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Sunday, 5 April

Two thoughts from Heimito von Doderer

“In comparison to what I’ve suffered from myself, the humiliation and suffering inflicted on me by others vanishes into insignificance.”

“The exhaustibility of a person is in inverse proportion to their real interests.”

Monday, 6 April

Two thoughts from Haruki Murakami

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

“You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.”

Tuesday, 7 April

Two thoughts from William Ernest Henley

“It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.”

“Under the bludgeonings of chance,

My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

Wednesday, 8 April

Two thoughts from Donald Miller

“Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”

“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.”

Thursday, 9 April

Two thoughts from Publilius Syrus

“Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.”

“Seek to please many, and you seek a failure.”

Friday, 10 April

Two thoughts from Byron Katie

“When I argue with reality, I lose, but only 100% of the time.”

“If you want real control, drop the illusion of control; let life have you. It does anyway. You’re just telling yourself the story of how it doesn’t.”

Saturday, 11 April

Two thoughts from Michael A. Singer

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind, you are the one who hears it.”

“It doesn’t matter what others do, unless you decide that it matters to you.”

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1. Jiro Dreams of Sushi : Still Not Perfect at 100

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a 2011 documentary about Jiro Ono, a sushi chef who runs a ten-seat restaurant near a Tokyo subway station. When the film was made, Ono was 85 years old and the restaurant had three Michelin stars. Last October, he turned 100. Asked by the Tokyo governor what the secret to his longevity was, Ono replied simply: “I believe the best medicine is to work.” He still hasn’t fully retired.

What strikes me every time I watch the film is the specificity of Jiro’s obsession. He has spent more than eight decades making sushi, and he still believes he hasn’t perfected it. His apprentices train for years before they’re allowed to cook rice. One of them practiced making tamago (egg sushi) for months before Jiro finally told him it was acceptable. The film lingers on these details because they are the point. Mastery is a practice, renewed every day, and the people who achieve it are the ones who find meaning in the repetition itself.

The documentary also captures something melancholy about excellence at this level. Jiro’s sons work alongside him, but they will always be in his shadow. His eldest, Yoshikazu, is now in his sixties and widely considered a master in his own right, yet he still runs the restaurant under his father’s name and his father’s standards. There’s a tension between inheritance and identity that the film handles with restraint, letting you feel the weight of expectation without ever stating it outright. Yoshikazu has spent sixty years mastering an art form he'll never fully own. It’s a family story as much as it is a story about craft.

I find the film genuinely inspiring. Watching Jiro work makes me want to be better at my own craft, to care more about the details, to find joy in the pursuit rather than the arrival. The best work about excellence makes mastery look worth the effort. [Jimmy]

• 🎬 Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

2. Dostoevsky: Begin the Climb

Dostoevsky is a daunting prospect. His novels are intimidating mountains to climb, even for seasoned readers. More daunting still is the fact that the man has so many classics to choose from—classics that run 700, 800, 900 pages, I should add—that most people never begin. They’re terrified of finding themselves halfway up the wrong peak.

“Where do I start? Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov?” That’s a question I’m often asked.

My answer is always the same: Notes from Underground.

It’s the perfect introduction to his psychology, philosophy, and style (and it’s only about 120 pages).

Written as a monologue by a bitter, anonymous man ranting about everything wrong with himself and the world, it’s actually one of existentialism’s foundational texts—the school of thought that would give rise to Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and countless others. There’s a passage in it that’s among the most profound in all of literature, ending with the line: “The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.” Human beings are not widgets to be placed in some mechanical system, nor will they ever accept such a fate. It perfectly encapsulates the fundamental difference between man and machine, and echoes as loudly in 2026 as it did in 1864.

So there you go. No more excuses about Dostoevsky. 120 pages. Begin your ascent. [Dylan]

• 📙 Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

3. Treme : The Other David Simon Masterpiece

Sometimes among siblings, one gets all the attention — and they deserve it. They’re brilliant, kind, beautiful, funny. The real deal. But there’s another sibling who’s also exceptional, quietly overshadowed. Treme is The Wire‘s quieter sibling.

The Wire is one of the greatest shows ever made. I’ve said so before, and I mean it. But David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s overlooked follow-up, set in post-Katrina New Orleans, asks a question The Wire never quite gets to: when the institutions fail completely — when the levees break, the government disappears, your neighborhood is underwater — what holds a community together?

Culture. Music, food, ritual, craft.

The Mardi Gras Indians sewing their incredible suits from exile. A chef fighting to reopen her restaurant. A trombonist scraping by on gigs. Over four seasons, these characters and a dozen more rebuild their lives in a city that is simultaneously one of America’s most beautiful and most broken, with French, Creole, African-American, and Caribbean traditions layered over one another.

The production is obsessive about authenticity. Real New Orleans musicians — Kermit Ruffins, Dr. John, Trombone Shorty, Allen Toussaint — play themselves. Scenes are shot on location. One of the leads, Lucia Micarelli, is a Juilliard-trained violinist who had never acted before. And John Goodman in one of his best roles (along with Big Lebowski, of course). The show has 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, higher than The Wire's 94%. Simon himself called it "a better executed, more careful project." Yet it barely averaged 0.57 million viewers by its second season. Nobody saw it, and that’s tragic.

This isn’t a show for everyone. There are extended musical performances woven into the storytelling, and it’s largely about character moments. But if it is for you, it’s really for you, and nothing else will quite do the same job. If you decide to try it, commit to at least three episodes.

Years after my last rewatch, I still feel like I know these people. They’ve become friends. What more can you ask? [Liberty]

• 📺 Treme (2010–2013, 4 seasons, 36 episodes)

4. Middle-Earth Was Built in the Margins

Unfinished Tales is the book you pick up when you know Middle-earth well enough to want a glimpse into how Tolkien built this world.

If you’ve already read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or perhaps you’re a big enough Tolkien fan to have read even The Silmarillion, this could be for you. Edited and published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth is a glimpse into Tolkien’s workshop — the drafts, the contradictions, the obsessive detail — which is precisely why I found it so absorbing.

It made me realize how the scale of Middle-earth was fueled by the enormous labor behind it.

Here you find alternate accounts of Galadriel’s past since Tolkien hadn’t settled on a final version yet, Gandalf explaining how Bilbo became part of Thorin’s quest, and fragments, annotations, and unresolved ideas that reveal how exacting he was. Even small details carry weight: why Saruman secretly acquired a taste for pipe-weed, or the precise value of the Númenórean mile.

It is not as exhaustive as Christopher Tolkien’s later 12-volume archival series, The History of Middle-earth, but it is a far more readable entry point into the same workshop. The success of Unfinished Tales later paved the way for The History of Middle-earth.

The book is divided into sections on the First, Second, and Third Ages, followed by a final section of notes and essays. It’s not an easy read. Some sections feel like notes rather than stories. But for Tolkien fans — and especially aspiring fantasy writers — that's exactly the point. This is where you see how he built it.

What makes it worth the effort: seeing that even the father of high fantasy struggled with unfinished scenes and contradictory drafts — the same man who ended up codifying and lending legitimacy to a genre formerly considered niche and juvenile. [Aashisha]

• 📘 Unfinished Tales: A Comprehensive Epic Fantasy Companion to the History of Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien & Christopher Tolkien

5. 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

⭐ Explore the OSV Field Notes Archive ⭐

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

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

— Jim

• Read Sam’s latest book

• Neal Stephenson's Innovation Starvation

Links

Highlights

Positive Science Fiction

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And you were deeply influenced by the Foundation series, as was I. And the thing we’re trying to do with Infinite Books is bring back positive science fiction. Because the stuff I grew up on was really pretty positive about the future. Obviously, there were the problems. Hari Seldon forecast that you’re going to be a thousand years of darkness. But then we kind of fell into this very dystopia, Black Mirror. In fact, we published a book called White Mirror. Do you see those kinds of trends happening?

Samuel Arbesman: I mean, so a number of years ago, people had noticed that exactly, very explicitly, what you were saying. And so there’s a center at Arizona State University called the Center for Science and the Imagination. And they actually partnered with a number of science fiction writers. And I think the kind of galvanizing essay was written by Neal Stephenson. And the idea was, can we create more positive, optimistic visions of the future? And they actually, I think they partnered writers with engineers and scientists. And so then they would write the story, and then the scientists and engineers would kind of flesh out the actual meat of whatever idea was in that and kind of show its possibility and its plausibility. I wonder if, though, some of this is as the world not only is changing kind of faster and faster, but as our ability to look further into the future, that horizon gets closer and closer. That means that we just kind of, not that we’re dystopian, but we kind of just cut off a little bit of that ability to kind of see further forward. And that makes it less easy to imagine these positive visions of the future.

We Need to Make Long Bets on Weird People

Samuel Arbesman: I feel like there's a need for just being able to say, let's make really long bets on either domains or people and say we can't call that money back. And we also really don't want to actually know what's going on inside until far later than most people would be comfortable with. And so you can see hints of this kind of thing when, so Xerox PARC, which of course was in a corporate industry lab setting. But my sense is part of the special secret sauce was that the administrators were very good at kind of protecting the researchers from what was happening outside. And they kind of were given a lot of freedom and a lot of time to kind of play with things. I think that there's just a lot of really long term undirected weird research or just weird researchers that we've never run the experiment of, what is it like to just give people almost too much freedom. Now conversely you could say, okay, too much freedom. You need to have a little bit of constraints or something like that to actually kind of get something good out of that. But I wonder if we've never really tried to run that experiment. And so that's something that I think is really interesting to run it just being able to try really weird long term things. But I would also say, now this is maybe this is an overly kind of strawman consider concern, which is university settings are overly concerned with disciplinary boundaries and we're talking the weird kind of more polymathic stuff. That's where the interesting things are happening. But even though people want to do the kind of free form kinds of things, they often have to still get tenure worth in their department or whatever it is. And so trying to actually run some of these experiments where people can be weird misfits in between disciplinary boundaries, that would be great.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Welcome back, Sam. And I’ve got to disclose, you are one of my favorite conversants because we go wild places all the time. So let’s start with opening the Cabinet of Wonders. What’s new? What’s new in the Cabinet of Wonders?

Samuel Arbesman

Well, so I feel like since we last spoke, we were talking about things around the history of technology and technological archaeology and kind of spelunking it. I’m definitely thinking a lot more about that. I think there’s something to be said for revisiting the past of the history of computing in order to kind of understand paths not taken. So actually, one, and I think related to this is also just the extent to which you realize that things like time periods that feel very new are not nearly as new. So, for example, I don’t think we talked about this last time. There was an organization in the 70s called the People’s Computer Company.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I know about it.

Samuel Arbesman

Okay. Yeah. So it was this. It sounds like it’s a company, but it actually was a newsletter and a center and kind of this weird thing. But the, I think the opening newsletter in 1972 had their sort of mission statement, and it was all, and I think it was something to the effect of, “Computers are being used against people instead of for people. They’re used to control people instead of to free us.” We need to kind of create this People’s Computer Company. And that feels very much of this moment. It doesn’t feel like, oh, it was written decades and decades before. These are things that people are still grappling with and trying to figure out, okay, how do we actually make computers kind of for humans and kind of at the human scale and all these kinds. And of course, the interesting thing is, even though it was at the human scale, this was even before personal computers. They were still thinking about how do we actually make them engaging for people? And I’m just struck by that kind of thing of over and over, seeing the way in which computing history and technological history just rhymes and what we can actually learn by plumbing those depths.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And one of the things I always search for, what I call urpatterns, you know, very primitive. And one of the biggest patterns around innovation and technology is the way humans react to it. And there’s always a subset of humans who absolutely hate that new technology. And right now, of course, we’re seeing it with AI. I saw a tweet that I wanted to ask your opinion about because I want to think about it. The tweet was this. It said, I believe that AI is going to actually bifurcate society more, not less and that smart people are going to get vastly smarter. Whereas, and this is not my tweet, whereas people who are not that smart are going to get dumber. And as I read that, I kind of thought it does have a parallel in terms of the way you think about AI. I personally think about AI as a tool that I can use. I don’t want it to think for me. I want it to help me do research. I want it to help me with a bunch of that type of things. And I love going like, for example, one of my new habits. Whenever I see something that I don’t really agree with, I immediately steel man the argument for it. And it’s really reveals quite a bit because I don’t think I’ve done it yet with a single time with. Huh, that’s a good point. What do you think about that?

Samuel Arbesman

So I wonder if it’s less true about smart versus not as smart in terms of what it’s going to accelerate and more about having an open mind versus not having an open mind. And I feel like many people who are smart often mischaracterize those kinds of things because I think if you have an open mind and are willing to try new things, it is going to accelerate you. If you think, oh no, this is not for me then, it will kind of not help at all or stultify or whatever it is. But I do think if you are open minded, no matter your intelligence level, it actually does have the possibility of kind of accelerating whatever you are learning and things like that. But at the same time though, I will kind of caveat that with the fact that I have seen some of the people who are most excited by AI, they’re excited, but they’re also in practice totally overwhelmed where it’s like they are more busy than ever. They’re spending all their time using it and they’re just kind of frantic, which I can understand. But that definitely doesn’t seem like the kind of tool use that feels enriching for one’s humanity. So I’m a little skeptical of. But I definitely think it’s much more the state of mind in terms of open mindedness of if you are willing to say, okay, this thing might actually be useful, then it can accelerate and it’s much more rather than kind of using it in place of your own thought. It’s like, okay, how can I make myself kind of the best version of myself or a better version of myself? But then there’s the opposite, which is the people who say, no, this thing has nothing for me. And then therefore there’s nowhere to go with it. It just kind of ends and kind of cuts off.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I love that distinction because obviously that was kind of the first place I went to. It isn’t raw IQ or anything like that. It’s really disposition, open mindedness being the top one. I personally think that, and I think you agree, but that generalists who are polymathic who have lots of interests, it’s catnip. Right. But on your point about the using it as a tool. So I’m writing a, I’ve written four books as you know, but I’m writing a fiction book. And so I used AI extensively to train me on developing my fiction voice. And I watched a lot of videos on YouTube and everything and I made notes and there were some really interesting things like everything’s the hero’s journey or whatever. But it wasn’t until I created a bunch of prompts for it to be really mean to me. And I would put it like the exact opposite of sycophancia. It’s like trash everything I’m creating, I really want you to be mean. And one of my avatars was the meanest but smartest critic in literature. And ooh, he’s wicked. Anyway, but the interaction, developing the voice. Wow. I’ve never used a tool that effective.

Samuel Arbesman

That’s amazing. And so when you were using it, because I feel like a lot of writers certainly pre-AI a lot of the time in which you kind of start to develop your voice, it’s oftentimes you’re kind of interpolating based on other voices and other authors that you look up to. Has this been able to kind of fast track that process of helping you find your voice that much more rapidly so you don’t kind of have to meander for a long time until you get there?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Absolutely. I love reading. I love fiction. My problem with fiction is I’m an addict. If I start reading fiction, I’m up until 2 because I just keep reading. But my tastes in fiction are generally literary fiction, like David Mitchell is one of my favorite. Cloud Atlas and all of his. I’ve read everything he’s written, but I also love sci-fi. But my challenge was having written four nonfiction books, I had a very distinct voice in nonfiction, which I learned very quickly was a really bad voice for fiction. So one of the parts of my learning curve was, here are the authors I adore and help me develop my voice, which is very, by the way, it turns out, very different than those authors. But the speed with which I was able to come up to writing in this new voice, I honestly don’t think I could have done it without the interactive, because I think that, as you know, I’m a huge fan of the centaur model. Human plus machine. I think a lot of the criticism that you always hear about AI slop, et cetera, well, that is pushing a button, saying, write me a science fiction novel. It’s going to compress it to whatever the middle kind of tier is, and it’s not being used as a tool at all. And so I’ll read that stuff and I’m like, this is awful. However, when you use it as a tool and especially as an editor, it’s pretty cool because literally it’ll say, yeah, that character would never say that. And I’ll read the line that I wrote and I’m like, God damn it’s right. So I just think that the ability to, it’s a bit like having a tutor. And we’re seeing this in education right now with the various schools that are forming. What are your thoughts about that? What do you think about really changing our educational system? I have a bias here. I think our educational system is horrible, especially because I think it’s incredibly antiquated. It was selected for training industrial workers. I kind of think to sit in a room for eight hours and take instructions, and that is not the world in which we live.

Samuel Arbesman

So I’m definitely sympathetic to what you’re saying. I’m also sensitive to the fact that oftentimes, whenever you’re kind of engaging or interrogating or trying to change any sort of large, complex system, you don’t necessarily want to just throw it all out and start from scratch, because you’re going to end up with a system that’s equally, if not more complex and probably not as well understood. And then you have to deal with Chesterton’s fence and all these other kinds of things. And so for me, I’m much more of the opinion of this kind of, actually, Karl Popper, I think in one of his books, he has this idea of kind of utopian engineering versus piecemeal engineering. And the utopian engineering is, okay, we’re going to just create this thing with this very clear end, and oftentimes it kind of destroys society in the path of getting to that versus piecemeal engineering and saying, okay, let’s try to experiment a little bit here and there, change kind of things, see which works, which doesn’t reevaluate, and slowly but surely hopefully get to something better. So I definitely think education has a great deal of room for improvement. I’m hesitant to say we have to just throw it all out and kind of start from scratch, but I definitely think at the margins, there’s so many things we can be thinking about. And it also depends at the grade level or the scale that you’re kind of thinking. So, for example, I think that one of the areas that we really haven’t thought about as a society for a long time is just sort of continuing adult education. Obviously we do think about that, but for me, just continuously learning and being curious about the world, that’s the thing I always want to be doing. And there should be mechanisms for everyone to be involved in that. And so if we can create institutions and mechanisms for allowing that and democratizing that kind of thing, and obviously AI can probably help with that kind of thing quite a bit, then I’m all for that. So there’s that, then there’s okay, rethinking the college level education. And I think there’s lots of space for that. And then you can also just go all the way down to K-12 or even infants and toddlers. I think at every stage you can probably modify it, but for me it’s not okay. I have a new idea. Let’s throw away the old thing. It’s more. Let’s actually build some new system or some new institution, new organization, new mechanism that’s maybe more bespoke, kind of much more adapted things like that, and then allow that to compete with the other systems that are already there. And then hopefully, kind of according to that piecemeal engineering kind of approach, there’ll be some competition. The new one maybe will do really well. The old ones will actually kind of have to up their game. So, yeah, I’m actually super excited, but I think a lot about that kind of continuing adult education kind of model. And you mentioned before of generalist models and polymath, that kind of things. I think that, and maybe this is also just me justifying me being too interested in too many different things. But we need more of that. And actually so one related to the polymath stuff. My mother told me that when she was young, when she was in I guess the Girl Scouts, she said, so you had all these badges you can specialize in like I don’t know, knot tying or I don’t know, arts and crafts or whatever it is. And she said there was one badge that was the Dabbler badge which was you could get a badge just for dabbling in a whole bunch of different things. And I love that idea. I mean that’s kind of that is my dream. And we need more educational models that kind of valorize and incentivize the Dabbler badge of knowledge at all different ages and levels. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of space there.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And just to be clear, I agree 100% with your approach. I am not in favor of top down systems being designed because you’re right. I’m a huge fan of Ken Stanley’s Greatness Cannot Be Planned. Everything is iterative and you can’t decide, oh, I’m going to get here. And that is the only path because you’ve got to see all of the branching everything else. So 100% agreement around the way it should happen. I think though that the idea of it would be great and maybe it happens slowly but it would be great if the new way of education. I think maybe you’re right. I think maybe start with adult continuing education.

Samuel Arbesman

Because you don’t have to worry about regulation or anything. You can just build a thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you can try everything.

Samuel Arbesman

Yeah. You can do whatever you want.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. We are investors in Synthesis School and they’ve done really well with getting kids to like math, which is really interesting. And we also have some other initiatives where we are helping out with tablets that are solar powered for less advanced countries. By that I mean they don’t have Wi-Fi everywhere. But you’re right. Let a thousand experiments bloom. What are your thoughts about, you know, I know that you grew up on the science fiction comic books that your grandfather gave you.

Samuel Arbesman

They gave me all these old magazines and short stories.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Is that not happening anymore? I don’t know.

Samuel Arbesman

Do you mean science fiction?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, kids with the comic book, with that type of thing.

Samuel Arbesman

Okay. I mean, so to be clear, these magazines, so this was, these were not comic books. So it was these kind of pulp magazines. And so the one that my grandfather, I think, most subscribed to was Analog Science Fiction and Fact. And as far as I’m aware, it’s still around. I haven’t, I don’t subscribe to it, but yeah, he would just give me these shopping bags full of all the old copies after he had finished reading them. And then I would take them. When I would go to summer camp, I would bring them all and just read them. I don’t know to what extent that’s out there anymore. Certainly because you can put things online, there’s just an abundance of stories out there. But in some ways, maybe that just makes it a little bit more difficult to or at least there’s another hurdle of just give me a whole bunch of stuff that I can kind of just plow through when I’m at camp or whatever. But I don’t know. I certainly hope. I think there’s short science fiction, short story magazines still out there. And I don’t know if it’s a burgeoning industry, but I really wanted to be.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you were deeply influenced by the Foundation series, as was I. And the thing we’re trying to do with Infinite Books is bring back positive science fiction. Because the stuff I grew up on was really pretty positive about the future. Obviously, there were the problems. Hari Seldon forecast that you’re going to be a thousand years of darkness. But then we kind of fell into this very dystopia, Black Mirror. In fact, we published a book called White Mirror. Do you see those kinds of trends happening?

Samuel Arbesman

I mean, so a number of years ago, people had noticed that exactly, very explicitly, what you were saying. And so there’s a center at Arizona State University called the Center for Science and the Imagination. And they actually partnered with a number of science fiction writers. And I think the kind of galvanizing essay was written by Neal Stephenson. And the idea was, can we create more positive, optimistic visions of the future? And they actually, I think they partnered writers with engineers and scientists. And so then they would write the story, and then the scientists and engineers would kind of flesh out the actual meat of whatever idea was in that and kind of show its possibility and its plausibility. I wonder if, though, some of this is as the world not only is changing kind of faster and faster, but as our ability to look further into the future, that horizon gets closer and closer. That means that we just kind of, not that we’re dystopian, but we kind of just cut off a little bit of that ability to kind of see further forward. And that makes it less easy to imagine these positive visions of the future. I mean, I’m kind of thinking this through as we’re talking, but I would say, I mean, certainly there are positive visions of the future that sometimes have in our future, but their past, a negative moment. So there would be, there’s some amazing future, but before that we have to kind of get through, I don’t know, World War III or something like that. I would love to think we could get to the really positive vision without necessarily getting something really bad. But I just wonder that if it’s simply the fact that as technological change happens faster and faster, we maybe lessen our capacity to think far off in the future. And that maybe somehow in our minds gets caught up with not quite dystopia, but sort of an impoverished vision of the future because everything’s changing so rapidly. And so at a certain point you’re like, oh, I can’t really, I can’t imagine what that’s going to be like. And people have talked about this idea that thinking about the year 2000 was this kind of mythical far off thing. And of course we would, as we got closer and closer to the year 2000, people still put set stories in the year 2000, even though it was getting closer and not nearly as far. And of course, now it’s in the rearview mirror. There’s actually the music duo, Flight of the Conchords.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love them. I adore them.

Samuel Arbesman

They have the humans are dead.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Samuel Arbesman

And it begins, we are the robots. The distant future, the year 2000. And I just, I love that. But I think many of us kind of are sort of anchored to that kind of past vision of the future. And I don’t know, maybe we just need to start talking about, I mean, what is it, 2001 Space Odyssey? The sequels were there was 2010 and 2061 maybe. Yeah, start aiming for 2061. Or I guess Futurama has the year 3000, some of those kinds of things. So I feel like for every example I’m giving, you can probably think of a counterexample. But I almost wonder if people are just so concerned with all of the changes happening in the here and now that they just don’t have the bandwidth to imagine these futures. And so it’s not as if we’re dystopian or utopian, we’re just very this moment focused. And that simply cashes out in the inability to imagine these positive visions.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I have a thesis that basically our human OS, our human operating system has a couple of kinks that lead to a more bleak outlook. And the first is a bias towards negativity. Which if you look at evolution and probably not the worst thing to have.

Samuel Arbesman

If you plan for the worst, yeah, you’ll probably survive.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You’re going to have a bias for negativity, but also this desire for the illusion of certainty. Because it is an illusion. Unless we’re talking about the sun coming up tomorrow. And have you ever noticed there’s nobody running around pounding on tables saying I will bet a million dollars the sun’s coming up tomorrow. But those two together kind of lean toward, well, what’s the worst? I mean, David Deutsch with his, you know, the principle that we are the greatest connectors and explainers, we’re kind of at the beginning of infinity. I read that and I’m just like, I love this, I love looking at it this way. But then he also does a great job showing why so many societies basically fall because of the precautionary principle. And my view has always been kind of around technology in particular. Everything is dual use and I don’t mean just AI or computers. Fire is a technology, the ability to consistently relight a fire is a technology. And we didn’t ban fire even though fire is really dangerous. Same with electricity, can be very dangerous. So instead of banning things like the precautionary principle would have many of those closed minded societies do. We came up with fire engines, fire departments, fire warnings, fire extinguishers, fire exits.

Samuel Arbesman

I will caveat that with the fact that fire has been around for quite a long time and some of those technological advances and those societal advances, those are relatively recent.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I know.

Samuel Arbesman

Which when you kind of think about it’s kind of wild that it’s like Benjamin Franklin was doing some of the work around fire departments and things like that. And I don’t know all the details, but I vaguely remember this. That’s only several hundred years old and we’ve had fire for a long time. And so I think, so I think there is some caveats there. But going back to what you’re saying of pessimism and things like that, I feel like, though, that pessimism is often viewed as a mark of sophistication. And I personally think, oh, thinking about how things can go well, that’s super exciting. And being optimistic. These are amazing things. That being said, I feel like time and time again, even if you are consistently wrong, if you are consistently pessimistic, people love to hear that because it sounds like you’re being very thoughtful and very serious. And I feel like, I mean, Paul Ehrlich recently passed away and he was, I.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And Julian Simon won the bet.

Samuel Arbesman

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Paul made his wife make the check out to him because he didn’t want his signature on it.

Samuel Arbesman

Oh, I didn’t even realize that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And if you do a deep dive on him, I mean, not to speak ill of the dead, but he was consistently wrong across his entire career. And yet they kept inviting him back. He kept having the lecture series, he kept being on TV. Meanwhile, Julian Simon, you know, the greatest resource, us humans, he won the bet. If we walked out into Union Square right now and just randomly asked people, have you ever heard of Julian Simon? How about Paul Ehrlich? It’s going to be 10 to 1, Paul.

Samuel Arbesman

That being said though, I’ve seen research that showed that depending on when you had kind of started and stopped the bet, it could have been a toss up, which is, so it’s a little bit more complicated. That being said, it shows that the way to think about the future is kind of this weird, complex and nonlinear system. And to be so certain about it and whether it’s certainly pessimistic or just certain, that I feel like also is not the right way to operate. And maybe it’s not even just pessimism is a sign of sophistication. Maybe it’s just ultimately certainty. And that having that sort of righteous, simple certainty is something that people find very appealing. And going back to the human OS kind of stuff, that is the kind of thing that we are drawn towards. But having that epistemic humility of, oh, maybe I’m, maybe there are weird nonlinearities and unexpected consequences and second order effects. And we should kind of think through all these kinds of things that does not a sophisticated pundit make or at least an appealing pundit. But we need more of that. We need that kind of thing. Much more now than ever.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I couldn’t agree more. And I call myself a rational optimist because I fully expect that we’re going to fuck a lot of stuff up. And if you don’t expect that, you have not looked at history. And so the idea that I move forward with is I’m incredibly optimistic about humanity. I think that we are really good at solving things. We’re also really good at screwing things up. But those have to coexist together. And so to be Panglossian or Pollyannaish is going to be defeated. Because there inevitably will come problems. And the way I look at it is there will always be problems, no matter how good. Whatever gets it doesn’t have to be just technology. Any part of society. No matter how good we get it, there’s always going to be problems. And sometimes we make them more apparent because, as you say, in the last, let’s call it, what, three or four hundred years, many of these technologies got invented. We’re missing the thousands of years where people are like, yeah, that’s just the way it is. And so I definitely believe that to be prepared for the problems, that’s got to be part of the way you think.

Samuel Arbesman

Yeah. And this is going back to Popper and the piecemeal engineering just constantly saying, okay, things can be, things are good, we can still make them better. Let’s constantly try to iteratively improve and just try to shy away from sort of that utopian vision. Because utopian visions often elide a lot of the complexity, but are also, they’re utopian, they’re not the real world, and the real world is messy. And so let’s just actually use the kinds of approaches that work with the messiness of the real world, which I think we’re pretty good at. And obviously, as the world gets more and more complex and interconnected, you have to have a certain amount of humility. But that’s kind of the whole piecemeal engineering approach, which is do things, run experiments, try to improve things bit by bit, see what works, see when things bite back and make a better world slowly but surely.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I’m 100% in the camp of piecemeal. Because you can’t know. It’s like, I love that quote about no matter how smart somebody is, no matter how innovative, no matter how creative, you cannot ask them to make a list of things that would never occur to them. And one of the things that I believe in very deeply is cognitive diversity. And I think that the whole movement, you know, diversity, et cetera, they got it wrong. Because they made it about skin color, about sex, about where you come from. The diversity that really works is people who think very differently. And I love the, we see it with our fellows, you know, about our fellowship program and when we get them all together, it’s just the most delightful couple of days ever. Because you have deeply scientific people who are working on really edge case projects with authors who don’t think like that at all. But the synthesis that comes out of those is really, truly extraordinary. And so that kind of leads me into the conversation where you think it’s much more important to look at biology as say physics when we’re dealing with these very human systems. Because again, I’m 100% on board. The real world is messy. And utopian visions led to Mao, to Stalin, to Hitler. They maybe weren’t utopian, but they were.

Samuel Arbesman

They were totalizing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

They were totalizing. And I’m terrified of that. What do you think? If I was going to put you on the spot and say, all right, Sam. Well, I’m going to fund an institute that you are going to be the head of. You’re going to be the executive director. Walk me through what that institute looks like.

Samuel Arbesman

And I definitely think a lot about these kind of weird research organizations and the need for more of these kinds of things. And I will caveat all this with beforehand, I’m fairly agnostic as to what are the right kind of models. I think we just need to try more things. That being said, I definitely think we were talking before, Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman of Greatness Cannot Be Planned. I think that as much as I think a number of people recognize the importance of that kind of thing, it’s very hard to incentivize omnivorous curiosity and kind of undirected sort of approaches of just pursuing novelty or interestingness. Because oftentimes in the research world or even when you’re funding people, not projects, there’s still a certain short term nature to it and accountability. And so it could be there’s blue sky research in academia, it’s still subject to grant cycles and you can only operate over the course of several years. And so I think I feel like there’s a need for just being able to say, let’s make really long bets on either domains or people and say we can’t call that money back. And we also really don’t want to actually know what’s going on inside until far later than most people would be comfortable with. And so you can see hints of this kind of thing when, so Xerox PARC, which of course was in a corporate industry lab setting. But my sense is part of the special secret sauce was that the administrators were very good at kind of protecting the researchers from what was happening outside. And they kind of were given a lot of freedom and a lot of time to kind of play with things. I think that there’s just a lot of really long term undirected weird research or just weird researchers that we’ve never run the experiment of, what is it like to just give people almost too much freedom. Now conversely you could say, okay, too much freedom. You need to have a little bit of constraints or something like that to actually kind of get something good out of that. But I wonder if we’ve never really tried to run that experiment. And so that’s something that I think is really interesting to run it just being able to try really weird long term things. But I would also say, now this is maybe this is an overly kind of strawman consider concern, which is university settings are overly concerned with disciplinary boundaries and we’re talking the weird kind of more polymathic stuff. That’s where the interesting things are happening. But even though people want to do the kind of free form kinds of things, they often have to still get tenure worth in their department or whatever it is. And so trying to actually run some of these experiments where people can be weird misfits in between disciplinary boundaries, that would be great. That being said, I think whatever I’m proposing right now is almost too broad. I can see also the need for, now I’m just throwing out idea after idea.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s what I’m looking for.

Samuel Arbesman

Related to actually going back to, we were talking about the history of computing earlier. I feel like whether it’s history of science or history of computing or history of technology more broadly, I have this sense that if we just stopped publishing new research right now, we would still be able to make a huge number of advances by just recombining some of the stuff that has already come before us and kind of poking around inside the archives and the old things. And so there was, I can’t remember if we discussed this last time, but there was this information scientist by the name of Don Swanson in the mid-1980s, and he wrote this paper about undiscovered public knowledge. And the idea behind it was in the vast scientific literature there might be a paper that says A implies B, and there might also be another paper somewhere else that says B implies C. But because no human can actually read all the literature, even though it might be true that if you combine those two papers together, A might very well imply C, no one knows this. And so he actually, it was very interesting. He wasn’t content leaving it as a thought experiment. He said, okay, I’m actually going to try to use computers in that case. It was the cutting edge computational techniques of the mid-1980s, which was, I think, keyword searches in a medical database. But he actually was able to make some advances that got published in medical journals. Even though he was just an information scientist, he didn’t have a medical background. And of course, since then, we now have much more sophisticated techniques. And obviously with AI, it’s kind of overclocked that ability. But whether or not it’s in searching the scientific literature, whether or not it’s looking in the old and forgotten kind of paths not taken of scientific advances or technological advances, there’s still so much to be done in just revisiting the past. And I think that’s another thing that is really just incredibly underappreciated, underfunded as well. And I think that’s another area as well that could really benefit from something like that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, we’re making a documentary through our film division about Bell Labs, and we’re working with the author of The Idea Factory.

Samuel Arbesman

That’s great.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so he’s kind of doing the script and everything. And the way I think about it is academia has these kind of constraints that developed into a system that creates that hyperbolic discounting. Like, no, we need results here. We need to get this grant. And one thing feeds the other, which is, I think, one of the reasons why we’ve seen so much less kind of profound breakthroughs. And the reason I’m fascinated by the Bell Labs Xerox PARC idea is Bell Labs gave us Claude Shannon, who gave us Information Theory. And nothing that we are doing right now, we would be doing if Claude was not there. But he also spent a great deal of his time just screwing around. Like the trumpet that shoots fire and the chess game.

Samuel Arbesman

Yeah, so my sense though is that Claude Shannon was still very much an outlier, even in Bell Labs. Definitely he was and he had a very early success and was kind of given almost this role of, okay, you can go off and do those kinds of things. Most of the people in Bell Labs were given a great deal of freedom, but it was a certain type of freedom. And so, and I know Eric Gilliam has written about some of these kinds of things around the role of the systems engineer within Bell Labs, which was the people whose kind of job was to identify the really interesting problems that could then be handed out to the people who were really smart and kind of needed interesting things to think about. I’m not exactly sure exactly how they operated, but there was this very sophisticated set of mechanisms to kind of channel in an open ended way the creativity and the innovation there, but in a way that’s still kind of cashed out in terms of things that could be useful for Bell Labs. That being said, I mean, mentioned Claude Shannon as an outlier, one of the other ones. So Richard Hamming, who was also kind of a computer science and I guess also maybe mathematics, if you look at this might have been in the 1970s, if you looked at the directory of Bell Labs, I believe. So he was the chair of the computer science research department. And it turns out there were only two members in that. It was him, the chair and I think his secretary. And he actually, and he talks about how he had worked very hard to kind of construct this mechanism and where he had a great deal of flexibility and freedom and you have to worry about bureaucracy. Now. He also was kind of an outlier, but I love that idea of departments of one that then create this institutional space for you to do just really weird things. And of course he was probably the outlier in Bell Labs, but I would love that at scale of departments of one where you can then kind of build your little bespoke organization within a larger organization.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So it seems like we’re getting back to the organization I asked you to design. So I agree, by the way, and we’re trying it in a very small way. And who we give fellowships to and grants to, we are very drawn to weird. We are very drawn to people who don’t fit the mold because we think that there is a tremendous amount of information there, but you have to almost treat it like a venture capitalist. For every nine you might get one. But we’re okay by the way, we’re okay with that. But when, I mean I was thinking about it on the way in here today and it’s like the number one question that’s burning in my mind. Do you have a metric or is it an intuitive sense for how do you establish the good kind of weird we’re looking for from the weird cosplay, you know, the people who like oh, weird’s in now. Okay, going to be really weird.

Samuel Arbesman

Yeah, I think, I mean certain, because this, there’s a lot of failure modes in building these kinds of organizations. And actually so related to this, one of the things I wrote this, I wrote an essay several months ago about the forces of institutional reversion to the mean, which some people have discussed. I kind of discussed it in the context of canalization of the fact that all these organizations maybe start weird or they have grand ideas, but then oftentimes they end up becoming kind of shunted into and channeled into much more normal looking things. Which I mean normal is great. You can do a lot of interesting things in traditional academia and corporate industry labs. But a lot of these organizations, these non-traditional research organizations start with grand visions, but then kind of they might end up becoming sort of independent versions of a university department, which is not bad, but maybe not quite the original goal. Or they might start as a really strange for profit research lab, but in a certain amount of time they are basically just a startup. And some of the forces are because they’re accountable to their investors or whatever it is. And so everything and every choice is all kind of defensible. But you kind of have to guard against those kinds of things. And actually going back to what you’re saying of the weirdness, there’s also, some people are like, oh, I’m going to kind of, yeah, cosplay kind of the weirdness. But one of the reasons why these organizations sometimes become much more traditionally academic in appearance is because even the people who think that they might want to do weird things, they often have kind of in the back of their mind the concern that oh, maybe this organization is going to fail or I’m not going to be a fit for it. And where would I go after that? Probably back into academia. And so I have to make myself look understandable to the world of academia and university departments. And so as a result, even if at the institutional level they’re trying to do something different, the individuals might try to end up doing more traditional kinds of research. And so the one way to potentially do this is find people who have already written off academia entirely and like, oh, I have no interest in this. I’m just going to go off and do something weird or strange or non-traditional and whatever term we want to use. But it’s really hard. And I think partly, and going back to what I was saying before, kind of locking in the resources and the structure helps prevent some of that kind of canalization forces. But it’s very tough because even if you kind of lock in the resources, if the people that you’re actually populating these organizations and institutions with are not actually the right fit, they’re kind of, they’re looking, they give off the appearance of weird, but they’re not actually doing something that interesting then that’ll also kind of force as well. And so it’s, I feel like there’s a lot of failure modes in terms of these kinds of things. I mean, one potential thing is to say rather, and in addition, alongside thinking long term, you say, okay, this kind of thing can exist for a long term, but we’ll still actually have a lifetime where you say, okay, we’re going to, it’s going to exist for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and then it’s done. And so that kind of can help inoculate against some sort of institutional drift or mission shifting. So maybe there’s kind of something in between where it’s like, okay, you have to say we have to think long term. We have to incentivize certain kinds of behavior, but we also recognize that there’s an inherent natural lifespan to it. And so that kind of can protect against some of those other kinds of forces as well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Again, I’m trying to get down to your selection criteria for the people. Because it could be very useful for me with our fellowships and our grants.

Samuel Arbesman

So I would, so I think, so there’s probably, I mean, certainly you can definitely, there’s a fine line sometimes between weird interesting and weird crazy. I would say potentially one. And I think people have tried to think about how to incentivize this kind of thing within even more traditional grant funding mechanisms at the National Science Foundation or NIH, which is as long as someone’s proposal meets a certain minimum threshold of quality, what you don’t necessarily want to do is find the consensus of, oh, these are the people that everyone thinks are great and should fund. It’s not agreeable. The high variance where it’s like, half the people think this idea is terrible and half the people think this is the only thing we should ever think about and fund. Those are the people you want, because I think that’s where you’re going. And you might still have that high rate of failure, but it’s still going to be interesting. And then going back to kind of this whole finding weird stepping stones and recombining them in unexpected ways, that’s probably where you’re going to find the raw material of ideas that are going to be then used and productively recombined in ways you can’t even imagine. Because they’re the things that they’re kind of, they’re not, oh, that’s kind of interesting, or that’s an obvious thing. It’s. These are the things that sound really interesting, but half the people think, yeah, that has no relevance whatsoever, or that’s not even the direction we should pursue. So I feel like that non-consensus kind of metric could be the way of helping identify those kinds of things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, I was again, for the book that I’m writing, looking up the origin of the term consensus and the actual Latin translates to when people feel together, not think together.

Samuel Arbesman

Oh, like sense. Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

When they feel together. And that brings me kind of back to human OS. Because you were mentioning scientists. What I grew up believing in, you know, the scientific method. And you know, Feynman, one of my heroes. No matter how elegant my theory, no matter how much I love it, if the scientific method says it’s wrong. I love that way of thinking.

Samuel Arbesman

Has to actually engage with reality.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. The engagement with reality is where I really. Because if you look at people who are really, let’s say, weird, the ones that I have seen succeed, greatly succeed are those where they’re in a discipline or they’re in an area of study that forces them to engage with reality. And you know, Philip K. Dick had that great quote, “Reality is that which once you stop believing in, it doesn’t go away.” And so you think of, I had a guest on who learned a lot from US Special Forces. And one of the things that I absolutely loved about it was they, the study group he was part of banned PowerPoint. Banned. They wrote everything on chalkboards or whiteboards, and they were kind of the epitome of no, no. Consensus got us here. We need to think of different ways. But as part of our conversation, I have a friend who wrote a great short piece about Jed McKenna, the non-dual philosopher. And his name is Dan Jeffries. And it is, he was my gateway drug into Jed McKenna. But his piece was basically saying the people who are closest to reality are Special Forces, ER workers and traders of all things. And the way he put it was, these are people who either metaphorically face death, the trader, or actually face death. And he was like, that’s a really great forcing function. And so I kind of thought, what kind of constraint could you put in to a process to whatever, to get people to engage more with reality? Because again, back to science. Again, sort of my temple. But when you look at the actual behavior of human scientists, it looks a lot like the movie Mean Girls, right? Like Oppenheimer, David Bohm came up with hidden variables, right? And Oppenheimer’s overseers in the military had said, that guy’s a communist. We don’t want any stuff from him. And so Oppenheimer. And I can’t remember because I did this research a bit ago, whether Oppenheimer said it or it was recorded somewhere where Oppenheimer said to all of his other colleagues, if we cannot disprove David’s theory, we must ignore it. Now, like, wow.

Samuel Arbesman

So I would say. And that story sounds very unfortunate. That being said, I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily say that scientists are like Mean Girls to the exclusion of and worse than.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No of course not, I mean I’m being hyperbolic.

Samuel Arbesman

I would say, I mean, it’s, it is science. I mean, scientists are humans and irrational, imperfect. And that being said, this scientific process, not necessarily just there’s the scientific method of kind of the very simple thing you learn in school. That’s one thing. The process of science is the rigorous means of kind of querying the world. That I think is a great way, albeit imperfect, of kind of harnessing our imperfect, irrational humanity for actually better understanding of the world. Now, there’s many places where it doesn’t always work where, what is it? Max Planck had Planck’s principle kind of, science proceeds kind of one funeral at a time. People have actually tested that and interrogated and said, okay, let’s look at the ages of the scientists who decided to adopt and adhere to Darwin and evolution by natural selection. And it turns out, for what I recall, it’s been a while, there is actually no correlation with age. So it actually turns out that some of the older scientists were just as willing to acknowledge this new theory as the younger scientists. And so, so I think, I mean, sometimes that kind of does, that kind of thing does happen. And there’s the idea of paradigm shifts and things being overturned. You kind of have to wait for the new generation. But I do think that scientists are more willing to actually overturn kinds of things. And of course, I mean, sometimes it’s one of these situations where you might talk a great game in the abstract, but when it comes to your own ideas, you might fight tooth and nail. That being said, I can’t remember if I told you the story already, but so one of my professors in graduate school, he told me this great story where he went in one day and gave some lecture on some topic, and then the next day actually read a paper that invalidated what he had learned the day before. So he went in the following day and he said, remember what I taught you. It’s wrong. And if that bothers you need to get out of science. And so there is the sense. And of course…

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh I like that story.

Samuel Arbesman

It’s not always adhered to, but sometimes, more and kind of the breach or whatever. But that’s ultimately this idea that scientific knowledge is constantly in draft form and science is less about a body of facts and more about this, the process of querying the world. I think that’s the ideal now, of course. Do we always get to that ideal? Not always, but I’d like to think kind of along the way we’re sort of asymptotically approaching the truth.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Circuitously

Samuel Arbesman

Exactly. There’s many. But it happens, and it happens unbelievably. Well, at least kind of in the limit. The fact that over, if you look over the past several centuries, we have made unbelievable advances. And that’s kind of on top of the fact that scientists are people too, and people are really irrational and kind of suck in many different ways, and yet we’ve still been able to make those advances. And so I’m willing to look at it maybe as a little bit more optimistic. But you’re right, there obviously are processes that we can kind of put into place to kind of make it even better and ways of thinking about, what should we be optimizing for? What should we actually be incentivizing. Because I think that’s another thing of when we think about what are the ways, what are the kinds of things we incentivize in terms of what scientists do that will also affect what we get out of it. And so the way I kind of think about this is you have this whole space of, these are all the things that science, these are all the things that are valuable for science. And then you have this little subset of the things that are valued by scientific academia, the things that get you tenure. And that’s a small subset of the big space. And we need to actually find ways of incentivizing all the other things, I don’t know, building software, building tools, connecting different ideas together, doing other weird kinds of things that are just as important, but far less understandable to the mechanisms of tenure or whatever it is. And so maybe it’s creating institutions that kind of incentivize some of those other kinds of things as well that can just make science that much more of a successful process. But that being said, we’ve done pretty well so far.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, you bring up Darwin, and I just finished Tom Wolfe’s book. Basically, he’s making the claim that it was human language, not evolution, that made humans interesting. But I love Tom Wolfe because he’s such a, and he just, he’s so good at just zinging people. But the thought, as I was listening to you, about older scientists embracing. Well, Darwin’s grandfather and his father had advanced different ideas about evolution.

Samuel Arbesman

Or like Erasmus Darwin, there was, so it was the idea of evolution. It’s interesting. The idea of evolution itself was kind of this evolutionary thing that it kind of took time to get there. And Darwin, his was evolution by the process of natural selection. And it was a very specific, almost algorithmic approach to evolution. And I think that was kind of, that was the key insight. And of course, he spent decades marshaling all this data and information. And it was this very kind of slow hunch that eventually kind of got there. But you’re right, it wasn’t, it didn’t come out of nowhere. And I think that is. I mean, ultimately all of knowledge, it’s not, it’s always this kind of process of recombination, whether it’s the idea of everything is a remix as well as the idea of science, and standing on the shoulders of giants and just kind of having this slow accumulation and weeding things out. There’s this great quote by Isaac Asimov where someone wrote a letter to him saying, we used to think the Earth was flat and we were wrong. And then we thought the earth was spherical and a perfect sphere. And that turned out to be wrong. So how can we know anything? And Asimov wrote back saying, because we now it’s an oblate spheroid or whatever it is. And Asimov wrote back saying, if you think that thinking the earth is flat is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is a perfect sphere, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. And so it’s kind of going to the asymptotic approach. But we have the processes in place to kind of slowly but surely kind of get there and build upon new different things. And sometimes there’s going to be a lot of turmoil and change, but it’s still building upon multiple different things and over time kind of getting us to these new theories and new understandings and approaches to hopefully a correct view of reality itself.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And it is inch by inch. And I again completely agree. You might enjoy Wolfe’s book because he is just absolutely the takedown on Darwin. And the man is really funny. And you know how he wrote. He invented the new journalism so he could get away with things that other people can’t. And it’s just really a fun book because making the case for language being the thing that separates us from all the other animals is just interesting in and of itself. But you know, he’s like, if we apply the scientific method to Darwin’s theory, and then he goes, does it meet this criteria? No. Does it meet this criteria? No. Does it meet this? And he just keeps going. And then, you know, the way he has the text grow in the book. No.

Samuel Arbesman

Oh, so interesting. I mean, the truth is, and I think Darwin is pretty upfront about this. When he was developing his theory, the then kind of cutting edge idea of the way genetics operated was sort of this mixing. And he knew that mixing of traits would not work for selection because you need to kind of have a certain amount of discrete quantitative things. And he recognized this was a gap in his theory, but he was still like, no, this, but it’s still worth describing and articulating. And of course then yeah, you had to have Mendelian genetics to kind of fill in kind of the missing piece. But I think that’s okay. To have, we don’t. And this is, and it’s both, I think important for science to kind of put forth incomplete things and totally subject them. But it’s also an almost, it’s a good way to operate as a scientist. If you get, if you put forth the last word, you’re not going to get cited because you just, you solved it all. You want to have something that people disagree with or argue with or expand upon. That’s how you get really well cited. So I feel like that’s a good way to think about science. And I do think I actually going back to incentives and even the way we think about publication, the fact that right now scientific papers have kind of expanded and gotten more and more complex where it’s not a single experiment or a single idea, it’s often a whole bundle of things. In some ways that slows the speed of scientific communication but also means you can’t just put forth a thing and then allow it to be tested and subjected to debate and argument. And I feel like we might need to incentivize somewhat different types of publication. And that being said, if you think about the scientific paper, it’s what is a 400 year old technology that is also ripe for reexamination. I mean, I guess we have PDFs now instead of just print. That being said, it doesn’t feel that different and people have a whole bunch of ideas how to think of rethink publication as well, which could potentially incentivize different kinds of scientific output as well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you know, I was also reading about the Republic of Letters which led to of course the creation of the Royal Society.

Samuel Arbesman

Henry Oldenburg, he was the secretary and kind of the hub and the node, central node of all the people writing together.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I was very taken by the deep dive on the Republic of Letters because I knew about it, but I didn’t know how varied the participants were. Like Catherine the Great was in the Republic of Letters, Frederick the Great also with Voltaire, all of these people. And I was just like, it got me back to see diversity. Because what would happen is they would send the letters privately, they would be read, and they would only be forwarded if the person who received the letter found something interesting in that letter, but maybe had a different view or maybe add it to that view, and then that would get copied and forwarded. And it’s kind of like, I was actually thinking about you when I was reading about this because I’m like, that’s Sam’s way of just clutching it up, but having these really great things come out of it. And then, of course, the institutional capture of the Royal Society. That was the other part I didn’t really think about. It kind of killed the Republic of Letters.

Samuel Arbesman

That’s interesting. Well, and I know, and my sense is the Royal Society, it also had a diverse number of people, but a lot of them were just kind of the money men, where it was like, okay, we need to kind of bring them in. They’re not really doing quality science, but they.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We need the money.

Samuel Arbesman

But I also just the, there was both in early Royal Society as well as kind of the Republic of Letters, there was this kind of democratizing feature because, I mean, certainly scientists was not really a job at this time. It was much more natural philosopher. But a lot of them, they were not really doing it as their main job. They were kind of doing it as other things because it didn’t really exist or make sense. It was a different sort of category. But it was also just there was. I don’t know if it was, I don’t know if pre-paradigmatic is kind of the right term for it, but it was. People just need. One of the most important things. And if you look at the early proceedings of the Royal Society or communications, it was just people saying, this is an interesting thing that I noticed, or I did this weird thing and I’m not really sure how it makes sense. And they kind of just throw it out there. And I love that very kind of early stage in a field where people are just collecting bits of knowledge and bits of information or facts or saying, here’s something that doesn’t really fit and I want to kind of just share it with other people because maybe they’ll have a different kind of insider approach. And I think about this, and certainly in the tech world, you have collecting bugs and glitches. Oftentimes they are actually the precondition for actually better understanding a system of finding that gap and reducing the gap between how you think the system operates and how it actually does operate. You need the glitches and the bugs to kind of narrow that gap. And I feel like when it comes to science, that’s the same thing. You need to find all that kind of weird stuff that doesn’t make sense. And in those early Royal Society days, that’s what they were doing. They’re just like, oh, I found, I heard this weird thing, or I tried this thing, and I’m not really sure what it adds up to, but it’s worth sharing with everyone else. And I kind of feel like we’ve lost a little bit of that. And yeah, there’s something to be said for that, kind of just sharing things that don’t add up and so therefore merit further consideration.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, we have our own AI setup, hardware. And I was going to ask you because I also very much agree with your idea that there’s just a gold mine of information in the past. So if I were to come to you and say, okay, Sam, I’m going to try a project over here, we’re going to let the AI loose and we’re going to let our fellows loose and all of that. What would you tell me about how I should populate that model and fine tune it? What I’m looking for are, you should really look at the writing on computers in 1977. You should really look at, you know, the social conditions that led doctors to ignore Semmelweis’s advice. What periods would you find most fertile?

Samuel Arbesman

Most fertile? And yeah, I would say in any time where there’s begrudging after the fact, after the fact acknowledgement of, oh, yeah, there was something really interesting here. Then you kind of want to go several years earlier and see, okay, when there were those really intense debates, I feel like that’s something there. But I also, so one other thing, and this is a little bit different than what you’re asking, but I actually think, and with AI, this is even more possible now than ever is the extent to which we can think in terms of jargon barriers. Because oftentimes not only can something be useful when you kind of combine it with something else that maybe is in a different subfield. But oftentimes people don’t even realize that they’re talking about the same kinds of things because of these, because of jargon. And so I remember seeing this in, when I was doing my postdoc and I was doing things in network science, there was this mailing list that I was part of and it had lots of people from lots of different domains and fields. And I feel like every week or so there would be someone saying, what’s a really good metric to measure the following thing. And invariably someone would email back and say, oh, this has been known for 30 years in sociology. And it was just, it was unbelievable to see. And I felt I actually experienced this once in my own, for myself, in my own research, where I was trying to find some sort of metric for clustering data. Couldn’t figure it out. I was working with a friend of mine and we were like, we were going to just kind of create our own. We knew it wasn’t going to be great. And then we said, let’s just talk to the statistician down the hall. And of course he immediately told us what we need to look at. And now AI can kind of help overcome those jargon barriers. But I still feel like you kind of really have. And maybe I’m wrong about this, but there probably still is some work to be done for productively overcoming those jargon barriers and really saying, okay, how do we actually translate one idea to another so that such that some mathematical model is not reinvented 8 or 10 times throughout 100 years? Which, these are the kind of things that have actually happened. And so being able to find ways to short circuit those kinds of things. And so it’s almost like ethics, sort of semantic or kind of conceptual level, what are these concepts the same? How do we make sure that even though the jargon is very different, how do we kind of recombine these kinds of things? So I would say that’s another thing, another approach that needs to be focused on because otherwise, even if there’s all this really interesting stuff in the literature, it’s not even just how do we kind of get people to have an open mind? It’s how do we get people to even be aware that this is something they should be considering?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And again to your earlier comment that it’s pretty amazing that a lot of the advances that we enjoy today are new, are relatively new. So would you concentrate on literature from a certain period? I love the idea of something that’s obvious afterwards and really contentious before. That’s a, I mean…

Samuel Arbesman

There might be certain time periods that are better than others for. So, for example, in the earlier days of computing when people were thinking about not necessarily just technical abilities, but more okay, thinking about computing in the sense of how do we kind of use it for the following use cases or children’s education, for example, or whatever it is. And it had kind of a broader sense. That being said, depending on the field, sometimes there’s really something to be said for going really far back. And so my father, he’s a retired dermatologist. This is many years ago, he was on the platform InnoCentive, where it’s they kind of provide challenges and people kind of try to find, and they’re often trying to find people who are in somewhat different fields that can maybe come up with something really interesting and relevant. He saw there was some challenge for, I think someone, it was to create a non-invasive biomarker for the progression of ALS, the neurodegenerative disease. And my father, in looking into that, I think he found it was probably over 100 years old. It was the one, I think it was the article that first described ALS. It mentioned almost in passing the idea that, and I might have gotten this wrong, I’m reaching back quite a way. But it was, I think it was the idea that the patients didn’t get bed sores. And it was like, oh, they kind of just mentioned it. And my father realized maybe there could actually be some sort of biomarker around skin elasticity where you could actually look at the pattern of the progression of the disease by measuring skin elasticity. So it’d be non-invasive and kind of look leaned into his dermatological expertise. But it was from this really old paper that was just like, here’s this new medical disease and we kind of have to think about it. And then I kind of mentioned this one thing in passing. And so I’m willing to almost say I want to keep it all. I want to keep it all, I want to search through it all. And obviously it’s kind of overwhelming, but that’s one of the beautiful things about these massive large language models is you kind of don’t have to choose. And I think right now one of the things we need to really just focus on is preserving all this kind of information and digitizing. And I feel like the Internet Archive and similar kinds of organizations that are just trying to kind of make sure that this information is preserved, digitized, accessible, they are doing really important work because that is going to be sort of the grist and the raw material and kind of the precondition for all these kinds of advances. And right now, great. If storage and hard drive space is basically infinite. Keep it all. Keep it all and find some way of actually making meaning out of it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I agree. And I was shocked to learn that, say, for example, William James, the majority of his writings are not digitized.

Samuel Arbesman

Oh, really?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And we actually have a project going on where we are going up to Boston or we have people up there doing it for us. His archives, most of them are paper. And we are digitizing them. And the interesting thing about that is it’s a massive project. And I’m talking about one thinker, William James. And so I’m a huge proponent of keeping it all. Yes. Because, you know, I kind of think when the library at Alexandria burned, how much knowledge did we lose?

Samuel Arbesman

Which, that’s why the scroll prize and the Vesuvius project of these.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We’re making a movie about that, actually.

Samuel Arbesman

Oh, it’s amazing. Yeah, because the actual work of that was unbelievably exciting and just amazing to use the kind of these computational advances. But I feel like, more broadly, just the act of digitizing and preserving these kinds of things, it might not be the most glamorous, but it is foundational and kind of the precondition for all these other kinds of things. And you think you look back at the early humanists in kind of the Renaissance era, part of what they were doing was thinking about what is human, but a lot of it was also just trying to rediscover and find some of the best ideas of a thousand years ago or a thousand years before then of ancient Greek writers and ancient Roman writers because they wanted to learn and rediscover from these previous thinkers. And I think we need to kind of do that kind of thing at scale and find the best of the best ideas that are out there from whatever time period, wherever they are. And part of that is just simply preserving or rediscovering or finding these kind of things or making them accessible.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And humanism is interesting to me. It plays a part in the fictional novel that I’m writing. And I learned so much about how it was possible for the humanists during the Renaissance to emerge. And one of the things that I hadn’t thought about was that one of the reasons why Italy in particular and certain parts of Germany were so fertile was because they had no central governing authority. There was no king with absolute power. The Germany was not united, it was a confederacy of duchies. Same with Italy with the city states. So it was very much non-centralized. And I think as I was reading about it more and more, it was that lack of centralization that contributed to the explosion of new ideas. There wasn’t a central authority to say, no, you can’t do that. And it bleeds over into the printing press. There’s a great book about the history of money. It’s an Irish author and he’s very funny. And so he presents Gutenberg as kind of a grifter. But how he came up with the idea, because he grew up in a wine region, was very familiar with the wine presses, he was a jeweler, but he really got, hey, what if I use those presses for this?

Samuel Arbesman

And it was a bundle of technology.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Samuel Arbesman

It wasn’t just a single thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

To your point, to your point. It was a bundle. And he just happened to be in the region where they were all operating. But the further part of my analysis is humanism basically was the first, I think of Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man. It’s the single greatest piece of art that is still missing. It was looted by the Nazis and Dürer also did the first self portrait in which he created himself. His portrait like they had reserved only for Christ prior to that. And so humanism has this kind of in your face to authority. In other words, the art of the time was the, like the Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael. It’s a self portrait, but he’s staring at you and he’s like, what he’s implying is I don’t need your permission, I don’t need your imperator. I am a human and I can figure this out. One of the reasons I love humanism. But the decentralized nature was something I hadn’t thought a lot about. And because, for example, China had the imperial throne and they suppressed a great number of technologies that they came up with first. And imagine if there wasn’t this. By the way, Gutenberg got his way into the church because again, he was not [inaudible] too. And he was looking and saying, you know, one of the biggest businesses for the church are letters of indulgence, which essentially was your get out of hell free card. You would give money to the Church, they would have the scribes do these beautiful letters of indulgence saying, no, Sam is getting into heaven. He’s getting into heaven. He might have made a rather significant contribution to us.

Samuel Arbesman

But that’s just kind of by the by.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s by the by. And so what did Gutenberg do? He went to his local bishop and said, I’ve got to believe that the demand for letters of indulgence is way up here and that your ability to fulfill that demand is way down here. And the bishop was like, yeah. And Gutenberg goes, I have the answer for you. And sure enough, the Church embraced it for that reason. And then the Pope of the time, I think it was Innocent. And my joke about the Innocent popes are they were anything but innocent, was very vain. And he would, during those times, he would give readings from the Bible to congregations. And so Gutenberg published a Bible with huge text so that he wouldn’t have to wear his glasses. And he was smitten. He was instantly smitten. But the point about the idea of decentralization, it got me thinking a lot differently about how a modern organization could be formed. Is that an important part of your thinking on this?

Samuel Arbesman

I would say. I mean, I’m partial to decentralization, especially kind of in the face of managing and handling complexity, of having competition, having that kind of that going back to the piecemeal engineering kind of that sort of slowly but surely experimentational kind of approach. I think that’s really important because when you are confronted with a complex system and you don’t really know the best thing to do, just try a lot of different things. And so decentralization is really good for that kind of thing. Yeah. And in some ways, actually going back to organizational structures, if you can get the department of one or two people, that’s decentralized and it allows you to then kind of have this, you have the kind of legible structure to do your thing, but it’s distinct enough from everyone else that then you can kind of do things maybe a little bit differently. And kind of having a lot of those could be, could work really well. But I wonder if, because I thought about, because there are a number of people who consider themselves independent researchers. Of course, as an independent researcher, it’s harder to get funding and things like that. And so there are, going back to theory of the firm, there are returns to scale and kind of doing everything together. But there might be ways of, in kind of a more modern way, kind of having things that kind of recombine in a sort of looser way where you can have maybe a group of independent researchers that work with some one administrative person who kind of helps them get funding but then kind of allows them to all do their own thing. Or there’s actually another, there’s a research organization called Ink and Switch which they do things related to the computational tools for thought and human computer interaction and ideas related to kind of programming as well as many other things. And one of the models that they adhere to, that they kind of talked, they’ve talked about is this Hollywood studio model where so in the same way that when you make a movie, it’s not all one large company. It’s, I mean sometimes there’s companies, but it’s people, the teams often are assembled for that project. They work on those things and then everyone goes off and works on another movie or other kinds of things. And I feel like, and so Ink and Switch does that. They have some people who are maybe a little bit more long term, but one, it’s also just a great way of getting very high caliber content or high caliber talent in the tech world where it’s like they might not be able to get them for a long term, but they have three to six months free in between a company, a corporate exit or they left something or they’re thinking of doing something else and then they’ll come and kind of join a little project and then they have the long term people kind of helping set the longer, more long term vision of the organization. And so I think having that ability for researchers to kind of come together for certain kinds of things in this kind of distributed way is really interesting. Now that being said, it can work better in certain kinds of research that maybe is a little bit faster. If it’s a longer term kind of thing, then maybe it’s harder to kind of have that sort of swarm kind of approach. But I definitely think there’s something to be said for that kind of decentralized approach. And I think it’s yeah, kind of like powerful.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Back to the fictional book that I’m writing. We’re trying the Hollywood model. I actually have a writer’s room with both humans who are great writers. I’m lucky that we have Infinite Books and we have a bunch of great writers and editors, but we’re putting AIs in there as well, with different types of personalities, et cetera. And Jimmy Soni, our editor in chief and CEO of Infinite Books, he was skeptical about doing a writer’s room because he’s mostly nonfiction. And after the first one, he’s like, I think I’m going to start doing these for my nonfiction books.

Samuel Arbesman

Interesting.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because what happens is you throw the world that you’re building out there, and it’s really kind of magical because, for example, my book is a thriller, and it covers a long period in history. It starts in World War I and it ends in 2027, or World War II, excuse me. And it ends in 2027. That’s a hunt that goes on. The villains are very villainy, but the people hunting them are very talented. And anyway, in our first writer’s room, Jimmy was listening, and he goes, you know what’s interesting about all the characters and some of the real life people you’re putting in that? And I’m like, no. And he goes, they were all orphans. And I went, I never thought of that. And so it opened this incredibly rich vein of looking into orphans. What drives them? Are they bridge builders or are they wall builders? And so I went down this. And it actually affected the plot. And so I’m a huge fan of the writer’s room approach for this particular purpose. But why they’re so fun is because, again, back to the, I would have never thought of that. But also from the point of view of just kind of AB testing with smart people, does this sound like something our villain would say? And there’s a lot of controversy. Like, no, he would never say that because he’s this way. But it really helps me as the primary author to whittle it down to. Yeah, he would say that. The other cool thing about writing fiction that I had heard from fiction writers but never experienced is when you get to know a character really well, they start writing themselves. And it’s the weirdest I’ve heard people in the world. It’s like I was writing the villain, and I looked at it. I’m like, I would have thought of that. So you kind of get involved.

Samuel Arbesman

There’s almost this emergence of. Yeah. Oh, that’s so.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So I definitely am a big fan of trying a lot of different models for old ways of doing things. Like the single author versus the writer’s room. It works very well for TV and for movies. And I’m a huge fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm and you know, his entire process is they just write outlines.

Samuel Arbesman

Right. And then a lot of things happen and then. Yeah, they tried many different things. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So anyway, I agree that experimentation, see what works, see what you can learn from it. Now, of course not all of it’s going to work and ultimately it’s going to be my name on the book. So what right now are you obsessed with?

Samuel Arbesman

What am I obsessed with?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m always interested in what is obsessing you.

Samuel Arbesman

This is, I think, I believe we spoke about this last time, but shows that I guess my obsession is still lasting, which is. So we talked about the company Maxis. It was the studio that developed SimCity and Sims and SimLife. And it was this weird moment in the early to mid-1990s when it was kind of this intersection of gaming and simulation and complex systems and all these other interdisciplinary science approaches. And they just did all these weird things. And then the company, I think it took a lot of investment on and then eventually went public and then kind of was not able to sustain that and then eventually got acquired by Electronic Arts and now does not exist as a studio any longer. And so it kind of had this kind of crash and burn kind of thing. Maybe not quite crash and burn, but an end of an era, we’ll say. But I’ve been just, I’m still preoccupied with what is still kind of perennial and valuable about that kind of a mental approach to this kind of clashing of different things. And can we actually, is it possible to reinvigorate a Maxis 2.0 or whatever it is. And so because I like making lists, I’ve currently been working on a list of more modern equivalent games or simulation toys or these kind of software based miniature worlds that you can kind of play with because there are a lot of these still around. But I think people need to recognize, yeah, this is, I don’t know if it’s a genre, but it’s a thing that should be a genre. We need more of these kinds of things. But I’ve also just been taken with the fact and maybe this is also just more broadly how I think about simulation because simulation, there’s high fidelity simulation of predicting the weather and that’s very important and powerful and useful and it’s valuable for prediction. But there’s also something to be said for these small models that are toys but give you a great deal of insight into just how a complex model works. And they are so valuable, giving you a certain set of intuitive hooks or leading you to learn further about urban dynamics or whatever it is. And actually, so I’ve actually been teaching this course at the University in Cleveland, Case Western, about the art and science of decision making. And it’s the seminar course, and we kind of talk about mental models and complex systems and nonlinearity and feedback and all these different things. And at one point, one of the things I have my students do is I have them play an emulated version of SimCity 2000 that’s available on the Internet Archive.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

My daughters were crazy for that.

Samuel Arbesman

Yeah, that was my childhood. I love that game. And it’s not because SimCity 2000 has this great degree of verisimilitude, but the thing is, it’s this complex systems model that’s just complex enough to have things that they bite back in unexpected ways. And you have to make a huge amount of decisions. You have to kind of play with these. And it’s a lot of fun. And some students get it right away and play with it, and other ones kind of crash and burn and that’s fine too. But the whole point is just kind of actually come to grips with a complex system. And I just want there to be more of these kinds of things because those kind of simulation toys are just, they’re so much fun and they’re so wonderful. And I want there to be more of them for basically every domain of complex knowledge out there. So that’s still. I mean, I think we talked about it last time, but I’m just going to keep on talking about it because I find it so fascinating.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I’m also a huge fan of in silico sims. You can put together huge audiences, for example, and have them read your work or listen to your music or watch your movie and you get insights that you’re not expecting. Like, oh, I wouldn’t think that kind of. We started by building ocean profiles from the Big Five, but then we refine them down. And so we can create huge populations depending on the media that we’re trying to test. And I’ve got to say that we’ve seen some really interesting feedback that I would have never guessed. Like, from the Anxious Processor is one of the names of one of the ones that we have in there. So I’m a huge believer in. I mean, that was the first book I wrote. Invest Like the Best was how you could clone your favorite money manager by taking all of the stocks in his or her portfolio, paying no attention to what they said, paying all the attention to what they did, i.e. what they bought. And then you could build a rule based, factor based way of coming up with portfolios with those exact characteristics. So I definitely. And again, that’s a temporal thing as well. The only reason I was able to do that was I was lucky enough to be born in 1960. If Ben Graham had all those computers, he would have done all that stuff. And I would have never been able to write What Works on Wall Street. I would have never been able to do that. But because I was coming of age when we were getting these extensive data sets and the computer power was fast enough, I just got lucky. So simulations, what other lists right now are really occupying your list?

Samuel Arbesman

I mean one. So I mean, I guess this list. I haven’t updated this that recently, but there I started creating a list of sports teams named after technologies because of course there’s sports named after things from history and animals, but there needs to be more named after technologies. But it turns out there actually are a non-trivial number. I mean you have the Jets and the Pistons and the Spurs and the Rockets. And then of course once you get into minor leagues, there’s a whole bunch. You have, I think there’s, I don’t even, this might even just be the high school team. There’s something called, I think I found a team called the Spark Plugs. It turns out there’s a ton of soccer teams named I think Dynamo. Then there’s I think one named after some sort of bicycle that has the big wheel and the small wheel. And I just love this idea that at least in certain times, technology is such a part of the culture that people actually name their sports teams after them. So I find that interesting. Another weird list is it turns out there is also a very large number of companies named after things from Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s world. And of course a lot of them are kind of connected to kind of the, I think the extended kind of Peter Thiel world because he and his people are very interested in kind of Tolkien, that being said. And maybe these people, maybe these companies are all connected to that. Most of them are sort of the good guy kind of related to stuff. But I’ve increasingly. I think I found a company named Mordor. There was one called Sauron and it’s a very interesting branding choice, but that exists. But yeah. Then I’ve also another thing I’ve been thinking about, this is not quite list, but I think also just kind of a framing related to some of the things we’re talking about, kind of the history of computing and the People’s Computer Company is. I was involved in this group that made this Resonant Computing Manifesto and the idea behind it is in many cases when you’re engaging with technology and certain kind of computing things, the computing experience kind of leaves you drained or you feel really bad or this is not something you want to, you really enjoy or want to be a part of. But there are, and this has been true throughout computing history, those experiences that are more resonant that actually leave you enriched. And the question becomes, how can we kind of try to incentivize or articulate kind of things that are more likely to kind of leave you enriched in kind of this more resonant computing kind of experience. And so, and certainly now with AI, there’s the possibility for both personalizing things in very bad ways, but also personalizing things in very good ways and making things that are kind of more pro-social kinds of experiences. The way I kind of think about this is that, and obviously you want kind of human scale sort of experiences or things that kind of privilege the human, even in the computing experience. But there’s this great television show, Halt and Catch Fire about kind of.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, I love that show.

Samuel Arbesman

It’s a fantastic show. And I think it’s in the first episode, one of the characters has this quote where they say, “The computer’s not the thing, it’s the thing that gets you to the thing.” And I feel like oftentimes we forget that we just, we get obsessed with things that are technically sweet or we’re not doing, we’re not thinking about what is the goal with compute. Computing are, these are technologies that should make our lives better and more enriched and more resonant. And how do we make sure that we make sure computers are the thing that gets us to the thing. And so that’s another, it’s another topic that I’ve been very obsessed with.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m interested in the new educational models. Like what is drawing you there and saying, wow, this could be really cool.

Samuel Arbesman

So you mean that space?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Samuel Arbesman

So oftentimes the thing that draws me to make a list is not necessarily a very clear thesis or idea. It’s more. Something interesting is happening here and it’s worthwhile keeping track of. I kind of, I think I described this once in maybe some essay I wrote about. I kind of call it the Linnaean instinct. So you have Linnaeus, taxonomic, taxonomizing. Yeah, there’s just this, I’m not doing very sophisticated taxonomies, but especially early on in science and we’re going back to natural philosophy stuff as well. The precondition for understanding the world, whether it’s collecting glitches or things, is just finding things that all kind of seem related and worth keeping track of. And I feel like that’s kind of the Linnaean instinct of, whether it’s weird things in computing history or weird companies or sports teams with interesting names and kind of something, I just think there’s something there. And I feel like with when it comes to the educational models. I don’t necessarily, going back to what I was saying, what we were saying before, I don’t feel the need for throwing everything away, but I do feel like we’re in this interesting moment where people are trying new things, but in a way that it’s not quite one offs anymore. And even just the act of list making for me kind of gives me a sense, okay, there is a larger space. But I also would like to think that maybe sometimes those lists will also allow other people who are playing in that space to realize they are not alone. They’re doing things. And maybe there can be something to be learned by connecting these different approaches. And so, yeah, so I oftentimes the list making is the precondition for getting a sense of what’s going on. It’s more just there’s something happening and I want to just at least chronicle it because it’s interesting. But in terms of do I have a larger theme? No, it’s really just that, that Linnaean insight.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But so on that topic, what is a recent example of something where you’ve been keeping these lists of very disparate items that you’re seeing emerge from the, like you’re having your eureka moment. Oh, that’s why all these things work together.

Samuel Arbesman

So I mean the, I mean. So let’s see. So the Overedge Catalog, which is the one about non-traditional research organizations. That one, that one maybe arose when I had a little bit more kind of theory of what was happening there. But it was still just a matter of, okay, there are interesting things happening. And it was more. I just wanted there to be more. And so that act was, so that act was even. It was less about eventually finding a theory and more about trying to make people realize that there needs to be more happening here. And so it’s like, oh wait, if there’s enough happening or maybe if the list is too short, people go out there and actually expand the list, make more things that can go onto that list. But I would say, I mean in terms of the educational stuff, there’s glimmers there of that something at the intersection of fellowships and residencies or. And people talk about the unschooling movement. And so the Recurse Center, which is kind of a retreat for programmers, they talk a lot about the unschooling movement. I feel like these creating informal or we’ll say unstructured spaces to allow. I wouldn’t say it’s unstructured because they’re actually, I think, and I think they’ve actually talked about this. There is a lot of structure or structure available, but we’ll say non-traditional kinds of environments. There is a growth there for creating collections of people for these kinds of things. But I don’t, I’m still not sure what it adds up to. Then again, maybe I’m just not good at figuring out what these things add up to. And I just have that Linnaean instinct of, I just want, I want there to be more lists and I can leave the sort of paradigm making to other people. I’ll just be the list maker.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

When have you just to finish on lists. What was the oddest compulsion to start a list on that, you know, friends, colleagues, family are like, Sam, what’s going on here?

Samuel Arbesman

I mean, definitely the sports teams named after technology.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love that one.

Samuel Arbesman

That one’s a weird. That one. I don’t even know where that came from. I was just, it was almost one of these kinds of things work. And the same way that people in the progress movement are like, we need to find ways of valorizing innovation. I was like, this is another weird way of valorizing technological advancement. And it seems like we’re not starting from scratch. There’s actually a lot of technologies that have been used as names for sports teams. And it was also one of these things where in the act of creating it and then sharing it publicly. I then discovered that there were many gaps in my knowledge and certain areas like sports that I was just unfamiliar with and then people kind of gave me even more examples. And that was definitely a weird one. Yeah, I. But I’m trying to think of even an even weirder one. Oh, there was this list. This was done actually. I wrote this for a, I think it’s a now defunct science humor magazine. But it was originally. I have no idea how this started, but it was, I found a non-trivial number of anatomical terms that sound like things you could visit on a vacation. So the Islets of Langerhans or. And it was a very weird list. But that one, that was a lot of fun to come up with as well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love it. So what’s next for you? What are you working on now?

Samuel Arbesman

What am I working on now? I mean, I’m still thinking a lot about the history of computing and what can be done with that. I still think there’s a space in the tech world where it’s almost there’s a need for this kind of translation where it’s not necessarily historical scholarship of computing because I feel like there’s a lot of people doing that very well. But there’s a role for bridge building of saying how can we get people who are already in the tech world more excited about actually engaging in the history of computing? Which can be as simple as, I don’t know, reading old computer magazines on the Internet Archive or actually playing with really old computers and hardware and software. I feel like that’s something also that’s worth trying to explore because yeah, I feel like sometimes we’ve kind of, we too quickly narrow the space of computing possibilities and then kind of forget all the other weird paths we can take, whether it’s user interfaces or hardware or software, whatever it is, and it’s worth revisiting. And so yeah, there just needs to be a mechanism for that. And that’s definitely, that I, that’s definitely one thing that I’m kind of constantly struck by and I have no idea what it’ll end up. And it could be as simple as maybe there’s neighborhood needs to be in the same way that Buckminster Fuller would go around and give these public lectures on crazy ideas. There needs to be more of that around the history of computing in the tech world. I don’t know. But those are the kind of things I like thinking about.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And as I was listening to you as one who is an early adopter of all technology. So I’m 65. You know, on Twitter, they have the, but are you this old? And they, you know, they show Windows 95. I’m like, I’m way older than that. And I got to thinking about that and the experience that I had in 1980 when I was trying to have the computer calculate a Black-Scholes implied volatility for me. And it took five minutes. But at the time, I’m a big journal keeper. So I was rereading some of those journals back then. I was like, I can’t believe that it can do it this fast.

Samuel Arbesman

That’s amazing. I love that. And we’ve forgotten. And that’s. And I would say that’s another interesting lesson of just understanding technological history, which is. Humans are really good at adopting.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Samuel Arbesman

Which is both very powerful because it allows us to handle lots and lots of change, but leads us to kind of almost overwrite our memories of how things used to be. And I feel like sometimes, yeah, things are lost when we kind of forget how it was or kind of understanding. Yeah, maybe some of, maybe maintaining some of that friction could be useful sometimes. It probably was not. And that’s fine. But. Yeah, but I think that, yeah, just revisiting some of those experiences can be at least very powerful for understanding.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And that’s where I was delighted that I was such a journal keeper, because we do.

Samuel Arbesman

You would definitely not remember that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, I would absolutely not. And we do overwrite our memories. I have nearly 50 years of proof. I started when I was a teenager with these journals. And it’s very interesting to me because of them, I learn. Oh, I didn’t think that at all. And it’s really helpful because it teaches more broadly than just that specific example. And I think that we overwrite another part of human OS. We overwrite our memories to make them consistent with what we believe now. And that can be a challenge and, or it can be like when you go back and have the ability to go back, you can see the chain of how you came to believe what you believe now, which is really interesting. So I’m all in favor of your notion of let’s keep everything, let’s explore everything, because, you know, there are a lot of connections that we just don’t intuit. Like we see in a very limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum. We, our senses are fabulous, but they’re very limited. And so that’s why I’m such a big fan of AI because it can, in fact, look into all of those and say, hey, look at how this and that way over there combined to make something really cool and interesting.

Samuel Arbesman

I love that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, Sam, I could talk to you forever. I know you have another engagement here in the city that you have to get to. You do remember, I hope, where we make you emperor of the world?

Samuel Arbesman

Yes, yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And we’re, you can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a reeducation camp. But what you can do is we’re going to give you the magical microphone which is sitting right in front of you now, and you can say two things that will incept the entire population of the Earth whenever their tomorrow is. They’re going to wake up with these two things and think, these are my ideas. They’re going to think that they had come up with them, but they’re also going to make the commitment. Unlike all the other time that I had these great on waking or shower thoughts, I’m going to actually act on these two things. What two things are you incepting?

Samuel Arbesman

So I think the first one is around getting people to ask more questions. I feel like it’s one thing to say, be curious. I definitely want people to cultivate curiosity, but I think the key to cultivating curiosity is spurring yourself to ask more questions, asking the name of the term for something, because it will often lead you to realize, oh, there’s this, I don’t know, entire domain of architecture around these things that I didn’t even know or some weird thing in woodworking or whatever it is. And so it can be as simple asking the name of something, but just more. We just ask more questions. I feel like that would be the first.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love that one.

Samuel Arbesman

And the second, walk more. I like walking a lot, and I think however much walking you do, you can always do more. So walk more.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love both of those. You’re in the perfect city for walking.

Samuel Arbesman

Correct.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Sam, thank you so much for rejoining me. I look forward. I’m already looking forward to recording number three.

Samuel Arbesman

This was great. Thank you so much.

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Sunday, 29 March

Two thoughts from James Michener

“Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”

“All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.”

Monday, 30 March

Two thoughts from Paul Valéry

“Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business.”

“The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.”

Tuesday, 31 March

Two thoughts from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”

“Every book we read must leave us richer or poorer, sadder or happier, safer or more uncertain, but never intact.”

Wednesday, 1 April

Two thoughts from Gaston Bachelard

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”

“Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?”

Thursday, 2 April

Two thoughts from Robert Musil

“The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one’s pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.”

“One does what one is; one becomes what one does.”

Friday, 3 April

Two thoughts from Elias Canetti

“No faith that is not surrounded by doubt can survive.”

“The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring.”

Saturday, 4 April

Two thoughts from Witold Gombrowicz

“Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man’s soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.”

“Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.”

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

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1. The Big Heat : The 1953 Blueprint for the 1970s Antihero

We had an uncharacteristically hot summer last year in Britain. So I’m told anyway: I spent much of it in a dark room, immersed in the world of film noir, that distinctly American cinematic movement that emerged in the mid-1940s and flourished in the immediate postwar years.

Rooted in the hardboiled crime novels of writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, noirs were generally produced cheaply and efficiently by studios battling tightening production budgets. Despite being often dismissed by contemporary critics, noir has aged into the most interesting and timeless of the American film movements (sorry, Westerns), inspiring filmmakers ever since. One shorthand for the health of American movie culture is how enthusiastically directors return to the genre – both the 1970s and 1990s saw major noir revivals.

The Big Heat is a shockingly violent vigilante tale from 1953. Directed by the legendary Austrian Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, Scarlet Street), it is among my favourites. Glenn Ford plays a cop investigating another cop’s suicide, getting sucked into the orbit of a mob bigwig in the process. When the stakes become personal, he launches a bloody revenge campaign.

As with all great vengeance stories, it functions as both a brutally effective crowd-pleaser and a complex tale of moral decay. Don’t get persuaded by the seemingly righteous fury of our protagonist; instead, pay attention to who and what he is willing to sacrifice to get his justice.

Warning: this is as dark and bleak as they come (genuinely shocking, for 1953). Ford’s protagonist lacks the wry humour or easy charm of someone like Humphrey Bogart. He is a grimly determined angel of death in a way that feels like a direct precursor to the cynical antiheroes who would go on to stalk 1970s cinema and beyond. [Ed]

• 🎞️ The Big Heat (1953)

2. The Soul of A New Machine : Turning Circuit Boards into Drama

Tracy Kidder, who died last week at 80, was one of my favorite authors and a great practitioner of narrative nonfiction. His book, The Soul of a New Machine, remains his masterpiece and one of my all-time favorite reads.

Published in 1981, just as the personal computer revolution was beginning, the book follows a team of engineers at Data General Corporation as they race to build a new minicomputer. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it deserves both. I read it obsessively while working on The Founders, and it shaped how I thought about telling a story set inside a company.

What makes the book extraordinary is Kidder’s ability to render technical work as human drama. He had no background in computers when he started the project, and he relied on his subjects to teach him. I valued this deeply because I’m not an engineer either, and yet I would lose myself reading it, completely absorbed in the details of circuit boards and debugging sessions and the internal politics of a computer company. Kidder was engaging in what Richard Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out,” and the best nonfiction I read does exactly that. It makes you curious about worlds you never thought you’d care about, and it earns your attention by taking its subject seriously.

Kidder also pioneered a method I came to admire: immersive, long-duration reporting that lets you disappear into a world. He spent months with the Data General team, watching and listening, earning the kind of access that makes scenes feel lived rather than reconstructed. The result is a book that moves even when it’s explaining technical minutiae. It’s a portrait of what it actually feels like to build something under constraints, and it remains one of the best books ever written about work.

His obituary in the New York Times noted that he once described his ambition as writing about “intensely good people.” The Soul of a New Machine is full of them, and Kidder gave them the prose they deserved. [Jimmy]

• 📕 The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

3. The Forever War : The Sci-Fi War Novel Where Physics Is the Cruelest Weapon

I read The Forever War as a teenager, and it blew my mind. I had to tell all my friends about it. Most space-combat novels treat relativistic physics the way superhero movies treat gravity: as an inconvenient problem to handwave away. Joe Haldeman builds his entire plot on it. His soldiers ship out at near-light speed, fight a brief engagement, and return to find that decades have passed on Earth. After protagonist William Mandella’s first campaign — about two years of his subjective time — more than twenty-five years have elapsed back home.

And it compounds! The war drags on for centuries of Earth time. Each subsequent deployment pushes Mandella further out. Each return is worse. The society he comes home to doesn't just change — it becomes alien, in ways more disorienting than anything he faces in combat.

That premise alone would make a good hard-SF novel. What makes it a great war novel is that Haldeman uses time dilation emotionally, not just technically. He’s writing about what every combat veteran knows: you leave, what you experience changes you, and when you come back, the distance between you and everyone who stayed is measured in a different kind of light-years. This isn't WWII-epic clarity of purpose. It's more like the chaos of Vietnam as seen through the eyes of a grunt. Haldeman was a combat engineer in Vietnam, wounded by a booby-trapped munitions cache in the Central Highlands.

It’s remarkable that no film exists. The book won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus — the scifi triple crown. Ridley Scott was attached to adapt the book in 2008; David Webb Peoples, the screenwriter behind Blade Runner and Unforgiven, reportedly wrote multiple drafts. It’s been in development limbo ever since. With Project Hail Mary proving that hard-scifi can pack theaters, maybe the window is finally open. But honestly, the book doesn’t need the movie. Fifty years later, a novel about a war that goes on so long it forgets why it started still doesn’t feel like science fiction. [Liberty]

• 📗 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

4. Ope! Is That Your Friend In The Wood Chipper? The Making of Fargo

Fargo is my favorite film. It’s the movie that rewired how I think about cinema: a film where a pregnant police chief in a parka could anchor one of the great American neo-noirs and violence could be both horrifying and banal in the same frame.

This past March marked thirty years since Fargo opened in theaters, and I picked up Todd Melby’s book, A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere, at exactly the right time.

Melby, an MPR journalist, spent years interviewing the cast, crew, and locals who lived through the production. My favorite chapter is devoted to the wood chipper. In the scene, Peter Stormare feeds Steve Buscemi’s body into a chipper while snow sprays red. Special effects coordinators fed it tiny pieces of raw chicken and pork, figuring the flying meat would pass for human flesh on camera. The chipper itself was a Yard Shark with an eight-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine, its dangerous guts ripped out so nobody on set lost a limb, then given a fictional name (the Iron Sphincter, Ethan Coen recalls) and a fresh paint job because the Coens wanted the machine to feel, in production designer Rick Heinrichs’ words, “both utilitarian and familiar.”

After the shoot wrapped, dolly grip Milo Durben bought the chipper for his hobby farm outside Minneapolis. He used it for a year, then retired it to storage. When the Coens came back to town to shoot A Serious Man, Durben brought the prop to set and got them to sign it. In 2011, the Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Bureau bought it. Today, it resides inside a grain elevator–shaped visitors center off I-94, complete with a mannequin leg, a fake gym sock, and a rack of fur-lined earflap hats for tourist photos. This summer, the local minor league team is rebranding as the Fargo Woodchippers for five home games in its honor.

Melby’s book is full of details you’d never think to look for about a film you thought you already knew — from a gutted Yard Shark on a hobby farm to the most cheerfully macabre tourist attraction in the Midwest. [Taylor]

• 📖 A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere (2021)

• 🎬 Fargo (1996)

5. 1975 Richard Feynman Lecture: "Los Alamos From Below"

For those Richard Feynman fans who, like myself, find the world holds not nearly enough Feynman content, I present one of his most underrated artifacts: “Los Alamos From Below”, a roughly 75 minute lecture Feynman delivered at UC Santa Barbara in 1975. Thankfully, the full audio has been preserved on YouTube.

The lecture explores Feynman’s participation in the Manhattan Project as a young PhD surrounded by some of the most formidable minds alive. Feynman’s hilarious anecdotes — the cat and mouse game that he and his wife played with the censors is great — unwrap one of the most interesting and consequential undertakings of all time in a way it’s never been done before, bringing all his humanity, humor and his famous curiosity to examine the surreal experience that was the Manhattan Project.

I revisit this lecture multiple times a year and find myself always rediscovering pieces I’ve forgotten and loving it more than the last time. The only shortcoming is, like most Feynman, it leaves you wishing it was three times longer. [Chris]

⭐ Explore the OSV Field Notes Archive ⭐

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

My favorite episodes all end up going down paths I didn’t expect. This conversation certainly did that, moving from Plato and Caesar to mystics, the muses, and near-death experiences.

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

— Jim

Links

Highlights

What is the Value of Truth?

Johnathan Bi: And so, from my own perspective and how I would want to raise kids, I want them to have to be both philosopher and builder, to be both action and contemplation. But I’m saying, if you looked at who the best men of action are, you have the really sober ones, right? And they can go quite far. You have 100 delusional ones, 99 of them are crashed out, right? Suicides, tyrants, terrorists. But one of them kind of just gets it, right? I mean, there was a recent book by Hofstadter. I can’t remember his first name, but his thesis was that evolution does not actually filter for truth, right? For example, the kind of optic nerve, where the nerve enters your brain, you should see like a black hole in your visual field.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The blind spot.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Over here somewhere, right? And your brain fills it in, because it’s better for evolution to not have a distracting black blob there. And that’s what I’m trying to get at. And maybe the deeper thing I’m trying to get at is, and this might be surprising coming from a philosopher, is that we need to examine what is the value of truth? And this is what Nietzsche asks in his book Untimely Meditations, which is, we think truth is this exhaustive, complete value. But maybe there are times where it’s good to not believe in truths. I mean, certainly societies, very successful societies, have been founded on just complete lies, right? Egyptian gods, or if you believe in the Egyptian gods and the Aztec gods, at least one of the Abrahamic religions, at most one of the Abrahamic religions is right about their core claim, right?

And so clearly falsehood, delusion ground society. And the question is, I think the individual question is very clear to me of where you want to go. You want to go on truth, you want to go on understanding. But the civilizational question of if you want to produce an innovative society, I think you’re going to have a lot of crazy people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I completely agree. And I agree on the numbers, right? It’s a power law. The 99 crash out, commit suicide, become tyrants, et cetera. The 1 figures it out. And on the societies founded on lies, I mean, in my eyes, one of the best examples of that is when Babylonia wanted to rule Sumeria, they realized they had a problem. Their god, Marduk, was a puny god. He was like a local god. And so they were like, let’s do a rewrite. And so literally they came up with a new myth for Marduk. And he took on this supernatural creature and tore it in half and threw half up creating the sky and heavens, the other half down, creating the earth. And he subsumed all of the other gods. And it worked.

Like, everyone was like, whoa, that new Marduk, we should let them run things. So I absolutely—and by the way, this goes on and on throughout history, right? Like any institution, be it the ancient rulers of Babylonia, there were the philosophers and thinkers writing the script, so to speak. And so listen, I think we also would have to get into a conversation, is there such a thing other than the notions of physics? And even there we don’t call them—most of them are still theses or hypotheses, right? If they don’t make it through the scientific method, if they’re falsified, et cetera, then they got to find a new theory. But is there like a truth with a capital T?

I find people searching for truth with a capital T often end up brain dead in ideologies, in religious beliefs, in a whole variety of beliefs that are patently untrue, right, in regard to, can we empirically test this? Right. But so I’m totally on board with you on that front. I just wonder if the age we’re going into, right, with AI getting smarter and smarter and smarter, will we see a shift to people who are more generalist, who are more polymathic in their interests because they can now understand. But more importantly, if they also combine action with it, create real new entities based on things that—if you’re just a man of action, right, if you lack the understanding for where this is going

Why Johnathan is a Seeker

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So what do you conclude?I’m—I’m sort of a Taoist. If I have to define myself.

Johnathan Bi:, I don’t know yet. Again, I’m a seeker, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So you’re a bit like.

Johnathan Bi: I know it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You’re a bit like Buddha himself, right? If you read Siddhartha by Hesse, what I love about that book is Buddha’s just like, yeah, I’m doing the whole drinking my own urine thing and I’m standing on one leg and I’m not getting anywhere. So thanks, guys. I’m glad I learned this lesson, but I’m going to move on. I think the seeker category is the most interesting one because it keeps you open to things that we don’t yet even know about.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so I definitely seeker, by the way. And most people don’t remember this—philosopher is meant to be a diminutive, right? Because this is in the Symposium. If you are a lover of wisdom, you don’t have it. If you have it, you wouldn’t pursue it so fervently. So to say that one is a philosopher is a diminutive in my case.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

Johnathan Bi: Because it means you’re not a wise man. And I think seeker is the same. What I’m trying to say is I don’t romanticize the seeker category. This is just where I’m at. I really want to answer this question to the best of my abilities and that’s where I’m going. I now know that certain things I think are certainly wrong.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Johnathan, what? Third time that you’ve been on Infinite Loops?

Johnathan Bi: Third time.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Welcome.

Johnathan Bi: Not the tenth time I’ve been told. I was quite proud of that coming into this, but then I realized, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Alex Danco has you really beat for right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t catch up.

Johnathan Bi: Is three pretty good?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Three is definitely pretty good. And it’s kind of a lead in to my first question. It seems like you’ve had three different lives, right? You were a math competitor, you were at a startup, so you understand that ecosystem, and now you’re having great success with the lecture series. Anything across all those three that you either learned where you were like, wow, that’s just like a startup, or that’s just like what I had to do for the math competition?

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. I think the more difficult question would be what’s changed, because I see why from an outside perspective those seem like quite different career paths. But it just boils down to execution in terms of the day to day. And when it comes to it, it boils down to the same kind of ruthless execution in all three. Because when you’re running a podcast, as you well know, there’s a lot of work when it comes to doing it, and you need to be very effective at doing that. And there’s a deep intellectual component to all three. Now I’m choosing what I’m doing right now because it is the most intellectual in the way I care about. But yeah, I definitely think that they tie in together. And I’m like you, I’m a generalist. I kind of love being involved in a lot of stuff.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And there’s this big brouhaha right now with Marc Andreessen saying that founders were not introspective. I don’t know whether you saw that. It was on David Senra’s new podcast.

Johnathan Bi: I did, yeah. Senra’s a friend. And he agreed. Senra agreed with Andreessen.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. I disagree with both. What’s your view?

Johnathan Bi: I actually agree with him. Yeah, I actually agree with him.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Convince me. But before you do, are you going to bring Marcus Aurelius into the conversation?

Johnathan Bi: I’m going to bring the Straussians and maybe Plato into the conversation, who sees maybe a slightly bigger tension between action and contemplation, right? Because this is the key tension between the active life, the life of the Roman general or today the business founder, and the life of contemplation of thought. And I think throughout antiquity, these two strands have been deeply in tension. So much so that when Plato, by the way, suggested the philosopher king, right, which is the combination of these two, it was structured in the Republic as the last of three waves. So this is the part in the dialogue when Plato’s like, I’m going to give you three ridiculous ideas about how to organize society. I believe the first one was communism. It was like abolishment of private property. The second one is feminism, the elevation of women.

And the third one, which is supposed to be even more ridiculous than these two, is the philosopher king, because to the Athenians of his age, philosophers are these kind of—they think Diogenes the Cynic, right? They’re kind of living in a barrel with dogs. So maybe that’s the kind of aesthetic picture I’ll paint. But I’ll just say empirically, because I’ve been involved in the startup sphere, the most successful people that I’ve met are probably the least introspective and the least probably self-aware. And they are motivated by certain pathologies and delusions that they are not themselves aware. And that’s what keeps them going. So I’ll tell you a funny story, if that’s okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Sure.

Johnathan Bi: I won’t name the person, but he’s a good friend and someone I look up to quite a bit. And he was like, Johnathan, I’ve been motivated by this one story ever since I was a kid in Rome. This is during the civil war and it’s Caesar against Pompey. And Caesar needs to cross the Mediterranean to do some, I don’t know, reconnaissance mission or something like that. And the Mediterranean has terrible seas. It’s very difficult to pass. So Caesar hides himself in a cloak and convinces these fishermen to carry him across. And in the middle way of his passing, the seas get really rough and the fishermen want to turn back. So Caesar, so my friend tells me, reveals, lifts up his hood, says, “I am Caesar. I am destined to rule Rome. Therefore, have no fear, you will make it across.” And then he does.

And my friend, who again is this super successful man of action, was like, every time I’m in a big struggle, that’s who I think about. That’s who I want to imitate. Here’s the issue. I went back and I read Plutarch, I read Suetonius.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I could see this coming a mile away.

Johnathan Bi: Caesar does not make it across. He lifts his hood, the fishermen turn back, and he fails. I text it to my friend, the screenshot of, again, I think it was Plutarch. What does he text back to me? What would you text back? You’d be like, okay, my bad. He texts back, “Haha. That’s not how I remembered it.” As if he were there, okay? And initially I thought, what a ridiculous way—I was so shocked, right? Because as a trained in philosophy, the people I looked up to, I always thought that they had a strong drive of will to truth, that they took truth very seriously. And here in one hand, I had a model who I really looked up to. And on the other hand, he just seemed to completely disregard the very fact of existence.

But then I realized him refusing to be—him not caring about facts and having his own self-identity, his own narrative matter more than the mere facts is exactly the Caesarean way. Because Caesar didn’t say, “Well, I lifted my hood and I didn’t make it across, therefore I shouldn’t have ruled Rome.” Caesar just treated it as my friend did. “Ha ha,” right? Like, I guess the gods are wrong or something like that. And I see this just again and again, whether it’s in Musk and him making promises that clearly are fake but get the company to a place that it wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise, whether it’s Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field. The text that I’ll point to here is Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. It’s his second book.

And one of the theses is that what motivates action is actually not truth, it is forgetting. It is the ability to forget certain things. And Nietzsche frames this as a lesson in history, where modern man wants to collect all the facts. We want to know what the Aztecs ate, how they shat. We want to know every single detail about their lives. Whereas in antiquity, history, as we talked about in Plutarch, is not like that at all. Plutarch sometimes just invents stuff to say, to put in the mouths of these great men, but it’s to inspire action in his day, right? It’s to have a pedagogical function. And so one way to interpret Nietzsche’s claim is that this will to truth that I and the other philosophers have, that is at best orthogonal to action.

And I want to go even stronger and say, maybe it’s in tension with action, whereas activity—I think if you were to choose the best men of action at a certain time, I think they would almost always be motivated by delusions that would pop if they were too introspective.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So my son Patrick always jokes that I ruin every sample I’m included in. But I think that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Johnathan Bi: I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think they’re deeply in tension.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Because I would not call myself the most introspective person and I’m definitely delusional and I want to push in on that. But I also want to go back to Plato and the Republic. My thesis about the Republic changed a lot when—I’m a history nerd, as you know. And I kind of started seeing the Republic as Plato’s reaction to the loss to Sparta, where Athens lost the war. And so he wanted to make sure he was still one of the in kids. And thus the Republic was born. Of course, the ideas are the ideas, but I am interested in what motivated him.

And by the way, like Plato, one of the best marketers in history, really. He would name—because his whole academy had patrons and he would name the things he wrote after those people and it all became a status prestige game. But staying on the action versus contemplation, like the famous, probably apocryphal story about the way Alexander the Great and his generals would look at the facts, so to speak, on the ground and then develop a battle plan, then they would get rip-roaring drunk at night and if they woke up the next day and still liked the plan, they would do it. But if they woke up the next day, kind of like, we probably might want to rethink this. Maybe it’s just a definition problem here.

Because contemplation, right, that does kind of scream philosophy, will to truth, all of those types of things. But can’t one do a pretty deep dive on one’s own motivations that one can see? I’m sure that there are a lot that are hidden, even though I fully admit that I am delusional, because I honestly believe that to get anything done that’s new, you kind of have to be.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, totally. So let me be more precise about my claim. I don’t think it’s necessarily mutually exclusive even to be the full form of both philosopher and king. I don’t think that. I do think there’s many mechanisms where one helps the other, right? If you’re fully delusional, maybe you can’t manage people or maybe you just—there’s so many clearly clear issues that there’s an upper limit on delusion, right? I think what I’m trying to tease out is the unintuitive mechanisms by which delusion helps action, actually. And so, as you know, I also have an interview series. And one of the series is interviewing philosopher builders, right? And you are—this is why podcasting is just a big, ancestral kind of—you interview me, I interview. Yeah, but.

And then, you know, people like Colin Moran, Francis Pedraza, and partially the reasons I’m interested in interviewing these people like yourself is that you’ve been able to synthesize these things, and it’s so rare. But you also know what? None of the people that I interviewed are the best at what they do in terms of worldly success. You didn’t build Fidelity, right? You didn’t build Vanguard. Colin is not George Soros. Francis didn’t build Palantir, right? So what I’m trying to point out is that in terms of one’s desires for living, and this was kind of the change I had to go through, I was purely on the action side, motivated by delusion. And I can tell you, if you wanted billionaire like Elon Johnathan, you wouldn’t have wanted me to do the introspection that I did in college.

But I did that because I wanted to live a good life. And so, from my own perspective and how I would want to raise kids, I want them to have to be both philosopher and builder, to be both action and contemplation. But I’m saying, if you looked at who the best men of action are, you have the really sober ones, right? And they can go quite far. You have 100 delusional ones, 99 of them are crashed out, right? Suicides, tyrants, terrorists. But one of them kind of just gets it, right? I mean, there was a recent book by Hofstadter. I can’t remember his first name, but his thesis was that evolution does not actually filter for truth, right?

For example, the kind of optic nerve, where the nerve enters your brain, you should see like a black hole in your visual field.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The blind spot.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Over here somewhere, right? And your brain fills it in, because it’s better for evolution to not have a distracting black blob there. And that’s what I’m trying to get at. And maybe the deeper thing I’m trying to get at is, and this might be surprising coming from a philosopher, is that we need to examine what is the value of truth? And this is what Nietzsche asks in his book Untimely Meditations, which is, we think truth is this exhaustive, complete value. But maybe there are times where it’s good to not believe in truths. I mean, certainly societies, very successful societies, have been founded on just complete lies, right? Egyptian gods, or if you believe in the Egyptian gods and the Aztec gods, at least one of the Abrahamic religions, at most one of the Abrahamic religions is right about their core claim, right?

And so clearly falsehood, delusion ground society. And the question is, I think the individual question is very clear to me of where you want to go. You want to go on truth, you want to go on understanding. But the civilizational question of if you want to produce an innovative society, I think you’re going to have a lot of crazy people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I completely agree. And I agree on the numbers, right? It’s a power law. The 99 crash out, commit suicide, become tyrants, et cetera. The 1 figures it out. And on the societies founded on lies, I mean, in my eyes, one of the best examples of that is when Babylonia wanted to rule Sumeria, they realized they had a problem. Their god, Marduk, was a puny god. He was like a local god. And so they were like, let’s do a rewrite. And so literally they came up with a new myth for Marduk. And he took on this supernatural creature and tore it in half and threw half up creating the sky and heavens, the other half down, creating the earth. And he subsumed all of the other gods. And it worked.

Like, everyone was like, whoa, that new Marduk, we should let them run things. So I absolutely—and by the way, this goes on and on throughout history, right? Like any institution, be it the ancient rulers of Babylonia, there were the philosophers and thinkers writing the script, so to speak. And so listen, I think we also would have to get into a conversation, is there such a thing other than the notions of physics? And even there we don’t call them—most of them are still theses or hypotheses, right? If they don’t make it through the scientific method, if they’re falsified, et cetera, then they got to find a new theory. But is there like a truth with a capital T?

I find people searching for truth with a capital T often end up brain dead in ideologies, in religious beliefs, in a whole variety of beliefs that are patently untrue, right, in regard to, can we empirically test this? Right. But so I’m totally on board with you on that front. I just wonder if the age we’re going into, right, with AI getting smarter and smarter and smarter, will we see a shift to people who are more generalist, who are more polymathic in their interests because they can now understand. But more importantly, if they also combine action with it, create real new entities based on things that—if you’re just a man of action, right, if you lack the understanding for where this is going.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, I think so. And maybe I’ll give you an even more provocative example other than Babylon. It was Babylon, right, about lies grounding society. I’m doing a lot of work on the American founding right now in preparation of 250, which is coming in July 4th. And I was reading the Declaration and it just struck me—no one really believes in the key philosophical underpinning of the Declaration anymore. I still think America is majority Christian, although—but even among Christians in America, I don’t think most of them believe in the natural rights tradition. Like God has given people these natural rights.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Inalienable.

Johnathan Bi: Inalienable rights that are somehow self-evident. And so again, that just goes to show that in a fully functioning, in the most powerful society in the world, it could be grounded on things that—I’m not saying whether they’re true or not. I’m saying that the people don’t believe that truth doesn’t have this kind of, again, this kind of ultimate value in social life. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And now we’re circling around a point where I think we can come to agreement because I’ve always thought of America as really one of the first countries founded on ideas, right? Not necessarily true ideas, aspirational ideas, most definitely. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And as I’m sure you know, the original line was the pursuit of property. And they’re like, we should maybe make it a little more general. But in much the same way that Kennedy got us to the moon. When Kennedy made that speech in the early 1960s, every engineer that was at NASA or in the United States, they were like, yeah, we don’t have any ability to do everything he just said, but he set the goal right out here. Outlandish at the time and ultimately we got to it.

That’s why I’m a huge believer in the power of fiction and specifically in terms of innovation, science fiction becomes science faction. And what do you think about that process? I’m really intrigued by it because if you don’t have this thing to get people’s minds engaged, even if it sounds at the time that you say it—a more contemporary example would be Bezos. “I’m going to be the biggest bookstore in the world.” What? Yeah, you know, like, huh. And of course he became much more than that.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. When I talk about delusion, I think I’m referring to something slightly different than these things in the objective world, like Amazon’s going to be the biggest, we’re going to go to the moon, which did end up being true. I think what I’m really referring to is like megalomania. Like, what America does really well, especially if you’ve lived outside of America, as I have, is how it encourages megalomania among its citizens. It tells them, every American child knows that he or she can be the president, too. And that’s what American culture cultivates in the children. You can be this, too. You can be a billionaire as well. How likely that is, right? It’s what American media tells. It encourages these.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Just let me stop you there. Yeah, right. It’s what American media used to do. I don’t think that modern contemporary media.

Johnathan Bi: Look at Marvel like Spider-Man, but maybe that’s—that’s old media. Maybe that’s already.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think of that as old because.

Johnathan Bi: You can be you know, Peter Parker.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think one of the things that is causing so much distress in America right now is that most of the media is incredibly negative. Negative about the future, negative about everything.

Johnathan Bi: That’s right. And so, you know, now this might sound good. This kind of—you can be anything you want, but the danger is that the empowering can soon become a debilitating ought. And Tocqueville had a—I think it was Tocqueville’s observation where he said, obviously, aristocratic societies aren’t like this, right? Aristocratic society, you stay in your place, okay? You do what is your function. And he says that even though no French peasant needs to have an excuse for why they’re not the lord. What do you mean, why they’re not the lord? I was born peasant. Each American feels somewhat guilty that he or she is not the president, because he or she can be.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I think I’ve told you about the book, The Hypomanic Edge: Why America Is Different. The book itself is not great. The theory, however, is very intriguing to me because the author basically says it wasn’t just the founders with these aspirational goals, right? It was the people who came here because of those aspirations. And the author makes a pretty persuasive case that if you do DNA samples of your average American whose families have been here for a while, right? Because we got to see the time element. He basically says, these are very different people than everyone else in the world. And then he makes the case. He’s like, just think about it. It’s, you know, 1885, you’re a peasant farmer in Ireland. The British have starved you out for a long time, and yet all your family is there.

You’ve been there for generations and everything you know is there. And yet you’re like, nah, I’m going to take what little money I have left, take a ship, which in itself at that time is dangerous, to this new promised land, America, and I’m going to leave behind my entire family, my network, my ecosystem, everything I know, and I’m going to strike out, right? And then he said, now supersize it and you’ve got your average American.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And by the way, I think you’re exactly right. It’s the circumstances around America that created, you know, just provocatively—and I’ll explain the kind of benefits and negatives of this megalomania. I actually don’t think it’s something the founders themselves intended. In fact, if you read the founders’ writing, they were worried about this kind of grandiosity. They were worried about aristocratic heroism being in—to the extent where they actively discourage certain types of, like, novel reading. Like poetry was a bit too dangerous, right? Like novels, they’re too grandiose. But anyways, so bucket that aside, I think you’re right that the structure around America has created this kind of empowerment of everyone to exceed. Now, obviously not everyone can exceed.

And so I think it’s this kind of megalomania, this kind of delusion that just a kid being born in the Bronx in a single family home can become a billionaire, can become the president or can become an NBA superstar. That is the cause of both America’s best qualities and her worst qualities. It is the rise of her entrepreneurs. This is why when you talk top investment funds, again, I won’t name the fund. One of the top partners told me we invest in three kinds of people: megalomania, autism and revenge. Because there has to be something pathological to make you want to push on this kind of journey that kind of rationally doesn’t make sense. Like why do you need a trillion dollars when you already have hundreds of millions? You need some kind of external drive there.

And when you read Musk’s biography, it’s clear that he wants to be the guy who changes the world. He’s less concerned about changing the world, more concerned about him being the one doing it, right? And so I think, however, I think this is also the psychology of the school shooter.

So we talked about the best of America, the worst of America, the greatest domestic terrorists. I think they’re all also motivated by this kind of desire, which is that I want myself to be elevated.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Wouldn’t you think that they’re motivated more by your final one, revenge, rather than grandiosity and the desire to be the guy or gal to build the way to Mars?

Johnathan Bi: If you read their manifestos, it is actually strikingly similar to the psychology of a lot of founders, which is, I am not at the station of life where I want to be. I do not have enough respect from society or attention from society or even a sign from society that I exist. So I’m going to do this outrageous act to prove myself. In the case of the founders, it’s productive. In the case of school shooters, it’s terribly destructive. But the core psychology is the same. And this is why I say, in America, you can’t get rid of your school shooters without destroying your pipeline of founders. And then when people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: What a pull quote that’s going to be.

Johnathan Bi: And then when people get upset at me, I remind them that Thiel wrote in Zero to One that all but I think one or two of the founders of PayPal built bombs in high school. That what America encourages is this deeply disruptive, I can be the best, I can far exceed my station. That’s the message you have to pump into your kids. And you know, one of them’s going to be great. 50 of them is going to be really upset. Two of them might become domestic terrorists, but you don’t know which kid is going to do what. So you kind of have to pump everyone with this kind of rhetoric. And that, again, this is already there in Tocqueville. Tocqueville says that the American worker is driven in frenzy by their neighbors who have a slightly better car.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Definitely. That is absolutely true.

Johnathan Bi: Even though the French peasant looks at the aristocrat and be like, hey, yeah, he’s an aristocrat. I’m a peasant. And again, this is kind of Tocqueville’s duality of equality, the benefits and negatives. But that, again, this is not a good or bad thing. This is just an observation about, I think, how the psychology of America works.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I used to joke quite a bit about the fact that I had—how many traits are there in a serial killer? I think there’s seven, and I had five of them.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly, exactly. And again, I’ll bring more kind of serious philosophical defenders on my side. One of my favorite essays by Rousseau is his Second Discourse. And he talks about amour-propre, the desire for vanity, recognition, to stand out, to esteem. And he has this great line. He says, “To this drive we owe our conquerors and our philosophers, our scientists, but also our kind of evildoers and thieves and scoundrels, that is to say, a few good things and many bad things.” And so, again, this is the kind of ambiguity that—sorry, this is the kind of ambivalence that I’m kind of highlighting between—again, it ties back to the Andreessen thing that, again, that the people you need to build a good society are not always good people. And the qualities you need to build a good life are not always necessarily.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, you know the book about the guy who built New York City, The Power Broker? Great example.

Johnathan Bi: Robert Moses.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, Robert Moses, exactly. Not a good guy. And then the author chose to write about LBJ and not a great guy.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You mentioned religion. I am definitely of two minds about formal religion. I’m not an atheist, and I’m not an atheist because how delusional is that? I, Jim O’Shaughnessy:—

Johnathan Bi: That’s a religion

Jim O’Shaughnessy: A human. Exactly, exactly. Its own religion. And so I—but I’m not, like, I was raised Catholic, but I’m not a practicing Catholic. I don’t understand institutional religion. And primarily, like, I—I’m sure you’re—well, I shouldn’t say I’m sure. Are you a fan of Spinoza?

Johnathan Bi: I haven’t read any Spinoza, but.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay, he dissects the Roman Catholic Church better than almost any philosopher. And I’d always had the idea, right, that all they did was recreate imperial Rome. We’ve got the emperor, the Pope, the Praetorian Guard, the cardinals, the generals and foot soldiers, the bishops, and then the foot soldiers, actually, the priests out there. But if you dissect the Roman Catholic Mass, it is, to my mind, one of the greatest innovations in controlling society ever invented.

Johnathan Bi: I agree with you. Although my interest in religion, I think, is less historical, social, anthropological, as yours seems to be, and it’s much more personal. So I was raised, it’s hard to say, raised atheist. But I didn’t grow up with the faith. My parents sent me to Sunday school so I could practice English, so—and they didn’t want to pay for a tutor, so. Hey,

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That’s very enterprising of them.

Johnathan Bi: Worked out pretty well, so I can’t blame them. And so I, you know, I converted as a six-year-old or something like that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: What religion, if I may ask?

Johnathan Bi: It’s just Protestantism, some kind of strand. I don’t even know, right? That’s how devout I was. In high school in Canada, I became again deconverted and atheist again for very similar reasons many young people do. And then in college, I had this period of suffering, this worldly suffering, you know, growing pains and teenage angst and a quarter-life crisis about what should I be doing with my life and how much do I care about the attention of others? And I got into Girardian Catholicism, which problematized desire socially, and I got into Buddhism, which problematized desire phenomenologically. And so my second foray into religion was to study their texts, unlike the first time, seriously, to do their practice. I practiced in a Tibetan monastery in Nepal for a while and studied there rather, I should say. But I didn’t engage with them on their own grounds.

So I was going to these traditions and saying, hey, what resources do you have to solve my this-worldly suffering? Okay. I started this project which is about the great books, philosophy, religion, literature. And I interviewed this one Yale professor called Carlos Eire, and he wrote a book called They Flew, okay? And the thesis of the book is that there is fairly conclusive historical evidence that people levitated in medieval Europe, that there were levitating saints in medieval Europe. And it was published again. He’s tenured at Yale. He’s published by Yale University Press. This is not something you see coming out of the academy. I was somewhat convinced about the arguments of that book, and I’m happy to go through for our audience if you want.

But because of that, while I was reading it, one of my Orthodox Christian friends said, “Oh, I’ve seen a miracle before.” And I was like, okay, tell me. And he told about this icon that oozed oil infinitely of the Virgin Mary in an Orthodox church. And the crazy thing is, Jim, you can just go drive and see it, okay? It’s in Taylor, Pennsylvania. They host sessions Sunday, of course, and then Wednesday evening, which is when I went. I went with Jeremy, whom you know, and our third friend. And yeah, lo and behold, it was just an icon. And I saw it just dripping oil for like 15 minutes straight.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Did you see them changing the oil?

Johnathan Bi: I did not see them changing the oil. And of course, it could be faked. There’s actually that exact instance of things being faked. I would—if I were to put a number on it, I would say 60% it’s not fake, 70% it’s legitimate just because of the people around that. And so that kind of opened up a metaphysical door for me. And then I started investigating. Basically I wanted to defeat scientific atheism, materialism—not defeat. I want to challenge it on its own grounds, right? And so that’s not saying, well, you know, I have this scripture, it’s clearly given by God, therefore you’re wrong. It’s an immanent critique. It’s saying, can we use empirical, scientific, historical methods as Eire used to challenge this dominant kind of narrative. And it turns out, Jim, that there is just—well, some being does not want me to talk about this. Angered the gods,

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, you’ve angered the house spirits. Johnathan, be careful on your way home.

Johnathan Bi: Basically, it turns out there’s tremendous, just empirical research that shows that the materialist worldview is limited. I’ll just give you a few examples. One example is have you heard of the lab at University of Virginia that studies reincarnation?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: No.

Johnathan Bi: So this is founded by the founder of Xerox. And for 50 years—I’m going there to interview the team next month. They’ve been collecting stories, testimonials of children who claim they had reincarnation. What’s the big deal? Okay. There’s over 3,000 reports over the last 50 years. I believe all of the claims—so the children were very specific about what they claimed. Like, my name was XYZ, I had this sister, I lived here and there. And I think for most of these cases, if not all of them, it was the researchers who validated the claims. So it wasn’t like the child already knew that family. And then the researchers came in, documented.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: How old were the children?

Johnathan Bi: All before six, I think, because after a certain time the memory fades.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

Johnathan Bi: Many of them grew up in non-reincarnating cultures, okay? So they were not culturally encouraged to do this. In fact, a lot of them grew up in Christian cultures or non-reincarnating cultures. They were actively discouraged and it was very troubling. And so there was no really ulterior motive. For some of them there were, but for a lot of them there weren’t. And about 300 of the 3,000 had a birthmark that matched the death wound of the previous personality. And so that is again.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Have you read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas? Oh, you should, you have to read it. Yeah, because he makes—he’s a literary fiction writer, I love. But essentially the case that he’s making in Cloud Atlas is the same one you’re making.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, but basically there’s just tons of stuff like this out there. There’s in the same lab, they did a lot of again, like testimonial gathering I would call it. Maybe that’s too—that’s not serious enough. It’s something like empirical, like anthropology or something. They’ve gathered a lot of testimonials from doctors who witness near-death experiences from their patients.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That I know more about.

Johnathan Bi: So a patient is on the verge of death. Happened to my mom, by the way. And they’re—this didn’t happen to my mom. They’re able to report things they couldn’t have possibly sensed even if they were awake. Like what happens a few doors down. And again, these are secular, usually atheist scientists, doctors who are reporting this. And it’s not like, you know, every time a patient is about to die they get something and one of the thousand gets it right. These are like fairly good hit rates about these things. And another example out of Duke University, J.B. Rhine, I think was a researcher that did like basically like telepathy essentially. And there was just—there was one guy who was able to guess cards at a like a 33% rate continuously. It was like a five-card kind of setup.

So you’d expect the rate to be 20%, right? Statistically if you want to do 33, that’s maybe one in a million or something like that. So that was kind of my first foray into this. And we’re going to talk about my seeker’s journey developed further. But that was my first journey into this which is just looking at, hey, serious dependable studies out of Duke, out of Yale, out of UVA, out of Stanford. What are they saying that makes us doubt the empirical materialist paradigm? And even there, I think there’s—I think it’s quite conclusive.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Have you followed the work of Rupert Sheldrake, the physicist? There’s another one you’re going to really want to tune into. He gave a TED talk. He’s very—he’s a brilliant guy, poster child for the materialist worldview who broke bad according to them. They literally did everything they could to destroy him. He wrote a book that questioned the materialist view from essentially inside the materialist view.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And the head of I think Nature magazine basically did a completely non-logical or rational jihad against Rupert. Basically just, you know, saying if I were Pope, I’d be burning him at the stake. And I’m like, that doesn’t really reflect the view you seem to be supporting at all. So I think you might find his work very interesting. Robert Anton Wilson, he was 50 years ago making all of these assertions and looking seriously into them from the point of view of somebody who—I’ve always believed that Apollo and Dionysus, if you can unite the two, you’re going to have a pretty interesting lens to look at the world through. And materialism did a lot for us and the advancement of humanity, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. And now we’re seeing all of the breaks. They hate the quantum guys, right?

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah. This is another kind of strand which is—materialism is based off of 19th century physics. It’s not even—it’s kind of—or a lot of these rather popular materialisms are based off of, you know, billiard balls colliding, matter is a real thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And you know, sort of the old quote, science progresses one funeral at a time, right? I think it was Max Planck, but I kind of think society advances one funeral at a time. I think that the social web in which we grow up in has so many invisible threads into us that we are completely unaware of. I used to play this mind game where I would say like, what would a conversation really look like if I was able to time travel back and talk to the most brilliant minds of say 1500, right? Basically the lack of any kind of shared context other than the basic human ones, right? I don’t think any of those would be different, right? I think that the underlying human OS, we are fear-driven creatures. We are prestige junkies. We want.

Like you made earlier the reference about the guy not liking his neighbor because he had a better car. That is incredibly well proven in economic theory, right? It makes no sense. And it basically dismantles most economic models, right? Because like Keynesian econometric models assume, no, no, no, everyone is a rational actor. Not true at all. And like study after study shows, you know, Johnathan, I’m going to give you the opportunity to get 50% more in compensation. But if you know that your competitor at work is getting 100, I’m going to feel shitty. You’re going to feel shitty and you will actively try to suppress both.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so we—the whole idea that I, you know, my degree in economics totally worthless because most of the axioms that it’s built on are wrong.

Johnathan Bi: Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Like we are not rational actors for the most part. For the most part we make decisions and then afterward paper over rational reasons for why we made them. But so I’m totally open-minded about—look, I think that we are just at the beginning. I’m a huge fan of David Deutsch and his book The Beginning of Infinity. That’s where we are. We don’t know half of 1% about nothing.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And yet we assume that we are these modern, incredibly well-informed.

Johnathan Bi: We’re this close until science closes off kind of all the questions worth asking.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And that is so wrong. And imagine if again we did our time travel. And I’m stealing this from Deutsch and rephrasing it, but he sort of in The Beginning of Infinity says, hey, what if you talk to the greatest physicists of 1890 and ask them what they thought about quantum and about the Internet? And he said they wouldn’t think anything about it because neither existed. And he makes the point that we human beings, the tools we make, are the best explainers, the best extenders of ideas. And that we’re literally sort of perpetually at the beginning of infinity because that knowledge compounds. The only way it doesn’t compound is if you are ruled by a society that hates change. Back to your American observations, right? Like America, whether the founders wanted it to be or not, got populated by people who loved change and look at what we got, right?

And so I’m totally open-minded about anything that—for example, the oil thing, now if I went down there, I would be intrigued, but I would—I used—my first job was as a stage magician, right?

Johnathan Bi: Really?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh yeah. And I love magic. You know, other kids growing up had Farrah Fawcett in my era on their wall. I had a poster of Harry Houdini. I loved magic and I just, I don’t really know why. At a young age my dad gave me these magic books that my grandfather had given him. And I was just like, what? But so I also, that got me to understand human psychology a lot better because I used to do a lot of mental effects, right? Where I’d say, Johnathan, think of a number, any number, it can be anywhere between negative number all the way up to whatever. And you’d give me a number and then I’d point to another person in the audience. You know, think of any line from any work of literature that you love.

Just, just one line and then the third, think of any animal. And you can make that animal different. You can make it a pink elephant if you want. And then I would write it down. And then at the end of the effect, I would remove what I had written—I’d already written. I wrote it ahead of time. And I would remove each of the coverings and they matched the person, what they said exactly. To the audience, like they thought I was legit psychic, right? And I had one woman at one come up and say, you are unbelievable. You are truly a psychic. And I felt bad. I was like, no, no. I’m a magician. This is—there’s a trick to this.

And literally, I ended up showing her the cardinal sin for a magician, showing her how it worked. And even after I did that, she was like, I don’t believe it. I think I know you’re psychic. So the will to believe is totally strong.

Johnathan Bi: And I should caveat. I would have tested the icon in obvious ways if it weren’t this holy object that I think, right? And so—so there’s limitations,.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: But it also reminds me of the selling of relics to the medieval Catholic church.

Johnathan Bi: It does.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: They just pick—they just pick bones up from anywhere. And this is the bone of one of the disciples or Jesus Christ himself.

Johnathan Bi: So this is my biggest unlock while exploring this space. And my favorite person I’ve interviewed, I would say, ever on the great book side is a scholar by the name of Jeff Kripal at Rice. And so this is his idea, which is the existence of fraud does not preclude a legitimate act. So I’ll give you an example that you and I are both aware of, entrepreneurs that we fund. So many are fraudulent. But do you say just because the WeWork guy is a fraud and Sam Bankman-Fried is a fraud, that means all of them are fraudulent?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: No, of course not.

Johnathan Bi: You say we use discernment to try to figure out who’s a fraud and who’s not. And I think the same is with—again, I investigated cases like the myrrh icon, and I found a case of fraud. Turns out they were also a pedophile ring in Texas. And so there’s a lot of other signs that—that are. Yeah, yeah. And so…

Jim O’Shaughnessy: you’re spitting fire today, Johnathan. I think—yeah, we’ll definitely get you up to 10 episodes.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, that’s what—that’s what I’m really going for. But the even stronger case that Jeff made that I think is totally right, is that even with the existence of one single person, the act that he or she did, fraud in one time does not preclude that he is authentic another time. Again, we’ve talked about this before, right? Elon and his fraudulent claims about how forward Tesla is does not preclude—in fact, it might be the cause of the fact that the stock goes up. And I think that is true probably for a lot of these holy men as well. Just because we can find cases where it’s fraudulent or it’s untrue doesn’t mean everything they say is untrue. And this is, I think this is kind of my perspective on organized religion, which is, and it’s going to continue my seeker story, right?

I kind of blown open the metaphysical door. I don’t have a denomination, but at this point it’s quite recent. I’m kind of worried about the existential consequences. Like if you take these religious traditions seriously, you’re going to end up in a pretty bad place most of the time if you don’t do very specific—.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Hey man, I have a block of ice right next to Satan himself reserved with my name on it.

Johnathan Bi: There you go. So I again, just like, I was just like, I try to be charitable with the scientists critiquing things from their own perspective. I want to do that with the religious traditions because here’s my issue, which is my Christian friends are teasing me. You saw this Christian miracle, why didn’t you convert? Most people don’t even have this and converted. And I said, okay, but what about the Buddhist miracle? What about the case about reincarnation? What about this Hindu thing that’s like awfully well documented? Like if it were just between Christianity or atheism, I think it’s an easy leap, but you need to have reasons for making the leap, right?

Not to say that the leap is a fully rational act, but surely even the Christian would say, yeah, the first guy on the street corner trying to join you, his cult, don’t take a leap of faith there. You have to investigate, you have to use reason. Reason has a role in this kind of process to play. And basically my claim against the apologist—this is why I think I’m a very weird interlocutor for a lot of these religious people who want to convert you—is I say, even if I agree with everything that you said, he came back from the dead, you know, he did all these miracles, so what? There’s other traditions who say the exact same things, including the “I am God” statements, by the way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, by the way. And I’m blanking on the title because I haven’t read the book yet, but I did buy it. There are like many other religious traditions with the exact same story as Jesus Christ.

Johnathan Bi: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And like you see the movie Heretic by A24? Oh, you’ll want to watch that for sure.

Johnathan Bi: I’ll have a lot of homework after.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: This because it basically makes the case that all religions borrow from other religions. Have you read the book?

Johnathan Bi: The flood and.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah. But have you also read the book The Immortality Key? That’s another one. Brian Muraresku, I had him on the pod. It’s fascinating. His thesis was the Eleusinian Mysteries use psychedelics. And literally their pitch was come to our group and talk to the gods.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Ayahuasca, same idea.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so we finally were able to test the ancient chalices and things. And they did in fact find residue of psychedelics.

Johnathan Bi: Really? Wow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, that’s what his book is about.

Johnathan Bi: It’s called The Immortality Key.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so Brian Muraresku, fascinating guy. Anyway, so I’m all for this kind of exploration.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Yeah, that was my question, which is, you know, the Christians often say hey, be charitable to—or the Muslims or to take whatever faith, you know, be charitable to us. Take our scripture, read it in the most charitable light. It’s allegory. Not everything has to be true. But then they don’t apply the same charity to the other religions, right? When you ask, this is an interesting exercise. Ask them about their religion and ask them about the existence of other religions. And usually the answer is threefold. If they’re feeling they’re having a bad day, they say they’re demons. If they’re having a decent day, they say they’re like hallucinations, they’re man-made. If they’re having a really good day, they’ll say they’re a lesser revelation, right? And this by the way, shows the Catholic Church’s different attitude towards the other religions.

In the Florentine Council, everyone else is going to hell. In Vatican II, Jesus can work grace through these other traditions. So anyways, that’s kind of my problem. And it’s the exact opposite of the modern’s problem. The modern doesn’t see anything in the religious project. I see too much. Again, if human history was just Buddhism or just Islam or just Christianity, that’s a pretty easy leap for me to make. But it’s this, what Sextus Empiricus has called equivalence. These arguments that don’t necessarily are wrong, but they’re in tension with each other. And I don’t see a clear difference between them. That’s kind of my issue. So my current project now is going into these religious traditions and figuring out kind of whether they hold up to scrutiny or whether their exclusivist orthodox forms hold up to scrutiny. So one example is Mormonism.

Okay, probably not. It like in its most orthodox exclusive interpretation, there’s King James Bible translation errors in the Mormon text. There’s—yeah, I can just go on and on. But again, I want to, I still want to be charitable to, let’s say, the Mormons, because what I said about even if a holy man has certain fraudulent acts, and by the way, these were the huge scandals of the Buddhists in the 20th century when these holy teachers from Tibet had all these sexual scandals. But I think it’s wrong to say.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The evangelicals gave them a run for their money.

Johnathan Bi: It was a great contest, the religious battle. But I don’t want to say, look, just because this guy had this one bad moral thing, it means everything he said is fake. I think in the same way we don’t say, hey, Elon lied about this one thing, everything he does is fake. We don’t do that when we’re investing. We shouldn’t do that in religion either.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, but also underneath that, right, is an analogy I used to use for social or political opinions. If you can infer all of my beliefs by hearing one of them, I am brain dead and I have been captured by an ideology. Yeah, right? You’re basically saying the same thing here.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly. And so that’s what I’m kind of doing now, which is I’ve kind of brushed aside the atheist, the scientific worldview, and now it’s a weird, wild world. It’s the beginning of infinity, as you say. And now I’m kind of exploring the different religious traditions and just seeing what holds up to scrutiny. I’ll give you another example. I have a video coming out about Daniel in the Old Testament here. And I spent about a few months on Daniel interviewing some of the best scholars, both apologetic and critical, because I think it’s actually a great way for reason to get a sense of the truth of Christianity for the following reason. Daniel 11. So Daniel is allegedly a captive in the Babylonian captivity, okay, so 6th century. In Daniel 11, Daniel has a vision and he has this insane prophecy.

There’s nothing else like it in the Bible. 11:1 to 35, where he perfectly foresees the next 400 years. He sees Alexander. He sees these minute battles and deals. He sees Alexander’s kingdom breaking into four. And then the prophecy stops working in 11:36, around the second century, the Maccabean revolt. The king that was supposed to die in Israel does not die in Israel. The end never comes. And basically this is very short summary. The apologists think that, hey, Daniel 11:36, that’s about the future Antichrist, okay? So this was about 6th to 2nd century. Then there’s a jump in time. This is a classic Christian move. The critics say, no, no. Even that 6th to 2nd century stuff, that was written after things happened in the Maccabean revolt. They wanted, the Jews wanted a symbol of hope to motivate them.

So they told their history in the form of a prophecy, put it in the words of Daniel, and then wrote out the death of their main antagonist, Antiochus IV, and that hopeful prophecy never happened.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Very clever.

Johnathan Bi: So I think this is a good example where reason has a lot of work to do to help you decide whether a leap is appropriate or not. Now, it doesn’t fully collapse down, but deciding whether Daniel is a 6th century or 2nd century text, that’s something historical methods can do. And so that’s why I’ve spent so much time investigating it. So it’s things like these that I think for a seeker, I’m just spending all of my time on investigating and seeing kind of what’s the shape that comes out of this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So what do you conclude?I’m—I’m sort of a Taoist. If I have to define myself.

Johnathan Bi:, I don’t know yet. Again, I’m a seeker, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So you’re a bit like.

Johnathan Bi: I know it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You’re a bit like Buddha himself, right? If you read Siddhartha by Hesse, what I love about that book is Buddha’s just like, yeah, I’m doing the whole drinking my own urine thing and I’m standing on one leg and I’m not getting anywhere. So thanks, guys. I’m glad I learned this lesson, but I’m going to move on. I think the seeker category is the most interesting one because it keeps you open to things that we don’t yet even know about.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so I definitely seeker, by the way. And most people don’t remember this—philosopher is meant to be a diminutive, right? Because this is in the Symposium. If you are a lover of wisdom, you don’t have it. If you have it, you wouldn’t pursue it so fervently. So to say that one is a philosopher is a diminutive in my case.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

Johnathan Bi: Because it means you’re not a wise man. And I think seeker is the same. What I’m trying to say is I don’t romanticize the seeker category. This is just where I’m at. I really want to answer this question to the best of my abilities and that’s where I’m going. I now know that certain things I think are certainly wrong. Like again, materialism, the orthodox interpretations of Mormonism, probably the orthodox interpretation of Judeo-Christianity as well. That’s kind of what my Daniel kind of research has led me to. And I’m just going to go through these religious traditions and see what they have to offer. And by the way, I’m not just doing this rationally, I’m also practicing this in some sense—for Buddhism, meditation. I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, Orthodox Christianity. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I had an experience at a Buddhist temple which, listening to you reminded me of it. It was in 1987 in Hawaii and obviously I knew about Buddhism, but I hadn’t spent much time like visiting their temples or anything like that. And literally my wife was with me and it happened to both of us. We crossed over into the temple and we literally felt our physical bodies just absolutely change. All tension, everything just like literally left our body. And I looked at my wife and I said, did that just happen to you too? And she’s like, yeah. And that was the closest I have come to any like physical mystical experience.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And what’s really interesting to me now is, and definitely from this episode, I think you and I are both going to get some inbounds on email.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh for sure.

Johnathan Bi: To reach out. Because when you’re quite open about these things, there’s not a lot of people who are serious who are also open about these things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

Johnathan Bi: And even the past year I’ve just heard incredible stories. More, even more incredible than the ones you told me. That again, are from super sober-minded people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

Johnathan Bi: Who have no agenda, unlike the Roman Church case, to share this with me. Like, like for example my mom and her near-death experience, which she didn’t see anything but she has no agenda to try to trick anyone, right? And again, I’ve just heard—I think modernity has a tendency to diminish testimony. That’s just testimony. But on the other hand, if, let’s say your son or someone else you really trust tells you, hey, this thing happened to me and you work through all the possibilities. Was it a hallucination? Whether they’re trying to get something out of me. No. Then you kind of believe them, right? You kind of believe—in other words, don’t hold onto your metaphysical views so tightly that makes you disregard this stuff. And I’ll actually tell you a funny thing.

It’s going to tie back to investing. I’ve developed somewhat of a new thesis that will either end up disastrously bad or fantastically lucrative for my angel investing, which is investing in people who’ve had mystical experiences. So again, this is Jeff Kripal’s idea. He basically claims every single great book in the canon was because the author had a mystical experience that they were trying to process, that literally the muses are real. So a good example is Nietzsche. What are we told about Nietzsche? He’s a naturalist, okay? He hates the religious stuff. He does. He actually says a few good things about Christ even though he doesn’t like Christians. But Nietzsche had an experience, two experiences. One at Sils-Maria, I believe, where he was in front of this boulder. And he describes it as a mystical experience.

And that’s where eternal recurrence, this metaphysical idea was imputed upon him. Another example, Nietzsche had what is called a precognitive dream, which is when you are able to see things in the future. And Nietzsche basically, after his father died, he dreamt that his father came from the grave and took his brother or a young child, walked back into the grave. A few days later his brother died. And so…

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Mark Twain too.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Twain is another good—his brother died.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: His brother. Yeah.

Johnathan Bi: On the shipping accident. Exactly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so he had it down to the coffin, which was very unusual and provided for them by people Twain didn’t even know.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And the flowers on the brother’s casket. It’s really interesting.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so basically Jeff—and again, my first interview with him was already out. I can’t stop recommending him enough. He basically rereads the entire canon this way, like at the end of the Republic when the near-death experience where they see Odysseus choosing his reincarnation.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Johnathan Bi: What we’re told in school is that this is for stupid people, okay? If you don’t get the high philosophy, here’s a little children’s tale to tell you the kind of moral of the story. But Jeff kind of flips it—this is actually the culmination of the Republic. And by the way, we call that the Myth of Er. Nowhere does Plato call it the Myth of Er, right? It’s a story for Plato. So anyways, his claim is that all the great writers—this might be interesting thesis for you as well. All the great writers in antiquity were actually mystics, okay? What about in modernity? And he wrote a book called Mutants and Mystics where he showed that conclusively, I believe, so much of popular media today is by mystics.

Like so much of the comic books you’re familiar with, Esalen Institute—Esalen popped up, I think, on the West Coast, the same time the X-Men were written in the East Coast. So there was.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I thought Esalen had much earlier. When did they write X-Men? Because Esalen’s been around forever. It was a big thing.

Johnathan Bi: It was the New Age. It was the core New Age institution. Yeah, yeah, I’m pretty sure they were the same time. And his point is, when you look at the most popular media, right—this is what you do. Movies, documentaries, you want to—in Dune, mystics. So that’s my thesis, actually.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: What’s so funny about that is William Blake, talk about a great mystic. Like, I don’t know how much you’ve read about him or read of his work. You should, because he’s also a fabulous artist and he’s got the—I don’t know, I don’t recall what the etching is called, but it’s essentially—it’s the infinite staircase. But it’s a DNA strand. If you take his painting and then put it next to DNA, they’re the same.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, exactly. And so this is my investment thesis, which is, it seems like—and I think Jeff is right. So much of the great ancient cultural works were created by mystics. So much of the great modern cultural works were people who were mystics.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Interesting. If you read Jed McKenna, he has a whole lot to say. In fact, I think the second book in his series on spiritual enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing, is a treatise on Moby-Dick, because he basically says Moby-Dick is about non-duality.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so, long story short, I started an angel investing strategy where I go after mystics who are able to keep it under control.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay, so walk me through that process. How do you discover…

Johnathan Bi: It’s mostly inbound at this point.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, okay.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. So I get a lot of inbound of a lot of weird people. And before I used to just dismiss this all the time. And now I think there might be an edge here. So one guy, he—I won’t reveal his name because again, this is—most people don’t want to talk about this. They don’t want to be seen—oh, this is unserious. And if I tell you his name, I think you definitely know his name. Or at least…

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Tell me off air.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. Certain things he’s worked on and he’s just a straight-up mystic, man. And he watched one of my interviews and he opened up to me. “I had a precognitive dream. This is crazy.” And again, he’s one of the most successful, let’s call it tech entrepreneurs or tech-adjacent, tech-entertainment entrepreneurs.

And then another guy came to me where, again, he’s a mystical experience. And the way that they relate to their company is just fundamentally different.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, a lot of—I think Dirac, the—a lot of the quantum physics guys, all—if you retrospectively look at, like, when—I’m blanking on his name, the—Meaning of Life guy. Short. No, not—was it Schrödinger? Anyway, they had all the Upanishads.

Johnathan Bi: Oh, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And if you look deeply into their bios, almost all of them exactly were what you would call a mystic. But I’m fascinated because I’ve had precog dreams. Aren’t they common?

Johnathan Bi: Can you tell us about the precog dream? Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So this isn’t a recent one, but it’s probably the most colorful. When I was a kid, I had a dream that I actually ended up writing down because my mom recounted it to me so much. It’s not like it was my own memory, but she was like, yeah, when you were little, you told us about a dream that really freaked us out. I guess I was, I don’t know, eight, and I had a dream that I was dead, and I went and visited my mom and dad to tell them that it was okay, I was just going elsewhere. And I said, but my luggage had these really weird tags on it. And my dad said, well, what were the tags? And I said, one said Isis and another one said Osiris or something like that.

And, you know, the way I would rationalize it is my eldest sister died when I was 10, and I had several dreams that were about death prior to her death.

Johnathan Bi: Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And you know, the way my mom would tell it was like..

Johnathan Bi: Was she sick before, it was unforeseen or.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: No. Yeah, she had lupus, so it was expected. Yeah, this is back when nobody knew what lupus was. And so that’s the way I rationalized it. Like, obviously I knew that my sister was sick and this was me trying to—but when I was 8, I didn’t know about Isis and Osiris.

Johnathan Bi: Right, yeah, exactly. And so, basically, again, I’m not an expert on this realm, but at least the most convincing things I see on precognition are a lot stronger than when you suggest, number one, they don’t really appear as dreams. They appear more as visions. Like it appears real.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, that’s—that’s—yeah, that’s where you’re getting.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay. I have another one for you.

Johnathan Bi: Okay. There we go.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So I used to get cluster headaches, which they used to call suicide headaches, because they are— I used to be told by neurologists that they were the worst pain a man could feel, childbirth being the worst. And then I don’t get them anymore, by the way. But I saw a female neurologist, and I use that line on her, and she’s like, no, they’re the worst pain a human being can feel, and they’re horrible. I would not wish them on my worst enemy. But I had discovered that sitting—and this is pre-Internet, right? So the ‘80s. And I was a research junkie then, too. So I went to all the libraries and found that sitting on pure oxygen could alleviate or at least ameliorate the headache.

And so I had a headache and was sitting on oxygen, and I had my eyes closed, and I suddenly was elsewhere. And the elsewhere—and I wrote it out. I described where I was. I did a diagram of me walking into the house and—and I kind of forgot about it. And after I was moving, I found this journal. It describes the house I’m living in right now almost to a T. The front entryway is the same with the same layout. The way to my office is the same with a living room. And here’s the freaky part. I also have an office for my chief of staff next to my office, and that was there, too.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, so that would definitely be something like that. And again, if I invested in you, I would have done pretty damn well. So I think my thesis is panning out. But, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I don’t think of myself as a mystic. Do you think of yourself as a mystic?

Johnathan Bi: No, no, no. But—okay, here’s what I’m really trying to say, which is it seems like some people are just more open to these experiences than others. Like, they’re more—they’re better receptacles of these experiences.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Tesla. Tesla.

Johnathan Bi: I haven’t had a single one of these. Yeah, I haven’t had—it sounds like you’ve had a few.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I have.

Johnathan Bi: And basically, Jeff, or a lot of people have this called a filter thesis, which is the materialists think that, you know, the brain creates the mind. It’s emergent. The filter people think the reverse. That the brain isn’t creating something, it’s actually reducing a lot of things. And the analogy they use is like TV back in the kind of radio wave days, which is you have a million radio waves, you get one TV. If an alien comes down, the alien’s going to think, well, this TV’s creating this image, but it’s actually receiving it. And it’s receiving it by reducing the radio waves all to a single channel. And what this explains is how certain times of low brain activity, terminal lucidity would be a good one, corresponds to heightened consciousness or super-conscious states, like near-death experience.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I definitely have to introduce you to Rupert Sheldrake because his thesis is that we and animals and everyone have a morphogenic field that contains like all human thoughts, all human history, everything, and that we’re interacting with it in much the same manner you’ve just described.

Johnathan Bi: This is Plato in his Meno, I believe, when he says that knowing is actually remembering. You’re actually just remembering things. And again, one of the conclusions, not a necessary conclusion, one of the conclusions you can draw from this is you really need to mess up your antennas to be open to these mystical experiences. And so you were quite messed up because you had the brain trauma and then you had oxygen. Psychedelics is another way chemically to mess up the kind of radio. And so what this thesis is called is the trauma hypothesis, which is that you need to kind of mess up the radio in order to receive all this stuff.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, I was quite intrigued. I can’t remember when I read it. It was just a few years ago, maybe six or seven, and it was a thesis about schizophrenia. And it was exactly that. The author was basically arguing that schizophrenia is filter failure and that the filter that you’ve just described goes haywire and, or it’s way too wide, thus the voices, thus all of that. It’s like you’re getting, most of us are getting that one radio channel or that one clean image exactly where they’re getting like 10 channels, 10, 20, 30. And so I am 100% open to all of these ideas because the more people I talk to, like Rupert and others like Brian, with The Immortality Key. Look, I started out as a pure empiricist. Like, that’s how I built all of the way I invested.

Johnathan Bi: Like, yeah, let’s look at the data.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, exactly, let’s look at the data. But I think maybe I’ve become much more open to it as I’ve gotten older, actually, because like intuition, another great one, the empiricist in me says, well, sure, it’s saturated or imbued intuition. When I look at the same chart pattern or price pattern for decades, well, yeah, of course I’m going to get it into it. I call it my spidey sense. And yet as my stated, I’m happy that I’m no longer managing other people’s money because I do things a little differently now. But I would get these intuitions and I wouldn’t do anything because the quant model that I had developed myself or with my team was not telling me to do it.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. I mean on one hand I don’t want to then jump to the other conclusion and say well all of it is, you know, like all of it is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I’m under. I’m only going long mystics.

Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Yeah. But I’m saying I think this is a huge part that this is probably the big piece, blind spot of modernity. And so it’s—by the way when you look into the anecdotal testimonies, these kind of experiences, they’re almost always negative. They’re almost always traumatic. The precognitive dreams or the signs they get is almost always someone dying, something they care really a lot about dying. It’s hardly ever “oh, tomorrow’s going to be sunny. Tomorrow’s going to be great for wearing a sweater.” And this is why by the way, it’s called telepathy. It’s tele, distance, pathos, emotion. There’s some strong emotion that’s being communicated.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The emotional aspect again, I’ve actually read quite a bit about—I didn’t know that this was your new thesis. That’s why this is so much fun for me. The heightened emotions is definitely—it’s been in my experience a must, right? Like I—after my mother died, I was very close to my mother and after she died I wrote out a list of 100 things that I wanted to do, right? I was 29 years old. On that list was become the chairman of a major arts organization. I was 29 when I wrote that. But I just—they weren’t like considered goals or I just was like freeforming. Here’s all the things I want to do. Write books, make movies, start a—you know, everything except for maybe two or three on that list has a check mark next to it.

Johnathan Bi: What are the two or three left?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Not going to tell you.

Johnathan Bi: You don’t want to jinx it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I’m working on those right now.

Johnathan Bi: But yeah, I just—I think this is probably the biggest blind spot of modernity which is in all the science and technology that we develop—by the way, I don’t think it’s not relevant for this. Like when we discuss one important question is will human writers still be valuable with AI writing? If you believe the things I said, by the way—I don’t believe—not necessarily. I believe that I’m a skeptic. At the end of the day, I’m kind of testing these things out. But if you believe that, I think there’s probably some credence to it, then humans just have a fundamental source they’re tapping into that the machines are not.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

Johnathan Bi: So I actually think—you know what? I actually think this is like a very productive thing in the AI age, because if we looked at what is this human source that we’re tapping into, this mystical source.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah.

Johnathan Bi: And we outline those attributes, maybe we can design experiments to test if LLMs can do that as well. Like, I’m just saying this is—this is a fundamental reconception of man that I think is going to help us even—maybe especially in this technological age.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

Johnathan Bi: Like, so I think, again, it’s kind of all connected. You asked me, like, all these things I’ve done like math and entrepreneurship and computer science and AI and philosophy, and now this—is it all connected? Number one is I kind of don’t worry if they’re all connected or not. I’m just like—what I’ve learned is if I do something I’m passionate about, I’m going to go so much further.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally agree.

Johnathan Bi: And I’m going to have so much more fun. That’s the most important thing. I’m going to have so much more fun. So who gives a fuck if I go further or not? The very fact that I have more and more fun, that’s the key thing. But the cool thing is everything kind of ties back together. Yeah. Like, all these things I’m interested in, like AI and—yeah, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I definitely have found the same. If you can make something fun and you can entertain people, that is, if you really want to teach people, that’s the way to do it. Like, get them engaged on their own kind of level of what animates them, et cetera. And these, though, are—what’s interesting to me is these ideas to many people would be like, these guys are wackos.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, exactly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: But there are a lot of practical things from this investigation.

Johnathan Bi: But that’s not why I’m doing it or why you’re doing it. But there are, right? There are.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Whereas maybe that’s my—still my bent toward action. Like, I don’t want to just think about things, I want to do them. I want to bring them into the world. And—and so, I mean, maybe that’s another—you know, I was thinking as we were talking about that, about the—in the beginning of our conversation I had Nick Maggiulli. Do you know Nick Maggiulli? He’s a friend of mine, he works for Ritholtz Wealth Management here and he wrote a book about the wealth ladder. And his final rung of the ladder is $100 million USD and up. And we started talking about those people and I did a deep dive on the profile of those people. And they’re all the same—the move from like rich, right? You’ve got $25 million bucks, you’re doing okay.

But there seems to be this final rung of the ladder and when you get up there, it’s completely different. Delusion enters, the burn-the-ships mentality enters.

Johnathan Bi: Height actually changes. I believe if you look at CEOs…

Jim O’Shaughnessy:Yeah, they’re six feet all…

Johnathan Bi: But if you look at billionaires, they go down.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. But also the Big Five profile is different and it’s quite unique. But when you apply, it’s really fascinating. And so I think that there are a lot of, even from the most esoteric stuff you can get inspiration for things that you want to put into the world, right, on the action part.

Johnathan Bi: And Jim, I think, because I remember in our—when I was interviewing you you said the kind of final stage of your four acts of life is mind, body and building teams around that. I just want to say in the last few months I think we’re in a better place. I know you don’t think about it in terms of the religious question. I do. But those type of questions, I think we are in the best place in human history.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, I agree with you. I absolutely agree.

Johnathan Bi: And people think, you know, I’m kind of crazy. They’re like, you think you can know more than Augustine, than Nagarjuna, than Al-Ghazali? And I’m like, yeah. Not because I’m necessarily…

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Modest ain’t he?

Johnathan Bi: Not because, you know, we are smarter than them in raw horsepower.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: But we have all of that as our context.

Johnathan Bi: So this is the crazy thing which is this example I always give—Augustine, right? He’s known for combining Platonic tradition with Christianity. How much of Plato did he read in the Greek? There’s debates, but a popular understanding is he’s only read the Timaeus in the Greek because his Greek was not that good. But the texts were lost. Plato was lost. We have better access to the traditions, to a lot of these historical traditions than the founders of those traditions.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Absolutely right.

Johnathan Bi: That’s number one. Number two, we have access to the other traditions as well. Yeah, it’s been a narrow—you’re a big fan of Daoism. When was it translated to English? Like let’s say 100 years ago, a little over 100, 200, something like that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

Johnathan Bi: And it’s only been such a short time of human history that we don’t—like those monkeys over there and their primitive religion, right? It’s only been a short amount of time since we’ve learned to really respect the different possibilities of other religions. That’s number two. We have each independent religious tradition. We have more access, we have other traditions. And number three, I think technology is going to play a huge part here.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Could not agree more.

Johnathan Bi: One example of it is near-death experiences. Why were we able to get so much more accounts of near-death experiences? Because we got better and better at saving people from the brink of death. Psychedelics. Another crazy technology, right? That these chemical substances—I know there was obviously like ayahuasca and—but now we’re able to manufacture chemical substances that are able to mess up your radio in a way that you know, before you had to get molested or traumatized or had get your arm cut off, right? Like if you want to—if you don’t really mess up your radio. This is why the ascetics beat themselves, starve themselves. Yeah. And I think because of all of this we are at, maybe culturally we’re so stagnant, people are doom scrolling and that’s the big issue.

But for someone who’s really passionate, I think we can answer this question. We can go further than anyone in human history has ever gone.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I actually agree. I think I am somewhat bewildered by what I look at as kind of Luddite view about AI and things. I honestly think it is like Jobs said, computers were bicycles for the mind. This is a rocket ship for the mind and the ability—I’m a huge believer in what I call the centaur model, man or human plus machine. And it sounds like you’re agreeing—the ability of the unique way that we might actually process reality such that it is. The machine’s probably not going to be able to do that, but we’re going to be able to use that tool.

Johnathan Bi: Unless you’re a materialist, right? The materialist kind of—and Silicon Valley is materialist. That’s why they think they can replicate that. I’m much more suspicious of that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: As am I.

Johnathan Bi: I think we have a special connection to the muses that they may not.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I totally agree. You know, from my point of view is like, it seems to me my ability to test this is what’s the result, right? Like, yeah.

Johnathan Bi: Show me the goods.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly, show me the goods.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so I definitely think, and to your point about—we’re so much better at saving people’s lives. Things that killed people routinely no longer do. And so—and we have the ability to really—you can actually use the scientific method on these. You’ve read Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying? Oh, man. I’m going to give you a—I have to give you a new list.

Johnathan Bi: I read a few books very carefully over and over again.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, good for you.

Johnathan Bi: Thankfully for your publishing business, most people aren’t like me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think you would gain some insight if you read—she was the pioneer of a lot of the research into near-death experiences. Another factoid about that’s really interesting, that also includes psychedelics is atheists who are dying. They have found that a single psilocybin intervention works for the majority and.

Johnathan Bi: For what stops the dying?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Fear of death.

Johnathan Bi: Right. Yeah. Because you’re dissolving your ego.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You’re dissolving your ego. And I’ve read a lot of—I work with a couple of institutes that are trying to bring some sanity around the use of psychedelics. Johns Hopkins has done a tremendous amount of research, as have other universities. And they’re finding—it’s a great example. Another reason to read Robert Anton Wilson, you know, all of this research into psychedelics. And Michael has this in his book, Michael Pollan. The Germans did a tremendous amount of real scientific research on psychedelics. And we burned it all because Nazis, right? So it was lost on the people who were burning all of this that virtually every one of those German researchers was a Jew. And so burning it because of the scourge of Nazism. Probably a mistake, but imagine had we not done that, right?

And that makes me think about what you alluded to earlier. All of the things that we can—we’re making a movie about the scrolls found at Pompeii.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. Alex Petkas.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And they were all, you know, turned to ash, but you can still read them if you put them in a particle accelerator and use AI. Anyway, just think of how much was lost, right? The burning of the Library at Alexandria.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And now we’re finding ways, like we’re doing with this documentary we’re making. Who knows what’s in those scrolls? But so I definitely believe that with these new tools, et cetera, we’re going to be able to unlock a lot of stuff that has been in plain sight, right?

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And again, but I think people are underestimating just how much just translation itself, right, is—you don’t need to learn like 50 languages to read the Daodejing and the Bible and the Quran. And that is quite, it’s quite new. Especially the East-West kind of thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally.

Johnathan Bi: Like to take Hinduism or Buddhism seriously. These were kind of people that I studied with that really put them in a way that made them respect. Yeah. And yeah, I definitely think we’re at a place where we can tread new ground here.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, Johnathan. I didn’t know—I honestly didn’t know that you were on this version of the journey.

Johnathan Bi: I didn’t either. And that’s the beauty of the journey, right? Again, I started this great books project about two years ago and this chance occurrence—I interviewed Carlos Eire, threw me into a rabbit hole. But the cool thing about doing what I’m doing is I can just kind of throw everything out the door and be like, okay, I’m going to go all in this direction.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And just a practical, the inner capitalist question. Is there an audience for this?

Johnathan Bi: There’s a huge audience. We’re at 1.4 million subscribers.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Amazing.I’m really actually quite happy to hear that.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. Like probably a year and a half—a year and a half in since the launch of this great book series and this is a whole other conversation to go down. But the Chinese audience has eclipsed the rest of the world combined. And we don’t even dub things, we just subtitle stuff. So people are reading subtitles in the big Chinese sites. And so that was super surprising. I would like the growth on YouTube and long form to be a bit bigger. But Instagram has been super strong for us. The Chinese side has been super strong for us. X recently has been working.

So I think again, you know my story and I think I talked to you about this before—I was building this rocket ship fintech startup with Joe Lonsdale and it was going great and but I kind of just wasn’t feeling it. This goes back to the doing what you love kind of thing. And when I did this project initially I was ready to take a monk’s vow of poverty and not celibacy, but poverty and certainly not giving up my gluttony. And I had generous support from people such as yourself and I was just happy to go down that—make subsistence wages in New York City. I was happy to make that trade-off because I got to do what I loved.

And now it’s barely been again a year and a half since launch and I already have money-making opportunities that were better than building the startup full time. And so it really is a kind of leap of faith. And then it’ll catch you. The air will catch you in a moment.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. I think Ken Stanley makes the great point in his book, Greatness Cannot Be Planned, right? And what you do, the way I break that down is if you just completely iterate as you’re moving along, you end up somewhere that’s much better.

Johnathan Bi: And it’s so much more fun.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, much more fun.

Johnathan Bi: It’s so much more fun, right? You’re an adventurer, you’re Odysseus. Well, Odysseus has never had a lot of fun. But that’s separate.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Probably was not fun, would not be the first thought that came to mind. But it scares a lot of people because it by very definition—there’s no ladder that says no, you got to do this rung, this rung, this rung, right? And it is a much more circuitous route.

Johnathan Bi: And I know you totally agree with me on this one, which is the ladders are all collapsing. The least secure route now is the ladder route, right? Like going to consulting, going to law school. Like they’re all going away. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe 20 years ago, if your normative scheme was—I value safety and security, there could be a good case of hey, just go down this safe and secure route. But now that’s not even an option. Like that route doesn’t even get you that anymore.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. But I am taken by your idea about the nature of founders because I intentionally went all in and everyone thought I was absolutely crazy. When I started my first company, I was like 28 years old and I had no backers—having lunch or dinner rather with a conventional—he would hate to hear himself called conventional. A very bright, very successful guy. And he just could not get his head around. He’s like, wait a minute, you just started it. Goldman, you know, not one of the big firms backed you. And I went, yeah. He goes, that’s insane.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And then—but I tried to increase the pressure on myself. So not only did I do that, I also put my own name on it.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Because if you really, really want to put your soul in the game.

Johnathan Bi: I remember you told me your wife and you had the conversation and you were like, J.P. Morgan.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right. If you, and historically, if you look, all the financial companies were named after the founders.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Because that sends the signal, hey.

Johnathan Bi: I’m sinking with the ship, I’m going down.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I’m going down. And a lot of that rethought through my conversation with you is in fact quite delusional.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, it is, it is. I would say that you and I, maybe this shows my lack of self-awareness. I think we have a degree of introspection that is absent in the really successful people. Like the really world-historic, like the Caesars of the world or the Elons of the world. I think they fear it even. But to that point I had a similar relationship not with the Goldman in the financial world, but with the academy. Because as a self-conception, as a philosopher, which again I can take as a diminutive, you want to be recognized by the people in the academy. And so just in the same way I was ready to take a vow of poverty, I was ready to just be this weird effing kid who does a little podcast and be this not serious intellectual.

And again, the crazy thing is I’ve built stronger relationships with the professors I so admired than if I went into grad school. Because now I have a platform that is very unique in the world. Yeah. You know, I read their books very carefully before I interview them. So again, it’s just this, by the way, this is not an advice I kind of give—I would give to everyone indiscriminately, but for people who are very competent, I think always the best thing to do is to do what is fun. Now if you’re mediocre, I think, you know, maybe the standard route is actually better.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, but yeah, I mean, honestly, aren’t we all the stars of the stories we tell ourselves and who’s—talk about introspection if you—the level of introspection it would take to understand. Yeah, I’m totally mid.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So it’s like my friend Adam Robinson wrote a book called How Not to Be Stupid. And I said, you have a massive marketing problem, Adam, because your target market doesn’t know they’re stupid.

Johnathan Bi: Not be—how to not be stupid for dummies.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, I’m delighted with your success. This is a really—I will watch with great interest you going down the mystic path and this path you’re going down. And you know, you get to incept yet again, Johnathan. So maybe when we get you up to 10 episodes, you will be the most—you will have incepted the most people. You know the rule. We make you the emperor of the world. You get to speak into a magical microphone and incept the entire population of the world. You got two things you can say. They’re going to all think it was their own idea when they wake up whenever their tomorrow is. What two things are you going to say into the magic mic to incept the world’s population?

Johnathan Bi: My first answer was pumping a shitcoin that I would invest in before. My second answer was to tell—it was to remind everyone that the Greeks valued the small phallus over the large phallus because it symbolizes the virtue of moderation. So I’ve really, you know, it’s a really hard thing to one-up myself here, I think. I don’t know, I think—you know what, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to put the exact same number in everyone’s head. 010198365. Something like that. And then when people all wake up, they’re all going to independently have come to this. And then they’re going to realize that the material world is not all that there is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Wow, that’s very heavy. Okay, you still got another one. You want to put another number?

Johnathan Bi: I think I’ll just reemphasize the Greeks and the phallus thing. I think they were very wise.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That was very funny, Johnathan. Always a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you so much for coming.

Johnathan Bi: Thanks, Jim.

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Sunday, 22 March

Two thoughts from William Wordsworth

“Strongest minds

Are often those of whom the noisy world

Hears least.”

“Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.”

Monday, 23 March

Two thoughts from Ezra Pound

“Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.”

“I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”

Tuesday, 24 March

Two thoughts from Julian Jaynes

“Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.”

“Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.”

Wednesday, 25 March

Two thoughts from Cheryl Strayed

“You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding”

“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.”

Thursday, 26 March

Two thoughts from Stephen Elliott

“What we remember, and how we order and interpret what we believe to be true, are what shapes who we are.”

“If you never forgive you’ll always be alone.”

Friday, 27 March

Two thoughts from Mick Jagger

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

“Polarization affects families and groups of friends. Its a paralyzing situation. A civil war of opinion.”

Saturday, 28 March

Two thoughts from Émile Coué

“The power of thought, of idea, is incommensurable, is immeasurable. The world is dominated by thought.”

“From our birth to our death we are all the slaves of suggestion.”

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

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— Jim

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Highlights

The Three Most Robust Patterns of Successful People

Polina Pompliano: The first one that I think is the meatiest is looking at or finding creativity and being creative by walking into the world or through your world. You don’t sit down and wait for inspiration or creativity to come. I think the most creative people walk through their lives every day, and they see things that they can apply to their own professions, whatever they may be, whether it’s finance or cooking or fitness. So in the book, I talk about Grant Achatz, and we mentioned it in the last, because I’m just fascinated by him. You’ve been to Alinea, his restaurant, but the whole idea is he moves through the world looking for ideas for his restaurant in the most unexpected places. He calls it seeing the world through a kaleidoscope of food. So he’ll see a woman wearing red earrings and be like, oh, I can incorporate those in this dish, or something like that. Or Rage Against the Machine. He listens to a song and he’s like, there’s peaks, there’s valleys. I want the, when people come into my restaurant, the dining experience to mirror a story. There will be peaks, there will be valleys. Things like that. So that is one.

The other one that I think was a section in the book that was very, not underrated, maybe overlooked by a lot of people, which I think is the most important section, is the one on rationality and how being an emotionally sober person is probably the best thing that you can be. Because I talked about this woman, Julia Galef, from the Center for Applied Rationality, and she talks a lot about beliefs and divorcing yourself from your beliefs, about how some of the most successful people in this world are able to attack ideas instead of attacking people. So if we’re all in a room together, having a meeting like they do at Pixar, and Ed Catmull talks about this. But the point is that there’s a lot of people, and somebody comes up, throws out a crazy idea, and everyone’s like, well, that seems dumb. But they don’t say, that seems dumb. They attack the idea, they criticize it. They do all these things, but they do entertain the idea. And I think that entertaining the idea first, then critiquing it, then debating it, you come up with something that’s so much better than somebody throwing out an idea, you being like, wow, that’s fantastic. Let’s do that without any sort of scientific process in there.

So that is the second one, and then the third one. I would say this is across so many people that I talk to that have achieved the highest levels of success, objective success, whatever success you want to measure, are the people who are willing to bet on themselves and reinvent themselves in some way. I find myself really attracted to people who have achieved something, lost a lot, learned from that loss, achieved again, and then come out on the other side with lessons to share. But along that reinvention process, they had to bet on themselves again. And I think betting on yourself is easy to say, but hard to do, especially when you’ve seen failure.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Polina, it is so great to actually do this in person.

Polina Pompliano

In person.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Last time we were between screens and a lot has happened since you last were on the show. Welcome.

Polina Pompliano

Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What I’d love to do today is talk about the period between when we last chatted and now. Obviously you wrote a book, which I want to spend a lot of time on because I think that I loved it, as you know. And I think that the way you break down all of these super high achievers by mental model is really instructive and people could actually learn a lot. So why don’t you fill me in on why you decided to actually write the book and we’ll go from there.

Polina Pompliano

Perfect. Well, the last time we recorded a podcast together, it was, I think, early 2021. So at the time I had zero children and zero books. Now I have one book and four kids. So a lot has changed. I need to turn my brain on for this conversation after all the child stuff. But yeah, so it’s been good, the book. I was surprised at how fulfilling it was to write a book. I always thought of myself as writing short articles, things like that. Never saw myself doing something so big. But the way I broke it down is just by, I was like, okay, I’m good at writing article length pieces, so I’ll have three articles that make up one section of one chapter. And I just did it piecemeal like that and it’s been awesome. There’s a paperback launch this summer, so…

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Congratulations.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah, thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So how much of the writing that you did for the profile, did you have sort of a satori? And you know what, these guys all seem different, but I can group them by the underlying way they look at the world.

Polina Pompliano

Yes. Okay. So one interesting thing about how I write is that I am not an outline person. I don’t sit down, I’m like, here’s my plan. I don’t know when I start where I want to end. And oftentimes I write in pieces. It’s kind of like imagine a jigsaw puzzle with pieces of information. And then I’m like, I want this piece here and this person’s mental model here. But then this other person is a completely different person, but they use a similar mental model, so they belong in the same section. Even though I think to the reader it’s like, what the hell is David Goggins doing in a chapter with a chef? It’s completely different people, but similar ideas and similar mental models. So I just had a Google Doc. I had themes. And then I would be feeding the baby in the middle of the night. And I would think, huh, what if this person actually makes sense with this person? And I would kind of put the puzzle together in my head. So then when I had 20 minutes to sit down and write, I wasn’t starting from scratch or with a blank page. I was like, I already know these people belong here. Now I just have to make it make sense.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Did you explicitly ask them about mental models or did you infer that?

Polina Pompliano

No, some of them I interviewed. Some of them I just researched and studied. I definitely inferred the mental model or the view of the world that they had. But after you read enough, research enough, watch enough interviews, you kind of get a sense of how they see the world.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so let’s dive into, in your opinion, obviously, what seems to be the most robust of the various mental models, because you cover 10. And I have an opinion on it. But I want to hear your opinion. The most robust, by that, I mean the broadly applicable to different aspects of life. I know a lot of people who are really good at one thing.

Polina Pompliano

Yep.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And they kind of suck at other things. And so they’ve got a great mental model for that one thing. But I’m looking for the ones that you would find most ubiquitous. You can carry it over here, carry it over here.

Polina Pompliano

There’s three that come to mind. The first one that I think is the meatiest is looking at or finding creativity and being creative by walking into the world or through your world. You don’t sit down and wait for inspiration or creativity to come. I think the most creative people walk through their lives every day, and they see things that they can apply to their own professions, whatever they may be, whether it’s finance or cooking or fitness. So in the book, I talk about Grant Achatz, and we mentioned it in the last, because I’m just fascinated by him. You’ve been to Alinea, his restaurant, but the whole idea is he moves through the world looking for ideas for his restaurant in the most unexpected places. He calls it seeing the world through a kaleidoscope of food. So he’ll see a woman wearing red earrings and be like, oh, I can incorporate those in this dish, or something like that. Or Rage Against the Machine. He listens to a song and he’s like, there’s peaks, there’s valleys. I want the, when people come into my restaurant, the dining experience to mirror a story. There will be peaks, there will be valleys. Things like that. So that is one. The other one that I think was a section in the book that was very, not underrated, maybe overlooked by a lot of people, which I think is the most important section, is the one on rationality and how being an emotionally sober person is probably the best thing that you can be. Because I talked about this woman, Julia Galef, from the Center for Applied Rationality, and she talks a lot about beliefs and divorcing yourself from your beliefs, about how some of the most successful people in this world are able to attack ideas instead of attacking people. So if we’re all in a room together, having a meeting like they do at Pixar, and Ed Catmull talks about this. But the point is that there’s a lot of people, and somebody comes up, throws out a crazy idea, and everyone’s like, well, that seems dumb. But they don’t say, that seems dumb. They attack the idea, they criticize it. They do all these things, but they do entertain the idea. And I think that entertaining the idea first, then critiquing it, then debating it, you come up with something that’s so much better than somebody throwing out an idea, you being like, wow, that’s fantastic. Let’s do that without any sort of scientific process in there. So that is the second one, and then the third one. I would say this is across so many people that I talk to that have achieved the highest levels of success, objective success, whatever success you want to measure, are the people who are willing to bet on themselves and reinvent themselves in some way. I find myself really attracted to people who have achieved something, lost a lot, learned from that loss, achieved again, and then come out on the other side with lessons to share. But along that reinvention process, they had to bet on themselves again. And I think betting on yourself is easy to say, but hard to do, especially when you’ve seen failure.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And what’s funny is you saw me nodding along. Those are the ones that I found the most useful as well. It’s really funny. I think the one about rationality is super important because I think that we are basically emotional creatures. Many of our decisions are driven emotionally first, and then we paper them over with rationality after they’ve been made. And when I was still in asset management, they used to tease me that I was Spock. You know, you have zero emotions. And it’s like, no, I have lots of emotions, but I have to be able to set them aside.

Polina Pompliano

And how do you do that practically?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, for me, it was just to understand that I was my own worst enemy. And I understood that by making a series of emotional decisions, investments, and the underlying logic was right and proved to be right. But I crapped out because I got emotional because of all the reasons emotion can lead you astray. And Proust has this great quote which I’m going to mangle. It is forever thus, feelings that are going to be very temporary nevertheless lead us to irrevocable choices.

Polina Pompliano

That’s so good.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so I just thought about it a lot and I’m like, I have to be able to create a system where I can neutralize that. Now, creativity is linked to emotion, but also rationality. So the best of both worlds, in my opinion, is kind of like the, I’m sure this is apocryphal, but apparently Alexander the Great, when he and his generals had made a decision, they would get rip roaring drunk at night.

Polina Pompliano

Makes sense. I’m from that part of the world.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And if they woke up in the morning and still believed the decision was right, they executed against it. But if they woke up in the morning and they’re like, we probably should rethink this.

Polina Pompliano

Oh, my gosh.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So it was like this perfect Dionysus and Apollo being joined together. And so I’m a big believer in that. What were some of the examples where, because I’m interested. I’m sure there’s a lot of ways you can unite the two, but I definitely think that I love the idea of don’t attack the person, attack the idea or support the idea.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah. A really good example, actually, of marrying creativity and logic, I include in the creativity chapter where Grant Achatz, to continue the story. He’s the best chef in the world, the most innovative chef in the world. He has these amazing things, and then he gets stage four tongue cancer. And everyone’s like, oh, my God. How is a chef supposed to continue being creative when he can’t taste? And then he applied logic. He was like, actually, taste doesn’t only come from your taste buds. The majority comes from vision and smell and texture. So he started playing with those things and would make strawberries. He would make tomatoes that look like strawberries but taste like tomatoes, and strawberries that look like a tomato but taste like strawberry. But what he did was he applied a lot of logic, actually. He would create this map of how he wanted the dining experience to go. He would draw it on a board, he would talk to all his team members, and he would say, basically, I can’t taste. How do we make this the most flavorful menu that we’ve ever had? And he would make his team blow up the menu every six months and just start from scratch. And they’re like, but, Grant, this is the best menu we’ve ever had. Why would you do this? And he’s like, because complacency will kill creativity. So we need to start over. Start over. That forces you to think, it’s not just based on emotion. And you’re married to the idea that this is the best we’ve ever done. We’re never going to replicate this. It forces you to continue to push yourself intellectually.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And that ties in, of course, to the folks at Pixar. Right. Ed was basically famous for, he didn’t want to make a movie if it didn’t have a chance to fail.

Polina Pompliano

Yes, yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Talk a bit about that. I remember, I read his book. Obviously, I read your book. I read a lot about him because he really fascinated me. I loved that idea. What are we doing if there’s no chance? I don’t want to make duplicate another. I don’t want to make sequels. I don’t want to make prequels. And, of course, how many Toy Stories are there?

Polina Pompliano

But he’s very counterintuitive. What I found interesting is he says all the advice that you’ve been given about, nail your pitch. If you can’t tell the elevator pitch. If you can’t. The whole idea of the elevator pitch came from, if you’re in an elevator with someone and you have 30 seconds to tell them what you’re working on, you gotta be able to do it in those 30 seconds. And he’s like, that’s kind of bullshit. It is totally bullshit. If you can explain your idea in 30 seconds or less, it’s not all that original. And he talks about how, think about Ratatouille. It’s a rat that can cook. That could be disgusting. But we came up with these really interesting, nuanced ways to make it interesting. Or Toy Story, it has these toys that can talk. He’s like, there’s a chance for it to become super commercial and kind of materialistic. So he’s like, how do we not make it that? And he says that when they go into the idea generation process, he’s like, we go through it and every iteration, I still think it’s shit. It’s still really, really bad. The thing that we put out is still not perfect, but it’s the least bad version that we could get to. So that’s kind of what I find fascinating with him is he’s very methodical and he likes the challenge of these two completely different things don’t belong together. But I’m going to make them belong.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I love Pixar movies and I have six grandchildren. So I get to watch them again because I watched them with my kids when they were children. And I’m thinking of that scene. I can still remember the opening of Up.

Polina Pompliano

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Where, how do you make, how are we going to introduce a movie that is finally about happiness and connection and human bonding? Let’s tell the darkest story.

Polina Pompliano

It’s so true. And I think that the opening scene to anything, now I’m writing a lot of original profiles on people and I think about that opening scene, where do you want to drop the reader, drop the viewer in that encompasses or kind of defines this person’s life in this moment?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And let’s talk about that. How has your process changed from when you were just doing the profile and then the Profile Dossier?

Polina Pompliano

You’ve known me for so long.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I have.

Polina Pompliano

You’re asking all the right questions. Okay, so long story. I was at Fortune. I was a business reporter writing about venture capital and startups and doing a newsletter there called Term Sheet, which was the daily deal making newsletter that all the big important people in Silicon Valley and Wall Street read. I was doing that every single day. Monday to Friday I would wake up and go to the office around 5am. I would publish it at 9am. It was a beast of a newsletter. It took me four hours, three hours to put together. Then because that wasn’t enough, I started the Profile in 2017, in February, once a week on Sundays just to publish. I really just enjoy long form profiles of people. I don’t know why I cannot tell you. I just like people’s stories. So I would publish that once a week for free to family and friends. But then it kind of started, word of mouth snowballing into this bigger thing. Quit my job at Fortune in 2020 in March. And as far as I know, I’m the first legacy media, traditional media reporter to go full time on Substack. I didn’t have anybody else to ask for advice. I just went in and since then, obviously Substack has grown tremendously. I started being like, oh, how can I make money on this thing? But it became a business out of a passion. The business part didn’t come first. It was the passion first. And then after I left my job, I started curating profiles. That’s what the Profile has always been. Here are the six long form profiles I read this week that were interesting to me. Across tech, across business, entertainment, sports. And I would send it to people. I listened to myself in old interviews when I first left my job to do this. And people were like, so what’s your goal with the Profile? And I was like, well, the goal is kind of like a Netflix model. First you curate and then you write original profiles. But I never did that. I got distracted with the book. Then I did Q&As. I was always kind of dancing around this thing that I always wanted to do but never did. And then at first I wasn’t doing it because it would be a conflict with Fortune. I couldn’t publish original writing if I was working at Fortune. But once I left, why didn’t I? I just kept doing the same old thing. And then this was at the end of 2024. I was having dinner with my husband Anthony, and I was like, I don’t know, the Profile just kind of feels like I’ve hit a rut. I’m doing the same thing every week. I have not missed a week since February 2017, which is amazing. That’s crazy, right? What am I doing with my. Anyway, I promise I have other things going on. But then he was like, you feel like that? Why don’t you just write your own profiles? And I was like, what are you talking about? It seems so revolutionary, but so obvious. It’s something called the Profile. Why am I not doing the thing that I’m the best at for myself and also the thing that I love doing the most? And I think part of what you said before we started recording, we are the most unreliable narrators of our own lives. I was telling myself this story about, well, they won’t give me access. I won’t be able to interview people, blah, blah. And I just never did it or I don’t have enough time, whatever the story is. So then January 2025, I was like, I’m starting. So my first profile was on Anthony Scaramucci. Then I did one on Ryan Serhant, the real estate mogul. Then I did one on Saquon Barkley, the NFL star who’s investing. Then Kathy Wylde, who runs the Partnership for New York City. And now I’m working on one that will hopefully publish in April.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And what, take me through the differences. Were you nervous when you were like, oh, I’ve got to actually do it?

Polina Pompliano

So, yes and no. I obviously wanted to do a good job because I knew that people I used to work with would read it. Other people in media, other people who are people who subscribe to the Profile. Finally, she’s writing these things. I wanted it to be excellent. So I had two editors, these two women that I used to work with at Fortune who are amazing, edited it. It went through so many things, but it was really cool because for the first one, I was like, who can I do? The people I love profiling, and it’s a common thread along my work, is people who are out there in the public, and people have an idea of who they think they are, but it’s actually a misperception of that person. I like being like, actually, you don’t know them as well as you think you do. The perfect person was Anthony Scaramucci. I was like, you think you know him? Let me show you another side. So many contradictions, so many paradoxical things. At one point, I remember being in his office, and I’m like, all right, so you just, you want to win. You want to be vindicated, right? He’s somebody who’s gone up, down to the side, all around. And I was like, you just want to be vindicated? And he’s like, no, I don’t care about getting vindicated. I literally, Jim, turn my head. There’s a figurine on his shelf of him wearing a cape, like a superhero cape. And on the base is inscribed, “We won. Fuck off.” I’m like, okay. So it’s like, I love noticing little things like that, and I think that’s what makes somebody human. My goal is to humanize these people, not to flatter them or write a hit piece of some sort. I just want to humanize them because they’re often caricatures in the press.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And as I was listening, I wonder how much does just everyone curate their personality that they show to other people so much?

Polina Pompliano

Ryan Serhant is a great example. He is someone who is so likable. He’s so charismatic. He started his career off in real estate on a Bravo show, selling real estate and real estate porn.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, we used to watch that.

Polina Pompliano

All of it. And then he got a Netflix deal, and it just opened him up to a wider audience. But every single part of his day is content. He’s always on camera. He’s on his phone all the time, on TV. I shadowed him. We went to the Today show. And I knew going in, my goal with Ryan is I need to see that mask drop. I need to see who he actually is. So I kept asking him questions about before he was famous, before the shows, before the real estate, all this stuff. And what I found was something completely different from what I expected because he has this golden retriever, puppy dog energy. But what I found is he’s driven by revenge, which is something totally different. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s calculated. And that I wasn’t expecting until I got to spend time with him in person. And he told me about. He’s like, yeah, the thing that fuels me is revenge. And I was like, whoa. But you don’t get that. I think the thing that media is missing today that it used to have, which is why I was so drawn to journalism when I started in high school, is because media companies used to have budgets, and they would use those budgets to pay reporters to send them to places to shadow people. And then it was like, oh, you can just do a phone interview. And then it was like, oh, now you can do an email interview. Now it’s like, oh, Zoom. It’s just not the same. And when you strip that level of humanity and interacting, I always think about it as, we are not who we say we are. We are how we move through the world. And if you spend a day with me and I tell you, before we go anywhere, I’m the most generous person on the planet, and then you see, I don’t know, I don’t leave a tip or whatever, you’re like. But because it’s what we do that colors who we are, not the other way around.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Jung has a great line, which is, you are not what you say you will do. You are what you do. And I append that with the idea, if somebody shows you who they are, believe them.

Polina Pompliano

Oh, yeah. And people accidentally get slips. With Ryan, I was really scared that I would just get the completely, the mask version the entire time. But there were small moments where I would notice how tired he was. There were certain times where he told stories that I’m like, why are you telling me this story right now? What are you thinking about that caused you to tell me this story? For example, I asked him if there’s a personal cost to his success, and he was like, yes. Hesitated, but he said yes. And then he told me a story about a man, a client that he worked with, who had five kids. He was like, oh, my God, you have five kids. How? With this high pressure, stressful job that you have. How? And he was like, you know, it was really hard. It was really difficult. But I would still do it every day. I would still have the five kids. I do not regret that a single time. And it showed me a small window in that Ryan has one kid. And then he was thinking about more, but he’s like, I can’t do it right now because I’m so busy. And it’s kind of a, it shows you what he’s thinking about and lets you into his internal world a little bit more.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. I’m fascinated by that type of personality because sometimes when I meet people like that, I kind of hear in my mind, this is the kind of guy where authenticity is a deliverable.

Polina Pompliano

Exactly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

In other words, it’s like, I’m writing a fiction book right now, and it has this grand scope. It starts during World War II and ends in 2027. And one of the things that I find really interesting is a lot of historical and current politicians. They’re manufactured. And when I was researching Hitler, I was amazed. He’s not in the book. Göring is, but he’s not. I found all this research that absolutely fascinated me. Do you know that he spent hours and hours a day with the filmmaker? I can’t remember her name right now, but she made the famous propaganda movies for him. But he literally spent hours practicing different hand gestures, practicing different ways of looking, of moderating his voice. And I just, the scales came off my eyes, and I started looking at some of our politicians, and I’m like, all of them. Authenticity is a deliverable.

Polina Pompliano

Yes, I know. I know. It’s really scary and terrifying. It’s like, how. But I do think if you spend some time with somebody when, even when they’re on camera to see if there’s a moment where that performance art goes away. It’s so much more telling. And it’s also almost the moment where it’s what they don’t say. It’s like, huh? Why are you avoiding talking about that part of your life? With Scaramucci, I found it interesting that he just avoided talking about his dad. And it was always forward looking, where are we going next? And I was like, okay, just take me back a little bit and talk about your childhood. And he was like. He said that he tried meditating one day and it ruined his whole vacation. Because I’m just like. He’s like, I’ve compartmentalized those things for a reason. I don’t want them flooding back. Things like that. And he doesn’t like. That’s the only time I’ve seen him be like, let’s not talk about that. Usually he’s like, oh, you can ask me about anything. But that was a part in his life he was just very uncomfortable.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

A lot of people. And again, in trying to write fiction, which by the way is really hard, you do spend a lot of time in people’s childhoods because you definitely see a lot of commonality. And that I find very interesting. For example, Göring, who was over the top. I had to literally tone down the historical Göring because I thought people will never believe this in fiction, but a lot of them had really bad relationships with their father. Göring, for example, was taken in and his anti-Semitism was driven partially by the fact that their family fell on hard times. And a Jewish guy who was fond of the family literally took them into his castle, right? And put Göring in this beautiful. Göring the man as a child in this beautiful room. But he also was in love with Göring’s mother. And so he put the father in a tiny little room at the base of the. So the cuckold husband. And you just, when you’re reading this stuff, it’s like, how does that not shape the man, right? Or a woman. You have a great, kind of origin story in that, you moved here. How old were you?

Polina Pompliano

Eight.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

From Bulgaria. And you didn’t speak any English. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah, no, it’s. So we were living in Bulgaria. My dad, his dream was America. He was like, that is just a dream in a way that it’s never going to happen. He lived through communism, a lot of that side of the family was jailed, killed, sent to concentration camps just for saying that they didn’t agree or saying something against the regime. So he was just like, he was part of the anti-communism protests and all that stuff. But he was like, it’s not going anywhere. They’re selling us democracy. This isn’t true democracy. And he just, his dream was to come to the US. So he was applying to green card lotteries. The US had one, Canada had one and Australia had one. And he was like, I mean, those two, the other two countries are fine, but I really want to get to the US. And so he would file every year. I think it was once a year. And the chances of getting this thing are very. I one time broke it down, it was like 0.1%. Then of that, of you winning that, then actually getting here because you have to go to the embassy, interview, background checks, all this stuff. So very slim chances. But I think it was my mom’s application actually that won. Then went in. I remember a very freezing day in Bulgaria. He stood with this folder outside in line to go into the embassy to interview. And they basically wanted to check, when you go there, do you know people who will help you find a job so you won’t be homeless in America and all this stuff? And I think my mom’s grandfather’s cousin knew somebody in Atlanta, so that’s how we ended up there. And yeah, so we moved when I was 8 in the year 2000. And then I grew up in Atlanta, went to the University of Georgia. And it was interesting, Jim, is that even as a kid, I always loved writing. In Bulgaria, I loved writing. In first grade, my poem won this thing that I wrote literally in 15 minutes. And I was like, maybe there’s something to it. I really like words and language and things like that. And then when we moved to the US, because both my parents were chemical engineers, I thought I would be some sort of scientist or something. So in high school I was in the science program, but then didn’t love that. Didn’t really. Didn’t work out. But I loved writing the research papers and the lab reports. So I joined the newspaper club in 10th grade. And then from there I just went all in. I majored in journalism at the University of Georgia. I became the editor of the college paper. Then I interned at CNN, USA Today, Atlanta Parent magazine, anything I could get my hands on. And then in 2014, I moved to New York.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, and I love your story because I think it’s a story that is not just unique to you in that immigrants to this country, especially from former communist countries, man, are they powerhouses.

Polina Pompliano

Oh, my God, yes. And the freedom of speech thing and the.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s such a shame that our immigration system is so fucked up because, even though we’ve got a lot wrong in this country, it’s still the country where the smartest, most creative people in the world want to go, want to come and live. And it blows my mind that we are not setting up concierge services to bring those people over here.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah. What was really hard and the beauty of it is it’s completely random. A lot of times the ones that are set up for merit are hijacked.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Genius visas and.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah. But they’re hijacked by corrupt government officials who are like, my son is a genius. And they go. It’s not the people like my dad who are actually really intelligent, but didn’t have a chance and didn’t have the connections.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

How much did that. You were only eight and you really had no personal memory of communism.

Polina Pompliano

No. Yeah. Because it fell before. Yeah, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But did your parents’ attitudes really influence the way you looked at it?

Polina Pompliano

Oh, yeah. Very much. Very much. And because, for example, I heard stories about my grandfather. His house was on the border of Bulgaria and Serbia. And so he would get Voice of America.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, yeah, Voice of America.

Polina Pompliano

And he would listen to that. And then that wasn’t allowed. And it was very. If they caught you, it was a very big deal. But. Or when my dad was in seventh grade, he wrote on his backpack, USA, and he got expelled, essentially. So it’s like things like that. I’m like, I can’t even imagine growing up here and going to school here and hearing how the students talk back to the teacher and the questions that they ask. I’m like, oh, my God. This. I mean, even during my time in Bulgaria, you would never. But it was just like a level of freedom. I talked to. Oh, I talked to this amazing guy from the Human Rights Foundation. I met him. His name is Evan Mawarire. But he grew up in Zimbabwe and he challenged the government. There was a dictatorship. And he told me one thing I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Freedom is when you go out to have a coffee with a friend and you criticize the government and then you forget about it.” He’s like, in Zimbabwe, if you do that, you’re never going to see that. You’re never going to see that friend again. You’re gone. You do not forget about it. So I’m like, it’s like that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What do you think about. As you mentioned, you were one of the first people on Substack. The traditional legacy media was very dismissive of all things Substack and yet they seem to be crumbling. And do you think that traditional legacy media style, do you think the playbook has just been played out and that we’re going to see new media take over?

Polina Pompliano

I think the top will survive as they always do. But I think independent writers expose this illusion that we all wanted to believe that there is no bias, that we’re all objective. I genuinely, Jim, I went into journalism thinking that objectivity is king. My major in college was newspapers. I really believed that if you deliver the facts objectively to the reader, they can make up their own mind. You don’t need to, they don’t know who I am. I don’t need to insert my view with choice words that will sway them a certain way, direction. But then over time, as I was in this world, I saw what was getting clicks. I saw that every time you included Trump in the headline, your story would skyrocket. I saw it all and I was like, it’s a game. And unfortunately, the long form pieces kind of went away for this short attention thing. Then there was a period, I don’t know if you remember, where one publication would do an original article and then it was everywhere for a day because everybody else would syndicate it, but they would just rewrite the article without talking to any of the sources, without verifying the information. It was crazy town. But anyway, so I think at first the first people to join Substack in a meaningful way were mostly original thinkers who were willing to bet on themselves, who were like, I already have a following who will follow me here. They trust me, they know my biases. And so, yeah, so I think it’s crazy to think that you’re reading something or watching cable news and think that is not some sort of propaganda in whatever direction you’re looking at. I prefer either to get somewhat objective reporting or to know your biases before I go into it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, in 2010, I just stopped watching all TV.

Polina Pompliano

It was so bad.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It was so bad because it’s so funny and the way I would, people back in 2010 people were like, well, how do you stay informed? I’m like, well, I can read.

Polina Pompliano

I can still read.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. But the funny thing was I had no problem convincing my very liberal friends that Fox was biased. But they would not have it if I said, by the way, so is NPR and so is CNN. But the same thing happened. The conservative friends could instantly see that NPR, more left based media was. But Fox, no, they tell it like it is. And I would just sit there and I’m like, wow. I mean it’s so. Wow.

Polina Pompliano

We’re all in cults. I’m fascinated by cults. And we’re all in ideological cults. I think Tim Urban once said, he was like, yeah, he was like, if you want to test whether or not you’re in an echo chamber, go to your closest friends and just throw out, say this politician that’s on the opposite side has kind of been making some good points lately and see what happens.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, well, and I view ideological capture as brain death because we label things so that we don’t have to think about them and we make the argument against the person, not the idea. Tim has a great book on this. One of the things that I found most helpful is with AI, I always have gotten now in the habit of steel manning a view I disagree with. And it is so helpful.

Polina Pompliano

How do you do it?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s super easy. I mean, take whatever it happens to be and. Well, I disagree vehemently with California trying to do a wealth tax on billionaires. It’s killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. But so I go to AI and I say steel man the argument for this tax. And what’s interesting is we all have biases and when you steel man the opposing argument, you start thinking, you know, they might have a point there.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah. You know what was so interesting? So I just wrote this profile on Kathy Wylde, who is, she represents the billionaires in New York City. Essentially for 43 years she’s represented the interests of the wealthiest New Yorkers. And it’s like a coalition of these people. And the whole idea is make New York better. And they work to. She is the mediator between this group and the mayor.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Our current mayor?

Polina Pompliano

So that’s what the whole story is about. Because I noticed that when I was talking to her, I was like, she was talking about Mamdani, who is a Democratic socialist, very warmly. And I was like, what? And I kept asking her, why do you like him? And she’s like, I think he has some good points, and I think he’s thinking about it the right way, and I think he’s very smart. And I was just like, okay, but. But. But this doesn’t align with who I think you are, basically. And then I learned her backstory, and she moved to New York. She was an activist in the 60s. She learned how to. So David Rockefeller set up this coalition, and she was the first person to kind of run it. But she has this amazing ability to put people in a room that disagree and mediate and have a conversation. So I thought it was. Her roots were interesting, but she didn’t. She sees capital as just a tool, and she doesn’t politicize it. It was so interesting. She’s like, we all have the same goal. How can we do this? And she was on Mamdani’s transition committee. She now stepped down. She’s retired. But fascinating. And it was interesting because to me, there was this dissonance and this discomfort that I couldn’t put her in a clean, neat box.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Well, I strongly believe that if you can infer all of my political beliefs from hearing one of them, then I’m ideologically captured. Right. And so I. Again, to Tim and his efforts to. It would just be so great if, literally, we could put people in a room who really disagree with each other. And you know what? There is a methodology that actually works, and that’s called the jury system. When you look at juries, they come. They’re randomly selected. Well, you got to be a. But they come from very different backgrounds. They come from very different points of view. They have very different priors, and yet they’re. Nick Gruen, I believe I had on my podcast. He’s an Australian who thinks that we could use jury systems for everything. Because literally, people, when they have a task, right, you got to figure this out, they open up. They are like, okay, yeah, you did have a point there. But we have all this vitriol and all of this just pure anger and hatred. And it just seems to me to be just. Again, we’re back to emotions, right? Wasted emotional energy. And everything becomes a horizontal fight, as opposed to, you know, maybe you should be looking up and who’s really running the world.

Polina Pompliano

Exactly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But no, no. Everything is a horizontal fight, and it’s us versus them. And, you know, it just fits right into our tribalism.

Polina Pompliano

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you’d think it’s 2026.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Can’t we get beyond this?

Polina Pompliano

Well, I think, though, yes, but I think so. Oh, man. So many thoughts on this. I think that the reason that I’m a. I really love profiles and people is because stories trigger emotion and emotion triggers your memory. So when I was in school, I could never remember any dates, any facts, any names, but the second, so I had to myself be like, all right, Marie Antoinette. And then I would have to be like, I wonder what life was like for her. She was a teenager. She was this, portrayed as this queen of excess and all this stuff, and they hated her. They wanted to kill her. Imagine how she felt. She, her son had to testify. This whole thing. And I suddenly felt like an emotional connection with her, which then when I was taking the test, I could remember. Otherwise, just cold, plain facts. I can’t remember. But I think the reason juries work so well is you’re put in a room with people maybe you don’t normally interact with, and then you hear their stories and then you can empathize and then you feel an emotional connection and then you can solve a problem together. Whereas right now, people are so divided because many of us don’t know, certain have never even met certain people with certain life paths. So it’s hard for us to empathize with those people. But if they were our friends, it’d be different.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. I mean, if I have one overriding social or political viewpoint is I am fiercely anti-authoritarian of either side.

Polina Pompliano

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right. I have no more interest in a left wing or right wing authoritarian.

Polina Pompliano

Whatever it may be.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Just bad for society.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so I definitely have that. What’s weird for me, though, is when some people will say, wow, you’re really conservative. And I’m like, conservative? And they’re like, well, yeah, I mean, the whole free speech and the fact that rule of law. That’s a conservative.

Polina Pompliano

Isn’t that crazy?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s crazy.

Polina Pompliano

The.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The people who fought for and got free speech were the most radical people on the planet.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because most of human history. Free speech. Are you kidding me? Crazy. And I think it built this country.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And the rule of law. And sometimes I’ll be like, how did that become, I don’t know, conservative?

Polina Pompliano

I don’t know. But I’m very. I guess I’m far right. If you think freedom of speech is bad, that’s crazy. A quick story. When I was in college, I was editor in chief of the paper my senior year. And it’s called the Red and Black. And it’s a very nationally acclaimed paper.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I knew of it.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah. And I started the second I set foot on the campus at Georgia, I was like, I want to work for this newspaper. So day one, I go, I apply. I start out as staff reporter. Then it was covering the administration reporter. Then I was assistant news editor. Then I was managing editor. Then I was a page designer at one point. And then finally, Jim, finally I’m editor in chief. And I had interned at USA Today that summer. And I come back, and in the 70s, the students at Georgia had fought for an independent newspaper. So they had a board and everything. It was completely student run. There was no university interference or anything like that. And I was going into the semester, and they’re like, oh, so we have a really involved board member now, and he would like to explain to you the new things, what’s going to happen. And it was this rogue board member who came in and was like, from now on, this speech is allowed. This speech is not allowed. And we’re gonna get prior review by an adult, basically. Students are no longer in charge. It used to be that the final. If I made a mistake as editor, it was on me, and I had to respond to everybody and be held accountable. All this stuff. Suddenly, none of that. And I was like, not on my watch. You don’t know where I came from. So the whole Bulgaria, communism, free speech thing. So I was like, yeah, so I’m not going to do that. But if you want to find somebody else who will do that. So then I stepped down, even though it hurt so bad to do it. Week one, I was like, my God. I was so excited. I stepped down as editor. And because we were so tight, the entire staff also walked out. And this walkout became a national thing. It was in the New York Times. It was in every paper. The students at UGA walk out of the. Whatever. So then the board was under pressure because this was kind of a story that went viral. This was 2012, so Twitter was still. But it went viral online before they could really figure out what to do. And it was. Everyone was calling, people were flying down. I was like, oh, my God. So then the. We sat down with the board, figured it out. But because of that, there are now two student seats on the board of directors. All these things that had to be reformed. And it all happened because somebody was trying to mess with free speech.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Polina Pompliano

And I was like, you’re not. The students in the 70s fought for this. It’s not going to be me that ends it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. I think it’s really. I was not editor in chief of a college newspaper. I was editor in chief of my high school newspaper.

Polina Pompliano

I find that investing and journalism are very complimentary.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, yeah. But we did have faculty supervision.

Polina Pompliano

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes. I actually. It was a kind of remnant military school. It had turned into a prep school.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So my interactions with the faculty, our faculty advisor, Mr. Keene, were sometimes fraught.

Polina Pompliano

Yes. Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I ended up getting voted most radical of my class.

Polina Pompliano

Now you’re most conservative. Most radical. Yeah. That’s crazy,

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because I would slip things in.

Polina Pompliano

That weren’t approved.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it led to my, better to ask forgiveness than approval. But there were some tense times. He was like, you do realize that I can remove you as the editor in chief. And I went, I do. Yeah.

Polina Pompliano

But you know what’s crazy? At the time, I remember people calling me a radical, and now freedom of speech, I would not be a radical anymore. That’s crazy. But. Yeah, but it just goes to show, times change, things change, and a lot of.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Even the labels are antiquated. Right. You know where the terms left and right originate, right?

Polina Pompliano

Not really. No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

They originate from France.

Polina Pompliano

Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And the French Revolution.

Polina Pompliano

Yes. I love the…

Jim O’Shaughnessy

At the assembly. Those who supported the king sat to the right of the speaker. Those that wanted to cut his head off sat to the left of the speaker. And so, what’s interesting is, obviously, it didn’t work out well for them because of the whole Reign of Terror thing.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But the idea that they were very much inspired by the American Revolution of freedom of self-determination. Those were the most radical ideas in human history. Right. That humans could decide for themselves they didn’t have to answer to a king.

Polina Pompliano

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And, you know, it went badly.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And we got Napoleon.

Polina Pompliano

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But I just think that in the world of today, those are really antiquated terms because I have opinions that many people, I’m pro-choice. I’m, you know, I think that most drugs should not be criminalized. I’m not saying they should be legal, but I, the war on drugs has been a horrible failure. And when I pop those off, people are like.

Polina Pompliano

The war on anything is.,.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Wow, that’s such a great correction. War on. Yeah, that’s not going to work out well. And, you know, it’s kind of like I very much believe that the individual has a series of rights. And I don’t care who that individual is. Right. It’s like, I don’t even know if Voltaire actually said this, but you know, I might not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it. I kind of really believe that.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah, no, same.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And this whole idea of policing speech like you went through with this board member, again, it’s that authoritarian instinct that I just, it really triggers me.

Polina Pompliano

Me too. Or people who have such deep seated beliefs. Those people scare me. I’m scared of mobs and cults and people who are so extreme that they cannot even hear.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right. And I sometimes worry that, are we ever going to be able to get beyond it? Here we have all of these pathways to communicate with one another. And yet, you know, I used to say about investing. Right. The four horsemen of the investment apocalypse are fear, greed, hope and ignorance.

Polina Pompliano

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It seems like the four horsemen of this is, you know, ideological capture. You know, our tribe versus your tribe. You know, those ideas have no merit. Right. And if you steel man like I’m doing with AI now.

Polina Pompliano

Such a good exercise.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I don’t use Twitter as much as I used to because I’ve been mired in trying to write this book. But one of the best features on there, in my opinion is Grok, because every time I see something where I go, oh man, that’s bullshit. I immediately go to Grok and say, can you verify any of this? And sometimes I’m surprised. And it’s like, yes, actually, this did happen. I’m like, wow, okay, I’ve learned something new. But most of the time it’s like, yeah, no, they’ve sensationalized this, they made up this fact, et cetera. But it’s really helpful.

Polina Pompliano

But you know what’s so interesting? I’m fascinated by people who trust the source so much that they’re willing to throw rationality out the window. Even if the source is not perfect, obviously not perfect. I knew someone who said something, I said that this person on Twitter said. And I said, huh, I can’t find that anywhere. I don’t think that happened. And, you know, I show proof and they’re like, I don’t know. I trust that person.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m like, well. And then that kind of. That’s back to the emotions ruling as opposed to logic. Communism. You grew up under communism, by the way. Any authority, Nazism is just as bad. Right? So. But under communism, people just seem to literally ignore empirical evidence.

Polina Pompliano

Right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it’s like if you stripped this story away. This is the importance of story. If you strip the story away and you say, okay, you get to live in one of two systems. This system has killed hundreds of millions of people, has to put walls up to keep its citizens inside.

Polina Pompliano

But no, Jim, we’re gonna do it better, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

True communism has never been tried. And this system provided more material wealth in three centuries than any other human system ever invented.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Which one do you want to live in?

Polina Pompliano

But it, to me, it’s like, okay, take my family. If we had moved. How much has changed in just one generation? Not, I’m first generation technically, because I came, but is that first generation? Yeah, yeah, but how much has changed already in the course of 26 years versus if my family moved to Russia, would we have achieved the same? No, my dad probably wouldn’t have his own business. I wouldn’t be able to work in journalism. The whole thing is just so stupid. But yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Well, I mean, regardless of what label you put on me, anything that increases human freedom.

Polina Pompliano

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m pretty much in favor of whatever you may believe. Yeah. And the. Let’s get back. I’m mindful of time because I know that you have to go in a minute, but what profile or insight from doing one of these dossier profiles where you’re hands on.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Which one? And you don’t even have to name the person. What was the most surprising thing? You went in with one set of priors and you came out. Whoa.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah, I think I would definitely say the Ryan Serhant one, because that one surprised me a lot because there’s so much out there on him, videos, books he’s written, all of this. I really thought that I had some sort of theory or hypothesis on who he was. And then spending time in person, which is so valuable if you’re a journalist or a writer or anything, investor, to spend time with the person in person, because I came away with, for example, I interviewed his old boss, didn’t think anything of it. His old boss said, you know, we helped him get a TV show. We helped him become who he is. It was the greatest experiment in all of real estate. What we did. It was kind of taking partial credit for Ryan’s success. And I wanted to tell him, in PR person, I wanted to tell him that quote, and I wanted to see his reaction to it. I wanted to know, in the moment hearing this, what do you think? So I went in, I said, so he said this, what do you think? And he was drinking water. While I was asking him, he literally choked on the water.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Spit take.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah, he was like, you interviewed him? I was like, yeah, he said this? Yes. And then he said, huh? And he took a second. He was like, I’m going to quote from. I’m going to take a line from the movie The Social Network with Mark Zuckerberg and say, “If you have to stand on my shoulders to feel tall, then go for it.” And I was like, oh, my God, this is so good. It’s just the tension and the drama and it’s human emotions. Right? But seeing just how Ryan is the type of person that I think a lot of people are where you’re not successful, you’re not trying to be successful to prove yourself right, you’re trying to be successful to prove other people wrong. And that’s so much more powerful, you know, Jim. Anyway, it was like this really charismatic, bright character ended up actually being fueled by something very dark. And the thing that surprised me the most is with Anthony Scaramucci, people went. The feedback that I got from readers was, wow. I went in with one opinion, and I came out with, I actually really liked him after reading this. With Ryan, it was kind of the opposite because they were like, I don’t think I would want that kind of life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. When you said motivated by revenge. I was like, yeah, it’s.

Polina Pompliano

And the final quote that I have from him, he says, you know, adrenaline, you know, I’ve built all this on revenge and adrenaline and that’s really powerful, but it also has the power to burn your house down.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Polina Pompliano

So you know that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, you need to have. Fire is very useful, but we need fire codes.

Polina Pompliano

Yes. So good.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, so what’s next for you? What are you working on now? Are you going to do another book?

Polina Pompliano

For now, for now I’m focusing just on the long form profiles. I want to kind of master that and I just love humanizing these characters. We’ll see if that could possibly turn into a book or I would love to one day write a biography.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Very cool. And being a mom, going from no kids to four kids. Do you know that old joke about the English lord who said that before he had children?

Polina Pompliano

What did he say?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Six theories about how to raise children.

Polina Pompliano

I would love to hear.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And then he said, now I have six children and no theories.

Polina Pompliano

Wait, that’s so true. It’s so true. It’s like every single second is optimized in my life right now because I have a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and two 5-month-old twins.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh my God.

Polina Pompliano

So it is a full.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The fact that you are here looking so resplendent.

Polina Pompliano

Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It says a lot.

Polina Pompliano

It was, you know, bouncing one while you’re getting ready, but it was, it’s been great. I grew up as an only child and I realized that the reason I love so many kids and the reason why I love New York City so much is that I secretly love chaos. I say I don’t. Oh, I miss quiet. But I actually really like chaos. So that’s why.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, you know, when I moved here in 91 and I would have friends come from the Midwest and I really developed this theory, watching them react.

Polina Pompliano

Tell me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And the theory is you either feed on New York’s energy or it feeds on you.

Polina Pompliano

Oh, that’s so good and so true.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I fed on New York’s energy.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I think it’s a certain kind of person who really just thrives here.

Polina Pompliano

It’s so crazy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And then others are like, oh, no, no, no. But four kids in New York City.

Polina Pompliano

It’s chaos on chaos.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That is really impressive.

Polina Pompliano

I love it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, Polina, this has been so much fun. So great to finally do it in person. You remember the question from the, our final question? I hope you don’t.

Polina Pompliano

I don’t remember.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, perfect.

Polina Pompliano

We listened to the episode. How did I miss? Somebody was probably crying.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The final question that we ask is, we’re gonna make you empress of the world.

Polina Pompliano

Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You can’t kill anyone.

Polina Pompliano

Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp.

Polina Pompliano

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But we’re gonna hand you a magical microphone.

Polina Pompliano

Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you could say two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of the world. In other words, whenever their morning is.

Polina Pompliano

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The two things that you say, they’re going to wake up and say, you know, I just had two of the greatest thoughts. And unlike all of the other times, I’m actually going to act on these two things. What are you going to incept?

Polina Pompliano

All right, I have them. And I’m curious now to go back and hear what I said last time. If it’s the same. The first one is what we talked about today. Freedom of speech is actually the best thing in this world. And if you don’t have it, you should try to move somewhere where you can have it. And the second one is, at some point in your life, you should bet on yourself.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, I love that one. Polina, thank you so much. This has been so much fun.

Polina Pompliano

I loved it. Thank you.

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1. Kobe Before Kobe

Mike Sielski’s The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality is one of the best sports books I’ve read in years, and one of the best books, period. Part of what makes it work is Sielski’s decision to narrow his frame. This is not a biography of Kobe’s entire career. It ends in 1997, after his first NBA season, when he’s still a teenager with everything ahead of him. The heart of the book is his time at Lower Merion High School in the Philadelphia suburbs, where he led a team with just one star player to a state championship in 1996. By focusing on this narrow window, Sielski turns what could have been a familiar legend into a genuine coming-of-age story, and the effect is revelatory.

The reporting is top notch. Sielski conducted more than 100 interviews with coaches, teammates, teachers, and others who crossed paths with Kobe during those years. He also had access to a trove of never-before-released interviews that a former assistant coach recorded with Kobe during his senior season and early days in the NBA. These tapes preserved the thoughts and dreams of a teenager who believed, with total conviction, that he would one day perform on the same stage as Michael Jordan. You hear Kobe’s voice before fame calcified it, before the persona of the Black Mamba was fully constructed.

The writing is masterful. Sielski captures game action with the precision of someone who understands that sports writing, at its best, is about rhythm and detail. But he also brings the same care to the quieter moments: Kobe watching VHS tapes of Jordan in his room, getting nervous every time the team bus crossed a bridge, navigating the strange social terrain of being a kid who had spent his formative years in Italy and returned to America as something of an outsider. You see the influences that shaped him - his father Joe’s basketball career and the coaches who recognized his obsessive drive - without the narrative ever jumping ahead to spoil what’s coming. Sielski trusts the present moment to carry its own weight.

Great books leave you wanting to return to certain passages, to sit with a particular sentence or scene, and The Rise is full of those. The kid Kobe was explains the man he became, and Sielski lets you see the connection without ever making it feel overdetermined. It’s a book about basketball, yes, but it’s also a book about ambition, family, and the strange alchemy of becoming who you’re going to be. [Jimmy]

• 📘 The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality by Mike Sielski

2. A Man on the Moon : The Rest of the Apollo Story

Everyone knows about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Apollo 11 gets almost all of the mindshare in our culture (followed by Apollo 13 — thank you, Ron Howard!). A great adventure has been culturally compressed into one iconic image, but the full story was longer, stranger, more dangerous, and more human than most people know.

Apollo 1 was supposed to be the first crewed flight, but a cabin fire killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee before the program ever got off the ground, delaying crewed flights until Apollo 7.

While Apollo 11 astronauts were the first on the moon, they only spent two and a half hours walking on the surface, venturing about 200 feet from the lunar module. Meanwhile, Apollo 17’s crew spent roughly 75 hours on the surface, more than 22 hours outside the lander, and ranged as far as 4.7 miles from the module.

These men were the biggest celebrities in America — astronauts on cereal boxes, their families photographed for Life magazine. Most were test pilots who had spent careers professionally flying experimental jets that killed their colleagues routinely (Tom Wolfe documented this extensively in The Right Stuff, another book I loved). By the time they reached NASA, they had already normalized levels of risk that would be unthinkable for almost anyone else.

Chaikin spent about a decade researching the book. He did personal interviews with 23 of the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon (Jack Swigert, who was on Apollo 13, had died of cancer in 1982), as well as mission personnel at NASA. Reading it made me feel like I was inside the Apollo program, living through those historic moments in real time.

Apollo 11 is the chapter everyone knows. Chaikin gives you the rest of the story. [Liberty]

• 📘👨‍🚀 A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin

3. Encrusting the Tortoise : Taste as the Antidote to Slop

“Taste” has become Silicon Valley’s favorite word. Founders drop it in pitch decks. VCs whisper it over Philz. Everyone has read Rick Rubin’s book. But Douglas Brundage, writing in his Substack newsletter Enfant Terrible, argues that most of the people talking about taste have mistaken it for something else entirely and that AI has made the problem impossible to ignore.

Brundage opens with an 1884 French novel about a reclusive aristocrat who encrusts a live tortoise with jewels until it dies under the weight of its own decoration. It’s a strange and perfect metaphor. He traces a line from that doomed reptile to the flood of AI-generated sameness that blankets the internet. His central claim is sharp: we handed the world a generative engine and most people produce slop with it, then blame the engine. That’s like cursing a Steinway because someone played “Chopsticks.”

What makes the piece land isn’t the takedown, but the standard it restores. Brundage’s argument is that taste is not style, and certainly not curation. It’s the uncomfortable process of discovering what you actually like, often before you can defend it, and then pushing on reality hard enough to make something from that impulse. The moment taste hardens into a system (the right typeface, the correct palette, a Ferrari interior that looks like a giant Apple Watch), it stops being taste and becomes fashion. That gap — between having references and having a point of view — is the one thing no model will close for you.

For those of us who are optimistic about what these tools can unlock, this essay is the sharpest articulation I’ve read of why optimism is warranted, and what it asks of us. [Taylor]

• 📄 Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise by Douglas Brundage

4. The End of the Tour : Spend Five Days with David Foster Wallace

Even if you’ve never read David Foster Wallace, even if you’re not ready for Infinite Jest, I think you should listen to his This is Water commencement speech.

If you like that, I think this lesser-known A24 film may also be for you.

The End of the Tour is delightfully small-scale and intimate. In 1996, Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky spent five days with David Foster Wallace during the ‘Infinite Jest’ book tour. The film is a largely word-for-word reconstruction of that extended-interview/road trip/hanging out with DFW based on Lipsky’s recordings and notes (he also wrote a memoir of the experience). There’s none of the usual prestige-biopic machinery. It’s mostly two dudes hanging out in messy living rooms, having interesting conversations.

Of course, DFW’s suicide in 2008 colors everything retroactively, but the film is really about the difficulty of genuine human connection, the weirdness of fame finding someone who distrusts fame, and the fact that brilliance offers no immunity from loneliness, despair, or self-destruction.

Jason Segel doesn’t play Wallace as a marble bust or a bundle of tics. He keeps him human while conveying the painful hyper-awareness that makes him feel more alive and more fragile at the same time. Wallace talks openly about performing for Lipsky even as he's trying not to. The film is full of that recursive self-awareness.

The film isn’t just about Wallace. There’s a lot of Lipsky, too. He’s ambitious, curious, needy, and competitive. The movie understands that interviews are not one-way extractions, they’re social duels.

To me, this film feels like spending an afternoon with someone you'll miss. [Liberty]

• 🎬 ‘The End of the Tour’ (2015)

5. Field Dispatch from Borges’s Buenos Aires

It is 12:29 a.m. and I am wandering the streets of Buenos Aires in search of a lighter. The kiosks are still open. There’s a slight drizzle. A few policemen patrol the streets, chatting with the locals. For some Argentines, the night has just begun, and many continue to drink coffee at hours that would scandalize most North Americans.

I am in the city of Jorge Luis Borges, and two blocks from my hotel is the street that bears his name.

It’s no secret that we at OSV are huge fans of Borges. We’ve mentioned his literary works before in the first two editions of Field Notes. Since I’m in his native city, I want to revisit his work and view this city through the eyes of its defining writer. My journey begins with Borges’s first poetry collection: Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). Here’s an extract from The Streets:

The streets of Buenos Aires
are already the innards of my soul.
Not the energetic streets
bothered by hurry and bustle,
but the sweet neighborhood street
made tender by trees and sunsets.

And here is another, from Houses like Angels, published in his second poetry collection, Luna de enfrente (1925):

Where San Juan and Chacabuco intersect
I saw the blue houses,
the houses that wear colors of adventure.

Now it’s almost 3 a.m., and I’ve lost myself wandering the night streets in search of these blue houses. There’s a cool breeze, and at a bus stop I hear a ragged man play the guitar. Borges spoke of his love for this boundless city: “Buenos Aires is deep, and never have I, disillusioned or suffering, given myself over to its streets without receiving some unexpected consolation, whether from feeling unreality, from guitars at the back of a patio, or from contact with other lives.”

Borges’s poetry has given me words to express my appreciation of this city. Now my morning walks write themselves the way a Borges poem might; I think I’m choosing the route, but the city knows better. [Rohan]

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Sunday, 15 March

Two thoughts from Kingsley Amis

“Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.”

“It’s never pleasant to have one’s unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.”

Monday, 16 March

Two thoughts from Annie Duke

“Experience can be an effective teacher. But, clearly, only some students listen to their teachers.”

“Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence.”

Tuesday, 17 March

Two thoughts from Henri Matisse

“Creative people are curious, flexible, and independent with a tremendous spirit and a love of play.”

“Another word for creativity is courage.”

Wednesday, 18 March

Two thoughts from Carl Sandburg

“The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.”

“To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking-glass.”

Thursday, 19 March

Two thoughts from Ronald Coase

“If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.”

“Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.”

Friday, 20 March

Two thoughts from Anne Sexton

“The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard, dies young.”

“Don’t bite till you know if it’s bread or stone.”

Saturday, 21 March

Two thoughts from Peter O’Toole

“I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity.”

“The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.”

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— Jim

• Adam’s Website

• The Decline of Deviance

• Slime Mold Time Mold

• My conversation with Julian Gough

Links

Highlights

Increased Prosperity = Less Deviance

Adam Mastroianni: So there’s an idea in biology called life history or life history strategy. That’s basically, you know, organisms, whether they’re conscious of it or not, are looking around their environment and trying to decide am I going to die young or am I going to be around a while? Because if I’m going to be around a while, I can invest in a slower life history strategy. I can get bigger and stronger and make sure that I hit my KPIs at each milestone of my life. But if I’m in a resource scarce environment, if I’m in a dangerous environment, I better reproduce quickly because I might not be around to reproduce tomorrow.

I think what’s true about organisms in general is true about humans too. We do this maybe somewhat consciously and maybe mostly unconsciously. We pay attention to cues in our environment to see am I going to grow old, can I plan on seeing my grandchildren? Or might I die of disease or an accident, or might I be killed by another human? And we are much less likely to die by being killed by another human, by disease or by deprivation than we have been at any point in human history. And this is a pretty recent thing. I talk about in the piece about how both of my grandfathers were drafted to fight in the Korean War, as were their fathers fought their own wars and their fathers’ fathers fought their own wars.

I’m kind of the first generation in my family to pass my prime war fighting age without being asked to go kill strangers in a foreign land. That’s pretty new. And so it’s natural that I’m kind of looking around going, all right, well, I want to make sure I contribute to my 401k. I’m going to be around a while. Don’t mess this up by poisoning my lungs with smoke. Don’t mess this up by having a kid at 17. Don’t mess this up by flunking out of school and not going to college. Make sure to play the long game. I think that’s what’s going on.

Science is a Strong Link Problem

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. I mean, the way I think of it is science is a strong link problem where we progress at the rate that we do our best work, rather than a weak link problem where we progress at the rate that we do the worst thing. Right. So food safety is a weak link problem where you really want to eliminate the things that are most harmful. Science has the opposite property, where the things that are most useless just fade away naturally with time. The things that are most useful actually have an outsized impact. And the way that you solve a strong link problem like that is by increasing variance, taking more weirder shots. Because if they end up to be total failures, they just don’t matter, people forget it and they move on. Just like Newton’s alchemy that didn’t make a big difference.

The laws of motion made a huge difference. So we wanted someone who’s doing way over here and way over there. Because it turns out that this one was great, this one wasn’t. Doesn’t matter. We got this one. That’s the entire idea behind them.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone. It’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. My guest today is someone who has intrigued me for quite some time. Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist, postdoc at Columbia University, Harvard PhD, former Rhodes Scholar, also a bit of a troublemaker. Adam, welcome.

Adam Mastroianni: Hey, thanks. Thanks for the introduction and thanks for having me. Looking forward to starting some trouble.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Listen, if there’s trouble to be started, I want to be there. I love it. Let’s go right at one of your central ideas, and that is you’ve argued culture is converging. I think everyone feels that. You see all the things on social media and getting ready for this, I was going back through YouTube videos, rock videos, right? And man, the 60s. You know, it’s the 60s and then all of a sudden the 70s, and you got disco and you’ve got very different. And it seems like we’re kind of collapsing into a sameness culturally. Let’s talk about that first.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, so one of my favorite things to do is take a trend that everybody’s complaining about and then see if we can actually see it in the numbers. And so one of my first big posts, I did this a couple of years ago with, you know, everyone complains that every movie is a rerun, a remake, a spinoff. Is that actually true or is this just people complaining about something? And when you look at the numbers, it’s like, no, that one’s really true. Until the year 2000, if you look at the top grossing movies every year, about 25% of them were somehow related to another previous movie. But after the year 2000, it shoots up to 75% of bestselling movies every year are now part of some cinematic universe, broadly speaking.

And so with these claims of cultural stagnation or decline, I was like, okay, well what if we look everywhere? What can we see? And I think the most interesting piece of this is that there is the positive version and the negative version. And the version that’s gotten the most airtime is the negative version. It is, you know, every movie is a rerun. The buildings aren’t beautiful anymore. These things are true, you can see them in the data. But I think the better way to think about this is in terms of deviance. And some deviance is good, we call that creativity. And some deviance is bad, we call that crime normally, or rule breaking.

And if you start with that data, if you look at surveys of what young people are doing in terms of smoking, drinking, getting pregnant, these are teens, to be clear, high school students. These things just go down and down, starting mainly in the 90s. And I think we can all agree that’s a good decline of deviance. It’s a good thing that the students aren’t smoking in the boys’ room anymore. But I think it has this negative ultimate outcome, which is the kids who are smoking in the bathroom ultimately go on. Some of them, maybe some of them are closer than you might think. Some of them go on to do some interesting things as well. And so if you don’t have that deviance at the beginning, maybe you don’t get it down the line in both positive and negative forms.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And it’s an idea that is also near and dear to my heart. And I’m just looking for reasons and I’m sure you’re going to give me better ones than I’ve come up with. One of my ideas is one of the hidden variables that the generation today. And I’m sticking with culture right now. But we live in a panopticon age. When I was a teenager, I was that kid smoking in the boys’ room. We did crazy ass shit. But there was no camera to record us. There was no social media to shame us and have people clutch their pearls and say, oh, this is awful. Do you think that’s part of it or am I going down the wrong path?

Adam Mastroianni: It could totally be part of it. I think any important social trend is going to have multiple causes. But the interesting thing about this one is that it starts a lot earlier. It starts too early for a lot of these Internet based or technology based explanations. So a lot of the decline in high school deviance starts in the 90s. At least that’s as far as we can tell, which is before everybody had a camera in their pocket, certainly before everyone had a broadband Internet connection at home or a 5G connection on their phone. So while I think that can certainly speed it up and might be a factor more recently, that doesn’t seem to be the place it came from originally.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So enlighten me, where did it come from originally?

Adam Mastroianni: Well, we don’t know for sure. No one knows. But my guess is that this comes from basically increased prosperity. So there’s an idea in biology called life history or life history strategy. That’s basically, you know, organisms, whether they’re conscious of it or not, are looking around their environment and trying to decide am I going to die young or am I going to be around a while? Because if I’m going to be around a while, I can invest in a slower life history strategy. I can get bigger and stronger and make sure that I hit my KPIs at each milestone of my life. But if I’m in a resource scarce environment, if I’m in a dangerous environment, I better reproduce quickly because I might not be around to reproduce tomorrow.

I think what’s true about organisms in general is true about humans too. We do this maybe somewhat consciously and maybe mostly unconsciously. We pay attention to cues in our environment to see am I going to grow old, can I plan on seeing my grandchildren? Or might I die of disease or an accident, or might I be killed by another human? And we are much less likely to die by being killed by another human, by disease or by deprivation than we have been at any point in human history. And this is a pretty recent thing. I talk about in the piece about how both of my grandfathers were drafted to fight in the Korean War, as were their fathers fought their own wars and their fathers’ fathers fought their own wars.

I’m kind of the first generation in my family to pass my prime war fighting age without being asked to go kill strangers in a foreign land. That’s pretty new. And so it’s natural that I’m kind of looking around going, all right, well, I want to make sure I contribute to my 401k. I’m going to be around a while. Don’t mess this up by poisoning my lungs with smoke. Don’t mess this up by having a kid at 17. Don’t mess this up by flunking out of school and not going to college. Make sure to play the long game. I think that’s what’s going on.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And that is consistent. I was born in 1960 and I was that generation as well. I came of age, was not drafted. Now that was because there wasn’t a draft at that particular time, but I wasn’t asked to do that. I think that’s really insightful. There’s another strand, a former guest I had on, Matt Clifford, who is in the UK and was advising the Prime Minister on their AI strategy, et cetera. His theory was intriguing to me and I’d love your take. His thesis is basically the Napoleonic wars changed everything. And by that he meant Western civilization was like, okay, we gotta come up with a way to stop these ambitious boys from trying to take over the fucking world. Let’s try to dampen the variance, right?

So instead of trying to conquer the world, maybe they’ll try to conquer commerce or arts or science or one of those. But then he brings into the mix and now we’ve got the Internet, which in his opinion is the largest variance amplifier that we’ve had in human history. Is that part of this conversation too?

Adam Mastroianni: It could be. I mean, like I said, I think the Internet can accelerate a lot of these trends and certainly one way it can accelerate them is by eliminating any eddies or niches in culture, right? There is no place in the world that is safe from the dominant and mainstream culture that’s being beamed onto the airwaves at all times, that you cannot be a person and not know who Taylor Swift is really, no matter who you are. You’d literally have to be in a hunter gatherer tribe to not know that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I tried. I tried for a long time, but I failed.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I mean, you go to a store and she’s going to be playing over the radio, right? Your grandchildren are going to know who she is. There’s no escape. That wasn’t necessarily true a generation or two ago. You could just be a person in, say, Belarus and not know who the most famous person was on the radio in the U.S. at the time. There’s no escape anymore. And so now if everybody has the same inputs, we’re more likely to produce the same outputs. So what could be an amplifier of variance? You know, now we have the Internet, anyone can make whatever they want. And there’s many more ways to support yourself. I think some of that has come true.

But at the same time, it is also a dampener on variance in that everyone is getting the same raw materials of culture put into their brains that get mixed up and come back out. And those now look more similar.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And it’s basically leading towards a monoculture, not only in pop culture, but in science and the arts, etc. But, you know, by the same token, on that topic, the idea that. Let’s take I Love Lucy, right? I Love Lucy. I think its final show had nearly 70 million viewers in the United States, at least. And then we fast forward today, and maybe Game of Thrones might be a similar thing to look at. I think they had 18 million. So there seems to also be a lot of fragmentation going on, right?

Adam Mastroianni: Yes. Yeah. So there’s these two things going on here where now everyone can be served content that is more to their liking. And you see this somewhat on TV, but certainly you open up social media on your phone. What we call social media, but is really just television that’s made for you on your phone. And so those are going to be seen by fewer people, but more tailored to your interests. So we have that as a variance amplifier. But what we have as a variance de-amplifier is that, for one thing, everybody knows about Game of Thrones whether or not they’ve actually seen it. So it’s part of the culture regardless. And at the same time, it gets a lot harder to grow these idiosyncratic cultures where they are.

So this is sort of a random connection, but I’ve read a lot about the Millerite movement in the 1840s. This was an apocalyptic movement. This guy thought, you know, Christ is coming back, and he’s really coming back soon. So people are selling their homes, whatever. But a really interesting thing reading into the background of accounts from that time is in the American Northeast, if you wander from one town to another, you can encounter a completely different religious culture. In this town, we are Baptists, and we really care about whether you get baptized as an adult or not. And over here, we are hardcore Unitarians, and we don’t see the distinctions that they see. And we have our own newspapers and we have our own civic society, and these are really different.

I don’t think you can get anything like that in the U.S. anymore. You drive from one town to another, you can get a little bit of difference, but nothing near that kind of cultural idiosyncrasy. And that’s because back then it would take you a day to get from one place to another. And so it would take a lot longer for culture to travel, whereas today it takes you an hour.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And I’m reading a really interesting book on the story of money right now. I vibe with it because I’ve always looked at money as an information technology or a technology rather. And part of it is talking about why Gutenberg’s printing press thrived in Germany at the time that it did. And the reason for that was there was no centralized power. There was a confederacy of duchies, as you say about the different towns, same deal, very different cultures within each one. And so the idea that they could do their own thing, write their own pamphlets, and the pamphlets and what they were advocating for, et cetera, were very different. Like a 5 mile walk away to the next town.

And in places like China, the author makes the point, hey, they knew about the printing press, but they suppressed it because the emperor was like, that does not meet the mandate of heaven. And I wonder, let’s bring in your idea of the moral panics, because this is something that really annoys me. And yet, when you look historically, they’re always clutching pearls around innovations, right? You go back all the way to the novel and oh my God, everyone threw the halo up and this is gonna ruin society and ruin the youth and everything else. And it just repeats. It’s a pattern. It’s just like every time, why are we not learning from this?

Adam Mastroianni: I think it’s because it’s a bit like learning that strangers aren’t as bad as we think they are. So there’s this finding in psychology that if you ask people, hey, if you talk to this person on a bus, the stranger, how do you think it’ll go? And they’re like, it’ll be horrible. I’ve collected some of this data myself. It’ll be horrible. They won’t want to talk to me, it won’t go well. And then you make them do it and it’s like, oh, actually it was fine, but it’s because they weren’t a stranger, they were actually just a friend in waiting. And so the next one’s going to be bad. And so strangers have this wicked problem where it’s impossible to learn about the population of strangers because each time you sample from it, that person stops being a stranger.

I think there’s a similar thing going on with innovation where it’s impossible to learn about the population of innovations because each time we sample one, it becomes a regular technology. So we’re all born into a point in history where everything that was invented before we got here feels normal to us, and everything that’s invented after we get here feels like a change. And so we’re always moving through time being like all the previous innovations, those turned out fine. It’s all the future ones that are going to be bad. What I find really funny is a lot of the things that people fear about these innovations does turn out to be true. It just doesn’t hurt in the way that we thought it was going to hurt. Right. There’s a lot of people.

I’ve read this book recently, Innovation’s Enemies by this guy Calestous Juma, who tells the story of there’s several hundred years of history of resistance to coffee. And actually the rulers who wanted to stamp out these coffee houses were 100% correct about the effect that coffee houses and coffee culture were going to have on their countries. They were correct to try to stop people from drinking coffee. It just turns out that for most of us, living in a world of coffee is a better one. For a very small percentage of people, it’s a much worse world because they don’t get to rule it anymore.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, I think there’s a lot of that going on too, right? Historically, you can see a common thread in all societies where the rulers want to stay ruling. And the way that they look at that is to suppress innovation, to suppress creativity, because, oh my God, what if an idea comes along? Like again, in this book that I’m reading right now, which is a lot of fun, is basically, the church was very put off by the emergence of money lenders because they had a complete monopoly on it. And it was basically, you know, time value of money. It took people. Fibonacci’s book, by the way, which ended up, the author claims, being one of the best selling first business books ever. But it was written for merchants, right?

And the church had maintained this idea that only God can determine what the time value of money is. And it just so happens we have a direct line to him. And so we’re the ones who know what the correct value is. And then Fibonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, when he wrote his book, he’s like, not so fast. And so, but there’s always been, right, this clash of old elites versus rising elites. And it’s universal, right? It’s not just culture. It’s in science, it’s in the arts, it’s everywhere. And so how do we, you know, Whitehead said the great ages have always been unstable ages. How do we design a little more variance into the system?

Adam Mastroianni: I think part of it has to come from the structure of the institutions that are producing the variance. Institutions in general have this tension where if you are an institution, you really don’t like the idea of a revolution because you’ve kind of invested in things being the way they are for a while, because you maybe own real estate, you’ve got depreciation to think about. So if everything’s going to change, that’s actually a big problem for you. So it’s a huge problem if you’re an institution that is supposed to do the innovation that there’s a very particular kind of innovation that you’re going to be interested in, which is extremely slow, predictable, where people can plan their careers around it and we can plan the sunsetting of our billions in our capital expenditures.

And I think it makes sense for some of our innovation to live in institutions like that. Because some innovations are like that. They are stepwise and slow and incremental. The most important ones are not that way. And so the most important ones cannot live in large institutions that have to have a bureaucratic apparatus to run them. Which is why I think we need a new set of institutions that are smaller and that are run differently, that are not invested in their long term survival in the current status quo. And if you look at the history of revolutionary innovations and breakthroughs, they tend to happen despite all of the forces trying to stop them from happening, that they happen because someone had a little bit of slack in their calendar, someone made a mistake and was able to take advantage of it.

They did not happen because of the purposeful functioning of the institutions. So James Scott, Seeing Like a State guy, makes this point that all formal order in these tight states, these autocratic states, are actually parasitic on informal order. That the state only works because people secretly disobey the rules. They’re secretly growing crops in the backyard. That’s why they don’t starve. If they actually did what the state told them to do, the state would collapse. So too with our institutions of innovation, they are parasitic on basically people breaking the rules. So what if we carved off some of that rule breaking and allowed it to be its own thing? I don’t know if this is literally possible. It’s kind of never been done or only been done for very short periods of time in very specific circumstances. But it’s really worth a shot.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I mean, we give every year $100,000 fellowships and we also give grants. And that’s what we’re aiming for. We’re aiming for funding the people who are way outside of consensus, but we’re really intrigued by what they’re doing. Are there any other. Like, if you were going to set up. If you were going to set. You got funding, right? And you were going to set up something like this. Walk me through what that looks like.

Adam Mastroianni: It would be what I call a science house. So I’ve run a prototype version of this on an Emergent Ventures grant for just a couple of weeks. But basically the idea is the core of scientific practice is apprenticing with someone who already knows what they’re doing. The scientific method is actually really illegible, despite our attempts to put it into a series of rules. You learn it by being close to someone who knows how to do it. Unfortunately, the only way to apprentice to someone right now is to join a PhD program, which has all of its downsides that I’m sure are familiar to you and your listeners. What if instead you went and lived basically in a hacker house where you worked on scientific projects under the tutelage of a more experienced person? You publish your results directly to the Internet.

You live there for, say, four to five years, like you would doing a PhD. But the environs are different, right? That we don’t answer to the incentives of the journals and the tenure track system. We’re trying to do weird stuff that we think is cool. And then afterward, you take that and try to make your life with it, right? There are now tons of alternative research institutions that would be great landing places for people with an alternative training. But what they’re finding is that all of their recruits come from academia, and so they need to be deprogrammed when they get there. And so we have this huge waste where we’re paying a lot of money to train people in a certain way of doing things. They’re like, oh, cool.

You can go to Arcadia, you can go to the Arc Institute, you can go to Astera, but first we have to undo this very expensive training that you had. And now you got to redo this other form of training. What if we didn’t have to staff our new world with refugees from the old world? As good as the refugees might be, what if we could grow our own there? That’s what I would like to build, is a place that we grow our own.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And again, we are incredibly aligned there. And it’s kind of a chicken and egg problem again. Back to the fellowships. The first year we did them, we’re like, we want to find people that are just way under the radar, et cetera. Guess who dominated all of our applications? Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, you know, Cambridge, Oxbridge, et cetera. And so it’s really intriguing to me because I think that we’re at a place where these types of ideas, we’re just kind of starting out with them at scale, right? So what do you do when you bring the whole. Because, look, human OS. We are status junkies. We are prestige junkies. And the old accreditation system, right? Like, one of my favorite Onion headlines was Texan who went to Harvard doesn’t know which to mention first.

And, I mean, that’s just the way we are. Me too, everyone. And so how do we hook that in with the Science House? How does that become cool or prestigious or, you know, that becomes its own credential that equals a Harvard PhD?

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think every cool thing starts by people who didn’t care about being cool, and that’s what made them cool. So there are. There’s not many of them, but I think there are rare people who, for whatever reason, have the status part of their brain switched off. That part didn’t develop. They’re just obsessive about something. They can be hard to find because they aren’t trying to promote themselves as much. But if you can find them and if you can concentrate them, they do really cool things because they aren’t encumbered by trying to make themselves look cool to other people. Then other people see that and they’re like, oh, that looks actually cool. It’s pretty cool not to care what other people think about you. I’d like to do that, too. That is, I think, where this comes from.

So when I recruited for the small version of Science House, your application was just the fact that you had ever done an empirical research project and posted it directly to the Internet. That’s it. And just by doing that, I basically restricted the world to like six people who had ever done that. Because why would you ever do that? There’s nothing in it. That’s exactly why I want those people, so you can train a generation of those people and they could do cool work. Then you get the kind of people who, okay, look, they’re not insane. They care a little bit about status, but they’re willing to take a leap. And then you get those people, and then you get people who, okay, look, I do care about status, but I also really care about science.

And then you can get those people as well. And eventually. Now we’ve infected the university system as well, but that’s what that system is full of, is people who ostensibly wanted to do science, but also got caught up in the status of it. And if we can get universities to start doing what we would be doing in science houses, that’s what victory looks like.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And while I am certainly not cool, I spent most of my time in asset management. And the reason for much of my success was a book I wrote called What Works on Wall Street, which is a massive empirical study of all the favorite factors, you know, that people say I like low PE stocks. And I’m like, well, let’s see if that works. And so we took it back to the early 60s and in some cases, all the way back with data. Pretty dirty data, to the late 1920s. And every academic said to me, why didn’t you publish this as a PhD thesis? Why didn’t you just go direct to the public with a book? And I just felt I didn’t. As I’m listening to you, I didn’t even think about, I should get this as my PhD.

So now that we have the Internet, I would think and hope that we could see this happening all over the place. Are we?

Adam Mastroianni: A little bit. Nowhere near as much as I think anyone would have thought. This was the empty promise of the Internet is like, yeah, there’s gonna be a lot more people doing this. They’re just doing what they love and they’re putting it out there. There are some people who do that, and God love them. There are so much fewer than there could be, I think, because they’re waiting for permission. You kind of have to be a little bit crazy to do it. You get no status by putting stuff on the Internet. So I love doing it. It’s actually really fun to be unencumbered by status. But you know, I wrote this post that was like, hey, I am giving you permission to do science and post it on the Internet.

I got so much response from people who are like, I’m very interested in this idea. How can I help support it? And very few responses that were like, I’m doing it, and I kind of consider it a failure. I have not figured out yet how to unlock more of that sense of, whatever you want to call it, agency, permission for people to do science on their own terms and put it on the Internet to feel like, yeah, you can do it. You can do it poorly. Guess what? Most of the people doing it professionally are doing it poorly too. There have been hot moments in history where this was a thing that people were allowed to do on an amateur basis and they could contribute. How do we get that back?

I think we are just under the critical mass. I think there aren’t quite enough people doing it. There aren’t enough physical locations where you can go and interact with the scene. I don’t think it works very well if it’s all totally online and distributed. You need someplace where you can go see the talk. You need someplace where you can go hang out with people. That’s why I’m all in on the Science House idea. But I think there’s a bunch of other ways that we can make physical scenes that amp up this feeling in people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So on that note, on the permission note, I completely agree. That seems to be another part of human OS, right? People waiting for permission instead of just going and doing it. So let’s say we’ve got a super smart listener. Of course, all of our listeners are super smart who is listening to us. And he’s like, I really want to do science, but I don’t want to join the priesthood. You know, what’s the first honest step he or she could take in the next 30 days to start down that path?

Adam Mastroianni: The very first thing I would do is read this piece by my friends who blog under the name Slime Mold Time Mold called The Scientific Virtues. And their whole point is that people think you become a scientist by learning a set of practices. This is incorrect. You become a scientist by practicing a set of virtues and they have a bunch of examples and quotes from great scientists. And the virtues are all counterintuitive things like stupidity and humor and rebellion. And I think this is a good spiritual introduction to what it takes to discover new knowledge. That’s the first place I would start. The next place I would go is to look around and try to find someone doing something cool that you think is cool. And you might want to learn how to do that thing.

And you could even just start by trying to replicate a thing that they did. People really worry starting out that I need to do something no one else has ever done. No, the way you get practice is you paint the still lifes. The scientific version of a still life is doing a replication. This is also a really useful thing that so few things get replicated that if you could just redo something, literally check the code, run the thing and whatever you’ve contributed to science, post it on the Internet, send it to the person who did the original version. And as soon as you’ve done that, you’re in it, you’re doing it, you’ve become the thing. I think the next steps will be a lot clearer because you’ll be in that world talking to the people who are doing it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And on those ideas of replication, crisis, medical fraud, policy capture, you know, institutions giving grants. In the old days, you know, grants came from industry, they came from universities, they came from a disparate and somewhat very different philosophical place. Now, you know, the government has sort of taken that over. Now we have all of the various journals that one must publish in to be, in quotes, air quotes, taken seriously. And yet when you look at that, I love your idea because there’s so much bad science out there and you could really kind of make a name for yourself just by trying to replicate, not replicating. I think there’s also a gold mine in things.

I graduated from the University of Minnesota and we had basically two charlatans there, Ancel Keys and Frantz Jr. who basically were trying to prove that seed oils are much better for the heart than saturated fat. They did a big study between 1968 and 1973, didn’t like the results. They ultimately ended up getting published in ‘89. But they were so hell bent on their little pet peeve that saturated fat is bad, you got to replace it with these seed oils. Now we all know what happened with that, but there’s gotta be just reams and reams of data that is just flat out wrong. Grab that and try to replicate and then say, here’s why.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, totally, just check the code. Probably no one’s ever checked the code. Probably no one’s ever checked the data. Most publications, no one ever looks at it. No one checks it before it gets published. So if someone took a finding that a lot of other people are relying on and was just like, hey, I couldn’t get the same results from the code and the data, hey, maybe I did something wrong. That would be so useful. And it’s a way that anyone can participate. I mean, I had a high schooler reach out to me a year ago, was just like, hey, I saw your post about moral decline. I’m supposed to do an experiment or something for my high school class. I’d want to replicate it.

And I’m like, you don’t understand how useful this is because I as a researcher have to go through so many hoops if I want to survey high schoolers, anyone under 18. If you do this as a class project, you can ask people. Just asking someone who’s 17 is contributing to the scientific process. You can do it. And I think people don’t understand how low hanging the fruit is that they can pick and can contribute. And if you start doing that, there’s so few people doing it. Another thing people worry about is like, well, I’ll do it and no one will pay attention. So few people are doing it that it really will get to the people that it should get to quickly.

I think this is a promise of the Internet that did turn out that the Internet has a pretty efficient circulatory system, that it really does sort things toward the people who need to know about them. That so often I find someone who doesn’t seem to have many followers or have much attention, but is doing something really relevant to me. And I see them a couple of weeks after they start doing what they’re doing. How that happens, I don’t know, is part of the magic of the Internet. But you too, if you replicate something and just post it, it will get to the person who needs to get to. I mean you should just email it to them, but it will get to the right people very quickly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And my experience writing What Works on Wall Street, I had to walk the data, literally. And that introduced me to dirty data. And literally for several years, the folks at Compustat, which is the data set I used to write the book, said that I was their best error finder. And I’m like, at first I was like, oh cool. And then I was like, wait, what? Why am I your, why aren’t you having your people walk this data? And then once you see it, you can’t unsee it, right? Because if you would take one of the biggest stocks, Apple, okay, let’s look at what Bloomberg says the PE is. Let’s look at what Reuters says the PE is. Let’s look at, you know, and they’re different. And so I got really kind of freaked out.

And so my poor team, I sat on a multi year data cleansing operation. But it was very useful. And I’ve always, I love reading psychological research, for example. And there’s several books that I don’t know, 15 years ago I loved. And now I’m seeing that more than half the studies in those books don’t replicate. And so it’s a bit, I think it kind of ties into this everyone believing we’re in moral decline, right? I’m sure it’s apocryphal, but they said that one of the first Sumerian tablets that they translated said, you know, I’m not going to bother writing poetry. All the greatest poems have been written already. And so it seems to be part of our human nature, but then also back again. Human nature, right.

So David Bohm, I’m sure you’re familiar with him, well known physicist and you know, the author of the hidden variables thesis and everything. But when you look into that history, what you see is basically the movie Mean Girls playing out. So David Bohm had attended a communist meeting or two, and this is during the Red Scare. And so basically the government says to Oppenheimer, who was his mentor, no, you got to suppress whatever he’s doing. And Oppenheimer actually sent a telegram. I can’t remember exactly how he conveyed the message to his fellow researchers, but there was a line that said something like, “If we cannot disprove David’s thesis, we must suppress it.” That’s going on all the time. And by the way, that’s not now, that was a long time ago. And the same is true of nevertheless, it moves.

There are these competing power structures and there’s us, we humans. I don’t know, you’re probably too young to remember the Pogo cartoon by Walt Kelly, but one of his famous panels was, it’s Pogo sitting very contemplatively and saying, “We’ve met the enemy and it’s us.” I mean, how do we work that into the mix?

Adam Mastroianni: I mean, I think it’s a huge opportunity, right, that I think people think that science or discovery or innovation in general is hard in the way that mental math is hard. That you just, you gotta squeeze your brain really. And this is why you need to be super smart to do it. And it should really hurt. And actually that’s not the way that discoveries happen. A discovery is much more like seeing a color that no one’s ever seen before. It’s hard in that way. It’s not hard in a straining way. It’s hard in this is too weird kind of way.

And this always gives an advantage to outsiders and to people who don’t have a strong sense of identity in whatever field is going on, or they’re not well established in it because their brain isn’t thinking in the same groove as everybody else. So even if you don’t think you’re as smart as the smartest physicists, if you aren’t as established as the most established, there is still a chance that you are able to think a thought that they could not think because it is too strange to them. And it turns out that if you look closely enough at every major breakthrough, there is always someone, well credentialed who’s saying it can’t happen, it didn’t happen, it’s impossible, it’s stupid. And that person might ultimately be able to overpower you. They could really ruin your life.

But in the long run, they can’t stop the truth. And so hopefully, if you were trying to be an outsider doing science, that your story is a triumphant one rather than a tragic one. But I think if you find a new piece of truth, it is a triumph. What is for people in the establishment, I think a liability is for everybody outside of it an opportunity.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I agree. And yet when I hear things like the science is settled, I cringe. And because that is not the scientific method. That is scientism, trademark. Right? The descent into orthodoxy in the major scientific schools is just such a problem that I’ve taken to the point where I read something and I read a lot of the studies and everything else, but then I immediately thank God for AI, right? Because I put it in and I say, okay, so build the strongest steelman for this article. But then I also have it build the strongest steelman against. And is that something that could catch on? Is, we’re talking a moment ago about walking the data, right? Well, God, if AI had a great use case, that’s it, right?

Walk this data, find out where all of the anomalies are, find out the inconsistencies. Now you got to have a good data set, right? So you can’t be just using a commercially available large language model. You’ve got to train it and everything else. But I think that could unlock a ton of fascinating things and paths to go down.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think so too. I think that there’s a lot of promise in automating things that are a huge pain in the ass to do right now of just like, oh, yeah, okay, you want to replicate this data well, it’s labeled poorly. You got to do all this formatting. I think that could be really helpful. I think, you know, uncovering things that are not well connected to the literature, not well cited. I think that can be automated and made better. Where I worry about getting basically lock in and burn in AI tools is in this thought experiment. It’s just thinking of, if we had trained an LLM on all extant text up until the year 1550, would it then spit out Copernicus? Would it give us Galileo?

Or would it tell us, if you asked it, is it plausible that the sun might be at the center of the solar system? It would tell you, actually, many esteemed sages have thought about this and dismissed it for all of these very good reasons, which would be completely true. But the truest thing is the thing that wasn’t in, or the most important thing was not in the data set and in fact clashes with the data set, which is why I feel optimistic for the future of humans doing science. But I do think those humans will be well augmented by all of these tools that are going to allow them to do things much better, faster and better.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I love that example because that’s right. You know, I’m a fan of David Deutsch and The Beginning of Infinity, and he has that great line in the book, hey, what were the smartest people in the world in 1900 saying and writing about the Internet and about quantum physics? Nothing. Because all of the prior data did not suggest either. And I definitely think that is something that many, it’s easy for people, even smart people, to overlook that fact. Right. When you live in a dominant paradigm and all of the official evidence and all of the official writing and all of that says, yeah, no, no, the Earth is the center of the universe and you put that into a large language model, well, that’s what you’re going to get. But that’s the human spark that encourages me about these new tools. Right.

They give you a means, but you’ve still got to work on the meaning. Right. And I think the idea of the ability to get those new insights is definitely something you’re not going to probably get. You could get it maybe faster and maybe more complete with the help of these tools. But the tools themselves are probably not going to do it. One idea that we have here at OSV is we have our own AI lab because we want to avoid the lobotomized AIs. And one of the things that we’re going to do hopefully this year, but maybe next, because we’ve got a lot of things on our plate, is basically just have the AI just generate via negativa. In other words, hypotheses with null sets.

And one of the things that if you just look at very few people apply for a grant, I want to prove that this doesn’t work. So I think that we’re missing a lot via negativa. Right. And we would kind of generate all these and then populate them to an open source data set. Are there other things that these tools could be used for that would both encourage, but also assist these. This new. The new people in the Science House?

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. I mean, ideally, I don’t think they’re there now, but they could be that if these things could acquaint you with stranger ideas and experiences and if they could show you like, okay, look, what if we entertain the idea that rather than working in this paradigm, we work in this paradigm. Let me show you what things would get solved and what things would get unsolved. Let me show you the implications. This is really hard for people to do. And I think it would also be pretty hard for an AI to do. I think it would take a lot to get it to do it. But if you can induce in people what Thomas Kuhn had when he has this passage where he’s like, I finally understood what Aristotelian physics was. It clicked for me.

And I understood how the system is internally consistent and leads to non-trivial predictions that do happen to be true about the world and why people found it so compelling for so long. You know, he did that by steeping in the works of Aristotle for a long time. If there’s a way to speed run that to make it a little less mysterious and to do it in forward motion rather than reverse, I think that’d be really useful. I listened to your episode with Julian Gough, which I loved, and I thought it was one of the best examples of the paradigmatic. What it takes to think through a paradigm shift. And I think there’s a reason why the guy who’s doing this is weird. And I mean that in a lovable way. Right. That he’s not a professional physicist.

He was a rock guy. He wrote a poem, he writes children’s books. There’s a reason why he’s capable of thinking these thoughts in a way that all the pieces are there for all the professionals. And it really seems like the professionals have looked at his work and been like it could be. But why did it take that guy? It’s like, well, he was exposed to a pretty different training set. And is there a way that we could make more people like that by exposing them to experiences in more rapid fire succession? I don’t know if that’s possible. You really might just have to do a lot of drugs and be in a rock band and write poetry. I kind of want that to be true. But I’d also like more Julians in the world, so I’ll take a little bit of both.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Julian was one of our grantees. The first conversation I had with him, I just adored because he was coming. I’m a huge believer in cognitive diversity. Right. There’s that great quote. I can’t remember who it is, but there’s simply no way that you can ask a person to write a list out of all the things that would never occur to them, right?

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so by putting together very disparate minds, very different backgrounds, very different experiences, you can create some really incredible opportunities. And we’re actually seeing it play out in real time when we bring our grantees and fellows together. Very, very different skill sets, very different cognitive abilities. And one example was we had a woman working on a project where you could basically take your poop and put it in this home thing and analyze it. And it was kind of devoted for runners and athletes and things like that. But she sat with the editor in chief of our Infinite Books publisher and for an hour and a half he explained to her why all of her ways of trying to get it out into the world were wrong. And you know, he walked her through it.

Anyway, she came back to me and she’s like, that was the best hour and a half I have ever spent. I mean, she goes, because I didn’t think about any of the things that he brought up. And maybe that’s another element of your science house, right? You get very different thinkers and then get them to talk to each other.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. This has been the dream is that, you know, you have this thing running and then we invite some people from the local psych department. Right. If I’m running, we’re doing some kind of psychology and they come in and see that this is a different way that you can do things. And I would want my students to see that this is the established way of doing things. And I think there’s advantages to both. But think about this thing that you’ve just literally never done. And why have you never conceived of it? I always felt like at the time, this seems so normal. Now it seems so strange that when I was in psych departments, everybody only did psychology.

There was no, you know, I’m going home and I do a weird botany thing on the side. Or there’s no, oh, you know, I’ve been playing around with different ways of training neural nets. It’s like I do my one thing which is really strange. Why is the world organized such that there’s only these strands of knowledge that never touch each other? Do we not care about investigating the world in other ways? I understand we’re paid to do one particular thing, that’s fine. But are we not interested even in attempting to query the universe in other ways?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, and I think that is critical. I mean, you know, you look at Richard Feynman, bongos, the letters to his wife. I mean, he was a polymath. Claude Shannon, are you kidding me? He spent more of his time tinkering on other things and you know, the trumpet that had the flames come out of it and all of that. Oh, and by the way, information theory. And so I wonder about why that is. Newton, of course, the obvious example, he spent most of his time on alchemy and you know, he had a variety. And talk about weird. He was weird, right? And you just wonder, those people, we didn’t completely change the human condition here.

And was it kind of that transition to the man in the gray flannel suit in business and the man in the white coat in science and all of that, or I’m looking for a cause here.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, no, I think it is the professionalization of science that there’s a lot to be said for professionalization. Right? It raises the floor of what people do, but it also lowers the ceiling. It is a variance reducing measure, which is why professionalization makes a ton of sense for your dentist and makes no sense for your scientist. Really, I don’t need the best dentist in the world. I just need one who’s not going to harm me and is going to perform procedures competently. I do need the best scientists in the world because it’s only the very best work that ends up mattering. I would trade a thousand people who produce papers that never get cited for one Newton. There’s no conversion between them. And I think we lost the culture when we professionalized.

If you read the accounts of early Royal Society meetings, it’s like, we got some unicorn horn powder and we made a circle. We put a spider in the center to see what it would do, and the spider ran away. Here’s I found a piece of glowing meat. And all of these things are considered part of the world of natural philosophy. And some of them turned out to be a total waste of time and we forgot about them. That’s fine. Some of them turned out to be really important. And we didn’t forget about them because we kept using them. Now, there’s no feeling of that in professional science. It is embarrassing to do something that doesn’t work or is kind of far afield.

It would be, you know, you’d kind of be laughed out of your department if you came and you’re like, I’ve been trying to graft plants onto each other and make a new fruit. They’d go like, what are you doing? And I think when we created that culture, we lost the old one of like, look, it’s a big weird world. Let’s bump our heads against it from every direction possible to try to understand what’s going on with it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And that’s the crux of the matter, I think, is that when you just. What was the great quote? Specialization is for insects. A human being ought to be able to do all these things. And then his final line, specialization is for insects. And yet I think that gets wrapped up in what we’re talking about earlier with the whole CV issue. The, you know, you’ve got the stamp of approval. I’ve always said that a degree of any kind from any institution suggests that you have capabilities, but that’s all it does. It just suggests, work can suggest, and maybe even more profoundly that you have these capabilities. And it just seems to me that I’ve been stewing, how do you create a new group of polymaths who are a little nuts?

Because the need for being a little crazy. Right. Is really profound. And the fact that we have just abandoned that entirely. Now we’re doing our little part by trying to fund all these guys and women and I would love to see more of that, but you mentioned Kuhn. Right. And The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the structure. And you know, it wasn’t he who said it, but wasn’t it Max Planck? Science advances one funeral at a time. And so is there a catalyst, do you think, that you’re seeing right now that gives you hope that, hey, we can get back to this?

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I see the raw materials there. I see people like Julian, like Slime Mold Time Mold, that I think those people, there’s always a base number of people who are like that, who are produced just by the happenstance of the universe. If you want more of them, you have to concentrate them. And then they have to create the culture in which more people like that reproduce. I mean, another way of asking is it sounds like you had a radicalizing experience in your career that there is a version of you that could have been managing assets until the sunset, and that does not appear to be what you’re doing with the rest of your life. So what was it that did that for you? And how do you encapsulate that radicalizing experience and give it to other people?

Because some people, they can become this kind of person, but it needs to be unlocked. Only very few are born. I’m certainly not one of them. For me, I had the radicalizing experience of felt like I was being told to lie in academia that it’s like, if you want to get ahead, you must do this wrong thing. And eventually it felt to me like I’m being a Catholic asked to stick a crucifix up my ass. It’s like it’s sacred. I won’t do it. But it took someone like my friend Slime Mold Time Mold to be like, what if you did something else instead? What if you wrote a blog? I was like, no, that’s stupid. What if you did? I’m like, okay, fine. And then it unlocked it for me. And yeah, what was that for you?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So I think in my case is, for whatever reason, I had a predisposition to being extraordinarily anti-authoritarian. And so anyone telling me what I had to do, I was apt to do either nothing or exactly the opposite. I had a very strong rebel streak. And so I don’t know that it was a single event, but I think it was probably when I was in a class in high school and the professor was giving the party line. And I love history. And so this was a history class and I raised my hand and I said, yeah, but Professor X, that doesn’t jive at all with, you know, and then I gave all of the things and literally he just shut me down. But you know what?

As I’m telling you this story, I think there was an earlier event when I was in grade school, in second grade or third grade, we had this thing called the SRA reading program. And it was basically a box of cards, and you would read the story and you would turn it over and you would write out the answers to the five questions that they had. I love to read and everything. And I read it. I did it all the way through. And rather than send me to the library to read other stuff, they punished me. This is a Catholic grade school in the 60s, so, you know, they’ve moved on, I hope. But anyway, literally during the SRA hour, right, that all the kids were meant to work on SRA, they made me sit at my desk with my hands in a Christmas tree.

And I think that now that you’re bringing it out, I think that was the moment of radicalization. Like, fuck you. Are you kidding me? You and your correct answer machine, and you’re not going to send me to the library. And so I, but then I was lucky enough to have parents when I went home, and I was like, you know what they did to me? And my father just said, come here. And he walked me into the library and he put me in front of the Encyclopedia Britannica and he said, read that. So I think that was probably my moment.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, this would be a good symbol for a Science House kind of thing. Remember this?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And, or Zoltan, do you ever see Dude, Where’s My Car?

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so that’s one way, right? You get inaugurated to this old world by being abused by the previous one. But I think, what would it have looked like to have been in a school where, you know, you read the whole stack of cards and they go, great, now pick any book you want and do the same thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I would have been in heaven.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, that brings up the interesting question. Would I have turned out that way had they sent me to the library? Had they said, yeah, here, go. You’ve done this. Good for you. Go read some additional books. We want book reports from you. You know, my son always has this great saying, which I agree with, which is the result of good work is more work. Right. And that’s the way it should be. But in so many of these institutions and everything, you must follow the rules every time. And I’m not a good rule follower unless I make the rules.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it might have been whatever school you were in you were going to rebel against regardless. And I think there are people like that. Right. The world is always producing people who are rebelling against the way things are going right now. And but right now I think a lot of that potential is squandered that most people don’t end up doing what you did. Right. Most people just end up feeling resentful toward the systems as they white knuckle their way through them for the rest of their lives. And I don’t think it’d be that hard to build more places for the person like that who just needs a little bit of activation energy to be pried out of this way of doing things and to do things this other way instead.

But I think that mainly we don’t build places like that right now.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. But I think, and again, why I’m so intrigued by you and the way you present things. I am a lover of humor. Right. If you’re gonna tell the truth, you better be funny or they’ll fucking kill you.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And so I think that we are kind of at a moment when you look at kind of, let’s not be histrionic about it, but institutions ain’t doing great these days. And it seems that the zeitgeist is ready for these types of ideas, the Science House. And you could replicate this in a variety of ways and try different strategies in each house. And I think that’s probably got to come from private sources because the government ain’t going to do it. And you know, certain universities might be more open toward exploring these types of things, but certainly not the granddaddies and those that are at the top of the elite structure. They’re, as we said earlier, they’re going to want to perpetuate that structure and that rule for a long period of time.

But it does feel to me now like this, all of this could work in terms of getting more and more of these people. You know, maybe one way in is people do seem to love, psychology says now, most of it’s bullshit. And, but maybe that’s a great idea for a book or a podcast or whatever. Take something that is, you know, this is a truth with a capital T, and then just demolish it. Do you ever see the show by the magicians Penn and Teller called Bullshit?

Adam Mastroianni: No, I watched a bunch of Fool Us, which is another show they did, but I never saw that one. No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, it’s great. And maybe recreate that show because that’s what basically what they do, they basically take a widely accepted and disseminated across society idea and then. Or for example, the one that is popping in my mind is recycling. And they actually study recycling and find that actually it doesn’t work nearly the way everyone says that it works. And yet I wonder too, recycling, I recycle. I still do. Even after watching Bullshit. I feel like that maybe that’s back to the morality issue. I don’t know. But what other things are there from your point of view, that people are still doing, even though we have figured out doesn’t replicate. In fact, it goes the other way. Any ideas of those that you can share?

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly a bunch of social psychology. There’s sort of this idea of situationism that I think has come out of psychology from the past since really the 60s and 70s of tiny changes in people’s environment and tiny changes in the way that you stimulate them can cause these massive changes in the way that they act. And I don’t think that idea is completely false. It’s just that we thought this was way easier to do than it turned out to be. That it turns out people are not just plastic bags blown around in the wind by whatever experimenters say to them. People do have personalities, they do have preferences. And you can’t just reprogram them on a whim.

And so I think there’s a lot to be gained by reinvigorating the personality tradition that was lost basically because it couldn’t produce experiments that were as interesting and flashy as the social side could. At the same time, I’m like, there’s so much to tear down. But really the fun part is building the next thing, right? And it would be great to build a thing that can be usefully torn down. The last time that basically there was a whale fall in psychology when behaviorism.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, yeah, I was. As you were talking, I’m thinking, oh, my God, I got to go right to behaviorism.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah, so we’ve learned so much by what behaviorism got wrong that it did us a great service. And so the story for me isn’t like, oh, those guys were so stupid with their pigeons and their boxes and they thought that they could reprogram humans. It’s like they at least put out a claim, a really strong claim that wasn’t right. Parts of it were on the right track and how productive it was to push against it. That is, I think what we haven’t been doing in psychology since then is trying to state claims that are strong enough that even if they’re wrong, we’ll learn something useful by figuring out how they’re wrong. That’s what I wish we did more of.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, and I could not agree more. And behaviorism is the right example here because I totally agree with you. At least they had a thesis that they were very bold about. I can’t remember which researcher it was, but he was the guy who was like, give me 12 kids, you tell me which one you want to be a plumber. I’ll make that guy a plumber. I’ll make this guy a doctor. I’ll make this woman a lawyer. And like, bullshit. No, you won’t. But really useful because you get to say, at least they tried. Here’s why it failed. Maybe we should start looking into the fact that we aren’t born a blank slate. We are born. We’re fairly unique in many regards in terms of personality preferences, talents, skill sets, all of those things. And then go in that direction.

What’s something today? Behaviorism, mid 20th century. What’s something today that would be really fun. That was a useful idea that was tried. But then we’re like, that didn’t work out so well. But that we could also build up the other cases you’re advocating for.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think one of them is the whole tradition of heuristics and biases, which I think has a really useful thesis to it, which is humans have bounded rationality. We try to solve problems that were relevant in our evolutionary environment. We optimize for solving those kind of problems. If you’re optimizing for solving a problem in general, you’ll probably fail at solving that problem in certain specific situations. If we can evoke those situations, we might be able to back out the rule that people are using. All that’s great. And now we’ve kind of squeezed all the juice out of that orange, I think, and now we’re just listing out more and more of these ways. I’ve done this too. I’m guilty of this as well, of just adding more to the list.

And I think we are ripe for overturning this idea entirely of like, okay, we’re actually not going to be able to delineate the outlines of the mind by just focusing on the mistakes. We need to roll this back to what is the structure of the mind? What’s the mind made out of. And this is the thing that I’m most excited about in psychology right now is resurrecting a cybernetic view of it that I think a useful way of thinking about the mind is it’s a stack of control systems. Humans need to keep many things at the appropriate levels or else they die. We can’t get too hot or get too cold. We can’t get too full or too hungry. We need to spend time with other people, but we also need to get our work done. These are all control system problems.

And so what if a big chunk of our psychology is in fact these control systems? If you think that way, then you’re like, well, okay, how many are there? What are they controlling? What’s the sensitivity on the system? Which ones win out when they compete? How do they compete? What’s that system look like? This leads to, I think, really interesting questions that look very different from the way we do psychology right now. And it has, I think, two cool bonuses, which is if you could figure out the number of systems and the set points and sensitivities on that system, you get a theory of personality for free. Because now the difference between you and me is the difference between my set points and my sensitivities and yours. So that’s cool.

And you get a totally different way of thinking about mental illness that now disorders are malfunctions of some point in the system. Oh, it’s because your gain is off, that’s why this isn’t working. Or, oh, it’s because this reward system isn’t funneling into the correct chamber. That’s why you get multiple kinds of depression. Some people who are depressed don’t feel anything. Some people who are depressed feel really sad. These are obviously different malfunctions. So where in the control system did we lesion to cause that? That’s what I’m really fired up about these days. And I think it can come from realizing this old way of doing things is not getting us much closer to being able to describe how are people different from each other? Why do people feel really sad sometimes?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And you know, good old Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes. And I’ve been intrigued by that thesis for a long time that, yeah, we have a lot of subsystems. You know, we attempt to cohere, but lots of times we decohere. And maybe that’s because one of those subsystems is fighting with the other one or it’s off or it’s poorly calibrated, what have you. And I especially agree with you on the whole idea of the way to look at mental illness, the way to look at addiction, the way to look at a variety of these problems, that a lot of the old solutions work well enough, but they could work significantly better under a new thesis.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah, I think it should be of big concern to us that of all the disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, we have not cured one, we’ve not come close to curing one. Many of them we can treat a little bit and all of our effort goes into, you know, increasing the meta analytic effect size from, you know, 0.15 to 0.17. And I see why we’re doing that because it works a little bit. What if it could work a little bit better? It’s never going to work well enough that we can say we cured depression or we cured anxiety. That’s where I think our ambition should be. Just like, you know, we want to cure cancer, we cured smallpox, we did it. We understood mechanistically how it works and we exercised our human mastery over it.

I think we could do the same thing for disorders of the mind. It’s just that we don’t understand their structures well enough yet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: But also I think that there’s a lot of kind of the social effect. If you look at the DSM volume or the second edition of the DSM and you look at the fifth edition of the DSM, things that were considered absolutely psychological abnormalities are now considered normal. Is a lot of that being driven by underlying research or is a lot of that being driven by the way society and the mood in the air, so to speak, is influencing those editors of the DSM?

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think it’s much more the second than the first. Right. There’s no study that comes out that proves that same sex attraction is not pathological. It’s actually fine. It’s not a scientific claim, it’s a moral claim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.

Adam Mastroianni: But it intersects scientifically with the problem being that we define pathologies by their symptoms. And so we are never going to understand their structure. It’s like trying to organize all the coughing diseases together. It’s like if you’re like these things make you cough. Well, lung cancer makes you cough, choking makes you cough. These things have nothing in common. A cold makes you cough. Right now we’re doing the same thing with okay, these are all the disorders that make you feel bad. It’s like, well, and so we’re going to be putting things into and taking them out of the DSM as long as we are categorizing them by the symptoms that they have.

If we’re able to understand the structure, and instead we categorize them by, these are things that are caused by a malfunction of this part of the control system or of this system, now it’s like, well, all of those things can be cured in the same way through whatever treatment that restores that kind of functioning. And I think if we do that, we’re going to have a lot less of things flopping into and out of these diagnostic criteria, because it comes from looking at a blueprint rather than making a list that these things are fundamentally different intellectual projects.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And there’s also the problem of the medicalization of everything. Right. And there’s financial incentives. Right. When you think about bipolar and you know the history of that, they used to call it manic depressive and then they gave it a new name. Very few people know that it was a campaign by the pharmaceutical companies that came up with a solution for bipolar. And literally the pamphlets, the. All of that left in the doctor’s office, and if you look at a graph of people under such treatment, it goes exponential. And so I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to know whether their claims are correct or not. But I think I’m smart enough to know that when you incent something financially and you have advocacy groups out there selling it actively, you’re going to probably see more of it.

The intersections interest me because if you want to be incredibly cynical, you would say that if you’re a big pharmaceutical company, what you want is recurring revenue. So you’re not going to get recurring revenue if you literally solve a problem.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, exactly. This is why statins are a great drug. Right. They work somewhat. Take them for the rest of your life. That’s great. You took it once and your high blood pressure went away. Horrible.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. A friend of mine once gave a talk on free cures. And I wish that the list were longer. The main one that I remember is that there is a really effective cure for the hiccups, but there is no reason to commercialize this cure. It’s just a specific way of breathing that just you breathe. I can’t remember the exact steps, which is maybe a problem with it, but when I’ve had the hiccups before, I’ve remembered to look it up and I’ve done it and it’s worked 100% of the time of just you breathe in really deeply and then a little bit more and you hold it for a couple seconds and whatever. And that information is just out there. It’s really effective.

It’s not going to go anywhere because no one can make money off of selling that to people. There is actually a straw that you can buy that’s meant to help you do this. But you know, the problem unfortunately isn’t big enough to do it. But I think that’s. Those same dynamics play out where, you know, no one can make enough money off of the best thing for society, which is why it doesn’t happen.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And but I think you could also invert that and maybe you publish a book with all of those free cures, maybe you have a podcast in which you cover with an expert such as yourself one every week or whatever. There’s a lot of ways to get that information and monetize that are not necessarily, you know, a recurring customer taking your drug. But it’s always fascinated me because all of these things do intersect, right? And we, I might agree, economics is totally worthless by the way because literally most of the precepts are wrong. Most of the economic literature posits that we are 100% rational actors. I mean, ha ha, really. Have you ever met a human Mr. PhD in economics? Because I think you might be a little off on your axiom there.

But I wonder how much of that also is how much of the sort of collective wisdom. It’s, it’s not. I was thinking about you. You’re not an anti-institution guy, you’re a pro-discovery guy. And I might be a little more of an anti-institution guy, but I’m really a pro-discovery guy as well. And you wonder back to academia for a minute, why aren’t there courses aligned this way, right? The confluence and intersection of incentives of. That’s why this particular illness is now the illness du jour. That’s why this particular cure. You know, I’m being inarticulate, but do you understand?

Adam Mastroianni: No, I know what you mean. That the universities are organized in such a way that those questions get difficult to answer because they exist between the distinctions between the departments of the university. Why do those departments, why are they carved up that way? Part of it’s historical, part of it is this person who created this field hated this other person and that’s why they’re in different departments. They can’t be the same. But part of it too comes from the structure of the funding that the government especially expects to see things fall into certain silos and things that exist between them. It’s unclear who’s supposed to evaluate them. How do we know that your ideas work or that they’re going to work?

Which reinforces the idea of there is molecular biology and you look at the cells. But don’t think about anything. Don’t think about big things because you study only small things. You do the mind. Don’t think about society. All the minds, think about one at a time. And I think this is the downside of professionalization is that it creates these distinctions that people now really care about. Well, I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist, not a molecular biologist. And identities get caught up in these things. But these distinctions are given by the Dean and the grant review committee. Not by God and not by nature. But it’s hard to understand those things when they’re so intertwined with your own ego and your own training. Right.

You start to think of yourself as, I am this kind of person, I do this kind of thing. But that effect is no different than the person who was younger at the time, on the younger side in the Royal Society and coming in and being like, oh, I’m the kind of person who does this set of things and that set just happens to be broader. No one was really strongly articulating a view of the world that was just backed out from watching what other people were doing. And I think it’s the same thing, we’re just getting the opposite effect.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And I’ve always kind of had a problem with labels because they are sort of the. Don’t think about this. Once something gets put into a bin with a label on it, people are like, okay, that’s sorted, I don’t have to worry about that anymore. And back to the Royal Society, everyone was a natural philosopher, which is just such a better all encompassing. If you want to label somebody, I’d much rather label them a natural philosopher. By implication, it allows that they’re going to be interested in a variety of things because with the molecular biology example, for example, and all of the other specialization, what’s happening is you’re creating a monoculture and monocultures are very fragile. And it just sometimes seems to me like, you know, you do the Homer Simpson. Oh, why are these smart people being so dumb?

Adam Mastroianni: I’m writing a book right now, and the second chapter is about how we trust that other people basically know what they’re doing. And this is a limitation on the rate of discovery of just we never feel like we chose to trust this thing. This is what I think of as background bullshit. Everyone knows that there’s foreground bullshit that, yeah, I know the used car salesman is going to try to get me to do a certain thing. I know people can lie to me sometimes. All of these things are things I’m on the lookout for. But there is, there’s this bullshit beneath the surface that we never think about. You would never think that just no one would ever just make up their data from whole cloth and put it out there.

That wasn’t something that I thought to be on the lookout for. And I think this too, specialization, professionalization, becoming trained in a certain discipline makes certain ideas into background bullshit. That in psychology, one of them I think is that, you know, we can ask survey questions to people online and make extrapolations from that. Actually, there’s a lot that goes into, are those people real? Are they now just LLMs? What are they doing when they’re taking these surveys on their phones? Are they on the bus? What’s going on? Anyone outside of psychology, when you tell people about survey research like that, they’re always like, well, but obviously that’s a big problem. And I’m like, actually, we’ve sort of just decided that’s not a problem.

Not because it’s not a problem, but because it’ll be a problem for us if it were a problem. So that’s background bullshit for us. We don’t like to think about that. And I think every field has their versions of that that become impossible to see once you’re inside it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Which is part of the reasons why I always like taking somebody from a completely different field and showing them all that and saying, what do you think? Because, you know, I’m a fan of Terence McKenna and he had this great quote which is, “The truth does not require your participation in order to exist.” And yet we literally are unaware of our participation because it’s background. And just push it over here. Well I think that your idea behind the science house is great. What, if you got a big grant, what would you do with that? Would you do a science house?

Adam Mastroianni: I would work on this cybernetic psychology idea that I think that is, that’s where the more I dive into that. And this also comes from my friend Slime Mold Time Mold who have put out a whole book about what if we start from first principles thinking about what are the units and rules that make up the mind that I just think there’s so much there and it just wouldn’t be that hard to do something interesting even in a couple years, even with just a handful of people. That’s where I would go first. But I think the advantage of the science house model is that it’s an archipelago, right? That you can have five people in a house working on applying cybernetics to psychology.

And down the street there’s people doing weird botany and around the corner there’s people doing Julian’s thing in astrophysics and we can all get together for a barbecue. That we don’t have to inhabit some kind of bureaucratic superstructure. Maybe we share the same accountant, but we cross pollinate without having to recapitulate what a university is. The advantage of these is that they’re small and idiosyncratic and their success condition is that they do cool stuff, not that they grow. Growing is a failure condition for them. Unlike university where every additional billion dollars they get is a win condition for them. That’s a fail condition for a science house. You should just do mitosis and create another one. So I would start with cybernetic psychology because that’s what I know the best and what I’m most interested in.

But I maintain a list of people that, man, if I had the next chunk of money then I’d put this person in charge of it because they could do cool stuff. So.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Size the cost of that for me. How much would that cost?

Adam Mastroianni: You could endow a science house in perpetuity for $15 million. Now I’ve talked to a bunch of people who are like, don’t try the endowment thing, go another route. But if you think about buying the house makes it cheaper because now rather than paying each person to pay for their own housing, you solve the housing problem for everyone. So you pay the students a stipend. The advisor lives somewhere nearby. It’s not a cult, it’s not they don’t all get married. The students live in the house, the advisor lives somewhere else. I mean, it’s only as much as a cult as academia is. Right. It’s a cult to a good amount. So you could do it forever.

And that turns out rhetorically to be very useful because that’s what Harvard spends every year on postage is $15 million. So for what Harvard spends to mail its, you know, pamphlets and I imagine move, I don’t know, plasma things around, you could have one of these houses forever. Or, you know, you could run it for a couple years for less than that. For a few hundred thousand dollars. You could run it for a few years.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, if you decide to really go down that path, definitely get in touch with me because I would definitely participate in something like that because I think the more people like you that we have doing these things, you know, let a thousand science houses bloom. You know what I mean? And there’s going to be somebody whose idea about it’s pretty different than your own. Great. Let’s try that one too. Because it’s that kind of diversity and that. A little injection of. I hate to use the word chaos, but variability. Let’s use variability instead. I think that would be a great project to embark upon.

Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. I mean, the way I think of it is science is a strong link problem where we progress at the rate that we do our best work, rather than a weak link problem where we progress at the rate that we do the worst thing. Right. So food safety is a weak link problem where you really want to eliminate the things that are most harmful. Science has the opposite property, where the things that are most useless just fade away naturally with time. The things that are most useful actually have an outsized impact. And the way that you solve a strong link problem like that is by increasing variance, taking more weirder shots. Because if they end up to be total failures, they just don’t matter, people forget it and they move on. Just like Newton’s alchemy that didn’t make a big difference.

The laws of motion made a huge difference. So we wanted someone who’s doing way over here and way over there. Because it turns out that this one was great, this one wasn’t. Doesn’t matter. We got this one. That’s the entire idea behind them.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love it. Adam, this has been super fun for me to chat with you. Our podcast is, that’s the whole point of this podcast, by the way, as you know, it’s not scripted. We didn’t send you questions because I think that they can be great for when just having a great conversation that you discover what emerges as the various themes. So we also do have the final question though, which is we’re going to make you the emperor of the world. You cannot kill anyone. You cannot put anyone in a reeducation camp. Okay, can’t do those things.

But what we are going to do is we’re going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that everyone in the world, whenever their next morning is going to wake up in the morning and say, you know, I just had two of the greatest ideas. And I’m like, all the other times I’m going to actually act on these two things. What are you going to incept into the world’s population?

Adam Mastroianni: I think it’s be brave, be kind.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love both. I saw there’s a great quote about basically that unites brave and kind, which is something along the lines of only weak people are truly cruel. It takes bravery and all of that to be kind. So I love both of those. Adam, we will have all of the various details to how to find you in the show notes, but in the meantime, thank you so much. This was so much fun.

Adam Mastroianni: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Great to talk to you.

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1. Two Underrated Duvall Deep Cuts

When you’ve got The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, and Network at the top of your CV, it can be hard for your other achievements to get a look-in.

Such was my experience with Robert Duvall, an actor I’ve always admired but never truly appreciated. Following his passing on February 15, 2026, at age 95, I’ve been pouring one out for the great man by revisiting some of the hidden gems in his extensive filmography.

In The Outfit (1973), Duvall plays a small-time bank robber who accidentally takes a score on the mafia. When they kill his brother in retaliation, he ropes in his old partner for a revenge mission: a series of raids on mob businesses. A great character detail: Duvall’s protagonist, ever the pragmatist, has no interest in a John Wick-style bloodbath; he simply wants a compensatory payment of $250,000. Naturally, a bloodbath follows anyway.

This is unmistakably a product of the 1970s: stripped to the bone, gritty, packed with memorable characters and defined by a sober, unfussy craftsmanship that elevates its B-movie bones into something far richer.

Something similar can be said for James Gray’s We Own the Night (2007), a downbeat crime thriller in which Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix find themselves on opposite sides of the law. Phoenix runs a nightclub that has become a haven for the mob; his brother, Wahlberg, is a cop investigating it. Caught between those two worlds, Phoenix is forced to choose allegiances.

Duvall plays the morally righteous but emotionally suppressed patriarch, who is also, you guessed it, the deputy chief of police. The role could easily have curdled into a gruff bully, someone incapable of love. Instead, Duvall brings genuine humanity: a real sense of personal betrayal and deep hurt at the fractured relationship between his two boys.

Yes, it’s all a bit convoluted, but Gray pulls it off. He is a devoted student of the morally grey, conspiratorial realism of the 1970s, and brings an unjudgmental complexity to his characters that the material might not, in lesser hands, have earned. He also casually drops in one of the best car chases of the century. [Ed]

• 🎬 The Outfit (1973)

• 🎬 We Own the Night (2007)

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. Walter Lippmann: Who Supplies the Pictures in Your Head?

I spend time thinking about human nature and what it means to think critically. It’s incredibly helpful in military leadership, private equity (i.e., spending other people’s money), and storytelling. So I’ve come to appreciate how a book published in 1922, before television existed, can still illuminate algorithmic media consumption 100 years later.

Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) knows how you think because he spent his professional life studying how everyone thinks. In 1922, he gave the word “stereotype” its modern meaning: the simplified “pictures in our heads” that stand in for reality. He used it to describe something he’d watched reshape democracy during World War I.

Public Opinion is his account of how that process works at scale, and why it makes mass societies so vulnerable to propaganda. Lippmann’s core insight: we don’t react directly to the real environment, what he calls the “world outside.” We react to a representation of it, the “pseudo-environment,” built from fragments: news headlines, political speeches, films, textbooks, memes, clips, and the conversations of people who are also operating on their own pseudo-environments. These fragments assemble into a coherent picture that feels like reality, even when it is only a selective sketch.

Most of us will never personally witness the wars we have opinions about, the economic systems we debate, or the political actors we support or condemn. And yet these distant events are enough to blow up Thanksgiving tables across the country.

Journalists choose which events are worth reporting. Editors choose the language to describe them. Platforms decide what gets repeated and to whom. These pictures are constructed and curated for our consumption, and through repetition and familiarity — like a pop song — they begin to feel natural, inevitable, and true. By the time a narrative reaches you, it has already been selected, shaped, and amplified. The power is structural.

Understanding propaganda begins with a question:

Who supplied the pictures in your head? [Nick]

• 📗 Public Opinion: How People Decide; The Role of News, Propaganda and Manufactured Consent in Modern Democracy by Walter Lippmann

4. On Writing Well : A Tuning Fork for the Mind

William Zinsser’s On Writing Well is a book I return to about once a year, the way some people reread favorite novels. It’s ostensibly a guide to nonfiction writing, but it’s really a book about thinking clearly and communicating with intention.

First published in 1976, it grew out of a course Zinsser taught at Yale, where more than 170 students signed up for a class designed for 20. The English department reportedly wondered if perhaps they hadn’t been teaching writing at all. Zinsser, who had spent over a decade at the New York Herald Tribune as a feature writer, drama editor, and film critic before turning to freelance work for magazines like Life and the Saturday Evening Post, brought a practitioner’s eye to the classroom. He wasn’t interested in theory. He wanted to help students write about the world they were living in.

What I love most is how Zinsser insists that writing is meant to be heard, not just read. He wants you to listen to your sentences, to test them against the ear, to feel when a rhythm is off or a word lands wrong. This is advice that sounds simple until you try to follow it, and then you realize how much of what passes for good prose is actually dead on arrival. He also emphasizes warmth, the idea that the writer’s humanity should come through on the page, which serves as a corrective to the bloodless, institutional prose that dominates so much professional writing. His four principles are clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity.

Zinsser also does something rare for a writing guide: he shows you his own revisions. The book includes pages from his drafts, covered in cross-outs and scribbled corrections, and the effect is both humbling and liberating. Even Zinsser, one of the best practitioners of the craft, built his clean final pages atop a mountain of rough attempts. The lesson is that revision is where writing actually happens, and that the first draft is just permission to begin. He revised the book itself seven times over its 30-year run, adding examples, updating references, and refining his arguments. He was himself a work in progress; we all are.

The book has now sold over 1.5 million copies and remains a staple of college writing courses. Whether you’re just starting or are decades into a career, it stays useful. It’s a tuning fork for the ear and a reminder of what good writing feels like when it’s working. I’ve given away more copies than I can count. [Jimmy]

• 📘 On Writing Well by William Zinsser

5. The Power of One: The Tokyo Bookstore That Only Sells One Book

Since stumbling across it online, I’ve become a bit obsessed with “Morioka Shoten,” a tiny bookstore nestled in the heart of Tokyo. It struck me as either marketing suicide or an act of genius.

Founded in 2015 by veteran bookseller Yoshiyuki Morioka, this unusual store takes curation to its logical conclusion and sells exactly one book per week. Based on the philosophy of issatsu, isshitsu (single room, single book), the store selects one title and builds the entire space around it: photographs, objects, artworks, and events that extend the text into physical space. So, if Murakami’s 1Q84 were exhibited in this shop, you’d probably encounter a two-mooned-sky ceiling, an air chrysalis and maybe even Little People.

When Morioka Shoten featured Kenya Hara’s DRAW, the shop was filled with around sixty original sketches. For Tomonori Taniguchi’s Gorilla no Kutsuya, the exhibition included original picture-book art and woodblock prints.

What I liked most about the concept is that it treats attention as something to be protected, rather than captured. In a typical bookstore, thousands of titles compete for a reader’s curiosity. Morioka does the opposite; by reducing the choice to one, he turns browsing into something much richer and more immersive. In a world of abundance and frayed attention, this store relies on the power of one to break through the clutter.

The bookstore is housed in the historic Suzuki building, once home to the publisher Nippon Kobo; design studio Takram later helped reshape the space so it feels less like retail and more like a gallery devoted to literature. Sure enough, this bookstore has earned a spot on my Japan travel checklist! [Aashisha]

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Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction is out now. Jonathan Tepper grew up handing out leaflets to heroin addicts in Madrid’s most notorious drug slum. He watched his dearest friends die of AIDS. He lost his little brother. He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. This is his memoir. Described as “extraordinary” and “powerfully moving” by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Shooting Up is published by Infinite Books in the US. Buy the book.

Sunday, 8 March

Two thoughts from Frederick Forsyth

“A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it.”

“Almost all great fortunes are based upon one cracking good idea and the guts to go with it.”

Monday, 9 March

Two thoughts from Rolf Potts

“Time is the truest form of wealth. And the beauty is, we are all born equally rich in time.”

“Someday” (“someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that”) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”

Tuesday, 10 March

Two thoughts from Natasha Pulley

“Being mad isn’t an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness?”

“Stop looking at it as an impossible thing and start looking at it as a thing that must be done.”

Wednesday, 11 March

Two thoughts from Harold Pinter

“One’s life has many compartments.”

“There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.”

Thursday, 12 March

Two thoughts from Rebecca West

“The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”

“It is always one’s virtues and not one’s vices that precipitate one into disaster.”

Friday, 13 March

Two thoughts from Evelyn Waugh

“[Change is] the only evidence of life.”

“It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.”

Saturday, 14 March

Two thoughts from Oliver Goldsmith

“Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall.”

“Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.”

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Arkady is one of my favorite people to speak to - smart, wise and always surprising. I’ve shared some highlights of our conversation below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

— Jim

• Arkady’s deep tech venture fund: rpv global

• Arkady’s previous episode: Bridging Science & Entrepreneurship

Links

Highlights

What do you do on a Monday morning?

Arkady Kulik: Another question I ask is, "Assume you got acquired by whoever is the leader in your industry and you get a position of a chief scientific officer, chief technological officer, CEO, whatever. Would you take it?" They're like, "Yes." I'm like, "So why don't you just go and apply for a job, dude? Get your salary. In a couple of years, in the same time span of the next 10 years that you're going to battle every day for building your startup, you're going to have a very comfortable job and you can rise in the ranks in this corporation, become this C-level, whatever." And "I never thought about it." And I'm like, "Oh, great. Dodged the bullet, not going to invest."

Another thing that I often ask people, and I used to ask that when I was hiring people in my previous life as an entrepreneur, is "Assume you have a billion bucks in your bank account. You took care of all of your families, relatives, homes, cars, etc. You spent two, three years touring the globe, going on parties, flying jets, whatever you have in your system, all of your teenage and child fantasies. What do you do on a Monday morning?" And either a person has an answer and then you dig deeper, or they don't have an answer. That's the first time they think about it. So I'm trying to put people into theoretical situations when there are no constraints around them of that type or another type, or in other theoretical situations when there are too many constraints of a certain type. And that's how you start understanding how they act at the fringes, in extreme situations.

The Phone Curfew Success Predictor

Arkady Kulik: I can talk about specific rituals of specific people that predict their future success.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Please.

Arkady Kulik: In my opinion, what is really important is any kind of self-reflection. Whether it’s meditation, journaling or anything like that, or just staring at the wall, being in the silence is very important. Another really weird, probably the smallest one that I’ve seen is people who put their phone away at 7 or 8pm or 9pm. They just leave their phone in the office or whatever, in a separate room, and they don’t go to bed with the phone. And this is one of the things that weirdly enough is one of the biggest predictors of success. And I think the reason is that it shows the level of self-control that very few of us have.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Hello everyone, it’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops. I have a return guest and one of my favorite people, actually. I said to him before we began recording that I could just talk to him endlessly and it would end up not as a great podcast because it’s all kind of the inside baseball stuff. My guest is Arkady Kulik. Arkady, I love your path through life. You are a trained nuclear physicist, but your career path was really circuitous, let’s put it that way. You started out with a pay-what-you-want music distribution company, to booking global headliners, to running tour logistics for major movie studios, to being the founding partner at RPV, a deep tech venture fund. You’ve got a great quote that I love: civilization-level progress depends on truth-seeking mechanisms and forcing them into contact with the messy market. Arkady, welcome.

Arkady Kulik

Jim, thank you very much for having me again. It’s a pleasure to talk to you always. And by the way, I think inside baseball jokes is what our listeners could really benefit from. There’s so much grandstanding in this industry and there is so much noise, and very few people are actually talking for real about those things for whatever reasons. Thank you for having me, Jim. I appreciate the second invite.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So my first question is, on that career trajectory, what skill survived every jump?

Arkady Kulik

Resilience. Resilience and agility, which in my opinion is very close. Those things, because I don’t think resilience is about rigidity and just banging your head through the wall. It’s about seeing your goal clearly and finding the path to achieving this goal, this way or another way. And this is the thing that survives everything, not just my career. For example, my fat is very resilient, especially around my belly, more resilient than my eating habits, that’s for sure. But yeah, resilience is very important. If you’re an entrepreneur, you have to have it, otherwise you will never be successful. You have to be able to wake up and no matter what life throws at you, good and bad, you have to keep moving. And when I say good and bad, I mean sometimes really good things distract entrepreneurs. Firstborn child, this new relationship, this amazing trip, something else. There are things that keep our focus moving a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right. We need to keep it straight all the time.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I agree. Agility. I’m glad that you added that to resilience because Ken Stanley has that great book, Greatness Can’t Be Planned. And one of the things that he points out that I really deeply believe in is that you’ve got to be agile. In fact, it’s at the top of my list when I’m looking at founders because I saw a tweet not too long ago that was what percentage of companies got successful doing what their original idea was?

Arkady Kulik

Zero.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Closing in on zero. But what’s interesting to me is I do think deep tech is a really different skill set than a generalist venture capitalist. And let’s talk about that a bit. You’ve said the hardest problems are humans. I say that a lot too. So if you don’t mind, give me your deep tech human failure taxonomy. The top five interpersonal failures that can derail even great science. The science is great, but we’ve got the messy human and human OS hasn’t changed very much since the beginning of time.

Arkady Kulik

I would go on a limb and say that there is no difference between deep tech, software, restaurant entrepreneur. It’s all pretty much the same set of human problems. If we talk about human operating system, it’s pretty much the same stuff all the time. And we see it all over the place. Whatever type of business they build, if they build a small restaurant chain or even a single cafe in Pakistan, if they build an AI in California, or if they’re building some kind of government-related focused agency in France, the human mistakes are always going to be the same. And by the way, I would even go further and say that interpersonal relationships are prone to the same types of mistakes. People do the same stupid stuff at home with their spouses, people do the same stupid stuff with their friends, and so on and so forth. I don’t think there is any specific deep tech thing. Sure, there is a flavor of a little bit geekier people, a little bit more PhD, a little bit more introverted, but we’ve seen it all in software industry on its own. I would argue that a system administrator is an even more introverted person than a PhD. One of my good friends, Richard Silberstein, the head of our scientific board, he told me a joke: How do you tell an introvert from an extrovert at a scientific conference? An extrovert is looking at your shoes when he’s talking, not at his own. But you deal a lot with those types. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I do.

Arkady Kulik

Sure, maybe we talk about a little bit more geekier, intellectual, less sociable people in deep tech than say in movie business or media business. But I would say that they’re not that far from developers and from the coders that built all of the software that you and I are using on a daily basis. Just look at Steve Wozniak. If we have to go all the way back, same idea, same type of person. I think it boils down to a couple of things.

There is intrapersonal and interpersonal things. When it comes to intrapersonal, it is what I call founder’s agency. In my opinion, it’s the combination of three things: it is the resilience we talked about, it is their obsession or passion. Can they put their heart, not just their mind into it? Do they really obsess about the particular problem? And it is capacity. Can they figure it out? Because as much as I would love to figure out something in biology, I have zero training, I have zero understanding of that. I will never be a successful biotech founder. So it’s ability to wake up every day and go at it with passion, capacity. That would be intrapersonal, so something about that particular person. And if one of those things is missing, I would never make an investment in the first place. Sure, over time those things can fluctuate. Somebody can have a better day, a worse day, but usually they stay there. If they are there in the first place, they will stay there. Then we come to interpersonal things, how people communicate with other people. And this is much harder to gauge. You can play and act for a while that you know how to do those things. But when stress comes into the equation, and stress can come from personal life as well, people change and their behavior changes and they show their ugly sides in a pretty dramatic fashion. I would argue that the most important thing in business and in personal life is always communicate, always talk to each other, be open and be genuine, especially about the difficult problems. Whether it’s your wife, whether it’s your husband, whether it’s your business partner or your client, be ready and ask them for those hard conversations. Is it about me leaving my socks next to the bed or not washing the dishes in the evening? I want my wife to tell me that she’s pissed about that. I want her to share frustration. And if it’s a client who is not happy with my service, I want him to share his frustration. People who shy away from those conversations are the ones that fail at interpersonal things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Again, you and I agree so much. That was the one rule when I was still running O’Shaughnessy Asset Management: we over-communicate. When things are going against us, you do not—the urge with many people is when you’ve had a great quarter or a great year, you’re just calling all of your clients. And I would say, no, quite the opposite. Do not do that. The time that we’re going to over-communicate is when things are really shitty. And this comes into the problem of humans, right? A lot of people just feel so uncomfortable with that they’ll do almost anything to avoid it. And it’s human OS. I’ve been fascinated by human OS all my life. But if you lean into the things that you really just don’t want to do, oh my goodness, there’s so much alpha there. Because I remember during the great financial crisis, I was on the phone with one of our bigger clients, and he was unhappy with me, to say the least. But he closed off the conversation by saying, “You know what? You’re the only incoming call I got from one of our managers today.” And that just kind of blew me away. The ability to have difficult conversations is such an important aspect of running a business. And yet, and it’s so obvious, right, to me and to you. What else other than—and I love the way, by the way, that you extend it to not just business, to your wife, to your family, to all of those things. That kind of continuity just gets you in the habit of being like, okay, hit me. What have I done that’s wrong this time?

Arkady Kulik

I think it’s intellectually easy, but it’s emotionally very hard. A lot of people, especially subconsciously, try to shy away from those things because they don’t want to hurt somebody. Look, the whole idea about not responding to somebody’s email if the answer is no—come on, why not just say no? But no, “Well, if I say no, I will hurt their feelings.” If you don’t reply to me, you hurt my feelings even more. And you and I can go all the way down the rabbit hole of Marcus Aurelius and Gestalt therapy and talk about can anyone but you hurt your own feelings? Is it really on the external part to hurt you, or is it about your perception of what they did that hurts you? That’s a whole different layer of that whole conversation. In my opinion, it is very important to communicate openly and freely about everything with anyone, because otherwise we all become locked into the small shells of our own worlds and we drift apart and then they have to collide. And that’s when real pain happens, when people come into conversation with very different assumptions about all those things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I love that nod to the perception, right? That’s another thing that I look for when looking for partners, people to work with, people to invest in: are they outer-oriented or are they inner-oriented? And by that I mean, listen, read what they say. When something doesn’t go their way, does the finger point outward? I’m not terribly interested in that person, right? Because it’s always somebody else’s fault.

Arkady Kulik

There is a Russian musician called Noize MC, one of the best poets Russia has ever seen in the 21st century. He’s a hip-hop artist, but he has some really deep thinking embedded into his songs. And one of the things—of course, it’s not going to be poetic when I translate it—but one of the things he says is, “Defeat does not require any expense or any effort. All you have to do is say, ‘I’m not to blame.’” He’s like, that’s all you need. And it’s very easy. And that’s how people lose in life, whenever they try to externalize the responsibility for their own life. This is the moment everything starts breaking apart. At the end of the day, it’s you who made those choices, who made those decisions to end up in that point in life. And if you keep on delegating responsibility, yeah, this will all go downwards from there. I agree. But it’s hard, Jim. It is hard. It is hard to understand that it’s on us. It’s always on us. And it’s again, it’s not just business, personal life, your friends, your spouses, everything around you. It was your decision that put you in this position. And if this position is horrible, what was the famous saying by Churchill? “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, exactly.

Arkady Kulik

At some point you will get out of there. So that’s it. But unfortunately, it’s easy for you and me to say about that. Maybe because of the life experiences that shaped us, maybe because of how we got brought up, maybe because of all the scars that you and I have. It is much easier for some people, much harder for some other people to embed this thinking and embed this philosophy of life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

My son has a friend who has the dichotomy of looking at people pre-fall or post-fall. And by that he means what you just mentioned. We have a lot of scar tissue, you and me. And so we’re both post-fall. And one of the things that I have noticed about post-fall people is they don’t do that “not my fault, not my fault.” In fact, they’re quite the opposite. They’re like, okay, that’s on me. And every company that I’ve ever started—well, let me add an asterisk: not the first company. I had to learn it. I had to learn it at my first company.

Arkady Kulik

That hits a little close to home.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And boy, did I learn it because I got repeatedly punched in the face. And I was young, I was 28. I was arrogant. I was all of these things that needed to be beaten out of me. And I remember the first couple of times, I’m like, oh, that didn’t go the way I was planning.

Arkady Kulik

One of the most embarrassing moments of my life was when I showed my wife—we’ve been together for a while at that point—one of my emails to one of my employees when I was 22. I’m not going to go into details because I don’t want to embarrass myself again publicly, but I’ve shown the email to my wife and she’s like, “Oh my God, if I met you when you were 22, I would have never even went on a date with you, arrogant asshole.” Oh my God. Go ahead.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, yeah. But that’s actually an interesting theme. I mean, I love to build mental models of everything. And I wonder, is there some value to that initial arrogance, right? Is there some value to “You know what, I’m gonna change the world”? And yeah, I think so. But then it really requires getting punched repeatedly in the face and learning some humility.

Arkady Kulik

I think, yes, I agree. And yeah, it’s an interesting way how you see how people go arrogant, humble, more arrogant, more humble. And then some of them just go into the stratosphere of arrogance. We see those examples every day in the media, for example. And some people never learn humility. Some people never learn to understand how their ego can control them. This is a sad story. It’s like with addicts, whether it’s gambling or alcohol, doesn’t matter. Any kind of—whenever one function of your psyche controls the whole behavior, that person is a slave of that function. Again, whether it’s ego or addiction. I had not even a friend, an acquaintance, who told me that he had a sex addiction. And I was like, that’s not a thing. That’s something invented by rich folks to explain themselves away in the court of law during the divorce proceedings. He’s like, “No, you don’t get it. I can see a girl’s wrist on a steering wheel of a car, and I will cancel all of my meetings until I get a date with her.” I’m like, “You serious?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s a real thing.” But unfortunately, when a single function controls the person, I think that it’s a really lopsided version of a person. I would never invest in a founder like that, for example.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, but how do you ferret those things out when you’re chatting with a potential founder? Let’s go through some of the questions that you ask to see, oh, this guy might be brilliant, but he’s blocking traffic on I-95, and I don’t want to invest in that guy.

Arkady Kulik

Well, it’s a combination of things, right? I don’t necessarily care when it comes to founders if they have that or other preferences and how they spend their time. But here are a couple of questions that I usually ask. I would ask the founder, “How do you deal with stress?” I would always get, “I go exercise, I go meditate, I go blah, blah.” I’m like, “Great. And when all of that fails, what happens?” And then you see that, like, “Oh, damn, I got all of my lies in front of me already headed out. What do I say now?” And their eyes are darting left, right, left, right. And you can see how they think about it. Some of them actually tell me the truth at that point. One of the best answers I’ve ever heard was, “I talk to my mom.” That makes sense. When I’m losing my shit, when I have no idea how to deal with my own internal struggles, I call my mom. That’s real. Somebody told me, “I play video games for a couple of hours.” That’s also real. Is it a good way to deal with stress? I don’t know. And maybe for that person it helps, but I’m not going to judge. That’s completely fine. Somebody told me, “If nothing helps, I’m just going to open a bottle of wine and have a silent evening in front of a fireplace.” Is it good for his health? Maybe not. Does it help him to get through the day? It does. That’s one question I ask. Another question I ask is, “Assume you got acquired by whoever is the leader in your industry and you get a position of a chief scientific officer, chief technological officer, CEO, whatever. Would you take it?” They’re like, “Yes.” I’m like, “So why don’t you just go and apply for a job, dude? Get your salary. In a couple of years, in the same time span of the next 10 years that you’re going to battle every day for building your startup, you’re going to have a very comfortable job and you can rise in the ranks in this corporation, become this C-level, whatever.” And “I never thought about it.” And I’m like, “Oh, great. Dodged the bullet, not going to invest.” Another thing that I often ask people, and I used to ask that when I was hiring people in my previous life as an entrepreneur, is “Assume you have a billion bucks in your bank account. You took care of all of your families, relatives, homes, cars, etc. You spent two, three years touring the globe, going on parties, flying jets, whatever you have in your system, all of your teenage and child fantasies. What do you do on a Monday morning?” And either a person has an answer and then you dig deeper, or they don’t have an answer. That’s the first time they think about it. So I’m trying to put people into theoretical situations when there are no constraints around them of that type or another type, or in other theoretical situations when there are too many constraints of a certain type. And that’s how you start understanding how they act at the fringes, in extreme situations. Does it give you a full picture? Of course not. You will never know the true color of a person until you’ve worked with them for some time. And both you and I have heard stories of people building multiple companies together for 30 years plus and then having a falling out. Things happen. Not a single human is a static system. So as much as I want to say that I’ve got some answers, there are only partial answers, always. You know that you’ve been doing investment for a while. There is never a whole picture.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, and that was the thing that intrigued me so much and got me obsessed with markets, right? You’re never getting the full picture. You have to learn to infer. You’ve got to learn that it’s a base rate game. You’re going to be wrong a great deal of the time. And mistakes are portals of opportunity, in my opinion. But again, that goes back to pre-fall and post-fall because the underlying process is often just incredibly boring and dull. In other words, okay, what’s the base rate? How often did this occur? What’s my base rate? Okay, let’s see. Everything I’m doing—every choice we make really is a bet. It’s a bet on some outcome. And if my friend Annie Duke calls people who focus on just the outcome of a single bet—she calls it “resulting.” In other words, let’s say we’ll just make it pure gambling, right? So you and I have money together and we bet on landing in the roulette wheel of red two. Okay. And it lands in red three. People who are what Annie calls “resulters” say, “Oh, our entire strategy was wrong from that one spin of the wheel.” But that’s a silly example, but it really underlines the fact that people do it. It’s much more difficult to see when it gets much more complex. But people do that and take that attitude far more often than one would expect.

Arkady Kulik

Yes. One of my venture partners and a good friend, PJ Jarvis, he keeps on drilling a hole in my skull every time about Bayesian versus frequentist statistics. He’s like, “You need to think about your confidence level and your level of your belief, not about the statistical probability of something happening.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” And in investment, that’s even more true. And the idea of—I would, to defend those guys, to try to make, to try to learn something from just one shot—the idea is good. Try to accelerate your learning cycle. Try to condense your learning cycle. The underlying core idea is a good idea. They just do it wrong. It’s like assuming that I can have a physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger by doing one squat and one chest pump and that’s it. I’m going to look like Arnold. That’s not how it works. But if it did and I could just do one squat in my life and have an amazing physique of my lower body, I would definitely do it. But that’s just not how these things work in life. Yeah, you probably want to accelerate your learning cycles. It’s just not the way to do it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Totally agree. And another one that I’ve noticed, I’d be curious as to your reaction, is time preferences. So time preferences, if you have a very long time preference, right? I used to say continually my view, my time horizon is infinite. And by that I mean I have children, grandchildren, hopefully great-grandchildren. I have organizations that I would like to support, etc. So my time preference is not literally but figuratively infinite. Hyperbolic discounting is a real problem in public market investing, but I think it’s a problem in startups, in all areas of life. How do you look for some potential founders? How do you calibrate their time preference methodology?

Arkady Kulik

I think I should embed this as an explicit thing. I don’t think I have it explicitly done right now. I don’t think I ask people about their time preference. I would also go on a little bit of a stretch here and say that there are some founders who win because of a very short-term preference and some founders who win because of a very long time preference. It depends on how their psyche works. For somebody, a very clear goal—get this pilot, get this client—they work in a very sprint-oriented manner, but they recharge every week or every month and then they sprint again and sprint again, and that’s how they win. And we know about organizations—say, I would argue that Google was an organization like that. They’ve tried so many products over their lifetime, so many of them failed, but some of them stuck and some of them are the best in the market right now. And then we have organizations like Amazon, which is a marathon runner with a very long time horizon. “Okay, if we can sell books, we can sell anything.” And then they expanded and expanded and now they do everything. They have pharmacy, they have medical services, they have so many different things. AWS on its own. I think that it’s a good idea for me to add time preference as an explicit metric, but I never thought about that when I evaluated founders. Jim, thank you for showing me a blind spot. Appreciate you, man.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Of course. That kind of leads me to a question I’ve always—and I don’t know that it’s specific to deep tech. I think it’s probably more generalized. But what are some things you’ve noticed where they’re basically lying but they’re not lying to you, they’re lying to themselves?

Arkady Kulik

That’s the hardest part of them all. And that’s the hardest for two very different reasons. It is the hardest one to distinguish because people can really say something with a lot of belief. And when you recognize that, it is the hardest one emotionally because you’re like, “You’re such a good man, you’re such a smart person. Why do you have to live in this world full of illusions?” It’s emotionally tough when you see somebody talented apply themselves into a wrong direction just because they had a couple of assumptions figured out in the wrong way. This to me is those repeated questions, layered questions. The one I’ve shared with you before is “How do you deal with stress?” When they’re like “blah, blah,” “Okay, when all of that fails, what do you do next?” This is one of those things. Another tool is we focus very much on the founder’s motivation. One of the lessons learned is we have one of our portfolio companies—the one that I promise not to mention by name—fantastic founders, they will be successful, but it’s never going to be a VC-scale business. It’s going to be a lifestyle business for those entrepreneurs. So probably our investment is not going to do that well, if at all. But the point is now I am asking about founders’ ambitions three times in the process: very early on, in a very kind of short way, 30 seconds. At some point some of my partners will ask them about ambition in a very different way, different phrase, and maybe spend 10 minutes on that. And then the very last point before we make an investment, when I meet them in person, I would talk about their life goals and their ambitions, not necessarily tied to the company. But in general I would say things like, “Assume everything with this company was successful. Assume it is whether public or acquired, you’ve made it. What happens in your life next? How do you change after that happened? Not your company, not your family, how will yourself change?” And those, I think it’s all variations of layered questions. Keep on digging a little bit deeper with every iteration and try to understand their motivation deeply.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so what answers are you like, “I might be onto something here”?

Arkady Kulik

I’m not going to tell you, otherwise everybody’s going to give me those answers. No, Jim, that’s not true. I will tell you honest answers. Honest answers. The way I see it, everybody’s talking product-market fit or founder-market fit is the most important thing. When we talk about the person not lying to themselves, when we talk about a person being able to be honest with themselves and looking for honest answers. I genuinely invested in the guy who told me, “I pop a bottle of wine when I’m stressed.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s fair. You do damage your health a little bit.” But have I never drank an alcoholic drink in my life? No, I had. Was I blackout drunk when I was 18? Yes, I was. More than once?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Who wasn’t?

Arkady Kulik

Why would I be a moral judge? I would have put myself on some very wrong moral high ground, and “Tomorrow, don’t drink alcohol, blah, blah.” It’s just stupid. Another guy who I also invested in, he’s like, “I play video games with my friends when I’m stressed out. I can go on like four or five hours binge playing with my friends, multiplayer.” I’m like, “Yeah, I get that. I do the same stuff. There is nothing wrong with that.” Maybe somebody would also say, “You’re a grown man. You play video games. How dare you.” The point is, if they’re honest with themselves, that’s what I’m looking for. And for different people, honesty would take different forms. Just to wrap up my point about founder-market fit, there is the founder fit. It’s a weird way to put it, but my wife and I were talking about that. You know how they all say, “Be aligned with your true self.” This whole spiritual/psychological/esoteric knowledge. “Be true to your ideal self. Be the best version of yourself.” Whatever words you put around it, if you’re genuine with yourself, then you will succeed. It doesn’t mean that it will be without problems. But my wife and I were having a dinner and she’s like, “I realize what happens when you’re honest with yourself.” I’m like, “What?” She’s like, “Suffering goes away. Pain stays. Stress stays. External irritating moments, they all stay. It’s not that just life becomes a miracle and then, you know, butterflies in a Disney movie. No, but your suffering comes from your resistance of those moments when yourself does not accept what’s happening with your life. That’s where suffering blooms. That’s when you start to really hate your life.” So when people know themselves, when people understand themselves, there is no suffering. There is acceptance of their own responsibility, of external circumstances, of their ability to change what’s going on. That’s the most important part.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Your wife is extremely wise because that just rings so true to me. Most suffering comes from attachments. And if those attachments are to how badly you feel about this particular outcome, the “why me,” all of that, you don’t understand that you are literally programming yourself. There’s a great line: “The happy man lives in a happy world. The sad man lives in a sad world. The angry man lives in an angry world.” And that’s because they are attached to those things. And the way your wife put it just really nails it so succinctly because it is so difficult to get people to understand that simple truth. And I like what you appended to it. Suffering goes away. The problems don’t go away. The stress doesn’t go away. None of that changes. But your whole attitude, the way you attack it, the way you either correct it or say, okay, I’ve got to learn from this particular mistake, etc. That changes dramatically.

Arkady Kulik

Yes, 100%. Now, the whole idea of psychology, the whole idea of, say, Buddhism or whatever other—Marcus Aurelius mentioned before—all of them are talking about pretty much the same idea. Accept your responsibility. Accept who you are, accept where you are in life and start acting consciously towards the direction you’re looking forward to. I was surprised to learn there is a thing called ACT. It’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It’s this new wave of therapy. I was never a client or anything of that particular, but I read about it online. I was like, that’s so powerful. Accept your feelings and emotions in a moment, commit to your values, and take action in the direction of your values. The problem with that, Jim, is that before people can act in that way, before people can do it, they either have to experience the fall, they either have to have a lot of scar tissue, or they should be very lucky with how they were brought up in the first place. And the society and the civilization we live in today does not promote that thinking. It’s so much easier to blame somebody else. It’s so much easier to point fingers. It’s just easier on every single level not to accept responsibility for your life. And this is something, if I see behaviors like that, this is a hard pass for me immediately on any founder. And if I ask questions—I would ask them to tell about a story of how they were not happy in a relationship or how things went with their previous boss—the moment I see this behavior, the finger-pointing, that’s when my ears go very high and I’m like, “What’s going on here?”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Learned helplessness is maybe one of the most toxic mind viruses that has been making the rounds in Western civilization for the last 20, 30 years. And the results are very predictable.

Arkady Kulik

Yeah. Yeah. And we see it every day in the media today. Yeah, unfortunately.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, that’s very sad.

Arkady Kulik

I agree. That’s something where I am losing my stuff with my brother. I’m losing my composure sometimes with him. He’s 23 years old and I’m like, “Oh dude, you’re old enough to start understanding those things. Come on.” I love him dearly. He’s an amazing person. It’s just sometimes he would say things and my eyes go wild. Like, “Seriously?” But then I remember myself at his age. Like, “Yeah, seriously. Not surprising at all.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It is always helpful. I’ve been a journal keeper all my adult life. Actually, I started as a teen and oh my God, I’m so happy I did that because I can look back and I just laugh.

Arkady Kulik

I bet you didn’t laugh at the moments when you were writing those things down in a very angry manner.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Very insightful on your part. All right, here’s one that I was thinking about for you specifically. You’ve got no pitch deck. Okay, I’m going to give you three things. I’m going to give you the lab notebook, I’m going to give you their hiring plan, and I’m going to give you three customer emails. What would you be able to infer from those three things?

Arkady Kulik

I assume I cannot ask for any follow-ups. I cannot ask to talk to a customer. Nothing, right? I can only get those deliverables. I would not make an investment. I need to see the people. That’s my honest answer, Jim. I need to talk to people. So based on paperwork I would never make an investment in the first place. But if you ask me what I would be interested in the most: customer interviews, then the hiring plan. And I don’t care about lab notes. Back to your original point of how many companies succeeded exactly in the direction they wanted to succeed in the first place. The lab notes is just an artifact of their original idea that will be pivoted many times before they actually succeed. So I don’t care for lab notes at all as long as there is no—I would skim through that to make sure there is no crazy statements like “fusion reactor the size of your tabletop” or something that breaks the second law of thermodynamics. So as long as there is no absolute nonsense there, I would probably not even pay attention to that. I care about customers and I care about hiring plan. Because again, business is a system of humans interacting with other humans, and customers is external interaction and hiring plan is internal interaction. Every time I hire somebody, I create an individual career plan for the person for at least the next three years. So that person and I have a clear set of goals, mutual goals on how to make the person successful in my company and how to make their life as stressless as possible. Because they know they’re going to get a salary bump, they’re going to get a bonus bump, they’re going to get some additional maybe equity or something else, as long as they hit their goals. And their life becomes so much less anxious, so much less ambiguous. They can just focus on delivering on a daily basis and they know how they will progress. So I would care about customer interviews and hiring plan. That’s it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Interesting. Another thing that we agree on is truth-seeking mechanisms, right? Rituals, routines, etc. What’s the smallest daily ritual you’ve seen in a lab or a team that predicts integrity under pressure?

Arkady Kulik

I don’t know if I can mention anything about the team dynamics, but I can talk about specific rituals of specific people that predict their future success.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Please.

Arkady Kulik

In my opinion, what is really important is any kind of self-reflection. Whether it’s meditation, journaling or anything like that, or just staring at the wall, being in the silence is very important. Another really weird, probably the smallest one that I’ve seen is people who put their phone away at 7 or 8pm or 9pm. They just leave their phone in the office or whatever, in a separate room, and they don’t go to bed with the phone. And this is one of the things that weirdly enough is one of the biggest predictors of success. And I think the reason is that it shows the level of self-control that very few of us have. In terms of the team dynamics, I’m not involved in day-to-day businesses of my operating companies so I wouldn’t know in the first place. And going and telling you about how my company succeeded because of the things that I embedded into my companies is a little bit too self-promoting and egotistical. And I also think it’s bad advice. It’s the survivor’s bias. It’s like this famous picture with a plane full of bullet holes and how they try to armor those bullet holes which they should never have done. It’s the same thing here. Different teams through different times will have different rituals that work. For somebody, it would be a daily standup meeting to review the sprint. For somebody, it would be annual strategy sessions. It depends on the manager, on the team, on the customers and the market. So many things. Self-control, the ability to reflect, the ability to do it on a daily basis to get—what was that? Also, it’s a meme. It’s like if you improve by 1% every day, you get a huge outcome by the end of the year. If you degrade by 1% every day, you go very, very low. Just tiny habits of making yourself better. Your cognition, your psychology, your empathy, whatever you’re working on today, your belly fat, cortisol secretion. You see, this is a pain point for me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I can see that. But, you know, again, I agree through lots of experiences and watching people, particularly under stress, right? I had numerous people that had worked for me over the years that—and I’m not going to name anyone here—but I had two really interesting examples. One guy was absolutely not from central casting for his particular job, and people would ask me about it and I would say, “Watch him and how he operates in the 10% of the most stressful times and you will understand why I love working with him.” Right? In other words, a lot of people, a lot of times people just look at the surface of things and that’s a really bad way to make decisions. I had another colleague who was literally from central casting—looked the part, walked the walk, talked the talk—but then under extreme stress, collapsed. And there’s an odd thing for a quant like me to say, but intuition becomes very important. And by that I mean I’m not just talking about, “Ooh, I have this intuition.” No, intuition gets better and better through repeated exposure to the pattern, right? In other words, an imbued intuition. You’ve seen the same thing so many times, all of a sudden your spidey senses start activating. And so now, very typical of a quant: How do I create an algorithm of this?

Arkady Kulik

What about my map, Jim?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, exactly.

Arkady Kulik

Can I pause here for a second? Because I think it’s a very important thing. I want to add: people use intuition and gut feeling interchangeably, which I think is a big cognitive fallacy. Intuition is exactly what you said. It’s a very heady thing. It’s very much in your head. “I’ve seen the same pattern.” Chess helps you develop your pattern recognition. Chess is not about intelligence. Chess is purely about pattern recognition. And that’s how you can train your intuition. Gut feeling is something very instinctual. It’s a body feeling. That’s something that actually comes from your guts and goes up. Intuition goes from up to down. It’s a very important, distinct thing. And people don’t distinguish them. And that’s something I also talk to my founders a lot. Listen to your body, listen to your brain. Those are very different things. And sometimes they will be contradicting. One of my other venture partners, he says, “A full-body yes is when we do an investment.” It’s a very good thing. My mind, my heart, and my guts all point in the same direction. And once there is a conflict, when there is a contradiction, that’s when you should pay more attention than usual. Because that’s usually when something is off. It can be off in a good way or off in a bad way, but something is off at that point. I just wanted to make this distinction. That’s it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That is an excellent distinction. And I do something similar. When the gut and the head don’t agree, that’s when I really start writing. Because I think of writing as thinking. A lot of people don’t agree with that. I passionately believe it. How do you know until you write out your idea? You don’t know if your idea is any good or not. The need to externalize it. And I’m very old school in that.

Arkady Kulik

I actually wanted to ask you about that. Do you mean typing or you mean writing with a hand?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, yeah, writing.

Arkady Kulik

That’s a different skill. It’s a different thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s completely different. And so if you came into my office here, you would just find pens galore and notebooks everywhere. Because it is so different. It’s a different part of our brain. It’s a different way of doing things. Then once I’ve written it, once I’ve physically written it with my hand, I’ll look and I’ll be like, “I am such a dumbass,” or “Oh, there’s something here.” Then I’ll move it over and type it out and do that type of stuff. But I always start with writing. And I sometimes feel like the old man shouts at clouds when I’m talking to younger founders, right? Because they look at me like I’m insane. They’re like, “Okay, grandpa.” But, you know, “We keep all our notes in,” fill in the blank, right? Whatever the computerized note-taking system is.

Arkady Kulik

What’s next? Are you going to teach us how to use a payphone? I mean, there are certain things and there is a lot of, by the way, there is a lot of neuroscience behind the micro motor functions of your hands. There are some weird ideas that if you teach yourself how to write with another hand and you write the same thing with different—never tried it. Never. So I’m not an experienced practitioner of that. I’ve heard people who do that as well. They would try to write the same thing with different hands because apparently it activates different hemispheres of your brain and you can have different experiences when you write it out. It might be an overkill, especially for those younger founders. But yeah, I think whatever helps. But look, Jim, that’s exactly the example of when you ask me what’s the right answer? The right answer is honest answer, the one that works for you. For somebody else it will be walking and dictating stuff and then listening to them talking about that. But for you, writing down makes it easier. That’s a fantastic example of when I would say, “Yeah, let’s proceed because you’re genuine.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I don’t even know how to put this. I’m left-handed, right? So the joke is I’m the only one in my right mind. But I think that’s also part of it with me. Again, because the world conspires against me. I’m a left-hander and I write on a notebook this way. And so I’m always scraping my hand against the metal. But I like the way you react to that because I agree with you for other people. And that was also a big part of my early—when I was starting my first company, I would write everything out. My grandfather called it “premeditating.” And it’s basically what he taught me how to do was: here’s what I want. Here’s what happens if I get it, good and bad. Here’s what happens if I don’t get it, good and bad. It’s the dual nature, right? It forces you into a completely different train of thought than “No, I know I’m going to get it. I just know I’m going to get it.” And you also don’t think about the externalities of, well, a lot of bad might happen in your life if you actually get that. That kind of ties in with your question about “You’ve got a billion dollars in the bank, what are you going to do the next day?” Right? Your company’s gone, all of that’s gone. You’ve spent your—I love your example—you’ve fulfilled all of your teenage fantasies, what’s next?

Arkady Kulik

They are important, though. Those are the things that very many people are optimizing for without even understanding that’s what they’re optimizing for. And how many stories—in every single culture, whatever you take, Indian culture, Chinese, Western culture—in every single culture, there are stories of a person achieving their goal and understanding that now their life is empty. And maybe this goal was never their goal. It was something imposed on them by their family, by their associates, whatever, but it was never their goal. And now they’re completely lost, and they have all of this money in this beautiful house and whatever else they want in their lives—cars, yachts, harem, whatever—and they feel nothing. And they’re absolutely empty inside. And there is a reason why this is a transcendent story through all the cultures, because it’s very human. It’s more biological than even culturally imposed. So I think it’s important to understand why you live your life and why you go there, why you do anything in the first place. And usually when I start talking about this stuff, my friends are like, “Arkady, come on, that’s too complicated.” So I’m just gonna stop myself right now. But I do have exercises that I give my friends if they’re interested in how to dig deeper, how to go through those layers of fake meanings, how to actually get to your own core. And many people have very different things that they expected to hear there in their heart and in the very deep layers of their motivation. And they would come out of those exercises with big eyes and like, “Oh my God, never thought about that. Gosh, I should probably go and rethink my whole life.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

There’s a great—and I’m paraphrasing it—but Jed McKenna has this great quote where he says, he quotes Socrates saying “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And he goes, “I know most people are terrified to even examine that statement.”

Arkady Kulik

I have a horrible saying, which I think might have a ring of arrogance to that. But I genuinely, I honestly feel like that. And that’s my phrase, I didn’t read it anywhere: “Life devoid of meaning seeks distractions.” And to me, this is very important, because whenever I feel that I want to spend a few more minutes on Reddit, or I want to spend 10 minutes watching some YouTube video, or I want to do something that is a clear distraction, there is no value. I’m not talking about walking a dog, for example, or spending a night with my friends. Those are different things. But when I really clearly want to get distracted. Or maybe pop this bottle of wine, right? And kind of go into this spotlight of mine for a while. I’m like, “Ooh, Arkady. That’s a red flag. What’s going on? Why do you want to get distracted? Is it that the task you need to do is complicated and you don’t feel great about it? Is it that you feel that what you’re doing right now is meaningless?” I train my brain to treat those signals as a red flag. “Oh, I want to get distracted. What’s going on? What’s going on? Stop, pause, breathe. Figure out.” And maybe sometimes get distracted. Maybe you’re just stressed. Maybe you need some meaningless time in your life. Half an hour of just pure stupidity. And then I would take some random, boring—no, not boring—random poorly written sci-fi book. Not Asimov, not classics, but some kind of whatever. One of those modern books when there is no meaning, like, blah, blah. Ten pages later, I’m like, “Okay, back to business.” But that’s very true. People don’t want to examine their lives. They don’t want to examine themselves. It’s painful, Jim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it’s also, you know, people who desire power over other people, not influence—power. They’re very different. They have almost perfected the—I always think of The Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” And that’s the person you need to pay attention to, because my first job when I was a teenager was I was a professional magician. I loved magic. Other people had Farrah Fawcett on their wall. I had Houdini. And yeah, I’m a geek, but I love—but one of the things that I really learned was, oh my God, people are so easy to distract. And it really stuck with me. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You can’t. It’s like, oh my God. And we’ve weaponized it and scaled it, right? TikTok, Instagram Reels—all of it is not good for moving society forward, in my opinion. I’m not saying ban them. I’m not saying get rid of them. I’m saying learn some discipline. Like, you read 10 pages of a newer sci-fi novel. There are strategies you can pursue.

Arkady Kulik

But then again, all of them demand willpower. And beyond that, look, traditional media, radio and TV and newspapers, all the same stuff. Alcohol, the same stuff. Now social media is just much more efficient in that. All of those dopamine cycles, all of this, like, “Here is a cute puppy. Here is some very negative news about somebody killed. Here is a cute kitten. Here is some new outrageous political news.” And they put people into this cycle of ups and downs and people get consumed. Social media just got very good at that. But it was always here. And it is not because there is some kind of an evil overlord sitting there trying to distract people. It’s because people are willing to be distracted. They’re happy to be distracted. They don’t want to face certain—there is, I don’t even recall what kind of movie it is. Or a cartoon. I think it was a cartoon. There is a character who tries meditation and he sits there, he puts his hands. And then he sees burning corpses and he’s like, “Oh my God. Never again.” Tells you everything you need to know about your inner world. The moment you sit with yourself for a minute in silence. Have I told you about my silent retreats? Have we ever talked about that?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No. No.

Arkady Kulik

Every year in January and August, usually around January and August, I do a three-day silent retreat. I stay at home. I don’t go to any Vipassana, any monasteries or anything like that because I think it’s, in my opinion, it’s kind of counterproductive. But I stay for three days. No phones, no music, no writing, no reading, no painting, no, of course, no games, no movies, no communication. I don’t talk to anyone, including my wife, not even my dog, which is the hardest one, by the way, because he would do stuff when I cannot shout at him. So three days of silence. Three days of no communication of any sorts with other people or with other media. The first day you’re going to clean up your whole house because you had all of those chores. Then the second morning you wake up and like, “God, what’s going on?” And then on the third day, you start really seeing your own movements. You start understanding yourself. You spend time in meditation, you spend time in talking to yourself and understanding, getting closer to yourself. As weird and esoteric as it sounds, twice a year, three days. Everybody can find a long weekend. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, everybody can find it. Even if you have the busiest job in the world, you can have a day off. Not a single bite so far. Not a single person, not even my wife. But then again, from what I understand, when I was telling this to my friends, they’re like, “That sounds like a prison.” I never thought about it. To me, it’s very liberating. It allows you to reconnect with yourself. And people will tell me, “Arkady, that feels like I’m in a maximum security prison.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yep. I do a different version of that. I don’t do it every day, but I try to every morning. I just sit with no phone, no music, no books, nothing, and sit in silence for between 15 and 20 minutes a day. And I also have a sensory deprivation tank, which I absolutely adore. That takes—I don’t do that every day, but I try to do it at least every other week. And you do it for about 45 minutes to an hour. And it’s really something.

Arkady Kulik

Where you float in the salty water?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

In darkness, no music, and it literally feels like you’re floating in space. And because the water is your body temperature. And I gotta tell you, I think I’ve gotten more out of those two practices than almost anything else I do. Why do you think—other than “I feel like I’m in a maximum security prison”—why do you think that people—is it simply they don’t want to examine that statement of “The unexamined life is not worth living”? Or is there something else? Kind of the cult of busyness?

Arkady Kulik

There is definitely a force of habit for sure. That’s how, that’s the thing that just happens. Lots of people are in the habit of checking their phone or whatever. There is—bad habit and addiction are different things for a reason. There are some people who have bad habits. They don’t necessarily have addiction to alcohol or something. They have a bad habit of popping a can of beer when they come back from work. It’s not that they’re alcoholics. If they replace it with a can of Coke or replace it with something else, it will still be the same bad habit for them. I think it’s a force of habits. So just pure reflexive, human thing. But at the core of it is that we are offered so many meanings by other external forces. Whether it’s your culture, your religion, your family, your country. We’re offered so many answers to this question of meaning that it’s easy to accept something and never examine that honestly and genuinely with yourself. There’s a very good old Jewish joke about a young boy coming to a rabbi and like, “Rabbi, what was the meaning of life?” And he’s like, “Dear boy, do you really want to trade this fantastic question for some simple answer?” And I think this is the core of it. A lot of people don’t want to ask this question. A lot of people, they have to face themselves, all the good and bad and ugly that is contained in them. And all of us, we’re human beings. We all have good and bad and ugly. None of us are saints. And I mean, maybe some of them are. I’ve never—have you met a saint person in your life?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Never.

Arkady Kulik

Even the Dalai Lama says he’s not a saint. He’s not enlightened. He’s not whatever kind of moniker you want to attach to that state. We all contain multitudes. We all have good and bad sides. And facing your ugly sides, facing your desires, facing your anger, facing your fears, facing all of that stuff is very difficult for people. To them, they get attached, as you say, like, “Oh, if I have it, that defines me. If I’m angry about the guy who just cut me in the traffic and I want to shout at him, it makes me a bad person.” Doesn’t. Makes you human. You got afraid. Your fear converts into anger. Now you’re like, “Blah, blah.” I know a couple of people who are perfect at that. Usually women. But the point is, I think people don’t want to get close to themselves because they don’t want to see the real picture. They want to live in this imaginary world of “Me being a knight in shining white armor that has never touched a speck of dirt in my life.” And this beautiful, fantastic, ideal self. And clinging to this picture is the best way to never becoming the picture.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I could not agree more. Jung has that wonderful quote about, until you integrate your shadow—that is all the things that you don’t like about yourself, right?—you will look at what happens in your life and call it fate. And I just—that I remember the first time I read that, I’m like, holy shit, is he ever right.

Arkady Kulik

My favorite psychologist of all times.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Mine too. Mine too.

Arkady Kulik

I’ve read all of his books. When I was going through this period in my life that you mentioned, when I was acquiring all of this scar tissue, it was not the easiest period in my life. I lost my girlfriend, I lost my business. A lot of stuff seemingly at the same time just collapsed around me. So at that point, I was, “Okay, I need to understand what’s going on with me. Why do I react like that?” And I started reading Jung deeply. The concept of shadow, the concept of anima, the concept of synchronicity. I think those are the three most powerful ideas that he has written down. I know there are lots of critics. I know that a lot of people think he’s outdated. I don’t know. I don’t care honestly about that. I think he has very serious tools that he gives you. Not ideas, not concepts, tools he gives you. Go ahead and apply them. Sometimes it does feel, Jim. Sometimes it does feel like cutting yourself open without any anesthetics and then taking that stuff out from your guts and looking at that and understanding how ugly all of that looks and then sealing yourself back up. It doesn’t feel nice. But then again, that’s the only way forward, the only way I know. Maybe there are people who know how to do it easier and better. Please introduce me if you know those people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I don’t know them because like you, same sort of thing. I was in a period in my early 20s where I was just feeling like I was almost nihilistic. It was like, “Why fucking bother with anything?” And I had read some Jung when I was in college, but I went on a deep dive and like you, I’m like, “Okay, I found my guy” because it—and I love the way you correctly phrase it, he gives you tools, right? And you’re going to use those tools differently than maybe I use those tools, but we both get to use those tools. Which leads me to another thing I wanted to ask you about. You’ve lived in different countries, different business cultures. What do you think is the most misunderstood between American startup energy—we talked about it a little earlier, the chest-thumping and all of that—and post-Soviet technical rigor, right?

Arkady Kulik

Okay, so technical rigor. Post-Soviet technical rigor is a myth on its own. There are some very talented people. Granted, post-Soviet, it’s been 35 years. At that point, the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So, okay, so let’s make it more modern. I had Dan Wang on who wrote about the difference between America’s legalism and China’s engineering cultures. Maybe that’s a more fresh metaphor.

Arkady Kulik

I don’t think that Russia today has the same rigor when it comes to science and technology as Soviet Union had. I just want to put it out there. I think that they have lost a lot of really talented people. Not a single really talented physicist with whom I studied together is still in Russia. Everybody immigrated. Every single one of them left. Russia is going through the early—it was going through early ages of capitalism and this kind of puberty of capitalism in the ‘90s and now it’s a full-blown, you know yourself, judge yourself. What Russia became in the last, I want to say 10 years or so, it is pretty clear where the country is trending. The US is not a homogeneous culture either. LA versus New York are very different social interfaces. Miami versus Seattle, very different value systems. I cannot say that the whole US is the same thing. I can compare San Francisco startup culture versus say some kind of idealistic Soviet Union physicist, engineer. And then the differences will come from society that brought those people up. San Francisco: take your risks, shoot your shot. You failed. Good for you. Now you know more. A lot of people in San Francisco, if they failed at their first startup, that would actually be seen as a good thing by a lot of VCs. If you talk about Germany or France or Russia or any European country, you failed once, definitely going to fail again, never going to get any money because this is the culture where they don’t tolerate mistakes that well. When you talk about some kind of idealistic Soviet scientist, that would be a person who is driven by the party, by the ideals of the party, whether it’s conquering space or building the hugest nuclear rocket to topple the United States or whatever it is. By the way, the funniest dichotomy of a Russian person is that they either want to turn the US into nuclear rubble or they want a green card.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We’re lucky that more want the green card. Either/or, no in-between.

Arkady Kulik

So that’s genuinely true. So I think that person who was brought up in a Soviet society, and again, I’m talking more about not lived experience, but what I’ve heard from my parents and grandparents, sure, Soviet Union had some good things about the respect for teachers and scientists, about the ethical codex of an officer of the army. The officer of the army was a very honorable person. If you’re an officer of the army, you are a person who is held to a very high ethical standard. You’re not here to bribe, you’re not here to cheat, you’re not here to abuse your power. They had some things figured out right. A lot of people were driven by the ideology of building this communism. So the drivers are different. United States, the biggest and the most important thing about the United States is a universally accepted personal responsibility for your life. And this is the biggest differentiator from all the other countries in the world. China, Germany, Russia. Take it. This is probably the most important part. Everybody here in the US understands that you’re on your own. And I think it’s a good thing because it makes people face those questions that we talked about a couple of minutes ago.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I agree with that assessment. A lot of the older cultures of Europe and Asia are not mistake-tolerant. And I’ve always had this idea, I bring it up a lot when I’m talking to people, of America almost has a different DNA in that. Basically, all of the people, at least originally, who came to America, what was different about them than their brother or sister who stayed in Ireland or Moscow or wherever, right? What was different about them was many of them were willing to get on a boat with absolutely nothing, you know, maybe $10 in their pocket, take a very arduous journey across angry oceans, come here and leave all their culture, all their family, everything they knew, right? And so it created a very different type of citizenry than—and then, of course, we had the platform, right? The constitutional republic, the rule of law, freedom of speech, all of that, where these people could really get busy. And it’s a very different culture. It is definitely not a monoculture. And I completely agree. There’s, Bill Bryson has a great book, One Summer: America, 1927. And it looks at the 1920s, and it’s a really fun read, but it also sometimes makes me a little sad because that American culture, in my view, is—it’s not going away, but it is certainly not as strong as it was back then. And it was basically, you know, the popular memes, “You can just do things.” Well, in America in the 1920s, they lived that. And so there’s a great story about Mount Rushmore. Calvin Coolidge was president at the time. He didn’t know that was going on at all. And he was vacationing nearby, and one of his aides said, “Hey, you know, I just heard that there’s this guy who’s chiseling the visages of American presidents that he likes into this mountain.” And Coolidge is like, “How cool. Let’s go look.”

Arkady Kulik

Yeah, people do stuff in the US. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes. And the difference between that and so many other cultures, to me is just incredibly profound. It’s just like, yeah, okay, he decided he’s gonna create these busts of presidents. No one said, “No, you can’t do that.” No one tried to interfere with him. No one—even Coolidge.

Arkady Kulik

Where is your permit?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Where’s your permit?

Arkady Kulik

Exactly. Show me your papers.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly, exactly. And that’s what got you this dynamic environment that created the United States, right? And I’m not calling for pure anarchy. I’ve been accused more than once of being anarcho-capitalist. I am not anarcho-capitalist, but I love the freedom that this country was based upon, right? And it’s still present in many forms. But you’d probably really enjoy reading it because like, wow, just you want to talk about cultural dynamism, America during that period, just off the hook.

Arkady Kulik

Thank you. What’s the book name again?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s America, One Summer. And I think it’s 1920, whatever. But the author is Bill Bryson.

Arkady Kulik

I’m gonna download it today.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, it’s a fun read. And you can read.

Arkady Kulik

One Summer America 1927.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

There we go. It’s a lot of fun.

Arkady Kulik

Thank you, Jim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Of course. Let’s get back to another thing that you say, which I—let me just stipulate I agree with. But I want to hear your reasoning. And it’s a quote that is: “Science findings are discarded packaging and a happy user.” If I was in academia, I would think of that as a gut punch.

Arkady Kulik

If I had to live my life avoiding gut punches again, nobody can punch you in the gut by saying something. Only you can punch yourself in the gut by misinterpreting something. The whole idea of, in my opinion, the whole idea of understanding the world better, the whole idea of doing something with that knowledge, the end point is to make the life of humans better or whoever comes after humans, whatever post-human society we’re going to build. Even if you build a digital twin of Jim and you actually have an infinite timeline and you don’t have to ever die and you can be uploaded to a spaceship and go explore the universe and whatnot. Whatever sci-fi dream, teenage dream you might have. By the way, nobody ever gave me that answer. “If I had a billion bucks, what would you do?” “I would upload my consciousness into a spaceship.” Maybe I would vibe with the person better. But the thing is, in my opinion, there should always be an ultimate goal to anything that you do. If your ultimate goal is to have a beautiful equation on the whiteboard, cool. And this is where you end. You created this equation. You build a theoretical framework like Maxwell did. Did he contribute a lot to humanity? Of course.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Very useful equations.

Arkady Kulik

People say that roughly 50% of our GDP is thanks to Maxwell today. But then there was another guy who took it to the next step. There was another guy who took it to the next step. Somebody created electricity. Somebody created the Internet, somebody created all these digital devices. At the end of the day, it’s an effort that spans over generations. But in my opinion, every single scientific discovery, or any discovery, anything that we understand better about the world around us should lead to some positive outcome. Because if it is just an equation, if it’s just an article, it’s an intellectual masturbation for the lack of a better word.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You took the thought right out of my head. It’s a masturbatory exercise.

Arkady Kulik

Yes, it’s just stroking my own ego. “Oh, look how smart I am.” Who cares? Nobody benefited from that. Nobody benefited. And to me this is the point of us as venture capitalists is to be those people who help those scientists. Maybe somebody has an idea on how to heat or cool our buildings with less energy spent. Maybe somebody has an idea on how to replace the blood with some kind of oxygen-carrying liquid for the sake of emergency. Somebody else has an idea how to optimize inference in AI. All of us are trying to make the lives of humans better. And then it makes sense. If it is just to stroke your own ego, I’m not interested. I’m sorry, just whatever. Go to your own garage, basement, shut your door behind you and do whatever you want there on your own. Nobody’s going to watch.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, as you bring up ego, I do make the distinction. I think when people say people have big egos, what they really mean is that person has a fragile ego. And by that I mean that we all know that person, right? I try to actively avoid them, but when you look at them, it’s not that they—I don’t think actually they have big egos. I think they have very fragile egos that need constant external reinforcement. “Oh, you’re so brilliant. Oh, you’re so great. Oh, you’re so—”

Arkady Kulik

Exactly. I would also say, just following up on what you say, that it’s not that they have big ego or small ego, fragile or non-fragile, it’s does their ego control them or not? Is it about them trying to look nice in the eyes of other people? I mean, I think the people who master their ego can have as little or as much ego in different situations when they need it. They can really tune it down, they can really tune it up and make a point and take a stance and dig their heels into that point when they need it and use their ego, their intelligence, their everything as tools to get what they need to do. However, when people are driven by their ego and it’s all that defines them, that’s a very sad picture, especially for a grown-ass person. Very, very sad picture.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And well, my advice would be everyone listening and watching, listen to what we said for most of our conversation if you want to avoid that, right? And it’s kind of like you got to take that first step. You’ve got to—and you know, as I was listening to you about people just kind of slipping into life, that’s been another one of my little pet peeves is there are so many shrink-wrapped ideologies, belief systems that people just like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like—and they’re all across the board, right? There are religious systems, there are political systems, there are other social systems that, “Yeah, here you go. Here are the rules. Play by these.” And that’s not—what a waste of a life.

Arkady Kulik

Yeah. There is no uniqueness to it. There is no individuality to it. There is no value to just following other people’s marching orders. That’s how people fall in line. And I really, really genuinely hate when people call other people NPCs, using the non-playing character from video games. I think it’s very derogatory and very inhumane and I don’t think there are any NPCs and I don’t think there are any players in this world. And this is not a video game. This is not—I just, I think it’s so arrogant to call somebody else an NPC. However, the people who are—in, say, in Hindu tradition they would call it, “He’s still asleep, he’s walking amongst us asleep.” Maybe that’s a little bit more of a gentle way to put it. But the point is, yes. People who are never examining their own lives, they will always be prone to being like a ping-pong, like a ball in a pinball machine, just being pushed by other forces. Today it’s your boss, tomorrow it’s your guru, the day after it’s your spouse. And then the person is all around and he never had control in his life. And why did he live his life in that case? What was the whole point?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I again, wow. I’d forgotten how much we agree on and even to the terminology. I love that metaphor of they’re walking in their sleep. And I would argue that many of those shrink-wrapped belief systems are ambient to keep them asleep.

Arkady Kulik

100%. Yes, yes. And I mean I would never thought I would find myself quoting Lenin of all people, but he said, “Religion is the opium for the masses” or something like that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes, he did.

Arkady Kulik

And I think this is very true. And now we have all of these self-help books, all of those gurus and psychologists who again keep training you a very simple answer to the question that should never be answered in the first place. It should be the question that keeps you awake. Not in literal sleep, but in the sense that we’re talking about. Yeah, 100%.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And you know, again, that’s another one of my pet peeves. I remember seeing one of those ridiculous listicles. I think it was 2017 or 2018. And I had joined Twitter early. But I had looked at it and was like, yeah, I don’t like—back then, when I joined in 2009, it was people taking pictures of their lunch and I’m like, “I don’t give a shit about this.” Anyway, there was—I was still in asset management and I had a lot of people telling me, “Oh no, no, Jim, there’s this huge group on Twitter called FinTwit, Financial Twitter. You really have to get engaged.” I’m like, “All right, I will.” And so I’m looking at some of this stuff and I’m just like, “Oh my God.” And so I got so triggered by one of these lists, right, by some guru, that I just composed a thread right on the app and I’m like, “Please don’t read these. These are going to send you in exactly the wrong direction. There is nothing that unites ‘Five things every millionaire does in the morning.’” That’s—it’s just lies.

Arkady Kulik

This is—well, again, people are looking for simple answers. Is it not the same reason that conspiracy theories are so popular? Yes, they just give you a very simple answer to a very complicated topic. Like, “Oh yeah, now it makes sense because aliens are behind all of that.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let me give you—I am currently writing a fictional thriller. My first, right? And it’s a lot of fun. Oh, it’s so hard. It is so much harder than writing non-fiction. And I’ve written four non-fiction books. But it’s fun. And as part of that is this theme. One of my villains is like, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. We sponsor all of the conspiracy theories. If you want to know where true power is, look for boring. Look for that which just is the anti-meme. You want to see true power? It’s in PDFs, it’s in notes from the Bank of International Settlements. It’s from all of these incredibly dull structures that bring no attention to themselves.”

Arkady Kulik

That’s an interesting take. Well, can I get a draft of your book when you’re done?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Of course you can. In fact, I will make you one of my first readers. But it is definitely fun. Well, I’m getting the hook here from Ms. Ena. I always really just—I need to talk to you more, just not in terms of podcasts.

Arkady Kulik

Sure, let’s just schedule something. I’ll reach out to your assistant and then we can just—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I would love it. Arkady, as you know, our final question is always the same. We’re gonna wave a magic wand and make you emperor of the world. You can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp. In other words, you can’t force, but you can persuade. We’re going to give you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it. And whenever the 8 billion—apparently that number is suspicious. By the way, I’ve been reading about that. I don’t know whether you have as well, but I thought that was interesting. Anyway, everyone in the world’s going to wake up whenever their morning is and they’re going to say to themselves, “You know what? I’ve just had these two great ideas. These are what you’re going to incept.” And unlike all the other times, “I’m going to actually act on these two ideas starting today.” What are you going to incept in the world?

Arkady Kulik

Be true to yourself. Be true to yourself and be kind to each other.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love both of those. Those are great. “Be true to yourself and you cannot be untrue to any other.” What was the Shakespeare line? “To thine own self be true.” It’s in the soliloquy. It’s a great one. I used to know it by heart. I’m getting old.

Arkady Kulik

Really appreciate such a conversation. Wow.

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1. The Patron Saint of Synth: Padre Guilherme

A church bell rings. Then another. Under the shadow of Christ The Redeemer, a bald-headed cleric drops a beat to Hallelujah.

Thus begins one of the most exciting DJ sets I’ve ever seen. The DJ? Padre Guilherme Peixoto.

A Portuguese Catholic priest and a military chaplain who served in Kosovo and Afghanistan, Padre Guilherme is one of the most unlikely figures on the global electronic music circuit. He started DJing in 2010 on a deployment to Afghanistan, organizing morale events for soldiers. Back home, he learned how to do it properly and when bake sales didn’t work, he used music to fundraise for his debt-ridden parish church in Laúndos.

Liturgical music and melodic techno turn out to be built for the same thing: repetition, lift, and collective transcendence. That’s what makes Padre Guilherme’s sets more than a novelty — Ave Maria threaded through synth lines, church bells woven with beat drops, papal encyclicals sampled over a rolling bassline.

His breakout came at World Youth Day in Lisbon in 2023, where he played an early-morning set at Parque Tejo before Pope Francis’s closing Mass, part of an event that drew about 1.5 million pilgrims. Since then, he has moved quickly onto major festival stages: Afterlife at Hï Ibiza, Medusa Festival in Spain, Zamna in Chile. In January 2025, he performed beneath Christ the Redeemer in Rio for the Youth for Peace Festival, with sacred vocals and melodic techno echoing under the statue’s outstretched arms.

Then in November 2025, outside the 14th-century Cathedral of St. Elisabeth in Košice, Slovakia, Pope Leo XIV appeared on the LED screens behind Padre Guilherme’s booth with a video blessing for the local archbishop’s 75th birthday. Guilherme answered by dropping a “papal beat.”

Padre Guilherme is my new music obsession. I’ve worked out to his beats, and ‘locked in’ many times while listening to his version of Gregorian chants. They feel like proof that ritual and rave have been reaching for some of the same thing all along. [Rohan]

2. The $67.5 Million Bet That Invented the Entertainment Franchise

Hulu's Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers is one of my favorite sports documentaries because it's really about the design of a modern institution. Under Jerry Buss, the Lakers became more than a basketball team: they became a prototype for the entertainment-business franchise, where wins, celebrity, branding, and dealmaking all reinforced one another.

Buss bought the Lakers in 1979 as part of a $67.5 million deal, roughly $300 million in today’s dollars — at the time the largest sports transaction in history — that also included the LA Kings, the Forum arena, and a 13,000-acre ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills. He then proceeded to reinvent what professional basketball could be. He turned courtside seats into the hottest ticket in Hollywood, cultivated a roster of celebrity fans to make home games feel like premieres, and was among the first owners to sell arena naming rights to a corporate sponsor.

Buss was an unlikely architect for all this: a chemist with a doctorate who earned his PhD by age 24, who had stood in bread lines as a child in Wyoming and built a real estate empire from a single $1,000 investment.

What sets Legacy apart is how seriously it takes the dealmaking. You see the negotiations, the financing, the strategic gambles that could have gone wrong. The series shows you how a franchise establishes itself as a brand, how it positions itself within a league and a city. It’s a case study in institution-building, told with access and candor that most business documentaries never achieve.

When Magic Johnson announced his HIV diagnosis in 1991, at a time when such news was considered a death sentence, Buss nearly collapsed at the press conference. Jeanie Buss recalls that she only saw her father cry twice in his life: once when his mother died, and once that day. The series captures both the triumph and the heartbreak of building something that matters.

It is also honest about what happens when a family business becomes a billion-dollar enterprise. After Buss died in 2013, his children fought publicly for control of the franchise, with siblings maneuvering against each other in ways that threatened everything their father had built. Succession is one of the hardest problems in any organization, and mixing bloodlines with balance sheets makes it harder still. Legacy earns its title by showing the extraordinary institution Buss created and the fault lines he left behind. [Jimmy]

• 📺 Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers (2022, 10 episodes)

3. How Cosplaying the Romans Led to the Scientific Revolution

A two-hour conversation about Renaissance history does not sound like obvious must-watch material. This one is. Ada Palmer is incredibly eclectic: She’s a historian, hopepunk science-fiction and fantasy novelist, music composer, and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago.

Oh, and she also wrote a popular history book on the Renaissance with a particular focus on Machiavelli and the Medici.

The story I can’t stop thinking about: Petrarch survived the Black Death in the 1340s, watched friends die to plague and bandits, and diagnosed the problem as bad leadership. Lords who cared about family honor over the public good. His prescription was to fill libraries with what the Romans read. Raise princes on Cicero and Plato. Make philosopher-kings by osmosis.

At first, it failed spectacularly. The first generation raised on all that classical learning did not produce Roman virtue. They produced uglier wars and nastier power politics. Cesare Borgia had Cicero memorized and used it to set fire to half of Italy. By some measures, life expectancy in Italy fell during the Renaissance, as greater wealth translated into larger armies and more destructive wars.

But the libraries Petrarch inspired stuck around. Printing, translation, footnotes, and glossaries gradually made those texts accessible to far beyond a tiny elite of classicists. A hundred years after Gutenberg, medical students were reading Lucretius and asking: what if there are atoms, and maybe that’s how diseases work? Through a long chain of second-order effects, that world helped produce germ theory, vaccines, and a treatment for the Black Death itself.

Petrarch wanted a world that shared his values. Instead, he built a world that didn’t share his values, but could solve problems he never imagined were solvable, including treatment for the disease that killed his friends.

The full conversation has plenty more: why Gutenberg went bankrupt, why Leonardo da Vinci was a saboteur, and how the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review.

I’m ordering her book Inventing the Renaissance. [Liberty]

• 🎧📄 Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

4. The Hound of the Baskervilles : Skepticism Without Blindness

Few stories walk the line between mystery and the supernatural as elegantly as Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Set against the bleak, fog-laden moors of Devonshire, the novel wraps its central crime in whispers of curses, legends, and a demonic hound said to stalk the Baskerville family. The atmosphere is so expertly constructed that the supernatural starts to feel not just possible, but likely.

What makes this Sherlock Holmes story endure, though, is Sherlock’s discipline under uncertainty. He is skeptical by nature, but he never uses skepticism as an excuse to stop looking. He treats even the most outlandish explanation as a live hypothesis until the evidence rules it out. That habit, more than his brilliance, is what makes him such a compelling detective. He refuses to let premature certainty close off the search.

“Is this Devil Dog a fact, or a fable?” is the question driving the investigation, and Conan Doyle keeps the answer genuinely uncertain longer than you’d expect.

That’s the balance that gives the book its charge. You get the eerie pleasures of folklore and Gothic suspense, but also the satisfaction of watching reason move carefully through fear, rumor, and misdirection. The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of Conan Doyle’s most iconic tales because it understands that the truth can feel supernatural right up until the moment it doesn’t.

If you’ve never read it, it’s worth a trip to Dartmoor. If you have read it, it’s probably time for a return visit.

And if you want a companion listen afterward, I did an episode on The Hound of the Baskervilles last October on my podcast, Becoming the Main Character, about what Sherlock’s method can still teach us. Beyond retelling the story, I give a lot of attention to the attributes that make Sherlock truly exceptional… it has less to do with being a genius than you may think. [Jameson]

• 📘 The Hound of the Baskervilles

• 🎧 BTMC episode on The Hound of the Baskervilles

5. Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies : A Machine for Breaking Creative Loops

“Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s one of the 100-odd cards in Oblique Strategies, a deck Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt created in 1975 to break creative blocks in the recording studio. Fifty years later, it’s still in use, and the reason it works isn’t what you’d expect.

The premise is simple: when a session stalls, you draw a card. Some cards are practical (“Use fewer notes”); some are philosophical (“What would your closest friend do?”); some are almost anti-advice (“Do something boring”). The original edition came in a black box, and Eno used the cards while working with David Bowie on the Berlin Trilogy albums. He would reportedly hold cards up to the musicians mid-take to push them somewhere unexpected. The results are not exactly obscure records.

Here’s the part that actually interests me. The deck treats creative block as a systems problem, not a referendum on your talent. When you’re stuck, it’s usually not because you’ve run out of ideas. It’s because your taste, your habits, and your self-consciousness are vetoing every move before it has a chance to come alive. A random external prompt cuts that loop. Not because it’s wise, but because it’s alien. If the instruction made immediate sense, it probably wouldn’t get you unstuck.

“Faced with a choice, do both”

The cards aren’t smart. But they are very good at creating a small rupture, and sometimes a rupture is all you need to get moving again.

The full deck is free online. There’s also a website version. Keep one nearby for the next time you hit a wall. You don’t have to believe the card. Just try it. [Liberty]

Enjoyed OSV Field Notes?

💌 Forward it to a friend and tell us in the comments which of the 5 is your favorite. 🏆

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• Our website (complete bundle or signed collector’s edition)

Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction is out now. Jonathan Tepper grew up handing out leaflets to heroin addicts in Madrid’s most notorious drug slum. He watched his dearest friends die of AIDS. He lost his little brother. He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. This is his memoir. Described as “extraordinary” and “powerfully moving” by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Shooting Up is published by Infinite Books in the US. Buy the book.

We’re giving away free spots to a live Q&A with Shooting Up author Jonathan Tepper, hosted by our Senior Editor Dylan O’Sullivan, on Wednesday, March 18 at 5 PM ET. Enter the lucky draw below — submissions close today!

Enter the Lucky Draw

Sunday, 1 March

Two thoughts from Galileo Galilei

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

“Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.”

Monday, 2 March

Two thoughts from Murray Gell-Mann

“Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they’re never really certainties.”

“Modern education is like being taken to the world’s greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu.”

Tuesday, 3 March

Two thoughts from Rupert Sheldrake

“Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.”

“The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.”

Wednesday, 4 March

Two thoughts from Jocko Willink

“Extreme Ownership. Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.”

“Besides death, all failure is psychological.”

Thursday, 5 March

Two thoughts from Thomas Carlyle

“I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”

“Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.”

Friday, 6 March

Two thoughts from Sylvia Plath

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”

Saturday, 7 March

Two thoughts from Samuel Adams

“How strangely will the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words!”

“It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail.”

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

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Angus’ research challenges one of the most widely accepted ideas in modern culture: that the human brain works like a computer. Drawing on his work with U.S. Army Special Operations, he argues that humans think not in equations, but in actions and stories — and that modern education systems are failing to cultivate the kinds of intelligence needed to navigate the real world.

I LOVED Angus’ latest book (Primal Intelligence), and had a blast chatting to him about the difference between probability thinking and possibility thinking, why standardized education may be suppressing creativity and how stories shape strategy and leadership.

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

— Jim

• Angus’ Harvard Business Review Article — Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think It Does.

Links

Highlights

Where is the Common Sense in Education?

Angus Fletcher: We know the more that a child believes that there’s a right answer, the less likely they are to come up with a new answer. That is just basic science. And I think the key as we start to think about this is that, you agree with this. I agree with this. A lot of folks agree with this. We need to start taking this common sense and putting it into the school system, because kids are suffering. And it doesn’t take rocket science. This isn’t an unsolvable problem. We just need to start dismantling this apparatus, this surveillance apparatus where teachers are evaluated on how well they get students to pass these silly tests. And my daughter, I was talking to her this morning, she’s taking essentially a history class. All they do in this class is they memorize definitions. They don’t actually study history. They don’t learn about history. They don’t read books about history.

They just memorize definitions so that the teachers can then have the students pass, and then the school can get its funding, and then the students can move on to the next stage. And we need to start to decentralize this system, give more autonomy to teachers, more common sense, allow them to give books out to students to read at their own pace, all these kinds of things. And of course, that doesn’t mean you totally turn everything into anarchy. You can still have math classes. You can still have some standardized tests. But it needs to be a balance. It needs to be a common sense balance that’s focused on nurturing the whole intelligence of students as opposed to just things that we can evaluate with these standardized tests. It becomes the tyranny of metrics. It becomes the tyranny of assessment as opposed to the usefulness of assessment.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And once you decide that a target is a measurable metric, it ceases being a useful information point for you. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about the British ruling India, and they had too many snakes, and so they gave a bounty if you brought a snake’s tail in. And what did it do? All the enterprising Indians started breeding snakes.

Angus Fletcher: They hacked the system. They hacked the system, which is what smart people do. They hack the system. I mean, I’m sure the reason that you’re sitting here today is the same reason I’m sitting here today, which is that I hacked the system.

Optimism Comes From the Past

Angus Fletcher: And what’s fascinating about optimism is it’s almost totally misunderstood in the modern world. The modern world understands optimism as, this will happen, I will succeed in this way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

Angus Fletcher: And that’s why people spend all this time visualizing success and manifesting, doing all this kind of stuff. Actually, in the brain, optimism comes from your past. It doesn’t come from looking at the future, it comes from looking at your past. And what your brain is looking at is all the times you learned from mistakes in the past, and what your brain is looking at is all the times that you were uncertain and then you figured it out. And the more you focus on those moments, the more it gives your brain the capacity to move forward in what we call negative capability. And negative capability is the ability to go forward without knowing where you’re going. But you know that in the past you’ve made it. And we see this as really strong in Special Operators.

Special Operators are always thinking back to that last mission where they were about to die, but then they didn’t die and they pulled it out. And that allows them to go into this future mission. And the same thing with any explorer or innovator. They’re always going forward in deep uncertainty. They actually have no idea where it’s going, but they’re sustained by this optimism, which comes from the past. And it sounds to me like that is a huge part of what drives you forward, is you can probably go back through your memory at all the times when you surprised yourself and you managed to pull it out, and you’re like, well, if I pulled it out then, let’s go ahead and give it a shot now.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, that’s so funny you bring that up because I was contemplating optimism the other day, and I am a very, what I call myself a rational optimist. And by that I mean, look, I’m not Pollyannish. And I don’t think that unicorns and butterflies will spring forth in front of me. But I started thinking, I wonder how much of optimism can be learned or can be taught? And you might have just given me the answer.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Angus.

Angus Fletcher

Hey, Jim. Good to meet you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Good to meet you. I loved your book.

Angus Fletcher

Oh, thank you. I’m very honored.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I finished it and I read on an iPad, so we might be at odds there, but I love it because I can highlight all the pieces that I want and then export them. It’s just like all of a sudden I have all of these new ideas that I literally didn’t have prior to reading your book. So anyway, I’m a big fan.

Angus Fletcher

I’m very flattered. Of course, history’s most imaginative thinkers all kept notebooks. Leonardo da Vinci kept notebooks. I mean, this is something that has totally gone out of fashion in the modern world. But I’m glad to see that someone is keeping it alive.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, if I can put even the tiniest dent in it, I would view that as a win and be very happy. I’m absolutely enthralled by the book. I’ve recommended it to several people. You’re right about the note taking thing. That is something that I have tried to get all the folks who work for me to really get in the habit of doing. And I’m kind of, you probably know more about this than I do. There is some evidence that actually writing with your hand makes a huge difference.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah. Well, so first of all, a little story on that, and then we can talk about the neuroscience if you want. But I’ve had the opportunity, the privilege to spend the last four or five years working with U.S. Army Special Operations. And I wanted to study some of their best planners, some of the folks who were able to come up with great plans and then able to implement those plans. And so I was guided to go work with Ranger Regiment, which is an elite infantry unit within Army Special Operations. And I went out to observe them, and the first thing I noticed was that unlike most other areas of the military, they don’t use PowerPoint decks.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s right. I remember that you pointed out in the book.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah, they don’t use PowerPoint. And so most, if you go to a typical military briefing, you show up, they’ll just hit you with these endless PowerPoint slides, which are just crammed with lists. And of course, the human brain can’t synthesize lists. Lists are how computers think. Humans don’t. We don’t think in lists. We think in targets, objectives. And so the Rangers, they just wheel out these ancient chalkboards, and they start writing their plans on the chalkboard. And then once you’ve got your part of the plan, you go over to your chalkboard and you write it out. And so I just asked, I was like, well, why do you guys do this? Haven’t you heard of PowerPoint? They’re like, oh, we’ve heard of PowerPoint. They’re like, we tried PowerPoint for about 15 minutes, and then went back to the chalk. Because writing with your hand, much better.

And the main reason for that in the human brain is that when you use chalk, you’re essentially activating the motor cortex of your brain because you’re actually using your body. And the motor cortex is what generates actions, and actions are what generates plans. Actions are what generates doings in the world. And so the more that you can get in the habit of using your body, that’s why walking around your office helps stimulate ideas as opposed to just sitting incredibly still. All these things which everybody knows, but we’ve somehow thrown out, because people think that the more time you spend glued to your computer, the smarter you become.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’ll tell you, I’ve written four books. I’m writing my first fiction book right now. And for the four nonfiction, every single idea for the book came to me on a walk. And I got in the habit of walking pre-iPhone with a tape recorder because I had this one great, magnificent walk, and I had this architecture and everything, but I didn’t have a tape recorder. And by the time I got home, my kids were needing care and stuff. And then I went to write it down. I went, “ahhh.” And that’s why I started with the tape recorder.

Angus Fletcher

That’s right. And every time you pick up a phone, it does the same thing that your kids do, which is essentially scrambles your thought. Because the way the computers think is associationally, they don’t think intentionally with this sustained sense of purpose. And that’s why computers can be helpful to kind of disrupting your thought or stirring things up if you’re in that moment. But if you’re trying to sustain and maintain a thought over time, if you’re trying to build, so if you just had this beautiful plan for a book and then all of a sudden you went to your newsfeed for two minutes, it would have the same effect as your kids did. It would just totally get your brain distracted.

And that’s why so many kids today, I think, are having a hard time planning their own lives. We see this a ton in schools. First of all, they don’t spend any time out in nature. I just came back from doing an event with the American Camp Association. We were just talking about how much kids, to them, nature is like this alien thing. And they don’t even understand how to use their bodies and walk around it and just, they get restless and irritated in nature as opposed to opening up and being able to draw on the creative force of the trees and the sky and everything.

And then, of course, in addition to all that, because they spend so much time on technology, they’re turned into these passive consumers of lists essentially in the computer brain, as opposed to being active generators of plans, of purposes, of directions, of strategies, of whatever. And so we’re creating an entire generation that I think, sadly doesn’t understand the benefits of writing with their hand in notebooks. Even while technology can be useful, even though AI can be useful, it’s, I think, starting to become a crutch and a disabler for a lot of young people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I subscribe to the centaur model. Half machine, half man. In other words, that’s the way I’m writing my fiction book. I literally could not write it without AI. It’s an epic. The scope of it begins in World War II and ends in 2027. It’s a thriller. And anyway, just on the research side alone. This is an idea I have had for 30 years. It was one of my hobbies. My profession had been asset management, but one of my hobbies was generating fictional story ideas and written by hand and the one I’m writing now and I’m going to publish because we have a publishing company called Infinite Books, has been in my brain and in my notebooks for the last 30 years.

And so I sold my company, O’Shaughnessy Asset Management in 2021 and I was like, I finally get to write the fiction book, the thriller that I’ve been obsessed with for the last 30 years. But where I started was very different from where I am now. And so I went back through all the notebooks with all of the additions, subtractions, et cetera, to this particular plot and then I settled on the one that I really loved. But it was going to require ridiculous amounts of research. But the research capabilities have really helped tremendously.

Angus Fletcher

You know, I was just talking with Marty Seligman, one of the founders of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was saying something very similar to me. He’s apparently at work on an entire library of children’s books because it’s been one of his desires to figure out ways to convey positive psychology and take all these ideas that he has. And I talked to him a couple days ago, and he had, through methods which elude me because I’m not this much of an AI master, he had somehow created 24 separate agents within Claude, each of whom was reading and copy editing the other ones.

And actually, what it honestly sounds like to me is that you missed your true calling as a Hollywood producer. Because, I mean, I worked a lot with folks like, I don’t know if you know, Bob Shaye. Bob Shaye, he did the Lord of the Rings and all that kind of stuff. He was a big mentor for me early in my career, and he had the greatest job in the entire world. He founded New Line Cinema, ended up becoming the biggest independent studio in the world at the time. And he basically just sat in his office and be like, I have an idea for a movie, Radioactive Cats. That would be a great idea for a movie. And then he would get on the phone and he would get the best screenwriters in Hollywood. You’d get George Clooney, everybody in the room, he’s like, go make Radioactive Cats. And they’d be like, yes, sir. And that’s basically, you don’t even need to use the AI. You can have all of the world’s most creative humans, and you order them around, and they come back to you with this movie in a year.

We know that the same parts of the brain that drive story also drive strategy. So they drive the ability to essentially make these plans for companies, for businesses. They also power your ability to anticipate futures that haven’t happened yet. So I don’t know what it was like in terms of managing assets, but I mean, if a lot of what your job is figuring out where could things go. And what we find is that really successful folks, I’ve worked with, I’ve had the opportunity to work with folks in various hedge funds and whatnot. What we find is they don’t lock in on a single probabilistic future, like a computer might. They see tons and tons of possible futures that could happen. And as a result, they’re very able, they’re very rapidly able to switch back and forth when other people are stuck in a single narrative. And so it’s probably that ability to imagine all those stories, I would think, on some level, that also launched you to financial success.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, that’s really interesting because I’ve done deep dives on that as well. And one of my conclusions is you absolutely have to be able to think of all the possibilities, but then you have to be able to hone them down to probabilities, stack rank them as to your view about which one seems the most likely. Challenge yourself, say, okay, what absolutely nukes that particular possibility. And then you go on from there. And in fact, one of the questions that I have written for you is this maps, your book maps directly to asset management in so many ways that I found it really interesting.

There’s another aspect for people who are really good at this. That I find interesting from the Big Five, the OCEAN profiles. Of course, high open mindedness is almost required. If you are a rigid thinker and you are doctrinaire and you are infected with some particular type of ideology, you might be many things, but you’re not going to be a great creative.

Angus Fletcher

No. And of course, I will be honest and say that I’m not the person you want managing your assets. I just want to put that out there. I’m not a money guy. I often hang out with very wealthy people and I’m amazed at their ability to make all the money that they have because I’m a lowly professor. But to your deeper point, I mean, the reason I think the book works in terms of asset management is so much of it was developed with work from U.S. Army Special Operations. And so much of essentially what they’re doing is a form of asset management. I mean, they’re basically, we have these resources, these are the resources that America has given us. How do we maximize them? How do we not lose them? How do we exploit opportunities? How do we demolish challenges?

And to your whole point about, you develop this field of possibilities, then you winnow it down. The way they generally think about it, as they put in the book, is that first of all, your success is only as good as your initial probability space. And what happens is that most people will hone in almost immediately on a small, narrow set of options that they think are likely to occur and in doing so, wipe themselves out. And really successful people are able to come up with incredibly unlikely possibilities. And part of that is just preparing the ground. But also part of that is that when you get into the future, things are going to happen you didn’t expect and you just need that flexibility.

But to your other point, there’s a ton of people out there that are great at thinking of possibilities. Some of them include children, for example. Children are incredibly good at thinking of possibilities. Children you do not want managing your assets. Why? They have no common sense and as a result, they’ll just pick up on some random possibility and go all the way with it. And what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to balance possibility thinking with common sense. And common sense is matching your environments to the plan so that if you’re in a highly volatile environment, you got to take more risks, which means you got to throw aside your old probabilities and take plans that you haven’t tried before. But on the other hand, if you’re in a fairly stable environment, it’s probability all the way. I mean, you might as well hand it over at some point to just this statistics machine or an AI, as long as things are sticking on the track.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And that, you know, that was something I have written down as a question which is, I love the idea. Match the newness of your plan to the newness of the environment. Right now I believe we are in a brand new environment with AI, with the possibilities that it affords us. I kind of, you know how Steve Jobs said computers were bicycles for the mind? I think used properly, and I want to underline that used properly, AI can become a rocket ship for our imaginations, our implementations, et cetera. What do you think about that? One of my ideas are that people who are highly skilled are able to notice things that other people don’t notice.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah. Well, that is the term that the Army has called exceptional information. The thing that other people don’t notice. And this was one of the eye opening moments for me when I started working with Army Special Operations is they kept talking to me about intuition. Intuition is this possibility thinking. Intuition is the ability that certain folks have to identify opportunities and seize on them faster than other people. And as you know, there’s a whole history of identifying intuition as pattern matching. Daniel Kahneman’s whole theory of computer science. But it turns out the computers are great at pattern matching, but they miss a ton of opportunities because they’re so caught on the pattern that they miss the exception. Whereas humans have this ability to actually identify and leverage exceptions to spot those.

And that’s why the combination of human and computer thought is so powerful. First of all, humans are already running a very powerful computer in our brains. So it’s important to understand that a lot of human intelligence is computational. All of our visual cortex, giant computer. We are very good at identifying patterns. We’re very good at, until the computer came along, we were better than anything else on earth at pattern matching and math and so on and so forth. But what the human brain has is it has this ability to pass back and forth between that probability engine and that possibility engine, between that visual cortex and the motor cortex, between optimization and innovation.

And I think what you’re talking about in terms of a centaur is the idea that we as humans can increase that part of our brain, that power that we have, that is about optimization, that is about pattern matching, that is about probabilism. And then that frees us to supercharge ourselves, the possibility part of our brain, the imagination part of our brain. And then you start to get this new future where the two kinds of intelligence can produce total intelligence.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And that is in a nutshell, my thesis on the whole centaur. You can’t. Look, the problem that I see with many people with exploring AI is they don’t do the human part. They basically just say, hey, make me a PowerPoint. And by the way, like PowerPoint, I hate PowerPoint. I despise PowerPoint. And in my old industry it was required. I mean, if you walked in without a deck, the PowerPoint presentation people would be like, well, where’s the deck? And so I actually started that as an experiment. I did no PowerPoint, no deck. And it happened by accident. I was giving a speech and the PowerPoint was ready to go, but we had a tech malfunction and it couldn’t go. And so my team who were there with me were like, oh, what do we do?

And I said, let’s just wing it. And honestly, Angus, it was maybe the biggest, best presentation I ever experienced in terms of the engagement of the audience, because essentially we were quantitative investors, algorithmic, we would test algorithms historically, et cetera. But I always began many speeches with, you’re not going to understand the algorithm part of this, but what you will understand are the stories. So essentially I just built my entire presentation around stories. And one of them was, would you go to a doctor who said, you know, I think I know what you have. And I just got these little yellow pills from a pharmaceutical rep, give them a try and see how they work. And everyone would laugh and I’d say, well, that’s what you’re doing.

If you don’t do your homework, if you don’t see, like with a medicine, there were double blind tests that tested the efficacy of that particular medicine. Which doctor are you going to go to? You’re going to go to the one who has the insight, but also has the evidence that this is the way to go. And so it’s really woven its way throughout my entire career and now it’s, I hope, blooming with the fiction work that I’ve done.

Angus Fletcher

Well, so stories allow for active learning. Basically, the reason that people hate PowerPoints but are addicted to them is because they’re how computers think. And so you put all this data on a screen, and the idea is that somehow the humans looking at it are going to download it into their brains. That’s not how humans work. That’s why whenever you get a new toy at Christmas or whatever, you don’t read the instructions. You just break it out and try and mess around with it. You try and figure out how it works. And the way that stories work is that they generate a sense of tension and suspense.

Because you’re telling me this story about a doctor and about these yellow pills, and I’m trying to guess where is he going with this. I don’t actually know. And as a result, I’m therefore actively learning because I’m trying to anticipate what it is you’re going to say. And that whole process of trying to anticipate what’s going to happen is both the basis of why we as humans interact with each other. That’s why we find each other interesting, but it’s also why we’re successful in terms of dealing with the future. Because the moment that you think the future is just there to be downloaded into your brain, you’re over, man. Because the future is actually unknown. And only a computer thinks that the future is known.

Because a computer can’t tell the difference between past and future, ultimately, it’s all existing in the same mathematical present. And so that’s incredible. Also, you and I, this is funny, we must be on the same kind of spiritual part of the universe, because I had the same thing happen to me a few years ago. I got basically asked by the Army to teach this class on what I do. And this was conventional Army. And they brought me in and insisted I had a PowerPoint deck. And so I spent all this time with them getting the PowerPoint deck, whatever, and then we had to go through the security clearance for the PowerPoint deck and yada, yada, yada, and then we get in the room and the whole thing breaks. There’s no PowerPoint. And they all freaked out.

And then they handed me a Magic Marker and this weird little easel with paper on it. And again, it was the best class I’ve ever taught the Army because I was engaging with the audience. Instead of the audience looking at the screen and trying to engage with the screen, we were engaging with each other. And I was able to gauge when they were interested, not interested, and build suspense or lay off suspense. And it just turned into a human interaction as opposed to us staring at a passive object.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That is the way you get people interested and you get their attention and you get their participation. And the questions that come back to me in that type of environment are so much better, so much richer, so much more nuanced. But why? And I know you talk a lot about why, but before we get there, let’s take a step back. I want to give you an opportunity to just put your thesis out there. We made a big mistake. And the big mistake has cost us quite a bit. And that mistake was equating the human brain with a computer and computation and all of that. And you through your research have found that’s not true at all. That we have this non-logical intelligence, this primal intelligence that allows us to think in a very different and more productive manner. So if you wouldn’t mind, just for people who haven’t had the chance to read the book yet, take us through that. And also really the impact not just on institutions, organizations, but on culture, on society. You make the point that modern education gives us really great standardized test takers who are anxious, rigid, more deferential to authority, sometimes even more prone to magical thinking. But take us through it, if you don’t mind.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah, so to your point on that last thing, we’ve never created a school system that’s better at teaching kids to solve math problems, and worse at teaching them to solve life problems. And everybody knows this. The moment you get a young person in your office for the first day, you know they’re incredibly smart. You know they’ve aced all these tests and they’re also going to be totally useless for the first two years they’re in the building because they don’t have any common sense, they don’t have any initiative, they don’t have any ability to think for themselves. What is going on? How have we built this optimized education system which is taking the smartest minds and really young people today? They have the best nutrition, they have the best support, they have all of this, and yet they are absolutely fumbling at this transition between school and life. And it’s getting worse and worse and worse. So why is this happening?

So yeah, to take you back to the beginning, my background is ultimately in neurophysiology, which is a branch of neuroscience which studies living brains. And one of the things I became really fascinated by is the fact that some people could be incredibly intelligent with limited information. And those people who are intelligent with limited information are entrepreneurs, they are leaders, they are innovators, they are the people that drive the future. And I wanted to understand how that happens. And if you talk to most people in cognitive science today, they’ll say, well, it’s just luck they happen to be randomly able to do this. Now, if you just take a large enough population of humans, of course you’ll get a couple leaders, of course you’ll get a couple entrepreneurs.

But what was really incredible to me is you look at people like Steve Jobs or a lot of folks I’ve worked with, they do it again and again and again. They have a method for being very smart with very little information. And I wanted to understand what was going on in the brain, the mechanics of it, because I thought if you could understand the mechanics of it, then you would take it away from the way that people normally talk about these non-computational things. People talk about non-computational intelligence as consciousness or the ineffable or something like that. But I was like, no, if you can build it down to mechanisms and you can train it and then you can build more leaders, you can build more entrepreneurs. And that’s really what we want our educational systems to do.

So I had a theory of the brain. I had a theory of how it worked. The simple theory of that is that the brain essentially thinks in actions, whereas computers think in equations. When you put a lot of actions together, what you get is a sequence of events. A sequence of events is a narrative. That’s why great leaders think in story. They see the future, the story of the future faster than they make it happen. That’s why great strategists like you also tend to run Hollywood studios because they have this ability to manufacture stories. And then I wanted to understand how does that happen.

And so in my career I went on this odyssey. I got my PhD at Yale studying Shakespeare to understand how stories work. Taught at Stanford for a while, got to work with Pixar, worked with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, worked in Hollywood for a while before finally working now where I am now, as a professor at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which is the world’s leading institute for the study of narrative. But for almost all of my career, I was considered to be this wacky thinker because everyone was like, well, of course computers. That’s what the human brain should be.

Because really, for the last 50 or 60 years, really since the emergence of ENIAC and then IBM and then Apple in the late 20th century, we just had this idea that computers are intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to be logical. Because computers have logic gates. They only think in logic. Specifically, they think in symbolic logic, which has a limited number of mechanical functions. They’re purely logical. Anything that isn’t logical must either be random or bias. That’s the thought process. And so therefore, all creativity must just be random, must be flailing around. And then anything that’s not random or logical must be biased. We have to eliminate bias. And so, of course, our school system has spent the last 20 or 30 years trying to eradicate bias from students, and it’s not helped.

So I have this totally different way of thinking. I keep pushing it out there. People keep saying, Angus, this is nuts. I keep saying, well, computers need all this information to be smart. Humans don’t need information to be smart. There must be something here. No Angus, you’re nuts. And then about five years ago now, I get a call from U.S. Army Special Operations. And at first I thought it was a prank call because I never had any contact with the Army. And they also introduced themselves when I talked to them initially as USASOC, which I’d never heard of before, stands for U.S. Army Special Operations Command. But when they said USASOC to me, I was like, are you telling me I need to use a sock? What is this word?

I’ve never heard this, and I don’t know if anyone’s ever spent any time with the Army, but it’s just this endless stream of acronyms. TRADOC, whatever. Nobody understands if you’re outside the Army, what it means, but you go into the cult called the Army, and you learn all the acronyms. So I got this call from them, and they said to me, hey, Angus, you’re on our watch lists. And my heart stopped for a moment. And they said, that could be very scary.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Angus Fletcher

And in particular, I got contacted by an individual. I can name him now because he’s since retired. His name is Colonel Thomas Gaines, and he was a member of a classified unit that I can’t name inside Joint Special Operations Command inside the Army, that is an intelligence unit. And their job essentially is to live in the future, solving problems before they happen. You can imagine, based on events that have happened over the past year, some of the operations they might have been involved in that went fairly seamlessly. And one of the things that they do in their spare time, apparently is they look for wild scientific theories that could be the future. And they said, Angus, we think you could have one of those theories. Now, we also think you could be a total crank.

We’re not sure because a lot of times it’s really hard to tell whether a new idea is brilliant or just totally nuts. And so we’re wondering, would you like the opportunity to come inside and test your theories? Would you like to test low information intelligence? Would you like to test whether you can actually train some of our elite units to do some of the things you think that students should be doing. And at the time, really the only theory that I had, and I talked about this thing in chapter two of the book, was imagination. It was basically how to increase your imagination. They said, oh, absolutely, I’d love to do that. So I went in and we had this really amazingly productive partnership in which it turned out that I wasn’t nuts. In

my first encounter, I go into this classified facility somewhere that doesn’t actually technically exist. It’s one of these just surreal experiences you have where this building was actually built out of parts of historic structures. So hypothetically, buildings that might have been destroyed overseas or aircraft carriers or whatnot, pieces of them had been forged together to create this almost temple to American Special Operations. Anyway, go inside. There’s the most high tech gym you’ve ever seen in your life. And I’ve been inside NFL facilities, so I’ve seen high tech gyms. I’ve never seen anything like this. And they get escorted into this classroom, which, again, super high tech.

I can’t do all the details, but you can imagine it’s a little bit like if you’ve seen Tom Cruise’s Minority Report or something like that. It’s really out there. So I’m in this room and at this point I slept about an hour the night before. I was so both panicked and amped up because I’d never been inside one of these facilities before. I had no idea where I was going. I get in there, and then I’m confronted by this group of operators. As you might imagine, they’re all incredibly fit, and they’re just staring at me with these laser eyes, their arms crossed, and I’m hyperventilating.

And they hand me a piece of chalk, and I’m trying to describe my theories on the blackboard. And of course, I’m a professor, so everything I say is incredibly abstract and there’s no relationship to reality. And they’re just staring at me with the most aggressive, I could tell I’m not explaining anything properly. And after about five minutes of this, I basically am about to quit. And then the instructor, the senior guy, comes from the back of the classroom and he walks down, he takes the piece of chalk, he says, what this guy is trying to say is this. And he then explains everything I was trying to say much better than I had explained it.

And I was like, that is exactly what I’m trying to say. And then everybody starts nodding. They’re like, oh, yeah, absolutely, that’s right. And then I had this amazing moment. I don’t know if you ever had this in your life where you’re wandering around, you feel like you’re the only person who thinks the way that you think, and then you suddenly find your tribe and you’re just like, whoa. And once we got over that language barrier, all of a sudden we were bonded and since become my closest friends, really the happiest team of my life. And I do want to say to everybody out there that as bad as you might think things are going in the world, there is Army Special Operations. They can be trusted to fix problems. So that’s also done a lot to reduce my stress.

And that was the beginning of this amazing experience where we started with imagination. And that was kind of a little bit what I taught them at the same time, really, just mostly confirming a lot of stuff they’d already thought. And then went in and we started to identify how intuition works, how common sense works, why emotions work in the brain. We built this whole theory, and then at the end of it, I basically said to them, hey, we’ve developed training that we’ve shown works on your most elite units. You guys have very generously validated me.

There’s this thing that Special Operations has called covert victory, which basically is their belief that when a victory is really satisfying, you don’t have to tell anybody about it. And they basically said, hey, Angus, we’ve given you a covert victory. You’ve come in here, there’s all this stuff you’re not going to be allowed to share with anybody ever. But you’ve got your covert victory. And it was really gratifying. I mean, I did feel like I’d lived my life purpose in a strange way, like I could have died there and felt fulfilled. But I still asked them, I said, hey, I said, but obviously, all the stuff, that’s your stuff we can’t take out of this building. But can we take the training out?

Can we take the training out and put it into schools? And the Army was like, absolutely. So we then went, we validated it with the conventional Army. They did a bunch of large scale trials on the core parts of the training. And since then we’ve started putting it into schools and we’ve shown that it has tremendous effects on helping kids develop self-efficacy, initiative, resilience. And the really dirty secret about it is it’s just getting you back in touch with your nature. A lot of it is stuff that when you talk to folks, my generation or above, we sort of, I mean, we sort of get it already because we’ve already had to take risks, experiment. We can’t just go to Google for answers for everything.

But this is something that kids today, they’re in a school system that essentially teaches them one thing, which is there is an answer and the system has it. That’s the main thing you learn when you take standardized tests. They’re habituated into that. It creates dependency in them. They’re always deferring to adults. They also, because they have a loss of self-efficacy, tend to get restless, more prone to anger and anxiety. And they also, because they have no contact with reality, to your point about magical thinking, spend a lot of time reading Harry Potter and other kinds of books, watching superhero movies, reading Romantasy, all of which is fine, there’s nothing bad with any of that stuff. But when you think that’s actually real, that’s a problem.

When it stops being something you do for fun and becomes something that you actually think is real, that’s a problem. And so a big part of what has happened on this odyssey is going, taking this rogue theory, validating it through U.S. Army Special Operations, trying to put it back into the American educational system. We’ve just started with that. But a big help has been businesses. And so I imagine one of the reasons that you and I are in contact is because you read the book and thought, oh, this could be useful in a business context. And I’ve been able to work with a bunch of businesses through writing this book, even though I know nothing about business myself. And they have been very helpful, both in terms of philanthropy and in other ways to kind of turn this wheel.

And a big part of what I’m hoping is that we’re going to start to turn the corner. We’re going to start to bring our education system back to what it could be because there’s so many good intentions and so much money in it. And all we really need is a little bit more common sense, a little more focus on human abilities and understanding that to your point, technology is a tool. It can make you into a centaur. But if you start out with technology, you’re essentially lobotomizing yourself.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I have a friend, we talk about this quite a bit. And we were on this subject and he said in his experience, the three groups of people who, what he calls are in closest touch with reality. And he names them Special Forces, emergency room doctors, and Wall Street traders. Those are his three and I believe it. Okay, now I’m watching your reaction. So tell me you believe it. I’m not going to give you his reasons. I’d like to hear why you think that he’s not too off base there.

Angus Fletcher

Well, first of all, they all deal in life and death. I mean, and so one is—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

A metaphorical death, the Wall Street trader. The other two are real life and death.

Angus Fletcher

Yes. And from the perspective of your brain, there’s no difference. This is the thing, I mean, you can obviously metacognitively realize that making and losing money isn’t life and death, but to your brain it is. And you’re constantly having to navigate your fight or flight response. And that constantly having to navigate your fight or flight response can either put you in a condition of submissiveness, short term coping, or you can learn to master that response because it evolved in your brain to help you do superhuman things. And once you get into that state, and so in addition to working with Special Operations, I had worked a ton with ER doctors for this book and also had the opportunity to work with Preston Klein. I’ll give him a shout out.

He runs something called Mission Critical Team Institute. They work with a lot of NFL teams, but also they work with a ton of doctors and EMTs, frontline responders, firefighters, and so on and so forth. And I also work with a lot of traders. And it’s exactly the same brain process, because what you’re doing is you’re going outside what Special Operators call the bubble. So the bubble is an artificial sense of stability that we’ve created in the modern world. The bubble is where you always expect there to be bananas in the supermarket. You just know. And you see the American consumer just freaks out. This is why whenever there’s a spirit snow thing, the American consumer freaks out, and it’s like, oh, my God, I got to buy toilet paper and got to buy bread.

Because that, to them is a crisis. It’s a completely artificial stability that has been built by generations and generations of people working really hard to give comfort and peace to others. But in order to maintain the bubble, you’ve got to go outside the bubble constantly, because the world is much larger than the bubble. The universe is much larger than the bubble, and increasingly fewer and fewer people go outside the bubble, and those are Special Forces. Special Forces go outside the bubble, EMTs go outside the bubble, and traders go outside the bubble. Because what traders are trying to do is essentially figure out the economy of tomorrow and the economy. I’m a very practical thinker. These are views that are not necessarily popular in the academy, but I think the foundation of any stable society is the military.

That’s why I think 1775, the formation of the Army, came before 1776. And then I think after you’ve got that physical security, you then get economic security. So then right on top of the military, you’ve got the economy. And those are the foundations that allow for all these other things to flourish. Other things will flourish a little bit in stability. People will still make art and poetry and do other kinds of things in military and economic volatility. But it’s when you’ve got that military stability and you’ve got that economic stability that you get this explosion of imagination and other things. Because the bubble essentially flourishes when you have those folks that are able to navigate the waters outside.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Robert Anton Wilson, I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work. But he’s been a favorite of mine, and he calls it reality tunnels. And he does a lot to explain. He would be just nodding furiously listening to you, because one of the things that he rails against is the educational installation of the correct answer machine, as he calls it. And he went to Catholic schools and as did I. And, boy, they’re good at installing the correct answer machine. Except I was the problem child because I just sat, and the nuns would just throw me out.

Angus Fletcher

We really are similar because I didn’t go to a Catholic school, but I went on scholarship, actually, to an Episcopalian school when I was growing up. And I remember I was constantly failing my religion tests because I just hated being told what to do in religion. And so for one of my answers, you had to define God and whatnot. And I would always show that I knew the definition of God, but change the words around in a way that infuriated the person who was creating it. Fletcher, you’re out of the class. Go kneel down outside. This kind of stuff. Yeah. And we know the more that a child believes that there’s a right answer, the less likely they are to come up with a new answer.

That is just basic science. And I think the key as we start to think about this is that, you agree with this. I agree with this. A lot of folks agree with this. We need to start taking this common sense and putting it into the school system, because kids are suffering. And it doesn’t take rocket science. This isn’t an unsolvable problem. We just need to start dismantling this apparatus, this surveillance apparatus where teachers are evaluated on how well they get students to pass these silly tests. And my daughter, I was talking to her this morning, she’s taking essentially a history class. All they do in this class is they memorize definitions. They don’t actually study history. They don’t learn about history. They don’t read books about history.

They just memorize definitions so that the teachers can then have the students pass, and then the school can get its funding, and then the students can move on to the next stage. And we need to start to decentralize this system, give more autonomy to teachers, more common sense, allow them to give books out to students to read at their own pace, all these kinds of things. And of course, that doesn’t mean you totally turn everything into anarchy. You can still have math classes. You can still have some standardized tests. But it needs to be a balance. It needs to be a common sense balance that’s focused on nurturing the whole intelligence of students as opposed to just things that we can evaluate with these standardized tests. It becomes the tyranny of metrics. It becomes the tyranny of assessment as opposed to the usefulness of assessment.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And once you decide that a target is a measurable metric, it ceases being a useful information point for you. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about the British ruling India, and they had too many snakes, and so they gave a bounty if you brought a snake’s tail in. And what did it do? All the enterprising Indians started breeding snakes.

Angus Fletcher

They hacked the system. They hacked the system, which is what smart people do. They hack the system. I mean, I’m sure the reason that you’re sitting here today is the same reason I’m sitting here today, which is that I hacked the system.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Angus Fletcher

I figured out how to get incredibly good at standardized tests. I was considered to be a wizard at standardized tests. I got scholarships all the way through. And I always thought that they were dumb. And I remember people would come up to me all the time. They’re like, I guess you’re so smart. I’m like, why do you think I’m smart? Because you’re getting these great test scores. I was like, that’s not smart. I mean, and I was just trying to get high enough in the system so that I could escape it finally.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yep.

Angus Fletcher

And do my own thing. But that’s what intelligent people will always do. That’s why I love humans, is because we have that ability. But I think a lot of people, they get overwhelmed by all, I mean, there’s never been bureaucracy like there is now. There have never been systems like there are now. It’s all over the place. And when we start putting kids at the age of three or four or five into these systems, they stop having that natural sense that you or I might have had, that there’s something outside it, and it starts to become their entire reality. And so we’re actually training them in an alternate reality, which is a fictional reality, and we’re divesting them of their autonomy, their initiative, their humanity. And that’s what really concerns me.

I think we’re at a point in this country where we’re all starting to see that this is a problem, but it’s like no one feels like they’re in charge anymore. This is what happens with bureaucracy. You get the accountability sink. It’s like, I don’t know how to fix it. Nobody knows how to fix it. Nobody’s in charge. The system is running itself, but people are in charge. It can be fixed. We could get folks together, start, whether it’s alternative schools or just start different kind of classes or whatever. There is a path I talk about in the book, but there’s plenty of other people. I mean, this isn’t new stuff. This is just common sense. And I’m really hopeful that will be the next stage of education, is putting students first as opposed to putting metrics first.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And it was one of the things as I was preparing and rereading your sections of your book. Do you have an idea? How did this become so dominant in our culture?

Angus Fletcher

I can tell you. I can tell you. Yeah, please do. So we’re a democracy, and as a democracy, we’re obsessed with fairness. And so essentially, this is all about the byproduct of good intentions. If you look at the end of the 19th century, turning the 20th century, you get the rise of industrialized education.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Taylorism.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah.

And so the idea is, we got to make everything fair, we got to make everything standardized, we got to make everything optimum, we got to make everything efficient. And so we then, which is not wrong in the sense that where you can have efficiency, you should have it. And in a math class, people can’t just pick up their own answers. I’m not arguing for that. But math is only a small percentage of life. Math is a very useful skill that you want to develop, but it’s not all of life. And so what ended up happening is these systems started to take hold. They then became motivated by this idea of fairness and meritocracy and justice and so on and so forth. And many of the smart kids were able to hack the system.

And so the system, to a certain extent, kept working because smart kids would keep coming out of it and surviving. But at the same time, we were suffocating all these other students and not helping them access their potential. And what ended up happening, and this is something that happened in Special Operations, too, is that a system that was supposed to be about training ended up becoming simply about selection and assessment. In other words, it basically became about, let’s identify the kids that are already smart by forcing them to run through these increasingly complicated gauntlets. We then skim them off. And then we just abandon everybody else. As opposed to really the point of a democratic society, which is to maximize the potential of your people. That’s the difference between us and say, communism.

Communism is basically about installing a single way of doing things and then forcing people to jump through hoops. The whole purpose of America is freedom and it’s to maximize the independence and autonomy of students. And of course we want to equip them to do certain types of, calculus is not evil, computer programming. These are good things. But the moment that we think that is the only reason to do things, I mean, people forget that what was the Soviet Union’s great invention? It was statistics. Marxism emerged out of statistics. And you get from that the idea that there’s an average person, and that’s the foundation of communism.

Whereas the whole foundation of democracy is there is no such thing as an average person. We’re all unique and we want to cultivate that and celebrate that. And yes, of course, I understand that we need to have statistics because cars need to be a certain size, we need to mass produce certain things. And that’s fine as long as we’re aware that it’s a heuristic and a tool as opposed to reality. So I think basically we got caught up in this Taylorism, which I think is actually pretty close to communism, as I’ve indicated. But just these statistics based approaches, scientific management, that in a small amount are good, but when they become everything are tyrannical.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. One of my central ideas is that one thrives with cognitive diversity, but when you get a monoculture, those are the most fragile and most destined to join the, as Marx would say, dustbin of history.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah, no, this is right. So this is also biological. So we know that the more optimized the species is, the more prone it is to extinction.

So species that become hyper specialized, thrive for very short periods of time and they get totally wiped out. And I always like to point out to people that the counter to this is the human hand. The human hand is optimized for nothing. There’s not a single thing that it’s optimized to do, but it’s adequate for endless tasks. And you want to start thinking about your brain the same way your brain is like your hand, only it’s the cognitive version of your hand. It’s not optimized for anything, but it’s adequate at almost anything. And that kind of flexibility is what we want to encourage in young people.

And that flexibility is what allows us to cope with uncertainty, to cope with volatility, not to get wiped out by over specializing and then essentially becoming dependent on our environment because we can only survive if the environment stays the same as opposed to becoming dependent on ourselves, self-reliant and having this natural evolutionary capacity to adapt.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s like the famous, I’m blanking on his name, Robert Heinlein, I think he had that wonderful line, specialization is for ants.

Angus Fletcher

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And the full quote is marvelous. It’s like, no, I’m a human being, I should be able to. And then he gives this huge list of very different things that he should be able to do as a human being. I was always taken by that quote of his.

Angus Fletcher

And Heinlein’s a great example because this is something we discovered working with Special Operations. Because it’s one thing to talk about how we believe in these things, but then the next question is, how do you cultivate that? That’s what we want. We want to build a culture. America has a history. The reason that America, and I think I can say this because I’m an immigrant, so I’m a naturalized citizen. So this isn’t me running around being a chest thumping patriot. This is me being a real patriot. This is me being someone who chose to be an American. The reason that America is so extraordinary is it’s had the ability to cultivate that individualism, to cultivate individuals. And how do they do it?

And so one of the things we learned from working with Special Operations is that they spend a lot of time reading near fiction, near future science fiction like Heinlein. And there’s something about it that just stimulates your imagination. And we find that when young people are exposed, for example, to science fiction as opposed to fantasy novels, they tend to do better later in life because what’s happening with the science fiction is it’s helping them to imagine, oh, here’s a future that’s kind of like mine. But there’s a couple things that are different. How would I survive in it, as opposed to fantasy, which is just putting you in a realm of magic, which has no contact with anything. And so Heinlein, I think that entire generation, Asimov, all those writers were really great at cultivating American culture, and we’re sort of losing that.

And what are our great science fiction writers today? They’re not popular, they’re not mainstream. Hollywood does very few sci-fi movies now. We’ve sort of given up on that, even though that was really the prime thing when you look at America’s golden years of innovation.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I’m a huge sci-fi fan, as you might be able to intuit. But I also concur. Have you read Bill Bryson’s One Summer, where he focuses on the 1920s? And I love the book because that’s the America that built what we have. It was freewheeling. There’s a wonderful story in there on how President Coolidge was vacationing near where the guy was doing the Mount Rushmore, and the guy just did it. He had no permission. He had no authorization. And so the President’s aide comes in to his camp. They were fishing or something and says, hey, Mr. President, you gotta come see what this guy is doing. And so Coolidge goes up there and he’s like, wow, cool. But the whole spirit of that America was exactly what you are detailing.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah, you take the initiative.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, you take the initiative. Some things are going to work out. To use a military acronym, some go FUBAR. But you have the freedom and the space and the underlying, as you point out, I think the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are perhaps the most brilliant documents in the founding of a country ever.

Angus Fletcher

Of course. Unquestionably. I don’t even know why that’s up for debate. Again, I’m not saying this as some rabid patriot. I’m just saying that is the case. They are the experiment. I mean, we often talk about America as an experiment, and that’s why it’s great, because it is an ongoing experiment. Unlike all these other countries that try to basically fix something. America has this idea that we’re going to build the plane as we fly it, and that’s going to create a culture of individuals taking risks and trying things. This ultimately is a difference between thinking in probability and thinking in possibility and systems, whether they’re communist or AI or whatever, they think in probability. And probability is based on what’s worked in the past.

And that’s why those systems are ultimately not able to develop huge innovations. They’re able to produce optimization and stability, but they don’t understand risk, because anytime they look at a possibility, they say, we have no data on it. And then what the American says is, well, that’s why we got to try it. We have no data on it, so we got to try it. We got to figure out if it works or not. And the system’s like, whoa, if we try it and it doesn’t work, it’s going to cost money. Things might go wrong. Rushmore might fall over. Just think of the disasters which might ensue. And the American’s like, no, because here’s the thing.

Once you start getting in the habit of taking risks and trying things and experimenting, you learn how to fix risks that don’t work out. And so it’s not just a case of I’m just randomly taking all these risks, and some of them are working and some of them aren’t. It’s, I’m learning how to manage risk and to use risk and to leverage risks and to learn and grow from risk. And you just get into that experimental entrepreneurial psychology. And that’s why once you’ve started one business, you can start five.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yep.

Angus Fletcher

But if you’ve never started a business, you’re never going to start one. Because you’re just going to sit there and imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m a big fan of David Deutsch, the quantum physicist in England, and his book The Beginning of Infinity. And he does a really good job explaining what he finds. One of the worst things that you could do, and that is to fall into the grip of the precautionary principle, because it essentially institutionalizes everything you’ve just said leads to decline and collapse because it doesn’t leave open any room for change. And when you only are operating on outdated things that no longer hold true, what’s going to happen? You’re not going to be able to think your way through to the new path.

Angus Fletcher

That’s exactly right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so the idea that we can reform is very appealing to me. I agree with you entirely. I’ve been on the soapbox about the need to change the American educational system forever. But I’ve also been on the soapbox of, America with all of our problems, we are still the place where most of the world’s smartest people, most imaginative people, want to come and live. And so if we could fix that process and we could get the best of the world and say, not only to say, yeah, you can come to America, but to actively say, hey, Angus, come become an American citizen. We want the way you think.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, I think America is bad, but it’s better than anywhere else. It’s still the best that humans have ever done. And I think a lot of us as Americans look around in frustration because we see that best and we’re like, why can’t we have more of that? And a lot of it comes down to the fact that when America is successful, it creates the ability for long term risk. And when you focus everything on the short term, it immediately turns people into just copying what happened in the past. And you get in this mindset of just, I’m going to survive, I’m just going to cope. And so many of our institutions now are not allowing individuals to take the big risks.

And then what happens as a result is you get a small number of people who are lunatics, like me, it sounds like you as well, who just almost have it in our nature that we’re going to take risks anyway. And so you get a small number of individuals who keep the system going by taking those risks even though there’s no safety net, even though there’s no support. But when America did, I mean, my classic example of when America was at its best was when it landed people on the moon.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yep.

Angus Fletcher

And that was an enormous risk and things did go wrong. There were tragedies and there were calamities, but there was a willingness to take risks in that era of NASA that does not exist in the current generation of NASA. It’s one of the reasons why SpaceX has taken over and SpaceX isn’t even taking risks like they used to back then. And if you could institutionalize that culture of risk taking where you’re of course doing everything you can to manage and learn from things that go wrong. I mean, if you’ve read The Right Stuff, if you read about the test pilots that we had in the 1950s, that was real risk. And that was why we had this explosive period of technological growth. And you have to create a system that supports that.

You have to create a system that will economically support individuals so they take risks that don’t work out and that’s the possibility of America. But at the moment, that’s really breaking apart in ways that I think are disturbing. And to your point about schools are all about, can you pass the test tomorrow? Students are never allowed to develop a long term plan for their lives. It’s always, can I memorize these two pieces of information and regurgitate them to the teacher tomorrow? And as a result, they just are completely alienated from the part of themselves that knows how to sustain a long term strategy or a blue sky shot.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And you know, as you were talking about the going shorter and shorter term, there’s an analog in what I used to do investing, and it’s called hyperbolic discounting.

Angus Fletcher

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And when you do it, you narrow your ability to choose between options to such a degree that you talk a lot about, fear is no plan. And anger is one plan. When you do hyperbolic discounting, you essentially so narrow your field of vision that your chances of making the wrong choice skyrocket.

Angus Fletcher

That’s right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I always try to get, I spent 30 years of my career trying to get people to understand that simple concept. It’s like, no, no, no. And one story that I told was about my first big client. And he was a gold entrepreneur. He just had a great intuition for where gold was. And so I asked him to explain it to me and he goes, I’ll show it to you. And he takes me out back, this is in the West, and we get into a single prop plane, he’s a pilot. And he takes me up and he starts flying over various geography. And then he says, do you notice anything different about the way that patch down there looks versus all of the other patches that we’ve flown over? And I’m like, yeah, it does look different.

He goes, I’m turning you into a gold prospector. But then he said something that really stuck with me and changed the way I presented this idea about if you really want to expand your possibilities, you’ve got to be very long term. He was old when he sold his company. And when I flew out, I had put together a portfolio, frankly a very conservative portfolio, because I made the mistake of thinking, well, you know, he’s 70, this is a long time ago. He’s gonna want the really low volatility type stuff. And I took him through it and he just had this big smile. We were sitting, I was on a couch and he was in a chair, and he just got this big smile on his face and he went, Jim, I gotta tell you, I’m disappointed in you.

And I went, okay, why? And he goes, why are you bringing me all this vanilla, plain vanilla stuff? And I went, well, sir, you know, not for nothing, you’re 70 and. And there was a table next to us, and it was filled with, if you can see in my background, you’ll see all my grandchildren. It was all of his grandchildren. And he pointed at the pictures and he said, my time horizon is infinite. And it so struck me that I just stole the line from him.

Angus Fletcher

That might be my favorite story of all time. There’s a couple reasons why I love that. First of all, he spots exceptional information. I mean, he’s like, the Special Forces would love him if he could just fly over and identify where gold is. I mean, that’s the secret to everything. That’s incredible. Also, he was able to spot exceptional information in you. He was able to see that you were actually, even though you gave him this portfolio he didn’t want, he was able to know that you could do something more than that. And that actually, I think more than anything else is actually the key to investing. I think that really successful investors invest in people.

I mean, this is certainly what Hollywood does. I mean, when I work with Bob Shaye, he would never buy a script. He would buy the writer of a script or he would buy a director and he would say, look, if this person produces a dreadful script, they’re still a great writer. They’ll write me something else. If this investor comes in, if this manager comes in and gets a terrible portfolio, I know we can come up with something better. But this idea that you invest for your grandchildren, now that’s actually in biology. We call this the grandchildren principle. What determines success in biology is not the number of children you have, it’s the number of grandchildren you have.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Huh?

Angus Fletcher

And that’s why, there’s famously, animals like the liger that are sterile. You could have a tiger, lion, a million ligers, and it would be the end of the line. And a lot of when you get into short term thinking, you’re thinking about your children, you’re not thinking about your grandchildren. And shifting people to think about second generation success, not just how do I get my customer to buy this car, but how do I get my customer’s kid to buy a car?

I mean, that’s where companies like Honda, establish their dominance, which I think they’re now losing because everyone is now focused increasingly, like, how do I get your cash and then run away in the other direction before you come back and ask me for it, but that focus and when America gets back into that, when companies start thinking about, no, actually what we’re really thinking about here is not the next investment cycle, but we’re thinking about the cycle birthed by that, the grandchildren of that cycle, we’re thinking always at least two steps down the road. That’s when you start to get this long term psychology that takes hold and that’s where America thrives. I mean, democracy does not work as a short term thing.

If you have a group of people who are always voting for the person that’s telling them what’s going to make them happiest now, the country collapses. And we’re seeing that now. It’s just, you just get politicians who are just offering people stuff that they can’t give them. You get into this debt spiral that we’re in now where everybody’s like, we’re not going to pay for it now, we’re just going to pay for it later. But democracy does work when you have everybody in that democracy like we used to have thinking about their grandchildren. If you get up every morning, you’re like, I’m voting for the person who’s going to be best for my grandchildren, democracy becomes the strongest institution in the world. If everybody’s thinking about what’s best for me today, democracy collapses and we lose to tyrants.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, it’s fascinating to me is once I had that conversation with him, that’s how I started viewing everything. And I have six grandchildren. Ages a little under 2 to 12. And that’s how I think about things. I think about what kind of world can I affect now that will be a good world for my grandchildren and their children to grow up in. And it leads you to very different conclusions. Where you’re going to put your time, money, energy, what you’re going to fight for, what you can be fine with just the way it is. But I’ve never heard it explained that way. So thank you very much for that. I now can say, well, the reason I do this.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah, well, I mean the nuns at your Catholic school were right, there is immortality. But it comes to us through our grandchildren.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Angus Fletcher

And that’s where it comes from. And when you think like that, you start to feel this spiritual connection. Of course you feel a connection and a kinship with your kids, but you then you see in grandparents and grandchildren there’s a different kind of connection. There is a different kind of spiritual connection. And that is because that’s where life thrives. Life thrives in that long term space. And I do think the fact that you’ve discovered that, that’s the thing that as much as we can cultivate that, whether it’s in our school systems, whether it’s in our businesses, I’m a big fan of family businesses.

A lot of the time when I work with family businesses and I see that they’ve been handed through multiple generations and I realize that one generation has been looking out for two generations down and basically getting their kids to think about the grandkids, it’s not just about making money now. It’s about making money two generations on. That’s when you start to develop these organic, really strong communities that thrive. And certainly the military has this. I mean, the military is always thinking about the future. The military is always thinking about the war after the next war and how do we set ourselves up. And I’m just afraid that not enough areas of American life think that way. And we have to figure out how to get people to connect really on that spiritual level.

Once you have that experience, it stays with you and it does change the way you behave. But if you just think about it in the abstract, it’s not going to deflect you from your short term hedonism.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And that was the other thing. Along those lines, when my son was expecting his first, my first grandchild, a grandson, I had said to him multiple times, you really do not understand how much I love you, but you will. And he used to dismiss me and he’d be like, oh, dad, I know how much you love me. And I went, no, you actually don’t. And when he came out holding Pierce, that’s my first grandson, tears in his eyes, he looked at me and he goes, I had no idea how right you were. And it is that connection that is very human. And you know, back to your thought about communist and authoritarian and totalitarian systems. What is the first thing they attack? The family.

Angus Fletcher

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Get the kids to rat out mom and dad, this whole paranoid culture so that they can sustain their monoculture, which never happens. I read, speaking of notebooks, I was just going through some old ones and I found one from 1982, when I was 22, and I have a 10 page little thesis explaining why the USSR had to collapse. And it was the underlying uniformity of their system, which didn’t allow for any change. Change was punished severely. And of course, we also can’t let the Catholic Church off the hook here. They tried for centuries. No, no, Galileo. You’ll be spending the next seven years of your life as our guests in the Vatican.

Angus Fletcher

That’s right. Yeah. No, and anytime a system thinks that it has finished growing, you know, maybe in the next life, but not in this life. I mean, the basis of life is growth. Everything wants to grow. That’s when you have your deepest experiences of joy, is when you’re growing. I mean, I can confirm, when we had my first kid, I did suddenly understand my parents in a totally different way. I mean, your entire, you experience a conversion, essentially.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Angus Fletcher

You change who you are in a radical way. You suddenly understand, oh my goodness, I’m entering a totally next phase of my life in which I can look back at my parents. I have a total, I used to have a fairly contentious relationship with my dad. I’ve got a great relationship with my dad now because having kids changed my understanding of all these things. And that growth, that sense that I can change in an organic way. I’m not just being ripped out of my life and thrust into another one, but I’m myself. But more, that’s what democracy exists to nurture and to cultivate. Whereas to your point, systems exist to perpetuate themselves by crushing anything inside them that is different or new.

And this is just a feature of all bureaucracies, whether they’re communist or not, is they just fear anything that in some way might destabilize the system because the system is so optimized, it’s moving so efficiently. And it forgets that it exists for another function. It forgets that it’s supposed to itself have grandchildren. That it’s supposed to hand something on. And it starts to think that itself is the focus. And that’s like weird, almost like teenage narcissism where you think that somehow the world was created for you as opposed to, you were there to perpetuate the world. That’s what suffocates all of these chances for experience.

And I think if I’d known as a young person that I could experience the same growth and joy that I did as a child when I was 40, 50, 60, 70. That’s what we want to excite in people as opposed to, we have a culture now that is terrified of change, that pathologizes getting old, that doesn’t understand that these are actually positive forms of growth, that you develop wisdom and all sorts of extraordinary things as you age. But no, we all have to stay the same. We all have to have Botox. We all have to look, the system has to stay the same. That’s where I think we lose out on the actual opportunity for life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I think Oscar Wilde nailed it with his Picture of Dorian Gray, right? The portrait. Perfect, handsome, all of that. The real portrait. And that can happen to a system, right? Because if it’s always trying to maintain that face and meanwhile it’s disintegrating in the background, you get to a bad place. And one of the things that I worry about, I mean, we are so ridiculously simpatico. This is so much fun for me is science, right? Traditionally in science, it was supposed to be the height of objectivity, right? And I mentioned Robert Anton Wilson to you earlier, but he’s got a great book called The New Inquisition, Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. And essentially he makes the case that they so bought into the old theory of materialism. In other words, everything had to be fit into that paradigm. And anything, like, for example, I had Rupert Sheldrake on as a guest.

He’s a scientist and very outside the fold, shall we put it? In fact, it never ended up getting anywhere, but we were going to work with him on an intuition app which was meant to help you increase your intuition. He’s written a tremendous amount on intuition, and he believes that it’s testable and that it’s real. And one of the things that he talks about is you’ve never experienced the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. You’ve never experienced that. And everyone was like, well, of course I have. And he goes, yes, because that is intuition, and you’re designed as an intuitive being. And maybe we can harness intuition and make it better.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah. And this point about science, science is supposed to be humbling, right? As a scientist, you’re supposed to actually remember that you know almost nothing. I mean, we actually do know almost nothing. I mean, we know a lot of very interesting things, and I think a lot of the stuff we know is interesting and valuable. But we know almost nothing. And yet science has become so conservative intellectually over just a little c conservative over the last 50, 60 years. I mean, never in human history has more money been poured into science and you’ve gotten less breakthroughs. It’s just bizarre. And it’s just become this entire paper mill, essentially, of scientists having to get a grant. And how do you get a grant?

Well, you get a grant by showing that you’re productive over this cycle. And so how do you show that you’re productive? Well, you basically just recycle experiments that are going to work. And so the entire system just keeps basically saying the same thing over and over and over again and not getting anywhere. And just like the assessment system in school, it acts as though the stuff that it’s repeating is all that there is. No, this is this tiny little area. And it’s great. If you want to keep repeating yourself endlessly, science, that’s fine. But the purpose of science ultimately is to innovate, to discover. And at some point, I mean, to me, science is on some level, it’s the attempt to figure out what are the limits of human knowledge.

When you get the limits of human knowledge and you’ve explained everything, then you say, okay, we are masters of the universe. But more likely when you get to the limits of human knowledge and you still can’t explain everything, you say, okay, there’s something more, and we’ve just given up on that. We’ve just said, no, we know everything. There isn’t any more to go. We are the masters, and we’re basically the masters of almost nothing. I mean, I think Covid, if nothing else, revealed to us just how bizarre science has become in the modern world. It became this weird mix of people overinvesting confidence in new ideas and there being a staggering lack of imagination and willingness to experiment.

And I think we’re at a moment where I hope, just as there’s a chance to change the school system, there’s a chance to change science, because I think people are ready and open to the idea that there is something more out there. And to get there, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, you just need to encourage a little more entrepreneurial initiative, encourage a little more creative thinking, trust people, invest in people. As opposed to in grants and in applications and scripts, start to go back to what made America such a dynamic, innovative country in the first place, which was betting on things that haven’t been tried before.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And in our own small way, we’re trying to do that. At O’Shaughnessy Ventures, we started a fellowship and grants program. We have a dozen $100,000 annual grants with no equity. In other words, we don’t get any. If they’re scientists and they come up with this amazing thing, it’s theirs, not ours. But what we select for is exactly the opposite of the way the traditional grant process works. We are inviting the oddballs. We are inviting, because if you think about it, Isaac Newton was an eccentric fellow.

Angus Fletcher

I mean, he might have been the nuttiest guy of the entire 17th century. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you know, out of the 5% of the time he spent on math, he spent 95% on alchemy. And he still did come up with some pretty cool stuff.

Angus Fletcher

He did. Yeah. No, I mean, I actually spent a tour. He spent a lot of time with the Book of Daniel and trying to predict the day of the end of the world.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s right.

Angus Fletcher

Essentially. I mean, that’s what he spent most of his time doing. And he was actually very uninterested in a lot of the astronomy stuff. I mean, people would come to his office and he’d be trying to figure out whether the world was going to end this year or that year. And he would say, oh, yes, by the way, I have this paper over there where I’ve explained the laws of gravity. You could maybe dig it up, and they’d be like, what? Yeah, yeah. So, no, absolutely. And a lot of, I mean, a lot of really, truly brilliant thought does come out of people who, mentally, their ideas are not right. But you only have to, if you’re having those just huge ideas you only need to hit once in your life to change everything. So I’m very cheered to hear that you’re doing that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And Ken Stanley, whose book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, has a really interesting take on that, which is very in line with the way you look at the world. He says if you start with just a single goal here and you just optimize everything you’re doing, all your research, everything else to reach that goal, you’re going to be very disappointed.

Angus Fletcher

Yes, you are.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because the title of his book is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. You have to iterate. You have to try. You have to make the mistake. I personally believe that mistakes are portals of discovery. And if you don’t make mistakes, you’re not going to get anywhere. Well, you’re going to get where you are, and that’s about it. But the whole path to doing something new, to doing something innovative, to thinking differently and solving a problem differently, in my opinion, is mistake, learn, mistake, learn, iterate.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah. So this might be a good place for us to start to tie this together. Because one of the things that I’m fascinated by is how individuals such as yourself continue going forward through mistakes without a concrete target. Like, how does that work in the brain? And the answer turns out to be optimism. And what’s fascinating about optimism is it’s almost totally misunderstood in the modern world. The modern world understands optimism as, this will happen, I will succeed in this way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Angus Fletcher

And that’s why people spend all this time visualizing success and manifesting, doing all this kind of stuff. Actually, in the brain, optimism comes from your past. It doesn’t come from looking at the future, it comes from looking at your past. And what your brain is looking at is all the times you learned from mistakes in the past, and what your brain is looking at is all the times that you were uncertain and then you figured it out. And the more you focus on those moments, the more it gives your brain the capacity to move forward in what we call negative capability. And negative capability is the ability to go forward without knowing where you’re going. But you know that in the past you’ve made it. And we see this as really strong in Special Operators.

Special Operators are always thinking back to that last mission where they were about to die, but then they didn’t die and they pulled it out. And that allows them to go into this future mission. And the same thing with any explorer or innovator. They’re always going forward in deep uncertainty. They actually have no idea where it’s going, but they’re sustained by this optimism, which comes from the past. And it sounds to me like that is a huge part of what drives you forward, is you can probably go back through your memory at all the times when you surprised yourself and you managed to pull it out, and you’re like, well, if I pulled it out then, let’s go ahead and give it a shot now.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, that’s so funny you bring that up because I was contemplating optimism the other day, and I am a very, what I call myself a rational optimist. And by that I mean, look, I’m not Pollyannish. And I don’t think that unicorns and butterflies will spring forth in front of me. But I started thinking, I wonder how much of optimism can be learned or can be taught? And you might have just given me the answer.

Angus Fletcher

It can be learned. It can be. So we know that some people just tend to be more optimistic than others, and this is the same way. There’s a lot of things in life. A lot of times, Special Operators, a lot of them just tend to operate better than average people. But you can train a Special Operator, and you can train an optimist, and we do. This is one of the things I was doing with the American Camp Association last week, is we were sitting kids down, and we were getting them to pause and think about moments in the past when they’d surprised themselves. And the reason this is important is we know that most young people run past those moments. And we know this because if you ask a young person, hey, when was that time that you learned how to walk?

They’d be like, what? I don’t remember when I learned how to walk, I just did it. Oh, when was that time you learned how to talk? Oh, I don’t remember how to do that. Wait, you learned language? You learned language? You don’t remember that? You learned how to move your body, and you don’t remember that? Yeah, I don’t remember that. They don’t lock in those moments and what you actually have to start doing, and we see this with really successful people, is the moment they’re confronted with a new challenge. The first thing that they think about is the old challenge that they succeeded at. It just pops. And kids today, if you don’t develop that strength in them, they see the new challenge and then they panic because they’re like, oh, my goodness.

And then you say to them, well, look, you’ve done this before. They’re like, I haven’t done this before. I’m like, no, but what you have done before is you’ve overcome a challenge you didn’t think you could overcome before because it was a new challenge. And they’re like, oh, yes, I have done that before. Boom. The optimism comes on, and they get after it. And so that is something you can train. It’s something that’s not being trained in school. It’s super simple to train. A lot of this stuff, it’s not rocket science, but we’re just abandoning kids. And as a result, a few kids who have natural optimism like you do thrive while the rest drown.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And it just is so frustrating to me. That’s why I love talking to people like you, because there are solutions. And I think the more that you had mentioned when we started talking, how sometimes you feel like you’re the only one. And another of my favorite authors, Howard Bloom, has a wonderful story. I don’t know if it’s true because I haven’t done the chemistry, but the story is great. He’s talking about if you take a clear beaker of water and you pour a huge cup of salt into it and then you boil it, the salt disappears to the vision of the human looking at that beaker. So when you’re looking at it, what you’re seeing is what you think is a beaker of water.

He maintains that if you take a single salt molecule and drop it into that container, all of a sudden the salt all comes and shows itself.

Angus Fletcher

This is so true. This is called supersaturation. This is a legit principle of chemistry. He didn’t just make it up. Yeah. Because basically what’s happening there is you’ve essentially got too much salt in there because you heated it up to dissolve it. And then when you cool it down to room temperature, it becomes supersaturated and you drop in a seed and then you’ll form crystals. That’s totally true.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Which is what I loved about the metaphor, though, is he uses it, and I’ve been using it. I stole it from him. Because when you don’t feel all alone, some of that fear goes away.

Angus Fletcher

You find the other salts.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. You find the other salts. You find the people who are like you, and there are a lot of them out there. And that’s my constant refrain. I’m lucky in that because of the fellowships and grants, I get to chat with some very interesting people, let’s put it that way. And the idea, though, is that originally some of them will come and you can see they’ve been rehearsing and they’ve been trying to fit in to the mold that they were not designed for. And so I immediately tell them, forget all of that. Tell me why this is your moonshot. Tell me why you think this is going to work. And then they entirely change and their entire personality comes out as quirky, as many of them are. I find it charming.

But they’re telling the real story rather than the other, well, I want to make sure.

Angus Fletcher

I want to make sure. Let me just say you’re a gift. That’s incredible. No, the fact that you’re doing that is incredible. And I do think that the real opportunity of life is to encourage other people’s individuality to help them tell their stories. Only they can tell it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Angus Fletcher

I mean, you get that experience when you work with young kids and you get them to write their first story, or when you talk with someone and they’re able to share with you who they actually feel. And the fact you’re able to empower those individuals to do that is a gift. And thank you for doing that. I think that the world would be a significantly better place if all of us did a fraction of what you were doing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I think that right now. Thank you for that, but I think I’ll return the compliment. I was so excited after I read your book. I said to my producers, I gotta have him on my podcast, because the more we find each other, the more we can affect some of these other things that seem intractable. Like the educational system seems intractable. A lot of societal things seem intractable, and they’re not.

Angus Fletcher

They’re not.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

There are ways that you can affect them that work. And that is what excites me. And again, it’s because of these guys. I definitely want them to be in a world that doesn’t operate the way we’ve let ours kind of decline into. And I’m not a defeatist in any way, shape, or form. I still believe that despite all of the systems fighting for control of every aspect of our life, that they are not gods, that we can change them, that there are ways and paths to do that, and there are people who do that.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah. Well, you define yourself as a rational optimist. I’m going to define you as a real optimist. A real optimist is someone who can look at the depth of the problem, can acknowledge how hard it is and still believe. That’s what real optimism is. Real optimist is looking into the depth of the night and realizing the dawn is going to come. That’s a real optimist. You accept the reality and you embrace the reality, and then you move the reality. So, look, you and I should do something together. I’d love to do it. We have a program here at Ohio State. We’re running 9,000 students at Fisher College of Business through some of this training. There’s a lot of change we’re trying to get going. Some of this stuff is happening inside the Army.

I’m working with a bunch of schools here in my district. So I would love to work on something with you or just in general, it makes me feel good to know, I mean, as I hope it makes you feel good to know that I’m not alone, that I have a team, that I have a secret team. That even if I get up every morning and you and I aren’t talking, you’re out there doing your good work. I’m trying to do my good work, and together, we’re helping make that future story happen.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I would love to do something with you and we will schedule a non-recorded conversation to do that because I just love the way you look at the world. I want to get a couple more questions in if you have time. You talk about the Disney danger and I’d like you to describe for our listeners and viewers what the Disney danger is. And then extend that to non-entertainment environments. What narrative formulas are infecting business, government, politics, science, all the things we’ve been talking about that are danger, Will Robinson, danger.

Angus Fletcher

Yeah. So I learned about Disney through my experience at Pixar and working with folks. Pixar was one of the most exciting opportunities of my life. It also turned out to be tragic because Pixar in the end got bought by Disney. So if anyone’s seen the original Toy Story, if you’ve seen Up, if you’ve seen…—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Beautiful movies. Wonderful, wonderful movies.

Angus Fletcher

They’re astonishing, they’re heartfelt and they’re really original. And they remind you that there are new stories to be told. And that’s really important because we as a country have always existed by telling a new story. That’s what we do. Every new technology is a new story. Every political movement, every artistic movement, it’s a new story. And what we’ve seen in this country is we’re falling back into the old stories. We’re repeating the old stories. We’re fighting with each other over which old story is right. The old story is never right. What’s right is a new story. What the American people want is a new plan. They want a new way of doing things. They want to go to the movie theater and be surprised. And so I asked Pixar, like, how are you doing this? How are you creating these new stories?

And they said, it’s really simple. Way back in our DNA is Steve Jobs and engineering. And the way that engineering works is it starts by saying, what are we trying to do? In other words, what’s the function? What’s the effect? And then we reverse engineer the structure from that. So when we’re building an iPhone, we don’t start with some eternal blueprint for a phone. If we did that, we’d still be using the Bell telephone and we’d just be optimizing it, making the receiver better and better. We instead say, what do we want to do with this phone? And then how do we build the technology to give you that result? And it’s the same thing with the story. So in the case of a movie like Up, what do we want to do in Up?

We want to lift you up. So how do we lift you up? We reverse engineer and we create the saddest beginning to a movie you’ve ever seen, and then you’re down, and then when you’re down, we lift you up. And so what they were doing is they were innovating story structure by thinking, what new thing do we want to do? And once we figured out the new thing that we want to do, we build a new story to get us there. And then of course, what happened is that Disney ended up taking over Pixar. Disney said to Pixar, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to make two, even three Pixar movies a year. How do we do that? We take your standard stories and we just repeat them. Cookie cutter.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Cookie cutter, yeah.

Angus Fletcher

And Disney has been doing this. I mean, Disney did this with Marvel, Disney did this with Star Wars. I mean, Star Wars is one of the most mind blowingly weird movies of all time. George Lucas’s imagination extraordinary. And somehow Disney has managed to make it boring and predictable by just repeating the story over and over again. That’s what Disney does, and that’s okay. I mean, Disney’s an optimizer, whatever. But the point of stories ultimately is to kindle the imagination of people to have them create new stories. And what Disney really wants to do is Disney wants to make you a passive consumer of its stories. It actually wants to take away your autonomy by basically feeding you the same thing over and over again.

And so what we all got to do is we got to go back to what Pixar discovered. We got to get back to that. You can go back and watch those movies and you can read the history of the early days of Pixar. You can study how it works, and you can realize, no, there are new stories to be told in Hollywood, but also in life. Your story can be a new story. You can walk a path that no one has ever walked before. You just have to figure out something new, whether it’s carving Mount Rushmore or whatever, and then figure out your path to get there. How are you going to get to that new outcome? Same thing in politics.

I mean, I think everyone is exhausted with politics right now because we’re just being yelled at the same answers over and over again. It’s like, no, we need you to come up with a new plan. That’s your job. Come up with a new story. And it’s a struggle for these folks because they’ve been brought up in a culture that doesn’t understand that. So that’s the Disney problem. But the good news is that every child is born being able to imagine new stories. Life keeps coming back. It does keep coming back. Every generation has a new chance. If we stop taking that young generation and putting it in schools and making it watch Disney movies, it’s going to be much more likely to be able to fix all the problems that we old people have created.

So that’s the pitch that I make in the book. And I’m sure everyone has experienced that same thing. I mean, you go now to a Hollywood movie and you never expect to be surprised. You never expect to discover something new or interesting or exciting. And that’s nuts, because these movies are made by the most creative people on earth, literally. And you and I have all had the experience of talking to someone and suddenly being like, whoa, I can’t believe that you existed. If you can have that experience talking with someone, you should be able to have that experience walking into a movie, because that person’s life story is amazing. So should a Hollywood movie amaze you? So I think we just got to get back to that.

It sounds to me like the novel you’re writing, you’re taking some risks, you’re doing some interesting things. And I think in general, the more we can encourage that, a little more creative writing classes in school, encourage students not to try and write to a formula. Marketing is so formulaic. How do you break through in the modern world? Not with a formula. The human brain does not want to see a formula. The human brain wants to be surprised. How are you surprised? Surprised with something new. So all of these things that we are getting out of the habit of doing, I think that there’s going to be a golden opportunity for creatives and original thinkers in the future. They just got to break through this crust of conformity.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I could not agree with you more completely, Angus. And I’m looking at the time, and we’ve already been talking for an hour and a half, and I haven’t even gotten to half of it. So first off, yes, I would love to have a separate conversation about working together on something, because it sounds like we’re directionally trying to head in the same direction. I’d also like to have you on the podcast again, because these are the kind of conversations I want people to be able to listen to and watch. And they’re like, oh, yeah, okay, I can do that too. That’s really cool. But I’m gonna ask you our classic final question here at Infinite Loops. And it is this. We’re going to make you, for a day, the emperor of the world. You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp.

You can’t kill anyone. But what you can do, we’re going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it, and the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their next morning is, and they’re going to say, you know, I’ve just had two of the greatest ideas, and unlike all the other times that I have these great ideas, I’m going to act on both of these ideas starting today. What two things are you going to incept in the population of the world?

Angus Fletcher

I want you to remember a time in your past when you took a chance and I want you to be that person again.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love that.

Angus Fletcher

And I want you to look at all the people around you and realize that they’re a mystery waiting to be discovered. Go learn their story.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, wow. Those are fabulous. I’m gonna do both of those. Angus. Where can people find you and your work and your books?

Angus Fletcher

I’m pretty much the only Angus in Ohio, so if you Google Angus in Ohio, you’ll find me. My latest book, which is a national bestseller, it’s called Primal Intelligence which s why I’m on here. And I also bizarrely, have one of the top articles in Harvard Business Review from last year, 2025, about my work with Special Operations. So if you’re an HBR subscriber, you can just Google Angus Fletcher and you’ll get that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Very cool. We will link to all of your stuff in the show notes. Angus, this has been ridiculously fun for me. I hope you enjoyed it as well. And I look forward to our next conversations about working together and doing another segment of the podcast, because this is the kind of stuff people need to hear.

Angus Fletcher

It’s just been a huge pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Thanks for coming.

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When people find out that I’ve written a memoir, the reaction is usually the same: surprise, followed by confusion. What’s a fund manager doing writing about growing up among heroin addicts in 1980s Madrid?

It’s a fair question. My professional life has been spent analyzing markets and companies, founding Variant Perception, a research firm for asset managers, and now serving as Chief Investment Officer at Prevatt Capital. My published works include The Myth of Capitalism and other books about markets. A coming-of-age story about missionaries, drug rehabs, and the AIDS epidemic doesn’t exactly fit the pattern.

But here’s what I’ve learned: we don’t choose the stories that shape us. We only get to decide whether we tell them.

We’re giving away free spots to a live Q&A with Jonathan, hosted by our Senior Editor Dylan O’Sullivan, on Wednesday, March 18 at 5 PM ET. Enter the lucky draw below — submissions close Sunday, March 8.

Enter the Lucky Draw

An Unlikely Beginning

I started writing Shooting Up in 2005, when I was a junior analyst at SAC Capital, an intense, demanding hedge fund. My days were consumed by financial models and earnings calls.

One day, I was browsing a bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when I stumbled upon Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy by Thomas L. Webber. Dr Webber wrote eloquently about growing up as an outsider in East Harlem because of the Christian calling of his parents. His coming-of-age story is elegiac, moving and deeply empathetic.

I realized then that my story — the story of my friends and family — needed to be told. For the next three years, I wrote in stolen moments during the evenings and weekends. By 2008, I had a complete manuscript. Then I did what many writers do — I put it in a drawer and moved on with my life after a few rejections.

(The usual rejection from publishers was, “It’s beautiful and moving, but I’m not sure there is an audience for it.” Also, who wants to read a literary memoir from a finance bro? I took comfort in the fact that editors repeatedly rejected Elie Wiesel’s Night, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, and countless other books that eventually found their audience.)

A Long Pause

I put the manuscript aside because life got in the way. I helped found Demotix, a citizen journalism platform that we eventually sold to Corbis (then owned by Bill Gates). I built Variant Perception from scratch with dear friends. I wrote a few economics books. I started Prevatt Capital. The urgent always seemed to crowd out the important.

Then, a few years ago, a mentor who is a successful fund manager told me, “You should get this published before your father dies.” I went back to editing evenings and weekends and got a book contract soon after.

What You’ll Find in These Pages

Shooting Up is the story of my childhood in San Blas, a working-class neighborhood in Madrid that became Europe’s largest open-air drug market in the 1980s. My parents, Elliott and Mary Tepper, were American missionaries who felt called to work with heroin addicts. Our family of six — my parents and four blond, blue-eyed boys — stuck out in the barrio.

Our apartment became “Hotel Tepper,” a revolving door of recovering addicts. We opened our lives to men like Raúl, who had been an armed robber and a desperate junkie. Like Jambri, who had robbed banks as a getaway driver and spent five years in Madrid’s largest prison. They became my older brothers, my teachers, my friends.

The book follows the explosive growth of Betel, the drug rehabilitation center my parents founded with Lindsay McKenzie (an Australian missionary) in our living room. From a single addict detoxing in Lindsay’s apartment, it grew to house hundreds, then thousands of recovering addicts worldwide.

But this isn’t really a book about drug rehabilitation. It’s about love in the most unlikely places. It’s about my parents’ unflinching commitment to people society had written off. It’s about men and women society deemed worthless discovering their own dignity and purpose.

Get Your Copy of Shooting Up Today

The Shadow of AIDS

The book is also a chronicle of the AIDS epidemic as it devastated Spain in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Spain had the highest rate of HIV infection in Europe, and the virus spread primarily through shared heroin needles. My neighborhood was ground zero.

Almost all my older brothers and sisters in the rehab were HIV+. In high school, I spent evenings and weekends at the infectious diseases ward of Ramón y Cajal Hospital. I learned the progression of the disease — the fevers, the pneumonias, and countless infections — through watching friends waste away.

An Improbable Education

Despite growing up in what most would consider poor and disadvantaged circumstances, my brothers and I thrived academically. When exchange rates made our missionary school unaffordable, my mother homeschooled us. Without formal textbooks, we taught ourselves everything.

My older brother David sent me his university books, and I worked through college-level economics, chemistry, history, and many other subjects in high school. Jambri sent Italian novels and a small black Bible that became my primer for learning the language. I memorized passages from Dante’s Divine Comedy, not for school but because the words offered solace and beauty in a world full of suffering.

My inspiration to learn was Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the first Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize in sciences. Whenever I visited my friends in the infectious diseases ward at Ramón y Cajal Hospital, I saw his quote in the entrance, “Every man can become the sculptor of his own mind if he sets himself the task.”

Why This Book Matters Now

You might wonder why a memoir about 1980s Madrid matters today. While the story of growing up among heroin addicts during the AIDS epidemic is unique, Shooting Up is a universal story of love and loss. None of us can outrun sickness, death or suffering. I hope the book is timeless and provides comfort to those who suffer, reminding them that they have dignity and are not alone.

This is also a book about how we treat the most vulnerable among us. About whether society’s outcasts deserve love, dignity, and second chances. About the difference that a few committed individuals can make when they refuse to look away from suffering.

It’s also about the consolations of learning and literature. In a world that increasingly measures education by economic returns and career outcomes, Shooting Up is a reminder that books and learning can be lifelines, sources of beauty and meaning, tools for sculpting our own minds and transcending our circumstances. I hope it is a reminder that we read to know we’re not alone.

The Act of Remembering

Finally, this book is an act of remembering. My friends from San Blas — Raúl, Jambri, Manolo, Ángel, Trini, and so many others — died largely anonymous deaths in the height of the AIDS crisis.

One day in 1996 I read an article that said forty thousand Spaniards had died of AIDS. I took my address book and counted friends from Betel who had died. I stopped at twenty-five and wasn’t halfway through. I was ashamed. These were not statistics; they were my friends, and I loved them.

They were remarkable people who showed extraordinary courage in the face of a disease that terrified the world. They created a community of love and mutual support that has now helped hundreds of thousands of addicts worldwide.

Raúl, the first addict in Betel, once said that the most beautiful story anyone can tell is the story of his own life. I do not know if my story is beautiful, but it is the only one I have. Some writers make a fetish of their suffering and wear it like a medal. Others treat memoirs like letters in a bottle, hoping to send the pain out to sea, never to be seen again. I wrote this book because words keep time from bleaching the colors out of memories, the fading snapshots of the past.

I wrote Shooting Up because I wanted to tell my friends’ stories. I hope the memory of my friends might be a blessing to others.

Buy Shooting Up Today

PRAISE FOR SHOOTING UP

Shooting Up is an extraordinary memoir of a unique childhood among heroin addicts during the AIDS epidemic, but it is a universal story of love and loss that is powerfully moving. At a time when society is so deeply divided—and faith is a wedge that is often used—it is refreshing to read a missionary kid’s true story of compassion and empathy for the outcasts. The book is also a tale filled with grace and humor in life’s darkest moments.

— George Stephanopoulos, political commentator and Good Morning America and ABC Sunday News anchor

Shooting Up is an astonishing work that opens your eyes—and your heart—to a whole new world, one that is as beautiful and inspiring as it is gritty and harrowing. Jonathan Tepper is an extraordinarily gifted writer who has somehow managed to write a memoir that is at once heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and joyous.

— Amy Chua, Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Golden Gate

In stark, often heart-rending prose, Jonathan tells the story of growing up with his three brothers and missionary parents in San Blas, a drug-overrun neighborhood of Madrid. It is a tale of tragedy and triumph in the midst of loss and death. Ultimately, Shooting Up is a powerful testament to the redemptive power of faith, friendship, and love. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. I cried, I laughed, I was changed.

— Tom Webber, author of Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy

Shooting Up recounts a young man’s coming of age in the unlikeliest of places and finds joy, wisdom, and humor in the darkest of moments. Reading this book made me think anew about grace, gratitude, and the hard roads that take us there.

— Daniel Swift, author of Bomber County

Jonathan Tepper’s story is remarkable. From his father’s dramatic conversion to the years pioneering Betel, this is the story of no ordinary family. I am so glad that Jonathan is sharing his extraordinary experience through this account.

— Nicky Gumbel, pioneer of the Alpha course and former vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) in London

I, too, grew up as a home-schooled “missionary kid,” so I “get” Jonathan Tepper’s brilliant memoir Shooting Up. Tepper’s story about addiction, AIDS and his parents’ work with addicts in Spain in the 1990s is an insanely entertaining and wild account. In fact, it’s the most riveting memoir I’ve ever read. Who else recalls his childhood with lines like these? “As a graduation gift, my father took me to see drug rehabs. It was what we did as a family.”

Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God

It has been one of the privileges of my life to know the Tepper family and witness first-hand the marvel that is Betel, where countless people have found hope, healing, community, and new beginnings. Here, in his memoir Shooting Up, Jonathan Tepper, with great skill, eloquence, humor, and provocation, tells us the extraordinary story of Betel. This is not just another read—it’s an event.

— Simon Ponsonby, priest, author, and teacher at St. Aldate’s, Oxford

Jonathan Tepper’s gut-wrenching, inspiring memoir Shooting Up immerses you so deeply in its characters that you feel as if you’re living—and suffering—alongside them. Set amid the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in Madrid, this gorgeously crafted coming-of-age story is both luminous and profoundly humane. An unforgettable read that’s impossible to put down.

— Joseph Luzzi, author of My Two Italies and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love

This is a fascinating story, brilliantly told. It recounts the work of two little-known but remarkable American missionaries in the drug-saturated streets of San Blas, Madrid, in an age of AIDS and addiction, told through the eyes of one of their sons. It is gripping, harrowing and tragic - yet somehow also a story of faith, courage and hope.

— The Rt Revd Dr Graham Tomlin; Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness

A remarkable, true-life story about an American family offering salvation in Spain’s slums… an unadorned coming-of-age memoir rooted in faith and humble acts of service. Our Verdict: GET IT

— Kirkus

Riveting memoir exploring missionary work, addiction, and human kindness…

— Booklife

Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction is published by Little, Brown in the UK and Infinite Books in the US.

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1. Night of the Juggler : New York Pulp at its Best

Imagine Mad Max: Fury Road, but instead of a post-apocalyptic Australian desert, it’s set in sleazy 1970s New York.

James Brolin plays a down-on-his-luck ex-cop who can’t catch a break. When his daughter is kidnapped in broad daylight by a psychotic criminal with a grudge against the city’s wealthy elite, he launches a relentless, bloody vendetta through New York’s streets, sex clubs, and sewers. Chasing him is a crooked cop (a gleefully demented Dan Hedaya) with his own score to settle.

The action starts with a batshit crazy 20-minute chase scene, all filmed on location à la The French Connection (seriously, I don’t understand how they filmed it without anyone getting hurt), and doesn’t let up from there. Like its apocalyptic Australian cousin, it’s effectively an exploitation movie delivered with maximum craft.

Being an Englishman born in the 1990s, I can’t vouch for how accurately it captures what New York actually felt like at the time, but I can say that it embodies the grimy, pulpy, purgatorial id of ‘70s New York cinema as well as anything I’ve seen.

For a long time, the film was invisible, having never made it to DVD or Blu-ray. Then last year, it was restored for theatrical presentation alongside a delicious 4K Blu-ray transfer. It's now on streaming, but if you can get your hands on the disc, do it — it looks great.

PS: If you’re thinking “they don’t make them like this anymore,” then check out last year’s One Battle After Another and Highest 2 Lowest, both of which feature glorious on-location urban chase sequences. [Ed]

• 🎬 Night of the Juggler (1980)

2. Homebound : A Window Into the India You Haven't Seen

Many of my peers with remote-possible jobs say that COVID was a great time. They may say it half-jokingly, but there’s truth in it. We got to work from home, binge Netflix, skip commutes, students got to skip exams and homework. No one had to pretend they didn’t enjoy at least some of it. And sure, we all intellectually accept that life was brutal for millions during the lockdown. But it stays abstract. It’s a thing we know but don’t really feel.

Homebound changed that for me. The film is set during India’s COVID lockdown and follows two young boys and their families, migrant laborers for whom “stay home” meant losing everything. It makes the devastation real in a way that news coverage and statistics do not. For viewers in the West, the film also opens a window into parts of Indian society that rarely get screen time. The desperation around government jobs as a path to not just financial stability but social dignity. The quiet cruelty of caste, shown through a character who hides his surname because it would invite judgment before anyone even gets to know him. These aren’t presented as exotic spectacle. They’re just the texture of these characters’ lives.

But it is not an exercise in misery. It is, at its core, a story of friendship and connection that manages to capture multiple emotions exceptionally well. The acting is excellent throughout, and Neeraj Ghaywan’s movies are now in my “must-watch” list.

When the credits started rolling, I was pleasantly surprised to see Martin Scorsese listed as an executive producer. That’s the first I’ve seen for a Bollywood film, and it feels like a fitting endorsement.

It’s a film that leaves you feeling more connected to people whose lives look nothing like yours. [Vatsal]

• 📺 Homebound (2025, Netflix)

3. Project Hail Mary : MacGyver Goes to Space

If your favorite scene in Apollo 13 is the one where engineers have to make square CO₂ filters fit into round holes using only what's on the spacecraft, then Andy Weir wrote this book for you.

Project Hail Mary is hard sci-fi with a MacGyver soul. A lone astronaut wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, no crew, and a very large problem that needs solving. The book is essentially a series of escalating puzzles: here is your situation, here are the laws of physics, figure it out. You'll absorb more physics and engineering than you'd expect from a page-turner. Weir clearly delights in this, you can feel him grinning as each new obstacle appears.

I've read The Martian, which made Weir's reputation, and I liked it, but I like this one significantly better. I can't tell you why without spoiling it, and avoiding spoilers is particularly rewarding here (if you haven’t seen the film trailer yet, DON’T!).

Thanks to a film adaptation starring Ryan Gosling, this novel is getting a second life. My honest advice: read it first. Even the best adaptations compress. A 156-minute film can't do everything a novel does, and this is a novel that earns its length.

One strong recommendation: get the audiobook. The narrator, Ray Porter, is exceptional, and there's an element of the story that works better in audio than on the page. I’m not surprised that it sold over two million copies in audio format alone.

Just be warned: This is a book people finish at 2 AM and immediately want to tell someone about. [Liberty]

• 📔👨‍🚀 Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

4. The Everything Store : What Relentless Actually Looks Like

Brad Stone’s The Everything Store is the definitive account of Amazon’s rise, and it remains one of the best business books of the past two decades. Stone traces the company from a garage in Bellevue, Washington, through its transformation into a force that reshaped retail, cloud computing, and the infrastructure of the internet itself. What makes the book work is that Stone never loses sight of the human being at the center. Jeff Bezos emerges as brilliant, demanding, occasionally cruel, and utterly relentless.

That last word is not accidental: Bezos originally wanted to call the company Relentless, and if you type relentless.com into your browser today it still redirects to Amazon. He chose Amazon because it started with ‘A’. Even the naming was strategic.

The book is full of nuggets like that. One of my favorites is the origin of AWS, which began as a solution to Amazon’s own infrastructure headaches. The company needed a way for internal teams to build services without constant coordination, so they developed simple building blocks that could be combined and recombined. Then someone realized that if Amazon needed this, other companies probably did too. What started as an internal fix became one of the most profitable businesses in history.

Even if you have no particular interest in Amazon, the book is worth reading because it’s fundamentally about belief, vision, and relentless problem-solving. Bezos has a line I think about often: many things will change in ten years, but no customer is ever going to ask for slower delivery or higher prices. So he built everything around the things that wouldn’t change. Stone captures both the power of that thinking and its costs. When I was writing The Founders, this book served as a model for what I was trying to do: tell a business story with narrative drive, blend strategy and character, and make the reader feel like they’re watching history unfold. It’s a high bar, and I return to it often. [Jimmy]

• 📙 The Everything Store by Brad Stone

5. McCartney 3,2,1: Sixty Years of Familiarity Dissolved

You already know these songs. Or at least you think you do.

Rick Rubin’s premise is simple: sit Paul McCartney down at a mixing board, pull up the master tapes for many of his best songs, and prove that you don’t know them as well as you think. He isolates the individual tracks: first the full mix, then layer by layer until there’s nothing left but McCartney’s bass, or the vocal harmonies, or some detail that’s been hiding underneath the arrangement for six decades. Songs you’ve heard five hundred times suddenly sound fresh.

One thing that surprised me was the bass, how rich a character it is, and how much it adds to these compositions.

McCartney came to it by accident. Nobody in the band wanted to be the bass player after their original bassist left, so Paul got stuck with the job. He approached it without the habits and constraints of most bassists, bringing melodic instinct to an instrument that was too often restrained to rhythm duties. He often showed up to the studio with nothing written down, no plan, and just figured it out on the spot. His bass wasn’t just keeping time, it was playing counterpoint, having a conversation with the rest of the song.

Rick Rubin mostly just listens. He asks good questions, but his method is the same as the show's: strip everything away and see what's actually there. Look for the load-bearing ideas underneath it all.

Six episodes, 30 minutes each. I enjoyed every second. [Liberty]

• 📺 McCartney 3,2,1 (2021, Hulu)

Enjoyed OSV Field Notes?

💌 Forward it to a friend and tell us in the comments which of the 5 is your favorite. 🏆

We’re opening up a small number of spots for readers to join us live, for free, via a lucky draw.

Dylan will leave plenty of time for audience Q&As, so come ready. This is your chance to ask Jonathan about the book, his extraordinary childhood, his writing process, or anything else!

The Q&A will take place on Wednesday, March 18, at 5 PM ET. If you’d like to be in the room (virtually), submit your entry here by Sunday, March 8:

Enter the Lucky Draw

We’ll draw winners and notify them by email ahead of the 18th. It’s a short form — takes less than a minute. Don’t miss it!

Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction is out now. Jonathan Tepper grew up handing out leaflets to heroin addicts in Madrid’s most notorious drug slum. He watched his dearest friends die of AIDS. He lost his little brother. He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. This is his memoir. Described as “extraordinary” and “powerfully moving” by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Shooting Up is published by Infinite Books in the US. Buy the book.

Manhattan Book Launch: Photos

It was a great evening! A few photos:

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