mean by that is, you’re an author, you write a ton. You have to publish. At some point, you have to stop editing and send that book out so that I can read it and give it to my team. That is facing reality. Sports is that. Every single night, zero sum, someone’s going to win, someone’s going to lose. What we talked about earlier with the restaurant or the Broadway show, like, let people experience the work that you’re creating. Have the confidence for that so that you can get the feedback from it. But also what you’ll find is, when you find your work and when you find your people to do this work, it is so unbelievably fulfilling to do that thing together with those people, to put that thing out into the world, to actually change something or to introduce something to society. I think that’s so fulfilling, and it’s probably why I like reading biographies and memoirs.

Jimmy Soni
That’s a wonderful place to end it. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on Infinite Loops.

Ryan Resch
Thank you.

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Sunday, 30 August

Two thoughts from Washington Irving

“Great minds have purposes, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.”

“A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.”

Monday, 31 August

Two thoughts from Sun Tzu

“To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

“When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.”

Tuesday, 1 September

Two thoughts from Hugh MacLeod

“The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.”

“I work extremely hard doing what I love, mainly to ensure that I don’t have to work extremely hard doing what I hate”

Wednesday, 2 September

Two thoughts from Marie Curie

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”

Thursday, 3 September

Two thoughts from Don Miguel Ruiz

“Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally... Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.”

“Be impeccable with your word. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions. Always do your best”

Friday, 4 September

Two thoughts from Sebastian Mallaby

“Capitalism works only when institutions are forced to absorb the consequences of the risks that they take on.”

“All new markets are inefficient at first.”

Saturday, 5 September

Two thoughts from James Allen

“The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.”

“Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.”

Follow Jim on Twitter for a daily dose of Two Thoughts!

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This week: what happens when you look a little closer. A wrong number uncovers half a million photographs and an unlikely friendship, Candice Millard finds fresh ground in one of history’s most overexamined lives, John Steinbeck explains how to finish a book by forgetting the book, a baby forces her father to rethink what makes a good children’s story, and Hitchcock turns the simple act of watching into suspense.

1. A Wrong Number, a Half-Million Slides, and a Real-Life Walter Mitty

Have you ever wondered who had your phone number before you? Lauren Stevens found out. When her new work phone started receiving calls and texts for someone named “Verndawg,” she and her friends did some online sleuthing. It didn’t take long. The intended recipient was Wernher Krutein, a 72-year-old San Francisco photographer who has spent six decades documenting the world through a camera lens — bugs, buildings, people, landscapes, everything — and archiving it all into a collection of more than 500,000 individually cataloged film slides. Stevens calls him a real-life Walter Mitty.

The archive isn’t just huge. Krutein built his own system to keep track of it. He invented a cataloging method he calls Fluid Logic, in which every single slide is stamped with a unique code, tagged with location and date, and wired into a digital database containing over three million search terms. The system allows him to locate any image from his life’s work almost instantly. He built Photovault.com in the late 1990s to house it all digitally, and the site remains a staggering artifact — part stock photo archive, part one-man encyclopedia of the visual world. One of his best-known images, a car dangling from the collapsed Bay Bridge during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, has appeared in textbooks and documentaries for decades.

When Stevens got to know him, Krutein was barely making a living. He lived alone in Sonoma County with no heat in the house, no family safety net, and savings he measured in months. Stevens launched a GoFundMe, created the Instagram account Verndawgtales to share his work and their story, and became what she describes as his adopted granddaughter. A wrong number turned into one of the most genuine friendships I’ve seen online.

Start with this video and try not to hit the follow button. [Taylor]

• 🌐 Verndawgtales on Instagram

• 🖼️ Wernher Krutein’s PhotoVault

2. Hero of the Empire : The Escape That Made Winston Churchill

Like the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq, or the Bulls with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, some rare dynasties earn a three-peat. The Field Notes version of those triumphs belongs to Candice Millard, the only author I have recommended three times.

I’ve praised her work on Theodore Roosevelt and James Garfield. But her highest dive may have been the book on Winston Churchill. Why? Because the world’s bookshelves groan under the weight of Churchill books. Worse still, he was a gifted writer himself, and his pen was as energetic as the rest of him. Take on a Churchill book and you’re competing against the man, the myth, and thousands of volumes, many of them canonical.

Millard took it on anyway and came out with something remarkable in Hero of the Empire. She found the story that had been underexplored: Winston as a young man in South Africa, twenty-four years old, hungry for a war record that would launch a political career. He went out as a newspaper correspondent and was captured by the Boers when they ambushed the armored train he was accompanying. He escaped in Pretoria, with no map, no compass, and no Afrikaans, then made his way nearly three hundred miles toward safety in Portuguese East Africa, hopping trains and hiding for a time in a coal mine. The Boers put a price on his head. He came home a national hero and was elected to Parliament within a year.

This is one of those moments in Churchill’s life where history turns on a few inches. During the ambush, he stood exposed on the tracks for the better part of an hour under fire, and later wrote that a bullet passed close enough that he felt certain he should have been killed. Millard tells it with her gift for the adrenaline-pounding scene.

Churchill is a complicated figure, of course. But there’s something bold in what Millard did here: take one of the most exhaustively chronicled lives in history, find a story still worth telling, and take a fresh angle on it. [Jimmy]

• 📙 Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard

3. John Steinbeck’s Best Writing Advice: Forget the Book

I’ve read dozens of books on writing, and ninety-nine percent of them fail in two pretty important ways: (1) they lack any insight into writing, and (2) they themselves are badly written. The only real wisdom I’ve found has been in the Writers at Work interviews published by Paris Review, and of those interviews one stands out: John Steinbeck’s. He actually died before he could give the interview, but the magazine stitched it together posthumously from his East of Eden diaries and personal letters. Maybe that’s why it’s so good. It’s honest.

In this pseudo-interview, Steinbeck lays out six rules (which are actually from a letter to his friend, Robert Wallsten, who was stuck on a novel of his own). The first rule, aptly enough, is the best:

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”

The book is not the problem. The idea of the book is the problem. It’s much like mountaineering. The difference between a heavenly ascent and a hellish one is your eyeline; if you’re constantly staring at the summit, the climb will take forever. You’ve got to forget the summit even exists. That’s how you reach it.

Steinbeck won the Nobel eight months after sending that letter, just so you know. [Dylan]

• 📄 John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45 (The Paris Review)

4. Tales from Acorn Wood : Baby Books Parents Can Enjoy Too

If you don’t have a child somewhere between 0 and 3, you can skip today’s recommendation (unless you just love reading books designed for babies, in which case each to their own, I suppose).

Over the first few months of my daughter’s life, we worked our way through much of the Baby Literary Canon, everything from The Very Hungry Caterpillar (greedy bastard!) to Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy (my GOAT).
As far as reading went, these were the halcyon days. The little one didn’t know me from Adam, nor a book from a spoon, so the whole exercise was pretty much entirely for my benefit. In hindsight, I may as well have been reading her a James Ellroy novel.

Anyway, at around 10 months, something shocking happened. She began to engage. This, plus her newfound ability to use her hands and to scream at us the moment she gets bored with a page, led to a dramatic shift in our reading material. Gone were the wry humour of Oi, Frog! and the magical realism of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, replaced by a single-minded fixation on any book that pops or flaps or squeaks or otherwise delights her senses.

The touch-feely, poppy-outty book industry has realised something clever. As long as their books have some physical element for a baby to fiddle with, they don’t need to worry about pesky, time-consuming concepts like language or story or art. So our reading took a turn for the worse. It is, of course, delightful to see the surprise on my daughter’s face every time Olly the Octopus shakes his little tentacles at her, but from an adult reader’s perspective there’s only so much to gain from such books as Pop Up Peekaboo! and That’s Not My Badger.
Which brings me, finally, to today’s recommendation, which I will keep mercifully short.

You may be familiar with the insanely prolific children’s author Julia Donaldson. Everyone’s heard of The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom. We’ll get to those in a couple of years. For now, the Donaldson du jour is her series Tales from Acorn Wood, illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It is the perfect series for our literary predicament.

Set in a whimsical woodland filled with anthropomorphic animals like the wise Doctor Stoat, the always-tired Rabbit and the hapless Frog, these books (we own seven out of eleven) are the only ones in our collection that unfailingly delight us all. For baby: charming illustrations and, crucially, flaps on every page, each hiding some fun little detail. For parents: a simple and amusing story, told in Donaldson’s delightful rhyming musical style. [Ed]

• 📚 Tales from Acorn Wood by Julia Donaldson

5. Rear Window : The Thriller Where All You Can Do Is Watch

I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the first time a few days ago with my family. Except, in a way, I already knew it. I grew up on The Simpsons, and season 6 has “Bart of Darkness,” where Bart breaks his leg, gets a telescope, starts spying on the neighbors, and becomes convinced that Ned Flanders murdered his wife. Only years later did I realize this was an homage to Rear Window.

It came out in 1954, so I won’t be as careful as I normally would be with spoilers. Jimmy Stewart plays L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, a globe-trotting photojournalist stuck in his apartment with a broken leg.

Hitchcock takes away the one thing thriller protagonists are supposed to do: move. Jeff can’t chase anyone, sneak into buildings, or investigate much of anything himself. All he can do is look out the window at the neighbors across the courtyard.

Hitchcock had the whole courtyard constructed on an enormous Paramount soundstage: 31 apartments, many of them fully furnished. From Jeff’s window, they become little screens, each with its own story playing out.

Jeff spends much of the movie doubting that his girlfriend Lisa could fit into his adventurous life. Then she crosses the courtyard to do the investigating he can’t, and ends up in danger. Jeff is stuck in his chair, and so are we. We can see what’s happening across the courtyard, but all we can do is watch. [Liberty]

• 🎬 Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

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We discuss how AI changes the economics of finding needles in haystacks, Effort’s investigations into hidden funding and government spending, whether AI can actually make journalism more rigorous, and what happens when everyone suddenly has the ability to interrogate the information around them. We also explore the darker side of these tools, including AI-powered persuasion, misinformation, cognitive security and the “crisis of nominalism.”

We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

Links

Apple Podcasts

Highlights

How Journalists Source Stories

Brian Chau
The way that journalism is sourced is totally shocking to me. And maybe you’ve been around the block enough that you kind of just know this and have known this forever. But almost all of investigative journalism is solicited. In other words, it’s someone coming to you, the journalist, with a story they want you to run. And I’m not saying that it’s never good, it’s never ethical, to run with a story that’s solicited. Of course, sometimes people come to you with a story, and that’s really important news. It’s genuinely important. And it’s totally a good thing that they run that. And it’s been like that since Watergate, right? Watergate’s famously a solicited story. And it’s been like that actually long before that.

But that actually warps the entire ecosystem of what you see in front of you. And until very recently, it was physically impossible to have stories that came basically any other way. Because to do something like what we’re doing now, in which, for example, we query every single row of the HHS grant table, and that’s how we find a story. And we do that literally, exhaustively, literally looking at the same criteria for all grants, saying, okay, which grants have spiked in the past five years, which grants have grown a ton, either proportionately or as an absolute value, and what relationship those might have to something that’s newsworthy. And I really don’t blame journalists pre AI, because like you said, if you were to do that manually, that would take you literally a lifetime.

And so, just based on the constraints of practicality, not necessarily due to any particular motivation, it was not possible to do that. And now we can have journalism that we source through these exhaustive investigations into legal and financial records, and we can actually have a more scientific way of approaching these things, where it’s like, okay, here are the data sources that we’ve searched. Here are the prompts that we used. Here are the results that we have. And here are the investigations that we tried to do and that we actually hit a brick wall. We didn’t. We found nothing.

A Conspiracy of Incompetence

Jim O’Shaughnessy
We all love our priors, and that turns us into confirmation bias machines where we literally are blinded to information that conflicts with our priors. So let’s just say that’s the average voter, right, if we keep this in the political realm. So an unkind term would be low information voters, right? And nevertheless you could make, I think, I’m asking you really, I think you could cherry pick real facts, not “I made it the fuck up”, but real facts that are verifiable in, let’s say, one of these many government data sets or private data sets or whatever, and you could turn that into an incredibly persuasive story […]

By the way, I’m amused by most conspiracy theorists, because the real conspiracy is there really is no conspiracy except in filing.

Brian Chau
Yeah, it’s a conspiracy of incompetence. My least favorite phrase in the entire English language is “do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.” Because if you’ve ever spent a moment in the real world, you would know that the most malicious people are also extremely incompetent. And very often incompetent people are also malicious. It’s not mutually exclusive. And yeah, I think you’re totally right

Edited Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, hello everyone, it’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I am very excited to have Brian Chau, the founder of Effort News, an innovative open-source investigative journalism site, on as a guest today. Brian, I love this idea so much. We have our own on-prem AI installation, hardware, support software, models, that we use, and this was one of the ideas, and you beat us to it. So congratulations.

Brian Chau
Thank you. It’s been really surprising, both the stories that have gone around and people just didn’t investigate at all, and the underlying infra. Because people have been talking about AI and journalism for basically as long as I’ve been around. This is pre ChatGPT, people are talking about AI and journalism, and just no one has done it to any effective degree at this point. I think everyone tries to do AI for writing, right? Everyone tries to make AI write the articles. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but when AI writes the articles, they are just terrible. They are utterly terrible. And no one has really made a dent in using AI to investigate these troves of legal and financial documents, which is what we’re doing, and we’re changing that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So for listeners and viewers who are not familiar with your new endeavor, explain exactly for our listeners and readers what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. I know that I’m a huge fan of tech making things possible that were impossible before, right? So the first book I wrote was called Invest Like the Best: How to Use Your Computer to Unlock the Secrets of the Top Money Managers. And it was literally, hey, no human being can go through the 1600 annual reports of every company that get released on a quarterly basis. But it’s trivial for a computer to do that. That was way back in the 90s. Now we’ve got the supercharged AI. It can go through tens of millions of records. But talk about A, what was the motivation, B, how you put it into practice effectively. And another thing I really want you to comment on is something that I love, and that is you published the null sets. I think that’s really, really important.

Brian Chau
Yeah, it’s really shocking even before you get to the null sets. The way that journalism is sourced is totally shocking to me. And maybe you’ve been around the block enough that you kind of just know this and have known this forever. But almost all of investigative journalism is solicited. In other words, it’s someone coming to you, the journalist, with a story they want you to run. And I’m not saying that it’s never good, it’s never ethical, to run with a story that’s solicited. Of course, sometimes people come to you with a story, and that’s really important news. It’s genuinely important. And it’s totally a good thing that they run that. And it’s been like that since Watergate, right? Watergate’s famously a solicited story. And it’s been like that actually long before that.

But that actually warps the entire ecosystem of what you see in front of you. And until very recently, it was physically impossible to have stories that came basically any other way. Because to do something like what we’re doing now, in which, for example, we query every single row of the HHS grant table, and that’s how we find a story. And we do that literally, exhaustively, literally looking at the same criteria for all grants, saying, okay, which grants have spiked in the past five years, which grants have grown a ton, either proportionately or as an absolute value, and what relationship those might have to something that’s newsworthy. And I really don’t blame journalists pre AI, because like you said, if you were to do that manually, that would take you literally a lifetime.

And so, just based on the constraints of practicality, not necessarily due to any particular motivation, it was not possible to do that. And now we can have journalism that we source through these exhaustive investigations into legal and financial records, and we can actually have a more scientific way of approaching these things, where it’s like, okay, here are the data sources that we’ve searched. Here are the prompts that we used. Here are the results that we have. And here are the investigations that we tried to do and that we actually hit a brick wall. We didn’t. We found nothing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I love the nothing, because learning via negativa is something that is not natural to we humans, right, for the most part. I was a big Sherlock Holmes fan when I was a kid, and I remember the story.

Brian Chau
Did you want the Sherlock Holmes cold cases?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah. And I always loved the story where he knew that the intruder was known to the family because the dog didn’t bark. And that’s something people just have a hard time getting their heads around, right? All of the null cases that sound very enticing, or like a motivated reasoner could say, well, of course there’s a conspiracy, well, of course this is going on. And then null says, yeah, we scoured 100 million data points and we’re not finding anything.

I wonder though, is, you mentioned a traditional journalist will generally look to sources, right, and then basically go try to either confirm or deny what the source is telling them. Here the sources are a cornucopia of documents that have been required for filing for public information, et cetera. What about situations where there are very little reporting requirements, and/or, for example, the size of the offshore empire, I call it the empire of elsewhere because of the way it gets cleared through the City of London but settles in jurisdictions that used to be part of the British Empire but have very lax financial diligence and paperwork requirements. How do you get into things that aren’t in a Freedom of Information, or aren’t one Freedom of Information Act request away?

Brian Chau
I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot of truth in what you’re saying, but also a lot of the time these barriers are more paper barriers than you might think. So we had one story where we uncovered the donors behind this degrowth organization in Europe called Partners for a New Economy, P4NE. And what we did there is that they were actually hiding their money. It’s funny enough, this degrowth organization calls for an end to growth, shifting of economic policies away from prioritizing growth. Who are they funded by? They’re funded by these 19th century European heirs who are hiding their donations through literal Swiss bank accounts. So they had this big, essentially money mixer, legal version of a money mixer, called Swiss Philanthropy Foundation. And what Swiss Philanthropy Foundation does is that it fiscally sponsors 106 different, essentially like NGOs.

And whenever anyone makes a donation to any of the 106, including the degrowth organization we are investigating, on paper that’s a donation to Swiss Philanthropy Foundation. In theory, no one knows who it’s going to. No one knows if it’s going to P4NE or anyone else or any one of the 106 different foundations that they have in there. So how did we crack this case? We ended up using those donation rows to trace back the donor side disclosures. In other words, in a lot of cases, even if P4NE doesn’t have to disclose their donors because technically it’s being done through the Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, a lot of the time the donors have their own disclosures that they need to do, and you can go line by line and see what matches, and then go to the donor rows and then see if they have a record for those same transactions to Swiss Philanthropy Foundation. And that’s how we traced back a lot of the donors to P4NE.

So there’s both cases where you’re right, there’s more of a layer of obscurity. But I think there’s a big juicy middle there, where there’s a lot of obscurity that does enough to obfuscate you from traditional journalists, or from people who are just doing it by hand or just doing it using traditional software, and from some of the tools and the search mechanisms that we’ve unlocked at Effort. And I think that’s true on a national and also an international level.

You mentioned routing offshore. We know where a lot of these accounts are filed. A lot of them are Hong Kong, a lot of them are Dubai. A lot of them are kind of like vaguely Saudi related accounts. I don’t know if I’m saying anything I shouldn’t on this, but this is all pretty well known, and they’re well known operators that will teach you how to do it as well. And I think that there is a lot more to uncover there. Maybe that’s not the ideal, maybe that’s not the pinnacle of 100% transparency, but I think just as a practical effort, we can put together a lot on that front still.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I’m finally writing a fictional novel that I’ve wanted to write. I had the idea for it like 34 years ago and I’m finally writing it. And we’re using a very experimental technique where we have a writer’s room. It’s me generating all of the story and all of the ideas behind it. But then the writer’s room is like, yeah, Jim, this doesn’t make any sense. And how do you ever think about that? It’s the way a lot of TV shows are produced.

Brian Chau
Yeah. I was just about to say, yeah, you’re writing the Seinfeld sci-fi novel.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
We are actually putting AI editors and writers into the writers room too. So I’m a big believer in the centaur model, which is man plus the tool, right? I look at AI as just an incredible tool that empowers us, we humans, to make the story better, et cetera. One of the things I bring that up because, as I mentioned, if you...

Brian Chau
Can I ask, how well is that going? I think a lot about using AI to improve my writing. And I’ve not really gotten anywhere with this. So I’d be curious on how that’s going with AI editors.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
The editing, certainly on copy edits, it is virtually perfect. On fact checking now that hallucinations have gone way down. Again, it’s difficult because we have our own on-prem which has been fine tuned for the things we’re looking for. So we’re not using just a commercial model off the shelf. And so it’s also very good at that.

On the writing, it’s a very good critic of writing, but that’s up to you. By that I mean you’ve got to come up with a prompt where you get rid of all the sycophancy, where you get rid of. And so I came up with one that was like, I want you to embody one of the most erudite, well-read critics, and I want him to hate everything that I’m going to put in front of him. And oh man, did that hurt. And the thing that is really interesting is it caught things that I would not, and my human writing team and editors also missed. Like, oh, we didn’t even think about that. So it’s really good at all of that. On the writing side it’s getting a lot better. But what you want it to do is you just have to constantly reinforce, no, this is not the voice. This is not my voice. Sorry, gone. But I suspect that as it goes along it will improve dramatically.

But the point I was going to bring up was, as now, remember, this is a fictional novel, but I run it through not only a panel of experts that we generate. So if a chapter happens to be about offshore accounts, we spin up expert panelist members who are expert in that particular thing. We spin up experts in the City of London and the Remembrancer, and on the Bank of International Settlement, et cetera. And then the reasoners are the ones that check all the facts. And we use an adversarial system there. We have one group of agents saying this is true, and we have another group of agents saying, no it’s not, and here’s the evidence.

But I ran a fictional chapter through it just recently and it kind of blew me away, because remember, this is fiction, but it’s looking for the facts around the town I’m using, right? And it comes back, one of our villains starts a terrorist campaign in Europe, and one of the things that is part of that is an electrical grid attack, right? And the AI came back with, yes, that actually did happen at that particular time. But what you maybe didn’t know was the family that electrified that town in this particular country, they had their own house on top of a hill that they had their own electrical system built for. So even if the entire town went black, their house would still be lit up. And I’m like, wait a minute. And so I went the traditional route and went and found the paper records and found all of that. I’m like, damn, it was right. So I suspect that in what you’re doing, you can find all sorts of similar items that don’t intuitively appeal to us.

Brian Chau
Yes. And there’s all sorts of things that become notable via the combination of information. The most obvious example is plagiarism, which is now in the news for other reasons. But you have one person write a thesis, that’s no big deal. You have two people write the exact same thesis, now that’s news. And it’s a lot like that for these entire categories of crimes or of newsworthy findings. Take fraud, for example, right? You have one ledger that’s just all of the expenses. Okay, that’s like, maybe you can look at that and say, oh, they’re paying too much for these services, they’re running inefficiently. Okay. But it is another level of newsworthiness if you have two ledgers, one for the people who are getting paid and one for the people who are paying, and they don’t match. Now that’s an entire different category of information.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And one of the things I thought is, the old way of doing things was a reporter would start with a hypothesis, and then he or she would go and try to find evidence in favor of that hypothesis and, ideally, information that was at odds with that hypothesis. But aren’t the prompts you’re using, isn’t this just like your prompt is your hypothesis?

Brian Chau
No, I think that is true at an abstract, philosophical level, and I think that is less true in practice, where there are degrees to this. For example, when we found the Office of Refugee Resettlement grant story, this was our biggest story at like a hundred, or sorry, it had a million and a half views on Twitter. The prompt that generated that was something like, I had at that point already set up the infra to efficiently fetch and create a mirror of the HHS grant table. But it was, search this database, identify any newsworthy findings, transactions, or evidence of wrongdoing. Look carefully for rapid jumps in absolute and relative values of grants, and cross reference that with other investigative reporting or legal findings.

And what we ended up finding was something that was very specific, was related to these particular religious charities, which claim to represent the viewpoints of religious Americans, both Catholic and other Christian and Jewish Americans, but really had the vast majority of their revenue, 81.8% in one case, coming from these federal migration services grants. So I know a lot of people with different perspectives. You can have whatever perspective you want on refugee resettlement, but the organizations that are moral arbiters for this issue should not be organizations that are actively profiting from these federal grants. They can provide those services or they can be the commentators, but that’s a clear conflict of interest.

But the way that we got these stories was with this open ended query. And in many cases the open ended queries are just more effective. They are just better. And it’s a way that the information flows are shaping the direction of journalism, I think for the better. Because if I set out and I’m like, okay, find me fraud in daycare centers ahead of time, and that’s all I say, then I probably would have missed the story. It’s not overtly fraud. It’s technically legal. It’s not in daycare centers, obviously, it’s in a different funding stream. And in this case, actually having a more exhaustive and more expansive prompt at the start leads you to having a higher likelihood of finding a newsworthy story.

And that is something that is inverted from journalism in the past, where in the past it would almost always be the case, just because of the sheer effort involved, the sheer human quantity of time and labor, that the more narrow your hypothesis, the more likely you were to get somewhere quickly. And that is just the opposite of true at this point, at least in our experience. And I think that this will have a permanent reshaping on what stories end up getting published.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay, so let me ask a question. Imagine we gave your harness and your models to a highly ideological person. And it doesn’t matter what extreme they’re on. Okay, so they’re either a communist or they’re a mega free market type, right? And they were able to run a million queries against a government database. Couldn’t they construct an extraordinarily persuasive but misleading story using only actual factual data that they cherry picked from those government databases?

Brian Chau
I think that’s true in theory, but I think that’s a better equilibrium than what we have now, right? The equilibrium that we have now is basically the “I made it the fuck up” equilibrium, right? It is, you know, all these stories about data center and water usage. It’s like, the real number is like 1%. Of what? Of what? Like, or the real amount is like 1% of total water usage. It’s less than 1%. It’s like a fraction of what, like almond farmers alone?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Pistachios.

Brian Chau
Yeah, yeah. If you ask me, like, okay, for Lent, you have to give up everything that you use data centers for, or you have to give up almonds. What would be the harder choice? And it would obviously not be almonds.

And it was this incredibly effective campaign of not even laundered, like, misconstructions, necessarily. You could call them misconstructions, you can call them misreadings or misrepresentations of denominators, but really what they were was, there was this one author who basically made it the fuck up and was promoted by the New York Times, was promoted by all these journalistic institutions who clearly had a story they wanted to tell and was grasping at straws in order to tell it.

And I think it’s in theory possible that they could do the same thing using the tools that we have. But in some sense that would be a restraining force, not an amplifying force. And here’s what I mean. We end up making literally hundreds of falsifiable claims when we set out. And actually not even falsifiable claims at the level of, here is the actual amount of water a data center uses, but falsifiable claims in that we’re saying, here is this financial record that is proving what we said, and here’s the link to that record. And really, if we were just full of slop, if we were just making shit up, then you could click on those links and you could verify that and you could very easily dismiss us. You could very easily generate this kind of reputation obliterating point, which is like, oh, you claim to have found this invoice, but actually this is just completely fake.

And that is actually something that has happened in some cases when it comes to either defendants or lawyers, defense attorneys, or attorneys in general, making ChatGPT hallucinated citations, or other news stories. Or famously, in the Nathan Cofnas case, the person who suspended Nathan Cofnas had this university speech which made up quotes by people like Albert Einstein. And apparently this was because that person used, this is Petra De Sutter, used ChatGPT to write the speech, which itself is a little bit suspicious, I think, because if you’re doing that with modern ChatGPT, it will not fabricate quotes so brazenly in that way. I almost think it’s some kind of deflection.

But it’s this information ecosystem where it is the “I made it the fuck up” information ecosystem, and there are all sorts of historical institutional legitimacies that are basically tied to the practice of making things up at the moment. And also, to be fair, a lot of new institutions or just influencers or whatever who are tied to making things up. And I think that when you get to the systematic production effort of actually trying to verify and source and evaluate large scale records, that imposes a discipline on you that doesn’t make it impossible, but that just by having this quality filter makes it less likely that’s the kind of story that you’re doing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
You make a very logical argument. But the fact is we live in a world where a lot of people are very busy, they have their priors, and we all, myself included...

Brian Chau
Yeah, I love my priors, I’m a huge fan.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
We all love our priors, and that turns us into confirmation bias machines where we literally are blinded to information that conflicts with our priors. So let’s just say that’s the average voter, right, if we keep this in the political realm. So an unkind term would be low information voters, right? And nevertheless you could make, I think, I’m asking you really, I think you could cherry pick real facts, not “I made it the fuck up”, but real facts that are verifiable in, let’s say, one of these many government data sets or private data sets or whatever, and you could turn that into an incredibly persuasive story.

And look, I am 100% on board with AI. I think it is potentially the greatest tool that has certainly been invented in my lifetime. I’ve been waiting for it since I was in my 20s. I keep journals, handwritten journals, and I found one from when I was 22, and I didn’t call it AI, obviously, but this supercomputer, et cetera. But every technology is dual use in my opinion. And so I worry about the cognitive load that is coming for your average person. And I don’t know that we are adequately prepared for it, because as you said, the idea that logically you can go back and tie it into all of the footnoted, et cetera. By the way, I’m amused by most conspiracy theorists, because the real conspiracy is there really is no conspiracy except in filing.

Brian Chau
Yeah, it’s a conspiracy of incompetence. My least favorite phrase in the entire English language is “do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.” Because if you’ve ever spent a moment in the real world, you would know that the most malicious people are also extremely incompetent. And very often incompetent people are also malicious. It’s not mutually exclusive. And yeah, I think you’re totally right. You’re totally right on this. You’re totally right on the human nature points.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And so I think that there’s going to be a lot of potholes, there’s going to be a lot of things that were, whoops, we didn’t mean to do that. But rather than subscribe to the idea, no, shut it all down, make it illegal, et cetera, it’s like the example I always give is fire. Boy, fire was incredibly useful technology for we humans. I’ve read reports that when we started cooking our food, it’s what developed the prefrontal executive function of the prefrontal cortex. But fire is also really fucking dangerous. And so rather than try to ban fire, what we got was fire departments, fire alarms, fire extinguishers, fire exits, et cetera.

And I think that we’re going to have to think out really thoughtfully. We’re going to have to do this here as well, because I could definitely, I don’t know whether you saw the report that said that, I haven’t read the full report yet, so let me add that footnote, but that they were finding in multiple studies that large language models are actually more persuasive for a majority of people than human beings are. You do not have to be a very insightful person to think, oh, what would happen if I put that in the hands of my greatest enemy, right?

Brian Chau
Oh, but you should do a double click on those reports. I’ve read very many of those papers. It’s an area that’s fascinating to me, practically useful to me as well, as you can imagine. But do you know how the LLMs tend to be better persuaders than humans?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
No.

Brian Chau
You know, what are the causal mechanisms that they found? No, it is by being patient, not being condescending, ironically empathizing with the other person’s views. It’s basically by the same epistemic technologies that we’ve known since the time of the Greeks make for good persuasive rhetoric and good persuasive conversation.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Brian Chau
And a lot of people just don’t want to put in the effort to do that. And that might be the frontier at the end of the day, is that the LLMs, no matter what your problems with them, are infinitely more patient, are by design infinitely more patient than humans are. And that’s going to come with, as you say, its own set of consequences, both positive and negative.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
And do you have any ideas about how that unfolds? And how...

Brian Chau
Oh, yeah. I’ve been thinking about this for so long.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Enlighten me. Enlighten me.

Brian Chau
Yeah, I remember there were these two dueling camps back when I did AI policy in DC. I was one of the few people who were doing AI policy in favor of having more AI. This is a funny anecdote as well, but when we were deciding on the name, the org ended up being called Alliance for the Future. But when we were deciding on the name, we decided not to put AI in the name, because every single organization that had AI in the name was anti AI. This is an amazing thing. But that really gave me an insight into how policymakers were thinking about this.

And there tended to be two camps. There tended to be one camp which was something like, oh, AI is not a big deal. Maybe it’ll be good for GDP on net, but it will be fundamentally uninteresting, and therefore we shouldn’t regulate it. And that ended up being most of my allies in that situation. And then there was another camp that was something like, AI is going to fundamentally change the world, and therefore we must ban it.

And I don’t know if it’s because I’ve always been a pathologically optimistic person, but my way of thinking about it, that really solidified after leaving DC and building more with AI for myself, was something like, actually, the apocalypse was in the past. This is like reinventing postmillennialism, right? But actually that there has been this massive wave of antisocial and destructive behaviors, and actually most of that is going to be revealed.

There was this concept that was floating around for a long time of something like an encryption jubilee, a time in which we finally crack RSA, maybe that’s with quantum computers, maybe that’s somewhat with the assistance of AI, and we leak everyone’s encrypted messages, and then everyone can be okay with tolerating each other’s strange porn tastes and Google search history and whatever, right? And I think that there is something analogous with people’s either laziness or biased forms of argumentation, or even just, like we were talking about, the lack of effort that many political commentators have in really trying to persuade people.

And when the LLMs become widely diffuse, I think you’re going to see a wave of things that could be, that are on their surface incredibly appealing and invigorating, in a sense that just gets demolished on the thinnest pushback. A lot of those arguments are just going to vanish. Or are going to become these anti-markers of intelligence or of status. They’re going to be much better socially penalized, because any single person can go, you know, “@grok, is this true?” And there’s a certain class of arguments that will just completely be evaporated by Grok or by ChatGPT or Claude or any of these models. Probably even by these 7B models, these tiny models from Google or whoever, like Gemma, where even not even just existing technology, but technology that is well below the frontier of what we have now, can just demolish these arguments. And I think that the biggest societal change that we will undergo is unveiling all of this essentially clown behavior that has gone on for the past really centuries.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I agree that I joke with people that we’ve always been living in The Truman Show, just now we are having the tools that say, oh, wait a minute, this all seems a lot more managed than we would have thought. And I think part of it came from this anomalous period, and I stress anomalous period, after World War II, through the ending of, I don’t know when the FCC changed the Fairness Doctrine, but we’re literally in America...

Brian Chau
It was under Reagan, right? It was...

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I think so.

Brian Chau
I think ‘82.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, the 1980s. But I definitely think that...

Brian Chau
‘87.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Thank you.

Brian Chau
It was second, second Reagan term.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
One of, I guess I would call it a bug, other people might call it a feature, of human OS is the desire for certainty and a hatred of uncertainty or chaos or what have you. And so we had this period between the end of the war and 1987 when in America there were three major networks that were the source of the news for the vast majority of Americans. There were two national newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And that was it. And you think, like shooting fish in a barrel, if you want something buried and you have access to those three networks and/or those two newspapers, you can manage society in a much more seemingly orderly way. Now, that started to break down right when television went and started filming the shit we were doing in Vietnam. And that’s another example. And I’m wondering your take on this. Is what you’re doing in any way kind of analogous to what happened when we introduced reporters who, by the way, for much of Vietnam were not censored. They were not, they were just riding along, and the American public for the first time saw what was actually happening. And they’re like, holy shit, we don’t want any part of this. Could you see something similar happening with things like Effort News?

Brian Chau
Yeah, I think it’s totally revolutionary. And it was actually this unfulfilled promise of the Nixon era. The idea was “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” We’d finally have transparency and that would bring a whole new wave of accountability to governments. And funny enough, we got the transparency, at least much more than we had before. And that led to almost nothing. It led to the Bill Clinton sex scandal. And there was some degree that was useful in some degree, but it led to no real systematic change. And some people would argue, I think correctly, that there’s been since then a systematic decline in accountability in all sorts of government areas.

And I think in part that is because the infrastructure to take advantage of that transparency never really materialized. You had all of this dependency on sources reporting. And once again, this isn’t to fully condemn sources reporting, but especially if you’re censoring your own stories as an institution in order to get better sourcing, that itself would be something that is a lot more worthy of condemnation, where the transparency was there. But at that point the news organizations, the centralized news organizations, I think actually by that time both TV and print, were so attached to getting stories through source reporting that they’re no longer able to effectively comment and really effectively counterbalance the measures that were taken in place to control information. And that only became stronger in the COVID and the post social media platform era as well.

And I think that is changing for a number of reasons. Number one is just underlying technology, right? It’s a lot easier to make these queries. It’s a lot easier to just process a sheer amount of documents, many of whom will be hits, right? Or sorry, many of whom will be misses. There will be a much greater number of misses per hit, right? Where for example, if we’re just looking through every grant in the HHS database, a lot of those grants would just be fully legal, and not just fully legal, but fully non controversial stuff that we, at least on balance, I don’t know if it’s fully good as a policy goal, but on balance, do not see as contradicting the purposes of HHS.

And that cost benefit calculus has totally changed, where if it’s something like, oh, maybe we’ll get one scoop, but we’ll really have to burn through thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of documents of things that we’ll completely not get anywhere with. Before it would just have been, you know, are you kidding me? Let’s move on to the next area. But now that can actually be investigated and actually investigated fairly diligently. So I think the overall trend, like I said, my underlying theme to all of this is that yeah, there are going to be problems, there are going to be misuses of the technology, but the overall trend is towards something better than what we had before.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that brings me to the economic question I had for you. So if in the past there was a big story that a news organization wanted to own, so to speak, like the Boston newspaper that basically broke all the stories about the child abuse rampant in the Catholic Church, and they made a movie about it, et cetera, that you can quantify. You could say, okay, we need to hire six, a dozen, however many journalists, it’s going to take them six months, a year, okay, we can tote up exactly what their salaries are, what their overtime is, what the cost of travel, et cetera. But you have costs too, right? In other words, you have costs of inference, engineers, a variety of things. How cost advantaged are you over the model I’ve just described?

Brian Chau
The stories that we’ve broken so far, whether it’s the Preferred Communities grant, whether it’s the degrowth donors, all of them are stories that would have just been straightforwardly infeasible under the previous model, which would have, if you were to put a dollar number on it, and it would probably not even be feasible to just recruit that many journalists. It would be this kind of market that eats the entire old market. It would have been like upwards of tens of millions of dollars at least, if you could even physically assemble, like find that many journalists who had those competencies in those areas, to pay. So it is a total sea change in terms of what is capable and what is cost.

Speaking of cost, though, this is actually more of my traditional educational background. I had a degree in pure math and started in machine learning at a really young age, basically when I was still in high school. Anyways, I had been a machine learning engineer before, and this is mostly what we optimize on, because a lot of the harnesses make extremely inefficient queries to databases. It’s shocking, because at the same time I can look at some of the cyber security applications, I can tell that there are a lot of things that the LLMs are a lot better than me on. But in terms of making API requests, not all of them, but many of them, or making efficient database queries, they just will put out tons of fucking slop queries and will consume way more tokens, will just take longer, will have higher latency on these tool calls. And there is just a lot that you could optimize for in many dimensions.

That’s part of what’s so exciting about this. And that’s been super exciting for me. It kind of points to that environment that a lot of people talk about, this is actually before my generation, but of the early Internet, where it seemed like everything was so unoptimized. You could just sit down and think about it and you could optimize these things. You as basically anyone who was reasonably smart, who had a computer, was reasonably familiar with these things. And that’s just this massively inspiring thing. And that’s something I feel like we’re picking up a ton of momentum on every single day on our team.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
So what about the idea that journalism has been misclassified for a century? And by that I mean, I think of H.L. Mencken, right? He was the king of the muckrakers, and he was always great with his quotes and everything else. But I, so at least I, maybe others don’t, but I sort of associate journalists with writers, with the actual act of writing or producing, if it’s TV or radio. But maybe they were actually search and verification engines, and using writers was just a hell of a lot cheaper because we didn’t have the technology. Your model changes the economics of finding needles in haystacks, right?

Brian Chau
Yes, that was one thing that we thought of putting on the website. We find needles in haystacks.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
But my question and pushback on that is, if I was your opposition, right, if I was trying to get up to something nefarious, why wouldn’t I, if I have my own tools that are at least as good as, if not better than yours, why wouldn’t I just make a fuck ton more hay and make it much more difficult to find the true needle, so to speak?

Brian Chau
Oh, it’s already happening. Yeah, I think that’s totally fair, and that’s totally happening. And actually that’s been happening for 30 years. That is the intelligence agency, Defense Department, that is the documented strategy of just producing so many documents, of maliciously complying with FOIA requests. That’s totally happened, and I think there will be another escalation of this. Imagine you make a FOIA request to the CIA and they just give you petabytes of AI slop. That could totally happen, and I think that probably will happen. So I don’t really have a solution to that necessarily. To some extent we will have to AI harder, and it is this Red Queen’s game where you’re staying in the same place, but you’re running faster and faster.

I think in some sense we can outcompete the CIA, at least in this narrow area, or we can outcompete all of the people who would otherwise be trying to obfuscate information. And in part that’s just the pace of technological development. Of course, I think a lot about incentivizing our organization and building up our capacities in that way. In part that’s innovator’s dilemma. There are all these tech theories and why the incumbents will always win, or why the startups will always beat the incumbents. It’s always treated as this kind of predetermined natural course of history thing. I think we just have to win. I think we just have to fight as hard as we can. And I think you’re absolutely right that it’s not just going to be us, it’s going to be people on both sides. It’s going to be people both maliciously complying, maliciously producing information, subverting transparency laws, or at least kind of maliciously complying with transparency laws. That’s totally going to be happening. And at the same time we’ll just have to race on faster and faster.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, but again I come back to good old human OS, and I don’t know anyone who reads the terms and conditions before clicking okay. And I agree with you, by the way, that the patient large language models will read all of them and they will point out all of the ones that go against you. But I’m worried about the people, you know, they’re busy with other things in their life, right? They’ve got a family, they’ve got a job, they’ve got hobbies, et cetera. And meanwhile I kind of see this massive battle between two philosophical points of view, if we keep the extremes, right, and the weapons are getting a lot more precise.

And I just wonder, and it’s like, again, the Pandora’s box is opened, and so trying to say no, we want to rethink, that’s not going to happen. But I do wonder if we should spend a little bit more time on cog sec, cognitive security, right? Like maybe freely disseminated. If we could figure out a way to really be able to judge deepfakes, for example, wouldn’t it be cool if you just freely distribute it to everyone, something on their phone that was like, the minute a video showed up, it just went “deepfake” across it. At least that would condition them to start thinking. Oh, you’re absolutely right about history. People have been manipulated by religions, by political ideologies, by a variety of incentives for all of human history. That’s nothing new. But now we’re doing it at weapons-grade and it scales. And so I definitely think some form of cognitive security for everyone might be a good idea.

Brian Chau
Yeah, you’re definitely the best kind of critic, Jim, because I think I really share the same fundamental view of human nature. I have a very Hobbesian view of human nature. Hobbes is still my favorite philosopher to this day.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Brutish and short, right?

Brian Chau
Yeah, and so much more than that. Both the dual powers of the sovereign, the origins of human reason, goes so far. But I think you’re right in that I think that you want to draw a distinction between the scale of deployment, where you’re absolutely right, it’s bigger than ever before, and the equilibrium harms. I think something that every major tech policy fight has sort of gotten wrong in the past few decades has been this conflation of the possible harms and then the equilibrium, where people will say this, for example, with cyber, that’s something that’s more played out. People will say, oh, there are so many potential hacks. And then you ask the straightforward next question, which is, well, how many of those potential hacks will be prevented by AI? And not only that, how many of the potential hacks from past generations, or just possible with previous levels of software or previous levels of human hackers, will be prevented by AI? And then that equilibrium, that’s not zero, right? That’s not zero harm, but it’s very different. And man, this could really be a long answer. I will try to keep it from being like a 30 minute Hobbes monologue.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah, no, obviously, let’s try to make it a little more compressed. But I think this is important. I think that people who are in favor of AI and all of the tools and the powers that they unlock need to examine and acknowledge the other side of the argument. Don’t get me wrong, I’m maybe one of the most pro AI guys out there in terms of the potential for what it can do. We just made a movie about how the Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed Pompeii...

Brian Chau
Is this the scrolls?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah. And love the scrolls. We made a movie about it because to me it’s the coolest thing in the world. It required a particle accelerator and AI to be able to translate these scrolls, but now we’re able to transcribe ancient Greek and Roman scrolls that if you touched them in the past, they just disintegrated. And I’m giddy about the use cases for AI in terms of expanding our knowledge, expanding innovation, expanding discovery, et cetera.

But I definitely think that you need to be, I call myself a pragmatic optimist. And by that I mean I think you need to consider the unintended consequences and try to come up with good solutions for them. Because if you don’t, the people who are on the other side of the argument are going to make hay with those, and they’re going to say, yeah, but, right, like. And most of the objections are going to be way deep in the tail and very unlikely to happen. But if we who are in favor of this new expansive rocket ship for the mind that AI is. And also I hate the artificial intelligence. Brian Roemmele calls it intelligence amplification, which I much prefer, because really that’s, in my opinion, one of the things it’s doing and/or uncovering, right, like you’re doing. But I do think we need to think about these other use cases and have good ideas, because it’s going to happen.

Brian Chau
Oh, absolutely. It’s totally going to happen. And I think one of the most important questions for any philosopher to ask is to step back and ask, is this a matter that will be decided by philosophy, or is this a matter that will be decided by action? And to a large extent, I think that the part that has been decided by philosophy we’ve already talked about, it’s kind of the nature of the story and that kind of epistemic field of what comes. And the part that will be decided by action is essentially, what are the names in the media ecosystem people will trust, what are the solid ground, right? And that can never be fully reliable. You shouldn’t put your absolute faith in any kind of news reporting or any kind of human institution in general.

But you have to have something, and I think about a lot of that on a daily basis as well, where Effort is not merely trying to produce a good technological platform, right? You’re not merely trying to say, like, oh, here is this technology, everyone will have this technology, voila. I’m really concerned, and I think this is very different than a past generation of more optimistic, more maybe Rousseauian founders, even. I don’t know if they’re explicitly Rousseauian, but implicitly Rousseauian. But I’m a lot more concerned about institution building, that this is the specific group of people who will be employees and founders and contributors to Effort. This is a specific kind of culture that I want to calibrate on epistemic openness and of hypothesis testing and of the scientific method and just a very high standard for everything.

Not publishing slop. That’s the most important thing. We do not publish slop, and we do not publish slop in all sorts of ways. We do not publish slop in that we do not publish AI writing, at least at this point, writing still, at least in our experience, not great. We rigorously, we human write all of the articles and thoroughly check for any improvements we can make to the phrasing, any improvements we could make to the clarity. We also, of course, don’t publish slop in terms of records. We verify all of the records, both with a lot of AI tools and by hand. We don’t publish slop in the sense that we don’t bury stories, but we want to make sure we take our stories to completion. We don’t want to just be wildly flinging accusations. We want to get to the point where we have a clear border of, this is what we found, this is what we didn’t find, here is how we can prove what we found, here is the steps that led to us not finding these other things.

And I think that at the end of the day, part of that will be decided by technology. Of course, we would not be able to do most of what we’re doing now without it. But there’s also a large part that will inevitably come down to a form of human judgment. And that is something, in my opinion, that you have to be proactive about. You can’t just completely leave the human judgment to the wind. That you have to be proactive about as we’re building out Effort. And to me in the long term there is no perfectly philosophically consistent defense against all bad actors. That’s just not feasible. Maybe there’s a solution to it. Maybe GPT 7 will come up with one. But it is just beyond me and it’s beyond every philosopher in history. But the practical solution to that looks more like the institution building that I think a lot of people in the previous generation have neglected.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, and that’s an interesting point, because it also leads to objectivity. I think that’s a term that we like to use a lot and misuse mostly, because I think that your organization, for example, right, like I would love to see that you don’t get captured because you’re a subscription model, right? There’s always audience capture. And are you dedicated to exposing whatever kind of corruption and/or story that got buried regardless of which political side it helps?

Brian Chau
Yeah, for sure. And I think that at the very beginning you’re going to see actually a different kind of selection bias, which is that we’re reporting on essentially stories that have been dropped. Because for example, the refugee resettlement story, that’s something that could have been reported on for literally five years. So the fact that we are able to report it is a direct consequence of it not having been reported. And honestly, it’s funny because this is going to be a justification for stories that are perceived as more right coded. But honestly it’s because a lot of the right wing media ecosystem are just a bunch of muppets who do not seriously complete their investigations and are comfortable with just publishing slop, publishing accusations, not actually digging into the documents.

And I mean, digging into the documents may not be completely easy, especially without AI. But it is just this completely different equilibrium where, you know, there are obviously biases with the New York Times, but they do actually do investigative reporting at least, and they do actually break stories, and they break stories in a certain direction, and that’s going to leave actually a gap that is not going to be equal. So I think that in the short to medium term you should expect that to be unequal via negativa.

Let me give a more concrete example related to that, though. We’re going to be breaking a story, I don’t know exactly when this will come out, but we will be breaking a story within a few days, reporting on something that the Trump administration has been trying to keep secret, which is the whole Freedom Fuel network. Do you know about this? You know about Freedom Fuel?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
No, I don’t.

Brian Chau
It’s this fascinating mystery. I think it’s been this fascination of journalism world because it’s this particularly enticing thing. Essentially the Trump administration has been promoting this series of gas stations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania that have been selling gas almost certainly at a loss. They originally sold at $3.47, right? This is because Trump is the 47th president. And they’ve in general been somewhere like 40 to 50% below the going gas rates in those areas, almost certainly losing money compared to selling that gas even on the open market. So a classic case of fascinating mystery.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, and economists would call that dumping to gain market.

Brian Chau
Yeah, yeah. And so there’s this fascinating mystery of where’s the gas coming from. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have tried to figure out where the gas is coming from and they have not figured it out. And we have not, I think we have meaningfully moved forward the Freedom Fuel case, I’ll put it that way. Meaning we’ve not fully found evidence of government subsidy, but we have found fairly conclusive evidence of self-dealing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Interesting. Of the stories that you’ve dropped so far, which one got the most reaction, both positive or negative? And then I do want you to, because when I was getting ready to chat with you, I read your story about how to hijack the new X, or as us old timers call it, Twitter, algorithm.

Brian Chau
But wait, am I an old timer?

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Maybe in spirit, maybe learning a lot today. But which stories are the ones that really the lightning hit the rod?

Brian Chau
Yeah, it was definitely the refugee resettlement story, because this one was just something where the financial record was so damning, and also where the players involved were these already very big media entities. US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Church World Service, HIAS, Episcopal Migration Ministries. For a long time they’ve been trotted out. They are the most public of public figures or public entities. They’ve been trotted out to be very critical of any kind of migration restrictions.

And for literally, for upwards of five years in terms of the grants that I reported on, but upwards of 10 years at least for the total body of grants, it had just gone completely unnoticed that they were being majority, that the vast majority of their revenue, 81.8% in the case of USCCB, 89% in the case of Church World Service, was being funded by these resettlement grants. In other words, they were explicitly benefiting from the policies they were advocating for.

It would be like taking a dairy farmer and having them be the object, treating them as the objective moral arbiter of whether the government should subsidize milk. It’s like, there are these well known names who go on TV every time there’s a milk policy debate. And they’re treated as the representatives of Christian Americans worldwide, or Christian Americans across the country. And they come out and they say, “we morally condemn in the strongest terms the President’s opposition to subsidizing milk.” And then it turns out five years later that all this time they’re selling milk. It’s like, what? This is a totally crazy story. And it also goes to show, despite all of the media attention, despite all of the endless commentary on these organizations, for a long time no one went and actually dug into the financials. And now we did, we finally done it.

And yeah, the reaction to that was overwhelming. Interestingly, there’s a certain type of story, there’s a certain type of, I mean, I don’t want to be mean to any individual specifically, but as an institution, there is a certain type of New York Post story that very effectively draws kind of counter criticism, that breaks a real thing, but also taints it in a way and fills it with other sort of inaccuracies or bias, or basically gives this massive attack surface to critics of that story. And of course the most famous one of these was the Hunter Biden laptop, which at its core was a truthful story, it was a real finding, but was distorted in all of these ways, which eventually became used in order to weaponize social media against it.

Anyways, we got very little of that with the refugee resettlement story. I think actually for that reason. And there’s actually a perverse incentive there, I’m going to do my best to avoid it. I think that we shouldn’t be lowering the quality of our story intentionally in order to get more counter reaction from the other side. But I think there’s a certain type of story that gets a ton of negative counter reaction because it, I don’t know if it intentionally introduces flaws, but because of the flaws that are there. And I think that this was sort of the opposite kind of story, where the financials were so clearly laid out, the conflict of interest was so undeniably established, that the other side didn’t even want to touch the story.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Interesting. And we’re talking a lot about incentives, right? And another point of view that is kind of consistent with my quip about we’re all living in The Truman Show and always have been, is like, what percentage of, in quotes, news is just propaganda, and it’s literally the various sides vying for power trying to win the news cycle? Like that’s another one, winning the news cycle. That’s as old as we have the media, right?

And I just wonder, one of the things that I do worry about is all of this is so new. And I’m not just talking about AI, I’m talking about, Bill Bryson has a great book called America One Summer, in which he’s talking about the first time a single human spoke to more than a thousand humans, right, was the guy on the radio announcing Lindbergh’s return from flying across the Atlantic. And so telegraphs, like, it’s in the scheme of human history, all of these new technologies are brand spanking new. And now we’ve got, we’ve gone from spears to thermonuclear multiple warheads really quickly. Is there going to be some form of way that humans just...

Brian Chau
Yes, I think it’s all resolving now. I think it’s all not resolving to a final conclusion, but a lot of that built up technical debt is now being reevaluated, and that’s the conflict we see. That’s what people are angry on social media 24/7. And not all of that is directed in a productive way. A lot of that is directed towards slop. Those criticisms are totally fair, but largely what I see is a reevaluation of those fundamentals. As Nietzsche called it, “a reevaluation of all values.”

And I think where that starts is something I call the crisis of nominalism. There’s this big phrase that goes around. You’ve caught me at a great time, because I was just on a four-hour hike and I was thinking about this and I have all these thoughts fresh in my mind. But there’s what’s called a crisis of liberalism, which I think is really mislabeled. And the theory behind calling it a crisis of liberalism is like, oh, there’s a ton of premises, but the story is like, oh, we’ve lived in what we now call liberalism for roughly 250 years, basically since the American founding. And that is now coming to various flaws, whether that’s fertility, whether that’s social media, whether that’s foreign influence, whether that’s migration. And what people will say is that liberalism is collapsing under its own values.

And I think a point by point deconstruction of that claim, almost every premise is false. Where we are not living under, we are no longer living under liberalism. It’s not a continuation of older values. Liberalism is not causing the issues that we see. And actually it is not even a crisis. It is a reevaluation of a slave decline.

And I can get into each of those points specifically, but let me try to give a core, something that’s like a useful takeaway from this. Is that nominalism, what it actually is, is people taking a name for granted, right? This is science. It was published in a title, in a journal called Science, therefore it must be science, right? And not actually going looking underneath. Is this the scientific method? Are these neutrally tested hypotheses? Were these in a controlled environment? What was the statistical probabilities, that this was actually a relevant finding, and so on and so forth. That at the very surface level, you kind of look at the cover of the box and you never actually look inside the box.

That problem has persisted. It has persisted, certainly scientifically, it’s persisted in news media, in both the older institutions and the kind of influencer slop type media that’s come up to rival it. Both of those domains are domains where you kind of just get the slop and you never look inside the box.

And this is really the most disastrous version in spending. And you get this in a lot of government spending. I’m very sympathetic with the DOGE people, where they had a complete communication failure and they just got so internally overwhelmed that they ended up being driven crazy and not really being productive in their political actions. Where if you are someone who’s had experience putting together financials for a startup, I’ve done this both in my own company and with previous companies that I’ve worked for, I’ve done this personally, and you are used to that level of accounting, and you know that if you do not present this quality of information to auditors, you will go to jail. And you see the standard that is set in Treasury or in these other government departments, then you will have a meltdown. It is just a completely different standard. It’s a total double standard.

And they were expecting to go to the media or to go to Congress with this, and for them to react with, oh my goodness, this is a total, this is like a five-alarm fire. This is something that, if you were done at a private company, you would go to jail for. This is some crazy stuff. And they were completely not prepared for the reaction that they got, which is, this is how things have always been. And both of these sides are kind of acting rationally in their own narrow context. It is simultaneously true that if you were doing this in a private company or public company, if you’re doing this in any kind of normal corporation, you would go to jail for this. That’s both simultaneously true. And the kind of protests of the senators of, this is how it’s always been, this is maybe not good, but there’s not much we can do about it, this individually, I think that’s also true. So it was this huge kind of Shakespearean tragedy that played out.

But that’s a good illustration of what I mean by the crisis of nominalism, that we have these names, right? We have these names of accountability or auditing or financial record keeping. And under the surface they’ve completely diverged. Under the surface you actually look inside the box and it’s like, what is even going on? It is this chthonic mass. And a lot of that is going to be reevaluated. A lot of that is going to be either split into different names, or there is going to be this type of philosophical colonialism where people who have been more competent over the past 10 or 20 or 30 years will go in and have to clean up these institutions. Part of that is also this new trend of software roll-ups, which could be a completely different rabbit hole. But there’s a lot that’s going to shift, and that’s going to hinge both economically, politically and philosophically on this crisis of nominalism, of the big question of what happens when you finally look inside the box.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, you make, now we’re down to linguistics in my opinion. So for example, I think it was Kierkegaard said, “when you label me, you negate me.” And you were using words like accountability, et cetera. Of course, good old George Orwell understood that a long time ago when he talked about Newspeak and, you know, “war is peace, freedom is slavery,” et cetera. And then, of course, the classic Bill Clinton under questioning during the Monica...

Brian Chau
“What do you mean is?”

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, it depends on what you mean by the definition of is, is right? But yourself, you’ve said slop I don’t know how many times. You see, we’ve always had slop. We, except it was always just human slop, right? Of the millions...

Brian Chau
When I say slop, I am inclusive. I am not discriminating based on species.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
I understand, but I want to say we get captured. One of the dangers of labels, in my opinion, is it puts thinking aside, right? You label something slop, it goes into that bucket. We call it slop. You no longer really try to disambiguate, is this really slop or is this real? I mean, would Joyce’s early works get put in a slop bucket? Probably. You know, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. And it was because he was so new, right? His style of writing was so new, people literally didn’t know how to read it, right? And now we know how to read it now, because we evolved into understanding that kind of postmodern way that Joyce approached his novels.

But I just think that I worry too, because labels, the power of labels. You yourself have just made an excellent case, right? Accountability, transparency. When I hear transparency and accountability, I think, okay, wow, it’s going to be accountable, this is going to be transparent. And so the power of language in and of itself, the semantic meaning, the semiotic meaning, is something that we’re going to also have to kind of dig into.

One of the ideas I had would be, how cool would it be to have an AI companion that was, I’m calling it the Reader, right? And when you’re reading a news article, it just points out, like, factually incorrect, appeal to emotion. I don’t know if you’ve read Influence by Cialdini. We talked about it a little earlier. And I joked one of the reasons why the large language models were pretty good at it was because they’ve been trained on the entire corpus of influence. And Cialdini is kind of the king with his book Influence.

But I definitely think if you had a Reader there that was saying, like, who benefits from this? I used to say to younger people, and they’re asking me, like, how do you navigate reading the news, this pre AI, I was just like, ask yourself the question, who benefits if I believe this? What are the objectives of this particular writer? Are they for a particular outcome? Are they just informative? What are they? But if you actually had a reading companion right next to you, or a watching companion, right, I mean, if we had this, I’d put it on this podcast and it would probably contradict me a lot. Well, Jim is doing an appeal to emotion. Jim is doing an appeal to authority, all of those things. But I definitely think that organizations like yours, that’s why I was so excited to talk to you. You’re the beginning stages of this unfolding.

Brian Chau
Yeah, I was just, so when you talked about Joyce and his early works, I immediately flashed back to this experience I had two months ago. So I’m going to read something and tell me what you hear.

Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay?

Brian Chau
“The old professor, em dash, Calguès by name, em dash, aimed his glass at one of the ships still lit by the sun, then patiently focused the lens until the image was as sharp as he could make it. Like a scientist over his microscope peering in to find his culture swarming with the microbes he knew all the time must be there. The ship was a steamer, a good 60 years old. Her five stacks straight up like pipes showed how old she was. Four of them were lopped off at different levels by time, by rust, by lack of care, by chance, em dash, in short, by gradual decay. She had run around just off the, she had run aground just off the beach and lay there, comma, listing at 10 degrees like all the ships in the phantom fleet. There wasn’t a light to be seen on her once it was dark, not even a glimmer. Everything must have gone dead, em dash, boilers, generators, everything, all at once, em dash, as she ran to meet her self-imposed disaster.”