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

“When I was nine years old, I got my first gigs as a software engineer.”

Mykhailo Marynenko: Oh, there’s so much to say about this. So a little bit of background on this part is that most of the consumer electronics that get into Ukraine aren’t officially there. And most of the things that, if you, for example, bought a phone somewhere in Europe or brought it from America, you would want to have Ukrainian language in settings.

The first iPhone would be a perfect example. When the first iPhone just came out, it was an exclusive contract with AT&T. Without an AT&T SIM card, you wouldn’t be able to use it. And people were bringing these phones back to Ukraine, ordering from the States. And essentially you would want your phone to call someone, not just to have it as a shiny object. So these phone repair shops would not just repair something in case of an accident. You would be able to bring in your phone and get Ukrainian language, get it to work with Ukrainian SIM cards, make it actually usable. And there’s a lot that comes into this.

Most of these shops, like where I came from, those are not just, let’s order a new part and make it work. It’s actually going down, understanding how the phone works, how the operating system on the phone works, how components interact with each other, where are the weak points, how you can flash it to do more than it did before. In a sense, that requires a lot of deep technical knowledge and a lot of tinkering in order to get it right.

My initial steps would be just getting consumer hardware and trying to solve a problem for a person. And if the person would be just like, okay, I don’t have Ukrainian maps, how can I just use this phone to drive my car? Most people can, why can’t I? Then you go and, okay, how is the building maps working? Why is it geo-locked or similar things? And you go down and you look up different ways on how people could have written the app to make it work. Then you would go and actually try to fit it in order to satisfy the customer’s need.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: While you’re doing all of this, you have no formal training in this at all?

Mykhailo Marynenko: Of course not, no. And to remind, it’s... again, I was really young. It’s before I was nine. When I was nine years old, I got my first gigs as a software engineer.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Wait, stop. You were hired as a software engineer at age nine?

Mykhailo Marynenko: Not hired. Technically you cannot hire a nine-year-old person. So no, it was more like freelance and doing some basic web development or also helping out with my father’s phone repair shop as some source of income to fund my toys.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Was it just a natural talent on your part?

Mykhailo Marynenko: I think that it has a lot to do with my father having a lot of tools and toys and me just wanting to touch and experience those. There’s an early picture of me being really young and playing around with electronics or disassembling my toys just to break them, to do anything with them. Just like, I need to know what’s inside.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So you’re familiar with Claude Shannon who came up with information theory. That’s kind of how he spent his early days. He was a free-range kid, but he just wanted to figure out how everything worked. Did you have a process or was it literally, were you just tinkering?

Mykhailo Marynenko: Just tinkering. There is no process. There wasn’t an end goal to satisfy the needs. Sometimes... for example, most of the background on me having access to tools, it was either having something from my father’s phone repair shop or later on in life I was living with just my mother. I wouldn’t have access to a laptop to code and there were going to be only two sanctuaries in my life in order to go and actually learn and tinker more. It was going to be either my IT classroom or my mother’s work. And at my mother’s work you would have a lot of corporate protections. You would not be able to do many things. And this is where most of the cybersecurity background started to stem from also. And sometimes you meet an end goal. You want to get some random corporate object to do things it should not do in order to just code. In some scenarios, you would just disassemble it to understand how the mechanism works, just out of curiosity. At some point you would just want to see how this thing looks from inside and there is no purpose to do so.

Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, hello everyone. It’s Jim O’Shaughnessy. I’m very happy, Misha, to welcome you.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Thank you, Jim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I know you quite well, but our audience doesn’t. So let’s go with your origin story.

Mykhailo Marynenko

My origin story starts back in Ukraine, where from a very young age, I was always in my father’s phone repair shop. It was a place where I was hanging out since I was an infant. And primarily, it was a place that inspired me and shaped me into who I am today. It’s the place where I discovered numerous technologies, went down into how things work. And that is pretty much where I came from.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Talk a little bit about how you discovered how these technologies work, because I think a lot of our audience, they go and buy their phone at the Apple Store and they think, okay, it’s all done and I don’t have to do anything. And there might be some things in that hardware that regular folks don’t know about.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Oh, there’s so much to say about this. So a little bit of background on this part is that most of the consumer electronics that get into Ukraine aren’t officially there. And most of the things that, if you, for example, bought a phone somewhere in Europe or brought it from America, you would want to have Ukrainian language in settings. The first iPhone would be a perfect example. When the first iPhone just came out, it was an exclusive contract with AT&T. Without an AT&T SIM card, you wouldn’t be able to use it. And people were bringing these phones back to Ukraine, ordering from the States. And essentially you would want your phone to call someone, not just to have it as a shiny object. So these phone repair shops would not just repair something in case of an accident. You would be able to bring in your phone and get Ukrainian language, get it to work with Ukrainian SIM cards, make it actually usable. And there’s a lot that comes into this. Most of these shops, like where I came from, those are not just, let’s order a new part and make it work. It’s actually going down, understanding how the phone works, how the operating system on the phone works, how components interact with each other, where are the weak points, how you can flash it to do more than it did before. In a sense, that requires a lot of deep technical knowledge and a lot of tinkering in order to get it right. My initial steps would be just getting consumer hardware and trying to solve a problem for a person. And if the person would be just like, okay, I don’t have Ukrainian maps, how can I just use this phone to drive my car? Most people can, why can’t I? Then you go and, okay, how is the building maps working? Why is it geo-locked or similar things? And you go down and you look up different ways on how people could have written the app to make it work. Then you would go and actually try to fit it in order to satisfy the customer’s need.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

While you’re doing all of this, you have no formal training in this at all?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Of course not, no. And to remind, it’s... again, I was really young. It’s before I was nine. When I was nine years old, I got my first gigs as a software engineer.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Wait, stop. You were hired as a software engineer at age nine?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Not hired. Technically you cannot hire a nine-year-old person. So no, it was more like freelance and doing some basic web development or also helping out with my father’s phone repair shop as some source of income to fund my toys.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Was it just a natural talent on your part?

Mykhailo Marynenko

I think that it has a lot to do with my father having a lot of tools and toys and me just wanting to touch and experience those. There’s an early picture of me being really young and playing around with electronics or disassembling my toys just to break them, to do anything with them. Just like, I need to know what’s inside.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So you’re familiar with Claude Shannon who came up with information theory. That’s kind of how he spent his early days. He was a free-range kid, but he just wanted to figure out how everything worked. Did you have a process or was it literally, were you just tinkering?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Just tinkering. There is no process. There wasn’t an end goal to satisfy the needs. Sometimes... for example, most of the background on me having access to tools, it was either having something from my father’s phone repair shop or later on in life I was living with just my mother. I wouldn’t have access to a laptop to code and there were going to be only two sanctuaries in my life in order to go and actually learn and tinker more. It was going to be either my IT classroom or my mother’s work. And at my mother’s work you would have a lot of corporate protections. You would not be able to do many things. And this is where most of the cybersecurity background started to stem from also. And sometimes you meet an end goal. You want to get some random corporate object to do things it should not do in order to just code. In some scenarios, you would just disassemble it to understand how the mechanism works, just out of curiosity. At some point you would just want to see how this thing looks from inside and there is no purpose to do so.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So let’s talk about that for a bit. What kind of vulnerabilities did you find and continue to find in commercially available software, phones, hardware, where the innocent buyer is like, oh, this is totally secure, and it’s really not?

Mykhailo Marynenko

A couple of weeks ago, this is one of the most recent examples, I got myself an AI speakerphone, a microphone. The microphone itself is a very cool piece of hardware. It can listen and pick up your voice from 16 feet away. It’s a nicely marketed product that would go into enterprise meeting rooms and be used as a speakerphone. I didn’t use it for a meeting yet. I didn’t utilize it in any way. I just got it and being a security professional, I would go and check if there’s any firmware updates and I wouldn’t do so on the microphone, but I would go onto the manufacturer’s website and see, can I download it and just flash my microphone with new firmware offline? And when I saw the file, I saw that the file was trivially unpackable so you could see what’s inside. And my natural curiosity, I unplugged the microphone, I started it up and I saw it can connect to Wi-Fi. I’m just like, okay. Most of the AI recorders are usually just a recorder, just an audio recorder that you later on connect to your phone or a laptop and you upload audio and some server processes it and returns you an AI transcript. This microphone stood out because it had the full ability to have this networking stack that your laptop or your phone has in its full capability. And that drove my curiosity a bit more. So, what does this microphone actually do? So I got this firmware file and since it was trivial to get to know what’s inside, I unpacked the firmware and I started looking around what’s inside it. Maybe there are some modifications I can do to this thing. Essentially, I got to know that the microphone does transcription inside itself. So the microphone doesn’t go to servers like any other voice recorders. You would get the file uploaded. This microphone would do the transcription part, not summary, but transcription part on device itself. And I was curious how they achieved it because it’s a relatively cheap device, it doesn’t consume a lot of power, it can be on its battery for a long time. And I’m just out of curiosity opening how their ASR pipeline, automatic speech recognition pipeline, looks like inside. And there’s one file that is not obfuscated in any way. It’s not hidden under... I would have hidden it better. That contained two politically hot words that are specific to China that essentially were just there. So the firmware, even though the device was bought on American soil from Amazon, contained code words that... I don’t know what happens next if you say them, but the device is definitely designed to recognize these specific, highly censored words in China, phrases in China, and something happens. So I didn’t dig deeper yet into what comes after if you say these words, but it’s definitely designed to do something.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So I’m assuming that the microphone was manufactured in China.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yeah, the company behind the microphone is, I think, don’t quote me on the number, but it’s multi-billion, definitely multi-billion. I think it’s $10 billion. It’s a publicly traded company in China. It produces primarily 360 cameras. I think they’ve gotten into the audio space a little, or at least the enterprise space a little. And yeah, it’s a Chinese company.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So what countermeasures? I mean, obviously I’m lucky to have you to let me know whether there is a bunch of spyware. What can regular people do?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Nothing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Nothing.

Mykhailo Marynenko

There’s literally nothing. There was another part of it. As soon as I got these words, I was curious to see what’s inside the privacy policy. So I got the privacy policy, I got the Chinese-English version and the Chinese version contains a bit more sub-processors. In China, most of the public cloud providers are sharing data with the government. It’s a publicly known fact. And their privacy policy basically mentions that yes, all of the things or part of the things would be transferred to Chinese servers for actually processing things, where the American privacy policy mentions that essentially it would go and get processed on AWS, on Amazon Web Services, and their marketing material on U.S. soil shows that this is AWS. But most companies don’t do this. Most companies have redundancies, backups. They don’t store information just in one country. There’s global replication and a lot of need for this information to be available in multiple spots. So I would assume that the Chinese privacy policy states facts that are true about this microphone, hence having the firmware that works the same way for any region, for any customer that detects these words. Essentially when you upload this transcript to their cloud, or maybe the microphone does it in some other secretive way that we don’t know about, you might be flagged. And also the microphone has an ability to... your voice is part of your biometry. There’s a couple of things about this microphone that allow you to segment people, means that if it transfers this information to China, it also essentially gets a part of your biometry, part of what you said, your words to identify you. And this is what’s scary. It’s not that it just would note that someone said something, any recorder would in a sense, but that it would transfer who you are, where you are.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And your voice.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So like, that’s fucking terrifying. And does the United States in particular or the EU, do we know about these problems?

Mykhailo Marynenko

I think that comes a lot into business decisions, right? As a manufacturer, you don’t want to complicate the process of manufacturing these microphones. You want to simplify it as much as possible. I think the proper way of doing this is to make a regulation for these things, like having how we process voice, how we process all of this data, especially if it happens on device as advertised. The device is capable of working offline. These things should be documented. There should be a legal obligation to document these things. Even if this feature is somehow disabled, if you chose United States in settings, it still should be documented because me as a consumer, in the firmware of the device I have on hand, the keywords are present.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, and having two different privacy policies or terms of service and the one in Chinese saying something very different than the one in English, that seems to be not a trivial problem to me. It would seem to me that these are things that... you know, I’m not a huge fan of regulation, but I mean, this seems like a regulation that might make sense for American consumers.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes, it definitely does.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And why isn’t there one?

Mykhailo Marynenko

I don’t think there’s any particular reason for it rather than it just isn’t there yet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let’s move on to things like DeepSeek. DeepSeek was super popular when it was launched. Do you think that people in this country or Europe or elsewhere knew that virtually every one of their queries was going right back to the CCP in China?

Mykhailo Marynenko

I don’t think so. I don’t think people think about it. They should and at the same time, they shouldn’t. DeepSeek depends on how you use it because DeepSeek models have been open weight. You would be able to download the model weights and even self-host those. And there were numerous American providers that provided access to the model that were territorially located in the United States. But most people went to download the Chinese app from the App Store that would process all of this information on Chinese territory.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s the thing that always astounds me, right? Like we have DeepSeek, but it doesn’t go back to Chinese servers. But I mean, let’s be very clear, there are very few people who have resources like you. And I was thinking about it this morning as I was thinking about what I wanted to talk to you about. Why don’t big corporations have a bunch of Mishas?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Mishas are hard to find. You’re lucky. That’s probably the reason.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, yeah, we discovered you as you know. But our audience might not know you were one of our first fellows for the O’Shaughnessy Fellowship program. Actually, it was more of an art project. Let’s take a moment before people are like, what did he just say about all of these things that we can buy in the App Store? Talk a little bit about that because I was immediately hooked. You had me at hello when I saw what you wanted to do. But tell our audience about that project because I think it’s fascinating.

Mykhailo Marynenko

I will connect it a bit to my life story as well. The war in Ukraine started and before the war started, I would go to visit France and Sweden, where I would end up for a year more before I would move to America. And during Sweden, I would call that period creative boredom. I had a job that I was quite good at. It stopped requiring a lot of attention. All of the things I could have done at the time in order to drive innovation of the company or generally contribute as much as I could for the business, I’d done. And I essentially was left to do all these legacy systems just to keep up the project in a sense. And I was also left to experiment with a lot of new things because they wanted to see if I could do something else as well for them. And being in Sweden, the weather was atrocious, it was sad, it was dark, or it was bright 24/7. I essentially just got bored because back in Ukraine you get all of the friends you ever need. You’ve got your life history, you’ve got your classmates, you’ve got your family, you’ve got everyone there. I had only one friend and his girlfriend. And I started to explore Sweden much more. Essentially I came to one of the raves, musical events in Sweden where I met a lot of wonderful people. My first night at that particular rave, there was a guy getting me into the room where all of the preparation goes. So it’s not a venue space, but a new space. And I see a vibrant hacker and artist community. First thing I see is people disassembling a Tesla battery from a car just randomly on the table. You enter the room, there’s on the background you here loud, beautiful techno. You open the door and you’re like, okay. One person draws, one person makes a video, weird big sculpture. Another person just goes and probes the Tesla battery. And essentially I got along with the creative community there. It was amazing. I met a lot of wonderful people who weren’t incentivized a lot to do what they did, but yet they did it and they made a lot of art. And I never thought of code as a routine for myself, or engineering for that matter, as a routine for myself. I always try to not think outside the box, but be attentive to things I have around me in order to drive my work. Since I knew a lot of artists, I tried to paint, I tried to make sculptures. I visited numerous art events, both very high-end and quite shitty as well. And essentially there were a couple of artists that I wanted to work with and I was doing a lot of design work as well. I wouldn’t just engineer software, I would design how users would interact with it, how to make the business decisions work with design. And then I was just like, okay, let’s apply this to art. Let’s see how my engineering skills can work to create something that serves zero purpose in order to make any revenue. I met a Ukrainian artist and essentially we wanted to collaborate on some AI things. We found that generating images at the time wasn’t as appealing for her collection. We tried training models on her work, tried approaching it from so many different perspectives and ways. And one of the guys in the space was just shouting, “Use brain!” It was like, what do you mean use brain? We are using our brains. And the dude was like, well, quite literally buy an EEG helmet and try to fuck around with that. And I’m like, oh yes, this sounds fun. And that’s how the descent into one of the projects for the fellowship started. Essentially we wanted to replicate what your visual cortex processes and correlate it to a model that would be able to generate approximately the same image. I think that back in Sweden, the project wasn’t as quite successful as it should have been. I think that most of the work was more exploratory. And when I came to the States, there were two performances that went amazing where the project would actually be used, where we would get an EEG helmet and do real-time processing to get as much of your visual cortex while musicians or artists perform and present it on stage to the audience to see the imagination of an artist in real time. So yeah, that’s one of the projects under the fellowship. The other one was also quite fun. The second project was analyzing crowd behavior. Primarily, I was just amazed and fascinated by raves. Most of the musical events you would visit in the modern day, you would see people just staring at their phones and going there to post a new shiny picture. They wouldn’t go there because they enjoyed the music, or they enjoyed the music but didn’t appreciate it that much. They didn’t appreciate the artists. They would go there as a social gathering, yes, but not for art. And essentially most of that underground scene for raves, you would find people who are actually enjoying weird alien sounds that make zero sense to normies, just not staring at their phone at all, where you would have a sticker on your camera that would prevent you from taking pictures. And people would be free. People would not care about time, people would not care about social media. People would not care about anything but having a great time. I found this as, okay, so let’s compare. How do crowds behave in these two different scenarios? What happens in normal musical events and why are our attention factors quite less when we not just have the phones, but what’s different between specialty underground, hard-to-get events and general public, huge festivals? And I got my hands on a couple of sensors like seismographs, lidars, infrared cameras. And I would start tracking people. I would see how people react to different parts of the music, to different styles. In some events we would collect Spotify, Apple Music to get their general taste as well. In some events we would even get an optional face... a person would be able to submit to correlate a specific person to their preferences and to music. And essentially the first initial version of that project would be an artist that plays in real time would get a distribution and real-time charts of how different parts of the crowd engaged, the parts that are not engaged, what do they like, all of these cool and nice things. And then later on we would bring generative AI to generate music in real time for people who are less active at the overall event to actually drive not just attention factor, but actual emotion, try to push people more and more, covering more of the audience. And the generative part went insanely well. There were numerous successful events where people would be enjoying and taking their attention fully just to music and to themselves, dancing instead of doing anything else.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Obviously the capitalist in me sees something marketable there.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Of course, of course.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because how much did the scene change? I mean, can you quantify it for us?

Mykhailo Marynenko

From 60-ish percent to almost 90.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And did people know what was going on?

Mykhailo Marynenko

No, they did not. Not a single event was talking about what’s actually going on. When you would buy a ticket, Spotify would be an option, but it wouldn’t be required.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I see. And how many people gave up the Spotify playlists and everything else?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Less than 50%. There wasn’t a higher number than 50%.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So you’re operating with a minority of the Spotify data. And I of course love that it’s all voluntary and that if you don’t want to give your Spotify, you don’t have to. But what was the unlock, what was the key that allowed you to move from the 60s to the 90s? Because that, I mean, that’s the difference between the most popular rave promoter and all of the also-rans.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Right. It depends a lot. Of course, the bigger the event is, the harder to drive people’s attention to the actual performance. The general idea is that you as a person, if you like specialty music, you wouldn’t like just one genre or just one artist. You would like many different things. An artist doesn’t know that, especially they don’t know that in the moment when they perform. They don’t know what the audience might expect or like. And sometimes it’s not about music at all. Sometimes it’s about natural rhythm, sometimes it’s about the group a person came in. We would track groups, we would recognize groups of people sticking together and generate more relevant suggestions for DJs, for example, to select from their existing track selection. So you still have the creative choice in style or music, but to suggest better times to kickstart more and more attention. So essentially the breaking point was that you can hook people more and not lose this and you can still have the control over your performance.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And did the participants... did you talk to them afterwards? Did anyone talk to them?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Of course, yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And what were the...

Mykhailo Marynenko

Just general amazement. Just like, this was so good. There wasn’t a single time where it was just like, it just came, kept going. That would be the tagline usually from people. It would just keep going, driving attention or generally just keep enjoying.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Lots of use cases here. Let’s shift gears into what we’ve been building because we’re taking a very different approach to building out the AI suite at OSV. Freestyle on that for a little while.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Freestyle. AI Lab. Well, we call ourselves the Department for Engineering, mostly AI Lab. We are a small team that develops a lot of fundamentally new ways to look at data, to look at how you approach AI, yet not trade off on existing things and existing approaches. Being a relatively small team, we covered so many things. I’ll tell about our successes first, then I’ll tell about what’s going on, not so good, both with the market and what prevents us from delivering the product we envision in a way. So from successes, we dug deeper than just using LLM APIs. The first initial thing of how AI Lab came to be is that we wanted to get LLMs to write movie scripts. That was the initial...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s right.

Mykhailo Marynenko

...for the engineering residency. So I would do this part-time. I would try to create synthetic datasets and actually drive the model to create a cohesive screenplay, which would not go well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes. Well, for listeners and viewers, our mantra is human-in-the-loop, a centaur model. We think that AI just left to its own devices, you’re going to get mostly a tsunami of slop. But with a human in the loop, if it’s built the right way, you can get magic.

Mykhailo Marynenko

So essentially we went to agentic approaches before most of the models we have today are much more suited for agentic stuff than when we just initially started. Our approaches to doing screenplay writing and generally approaching doing this kind of writing work that should be connected, that should have a higher-order understanding of what’s going on in a sense... general completions, the way how language models work, in a sense where you would get a context and try to predict which tokens come next, would be good for writing, but terrible at many different number of things. So essentially we tried some agentic approaches. We’ve built out our AI chat thing we still have today, which I think that many people would say, okay, building an LLM wrapper is easy. I’m going to say, try to make it right, try to do it properly, try to make it useful and try to make it work on all devices in poor network conditions in all the possible edge cases. This is what a product is. You polish for people. You don’t want people to get stuck in chat and then try to say to me how easy the AI chat is. Although there are very much different sets of alternatives in the market, like Claude. Claude is so much better in my experience than OpenAI’s models when it comes to work. When it comes to personal things, somehow ChatGPT is a little bit better. I don’t know why. OpenAI did an insanely good job on making a good product. The chat, the user interface, the responsiveness. When you open the app, you have first time to interaction, you have everything set right. And that’s one of their insane advantages. They were the first one to try to make this product and they did it good. It would be really hard to compete with them. I think that we are on the level where our chat platform is still quite buggy because again, it’s in beta, but we’re at a technological level where we cover most of what their team did in terms of product, yet we added our nice things and our unrestrictiveness and all these scenarios. So that’s part number one. It still exists. We need to collect training data. And there’s part number two. How do you approach AI products with all of OSV’s craziness and all of the “try to create a movie script, then try to actually generate video based on that”? And there’s a lot of agentic products out there. There’s a lot of open-source projects that would try and do this, but they’re fundamentally wrong. They’re not the way you should be doing that. And the deeper we dug, the deeper we found issues that relate to how general businesses work, how big data was structured, how it was initially optimized for hardware that was much slower and much less flexible and much less resilient than we have today. How all of this legacy bulk continued to exist and how most researchers don’t want to go into software engineering and they need to. So most of the researchers would think well about math, they would think well about general concepts, they would do good research, but they would never do good engineering. You would get a great model, but not great engineering behind that model. All the tooling that you do when you train models nowadays, it’s still this way. It’s not universal, it’s not portable. You would adjust so many different things and you don’t want it to be universal, but you want it to be portable, you want it to be extensible. Right now it feels more like people are building temporary solutions for small events to drive their business and experience better, but not build something that drastically shifts how they do their work. That’s where we come in. There’s a lot of our new sets of tools, approaches to how we store, index, process, train, do all of these sorts of things and even maintain our own hyperconverged infrastructure and bare metal infrastructure. And yep, that is also the lab in a nutshell, where we try to approach it fundamentally different in terms of how we approach data. And with that comes a set of challenges, remaking the whole ecosystem, trying to make novel approaches that I probably will mention a bit later, which is Interplanetary Link Knowledge, or IPLK, and our upcoming flagship product, Infinite Canvas, that basically change how you look at AI in general, how you look at data, how you look at data sharing, how you look at data brokering and exchange, how you look at data indexing, how you look at AI products where it’s not just chat.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Since we’re talking about it, let’s do it now because every time that I go in there, I’m blown away by what you’re achieving because I of course use all of the commercial large language models and yeah, you’re right. ChatGPT I always think of as more in white tie and tails and, you know, Claude is much more relaxed. But we’re taking a fundamentally different approach.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes. So fundamentally different approach. There’s so many things this can mean in a sense, right? There’s all the technological things I just mentioned, but there’s also a user side of things. There’s a way how we build our AI products today, trying to connect to technologies that fundamentally weren’t designed for AI, that fundamentally didn’t predict AI would exist in such capacity we have today. So people connecting agents to databases and all of these things, it doesn’t look and feel right if you’re deep into engineering. And from my world, it just doesn’t feel, it doesn’t sit right even by today’s metrics. We have, what was it, around four years now, three years now, where people are trying to do agentic products. We see success stories like Cursor and I’ll go deeper into why this is a success story. And we see a lot of shitty products that are essentially just either trying to be products like Cursor who took an actual proper and innovative approach to do what they do, or just try to glue shit and stacks in order to make it work, connecting things that weren’t designed for each other to do something. Infinite Canvas is probably a new category of AI product that didn’t exist before. It’s what I like to call it, an infinite-dimension reactive computational whiteboard.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Very Philip K. Dick of you, Valys.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Essentially it’s a whiteboard that understands what you do. It’s not a diagramming tool. It’s not a tool where you would be drag-and-dropping your tools and connecting things together. It’s a tool that orchestrates itself, that coexists with you, where you are capable of changing any part of the process and complex orchestrations, which I will go to in a second, down to their smallest details without having any domain knowledge. Infinite Canvas should be able to provide you with an ability to even train your own models, orchestrate a lot of different...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And let me stop you. You mean like people...

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes, like Jim O’Shaughnessy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

If you achieve that, you’re going to win a Nobel.

Mykhailo Marynenko

No, I’m not. So when it comes to these products, we see a lot of really cool new approaches to collaborative environments. One of the best products we have today that I enjoy a lot, that I’m sad about because I feel like they are taking the wrong turn right now, is Figma. Figma is essentially a tool for designers where they could wireframe, design really complex things, build prototypes of apps without having domain knowledge. It’s not a no-code tool, it’s essentially drawing rectangles but doing it well and doing it like 100 people can do it in parallel. And what’s cool about Figma is that they didn’t write another shitty layer like Adobe does. They would take their codebase that exists from the ‘80s or ‘90s to this day and try to continue on the legacy approaches just to not break their existing user base. Figma did a lot of drastic changes to how you approach general UI/UX design. At the time it was a killer product that you don’t need to install. You open it in a web browser and it works. It magically can do much more than any other product was able to in your web browser. And we drew a lot of inspiration from a lot of products like Figma that are essentially infinite whiteboards, infinite canvases. There’s a whole curated list of websites that mention Infinite Canvas products where you would be able to diagram, to design, to prototype, to do all different sets of things. But the biggest issue with these is that, for example, Figma, they would add AI features, but they would not fundamentally shift some of the things in their product to make these AI features right and sit well. What does Infinite Canvas provide for a user? Essentially, you can dump any information you want. You can use it structured or unstructured, both. You can do spreadsheets, you can upload manuscripts, you can just drag and drop it. And it’s a spatial space that would use machine learning to automatically arrange your space as well. So as soon as you dropped thousands of files, it would essentially just organize information for you. Then essentially you, as with any other LLM, you’re capable of doing anything like any other LLMs do. So in a sense, what’s in these files? But what’s crazy about this product is that you would be able to say, I want all of my characters to be a different way in my script. And it would go and parallelize itself and use a semiotic approach. Semantic, primarily what we have today, we have symbolic. So symbolic is something like images, words. Semantic is them, but understanding of them in context. But the missing part is semiotics, where you would be able to connect and change the meaning of a specific word, not just in context, but globally. Where you are capable of reacting dynamically to new information or making adjustments and still operate on symbolic and semantic environments. And also the symbolic part of most of the AI today is not on the level required for complex automation orchestration or being able to also extend it not just to basic business automation, but to do it for actually writing a book. Some of the most wonderful use cases I’ve tried previously that work well today and some of the things that are upcoming, essentially you write a book, you have many different characters and you uploaded your first outline or asked it to do a first outline of your idea. As you expand, you don’t lose any other properties. You can easily navigate between your drafts. You can put there a lot of information, tens of thousands of pages that you can still easily navigate. And then you are able to tell it, okay, let’s write it. Let’s actually write it. And you have a nice, what you see is what you get, text editor that actually would properly work, that would allow you to see your final book in a sense or allow you to modify anything in that book. And maybe there’s some character that owned a network of hotels or some traveling company. And the traveling company would be named after your character. And around that there stems a lot of different parts in your story about how he might have fun making fun of the company name, for example, or he was bullied in childhood, or different sets of things that rely solely on understanding and deeper meaning in the general overall context, higher-order level thinking about it. If you change the character’s name, if you ask the canvas to change the character’s name, you have the flexibility to change all of the points of view in your story cohesively in order to make it right. Not just ask, yeah, how would it look like? Or let’s do it, or let’s adjust this or these parts. It just magically would go and rearrange your story beautifully and cohesively into one piece. Imagine putting these capabilities to a test. Let’s say in five years you would be able to generate a movie, or maybe a bit more than five years, who knows, maybe it will be tomorrow. Essentially when you would want to generate a movie, you would want to have an ability to have a stable trajectory for people or crowds moving because it’s essential for your story. You would want a lot of these symbolic things, all symbols to be in place. And you want your video generations or image generations or character appearances to be consistent and you want them to be physically consistent as well. One of the technologies I’m proud of that we made in AI Lab, we call it Canvas Kit. Canvas Kit is essentially a multimodal environment for information to exist and be represented and be operated on. Canvas Kit allows you to visualize almost literally anything when it comes to structured or unstructured information, both to handle real-time stock information and to having a scan of the room or a 3D space and seeing the process of how the 3D space would be converted into a scene in the movie, for example. And this is all one cohesive product that you don’t need to go into something like a 3D editor, like Blender, then go into Photoshop, then go into all of these places. And yet you will not trade off on features. So essentially you would potentially be able, with this technology, to simulate real physics for your movie, or also provide VFX for your movie, provide even aperture or lens parameters for your shot that are not purely dependent on AI generation, but on actual post-processing that make it possible. So this is what Infinite Canvas is, a completely new approach to how you interact with complex, structured, creative, boring, whatever information in a huge and scalable manner that can self-automate, self-orchestrate, interconnect with other processes and allow you to orchestrate not just boring business work, but also creative stuff.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let me translate it into normal human speak. If you’re a writer using this, you can be writing your novel or whatever, your screenplay or whatever, and you change that guy’s name, right? And rather than having to hunt and peck throughout the entire document, let’s say it’s at 500 pages now and this guy is a really important character, and then you have a writer’s room and everyone in the writer’s room is like, oh, this character is awful. We’ve got to really upgrade him or her. They’ll be able to do that. But then it understands context and it goes and makes those changes on your behalf.

Mykhailo Marynenko

It doesn’t only understand the context of semantic text, right? It understands the context of symbolic things. It can invert symbols like change a relationship between a character or someone and convert it into semantic text that would be consistent.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So give another example of that, because as you know, this is one of the things that I get really excited about when you tell me, but the first couple of times I was like, Misha, talk to me like I’m a small child or golden retriever, to steal from the movie Margin Call.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Sure. Imagine your company is a complex system that is alive that operates both with or without you. The company has multiple verticals. The company might have thousands of different processes inside all of these verticals. And essentially you want to merge two verticals or you want to change one process and you are able to predict every single part of what it means and put it into effect. This is another example. If you do complex business automation, it wouldn’t be just, okay, let’s intake emails now. It would be also higher-order part about what it means for the business. What’s the actual meaning of why it exists? What’s the purpose of all of this? You want to change a higher-order process, but how do you re-puzzle all of these things together? This is what Canvas is capable of. It would go and rearrange all of the pieces to fit right into the actual proper network of things as you set it, not as it just predicted, but also to have the flexibility to set things as they go.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So in, again, translating, it changes not just the semantic part, it changes everything.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes. Essentially a symbolic thing is, I would tell you, this is a glass, right? There’s a glass that is a glass on the window. It’s the same glass. So glass means something as one thing, right? But the glass in a cup has a bit different meaning. When I speak to you and I look at the glass, I say “a glass,” which means cup. If I look at the window and there is no other glass around me, or I haven’t drawn attention to any glass around me, I would say, okay, so this glass is dirty, for example. It would give you a meaning. How does this work? Glass is symbolic. It’s a symbol. The semantic part is context. So when I look at the glass, for you to understand that I’m talking about the window, you see the semantic part where I look at the window. The symbolic part would be that this is essentially a material. But there’s many ways to look at symbolic things in our world. There are mathematical equations, for example, where you would have symbols and how those symbols would interact. And you have operations, which is also some kind of symbol that performs computation. And essentially what AI Lab would allow you to do is to change the equation for your whole book and to do it consistently and without the hassle. So if you have an equation where you have a couple of characters doing things in a perfect balance as you see it, you’re still able to follow your equation or change your equation in general in order to rearrange everything that comes into your book while still keeping it...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Could this potentially become something where we ship a book or a video or whatever, and the end user, who we don’t know, can actually change the story?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes, it’s part of it, of course. Or if we ship a movie, for example, if we provide a movie, this whole technical infrastructure and frameworks and libraries we developed internally allow and predict for the future of making films, for example. And what if someone would want a different end, not just for the book, but maybe for a movie of the book, while still keeping the original intent of the author and his equation in his brain? That is the possibility, yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Now, I know a lot of authors and movie makers, et cetera, can be very protective of their art. So in those circumstances, you can also ship it so they can’t change it, right?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Of course, yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

One of the things that we’re trying to do with all the various verticals at OSV is ultimately, we want to empower the creator. And if creator A wants it to be locked and no changes, then creator A gets that. But if creator B is like, no, let’s experiment, let’s see what comes out of that. But it will always be at the creator’s discretion, right?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Discretion, right. You and I align on that 100%.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I, being the crazy person that I am, love the idea of being able to write a story and then see all sorts of different ends. Will we ever see a time when, let’s say I write a story and I say, yeah, you can do whatever you want to this story. Will we be able to let the reader of that story make changes that he or she wants to see as the end? Like, oh, I hated the end of, you know, fill in the blank. I really think they should have gotten together and they didn’t get together. Will we provide suggestions and support or is that also completely customizable?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Completely customizable.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let’s say they have a very specific... yeah, these two got to get together, they’ve got to get married or, you know, live happily ever after.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But they’re like, I don’t like this one. They’re going to have the opportunity to ask the AI, well, what would you suggest?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Exactly. But it’s also not “what would you suggest?” right? The important part is that most of the things... there’s the original creator’s intent, right? So you would want to see how a creator would change the ending and what were the possibilities for this ending to be. Not only training models... and we have sims. We’ve done multiple sims by now and we will do much more as well in terms of dynamically training models. Sims are essentially being able to simulate a person, right? Just getting as much data and trying to speak in the voice... it’s not essentially cloning someone, unfortunately.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Unfortunately.

Mykhailo Marynenko

But I did a couple of experiments for my sim. I enjoy writing emails using my sim. It’s amazing. I don’t ever need to change anything about it. It just perfectly captures my humor, my points of view, things I would most probably discard just exist in that, right? And it comes not only for sims, but when you train an AI model, when you show it so many different patterns, same way as the human brain, you don’t always remember specific things. You recreate the appearance of these memories. You are synthesizing from your training data. You looked at things and you would not be able to tell exactly how that tree was looking. Same thing with AI. When you train models, it would reconstruct from the data you’ve seen previously. During training stages, I think that there’s a big disconnect on these ends. And something that we are looking at in terms of some of our internal R&D is that even if you train a sim, would it be able to look at the original things? Because you as a human, you would probably be able to go into one of your notebooks and take a look at it. And you would remember some things differently...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Which I’ve told lots of stories about. I’ve kept journals for people who don’t know since I was 18. I’m 65, so I have lots of journals. And it was one of the things that really unlocked my understanding of human memory. I would swear on a stack of Bibles that I believed a certain thing. The story I often tell is about the first Gulf War. And I was at a party here in Manhattan and the group seemed to be like, yeah, you know, the first Gulf War, I support it because Saddam went into Kuwait and that was crazy. And I was saying the same thing. And then the group would say, yeah, but this one, like this is a bad idea, right? So I completely believed that was my memory, that I had supported the first Gulf War. And then I was looking for something else in a journal that I wrote right around the time of the first Gulf War. And when I read it, I realized I did not support the first Gulf War when you go back to the real-time writing. And so it’s quite a shock really, because it led to my theory that memory is often overwritten with our current beliefs, right?

Mykhailo Marynenko

That is true.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so when you think that you remember something completely crystal clear, you’re probably wrong.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So let’s talk a little bit about the sims, because that was another thing that I’m very excited about. One of the things that I’ve asked you to do is create synthetic audiences so that we can stress test, do A/B testing on these synthetic audiences. And we kind of kicked around ideas like maybe we should use Big Five OCEAN profiles. Maybe we should interview varying types of people.

Mykhailo Marynenko

I already have Enneagram. So essentially you have different practices, right? You want to do what you said, the last two, Big Five OCEAN. Essentially what Canvas provides you today is the capability and you can go and basically tell it, I want an audience from these parameters. Can you run simulations on all of these things? Can you go to the internet? And we have, by our internal benchmarks that we of course haven’t yet published... we are quite early to most of the things, but we have one of the best web crawlers that is out there. We crawl and index much faster than big search engines like Google, for example.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Brag a little. Tell me how much faster we do that.

Mykhailo Marynenko

We do it on average... there is no definitive way. But essentially the technology itself is fundamentally different in terms of how you interact with web pages and how you follow web pages. That proposes a new algorithm that provides the ability to crawl a little bit faster. Of course, we don’t know Google’s numbers. I don’t think many people do know. So we can’t say for sure that we are 100% or 20% faster than Google. But essentially we are capable of re-indexing more than 15 terabytes an hour of pure web pages. It’s an insane number. It’s a purely insane number. Billions of pages, pure text that are getting indexed not just as a typical search index, but as a semiotic index. And by that I mean if, for example, inside your canvas you’re told that, oh, there’s these effects, and you want to use internet knowledge to synthesize or run tests or create an audience based out of internet knowledge updates, you have a history and time travel across internet knowledge almost in real time to synthesize your audiences and see how that opinion changes now versus a week ago, for example. And this is where semiotics are cool because you essentially are not reacting to new data, but you react to new contents of data. And you have a network effect and cascading effect of things that change that births this new information.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So, yeah, so for our viewers and listeners, one of the first things that I said to Misha was basically, I want the Eye of Sauron to be able to see everything that is going on. Because obviously, you know, prediction markets are really hot right now. And this maybe takes that a step further.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let me restate again for maybe our listeners who aren’t as technically brilliant as you are. I am certainly one of those people. But rather than have a set audience, right? I, for example, I’m right now in the throes of writing a fictional thriller, the first fiction I’ve ever written. When the system is finished, I could literally go in there and say, find me the audience for this particular piece of work, right? And then I could change things in my story.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Restructure your audience also. And you can use it without a chat or with chat, however you want.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And essentially it might serve me up an audience that surprises me.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Right? Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So rather than go to, oh, yeah, here are the stats on people who like historical fiction, or here are the stats or general personality profiles of people who buy, you know, books about World War II, it will synthesize and give us a new look, right?

Mykhailo Marynenko

In a sense, yes. Yes, of course. And besides giving you a new look, that would be just text. This is where Canvas Kit, our representation layer, kicks in. You would be able to see it as a higher-dimensional space, see populations of information, see different populations of opinions, be able to dissect those and run on subsets of those, for example, or on all of these, or expand those, or subtract or summarize those, right? So you have this full multimodal flexibility, not just around what AI produced or what you want AI to produce, but around your data as well and the data that AI produced as well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So again, stop me when I’m wrong.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Sure.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

When it’s working the way I want it to work, we want it to work, we could in real time experiment with different ideas we have for the story.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Of course. Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So we have, as you know, because you sat in the writer’s room, we have what Jimmy Soni called a villain worthy of Iago from Shakespeare. That led me to believe, you know what? I don’t think the heroes are beefed up enough. And when this is working in real time, I’ll be able to go in and put my ideas for how to beef up the heroes so that they’re worthy opponents for this incredible villain. And I’ll be able to see... right, then maybe one of the heroes is skilled in aikido or whatever. But as the author, I’ll be able to see what that idea changes, right?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes. And more importantly, you would be able to see the cascading network effect and trace it to see how it changed. This is the important part. And you can affect that network in order to get different things if you didn’t like the end result. So you again have the full supervision. Of course you are not able to change how the model thinks, but you’re able to change higher-order structures of how the model gets all the things together and that’s essentially part of it. Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so this is applicable far beyond writing, right?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Oh, I have something to say here. You’re coming from a finance background and of course, in a perfect world I see the core technology we have today in R&D stages be used to study network effects of traffic jams in New York on financial districts, to correlate those with stock price drops, or to be able to project what this movie would be doing to research and innovation in the biotech sector, for example. A lot of highly disparate things we have around us are shaping us in many different ways we don’t notice. But having big data systems that scale so well and have so much depth and yet allow you to orchestrate all of these steps blazingly fast and without the hassle in a perfectly normal user interface that anyone is capable of using, allows you to do some crazy stuff.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And one of the ways that I think about this is we’re giving our user... I love music, as you know. And the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I’ve been thinking that the user, the end user, is the conductor of an orchestra. And they can be doing like, no, you’re playing that note wrong. And no, you got to do this. And yet, as you bring up, like markets, obviously I’ve been known to have a little interest in markets. When you mentioned the idea about the traffic around the financial district, I remember reading in the Journal of Portfolio Management, a very geeky publication, but like 20 years ago, and this guy got this idea that stock prices went down when the weather was inclement.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I was intrigued because I love new data sources, I love new indicators. But what it took that guy to literally produce the... so he had a hypothesis, right? Stock prices go down when the weather is inclement or cloudy, and they go up generally when it’s sunny and nice. But it took him years to even test his own hypothesis. Spoiler alert, he was right, which kind of surprised me. But literally, when I read the afterword, he had a huge team of undergrads. He was a professor, and so he had a huge team of undergrads and grad students literally down on Wall Street taking pictures and doing all that. And the data capture... we can do that essentially in real time.

Mykhailo Marynenko

We already do most of the data capturing. This is the part. And I think that we could touch on Interplanetary Link Knowledge now. It’s a crazy name for a crazy technology that is quite new at its core concept. It encapsulates a lot of really complex systems and brings them down into one beautiful, cohesive and simple thing. I can’t wait to write about it also when we have it running and we have a bit of benefit in terms of getting our products on the market first. Essentially, IPLK, Interplanetary Link Knowledge, is one unified layer that allows you to have ownership over your own data, yet not sacrifice an ability to use this data in all of the crazy contexts we were just talking about. It allows you to both utilize very traditional approaches to data and at the same time allows you to boost those and scale those to very enormous sizes where some of this information might be even stored on your phone and we don’t even need to store it on our servers. I would make a disclaimer. It’s not a decentralized system, or as many might think, there’s a lot of projects like this that tried using crypto. I would say that this is a semi-decentralized approach where you would have parts of your information on your phone and you would agree to have this information have a fixed time of life on some other end. And either end, when it doesn’t need it, it’s ephemeral and it disposes. And when it needs it again, it would be able to go back to your phone and get it if it needs it. And you have the full transparency over these things. And this works not only for these small examples like user data, but this essentially works as a potential new framework for data brokers, for being able to stream high-frequency trading data, even in a manner that is traceable, transparent and fully appropriate for modern big data systems.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And importantly, the key that I want built in, and you were wonderful about making that a reality, is this also allows the person whose data it is to control that data.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Of course.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So unlike a lot of the last 20 years where essentially most of the big tech companies... we were the product, right? Because they were essentially training on all of our interactions, et cetera. This gives the opportunity for me, if I wanted to use a particular dataset that was sort of precious to me, to control that, right?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Of course. Not just control that. There’s multiple ends for end users who are actually producing data and for companies processing, handling or operating on these things, right? When in the real world you would share a secret with a person, you cannot take it back, right? But the problem with the modern world is that you’re sharing a secret and you don’t know if you even gave it. And yes, there’s multiple disclaimers and a lot of cryptic language that people have to come across, yet they don’t know if their picture was used. You don’t know if the face on your photos in iPhone was used to train a model that would recognize faces for all of the other people, which was not a huge problem. I think that ethics and the general approach to privacy shifted a lot from us having villages and everyone knew in villages who was in those villages, to the industrial revolution in big cities where people would share information with the speed of walking distance, to the modern day, which is insanely new compared to what I mentioned just before, about sharing information online. And I think that we are just not balanced, right? I think the time will come. I think that there were so many case studies right now and there should be at least four times more in order for us to catch up and take the lessons to do it right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right, yeah. And you and I talked about that a lot. There is huge cultural lag built into people’s behavior. And as you rightly point out, for the vast majority of human history we lived in small villages or farming communities, et cetera. You knew who you were telling that secret to and you knew whether they were going to be reliable or you thought you knew whether they were going to be reliable or not. And so that’s so deep in our human OS code that’s how you got the last 20 years, right? You got people just naturally thinking the old way. How do you see transforming people to think the new way?

Mykhailo Marynenko

I don’t think people need to transform at all. I think that our human nature is to share. We are social creatures, a lot of us are. Not all of us, but there are some historical exceptions. When you work with private information, you share your picture online. I have a lot of points of view on privacy. Ever since I was 10, I would work on computer vision technologies. I would love to play around with facial recognition algorithms, just being able to compare faces algorithmically, try to build databases of faces. And then at that young age, I was quite scared of implications of what it meant of having an identity that could be used and primarily it’s going to be used against you. And a year after, I tried to appear less with my face in pictures. There’s been a period in my teenage years where you would not find a picture of my face. It would be either covered with my hand or I would not be in the picture at all. I would have issues in my school because there’s a class photo, you should be there, why are you an exception? And a lot of these different things. But essentially what I found for myself is that having extreme privacy isn’t the answer, right? You as a human again need to be a highly social creature, especially in the modern world to survive. When you share your face, you share your photo on Instagram, there isn’t going to be a world where a single person would be able to trace where this and the implications of posting this photo goes. But there could be technology that is lightweight enough, portable enough, cheap enough and sufficiently made, right, that would allow both companies to adopt it and users to see where did their picture travel to, how was it used. So we see Web3, which is another end of this. I honestly hate all of the Web3 space and I know too much about the technology in Web3, about all the things like IPFS, it’s Interplanetary File System, not Knowledge. And we draw a lot of inspiration from things like multi-formats. It’s formats that can describe themselves. Imagine reading something that reveals what it is not just by words, but by actually reading it, you understand it in a sense. Same thing for machines that is not based on AI, but based on basic cryptography and algorithms that allow machines to recognize what information they are reading without having any kind of super intelligence to do so. Multi-formats are very important concepts that drove a lot of our symbolic research. Afterwards we changed a lot about multi-formats. But I still love the Interplanetary prefix, so be….

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Aim for the stars, hit the moon.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Right. It’s more...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. You want to leave the galaxy?

Mykhailo Marynenko

I don’t know about that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But I think it’s really important for people to understand the point you just made because I personally think it’s vital and that is the technology can be developed so that literally people don’t have to change their behavior.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Exactly. And businesses can even save money by doing that. The problem is that Bell Labs was such an amazing part of the history of innovation and general things. They never stopped exploring, they never abandoned a lot of concepts. They were aware, just the structure of the company allowed them to do crazy things. And I think that most of the research we do today and how we build things today doesn’t allow as much experimentation as we used to have. And the more we build, the more we... this works, this generates revenue. Why would we ever change that? It’s better to lobby something that would prevent this from ever changing than changing things to their core, which is deeply wrong. And I think it’s a very bad habit for us as a civilization to prevent us from experimenting. And I think if we focused, if many companies that do big data today and companies that do all the sectors of analysis and recommendations and ad algorithms, if they actually went deeper into how they structured most of the technology behind this, they would have made it much cheaper for themselves, maybe even more profitable, and yet fully ethical.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And obviously that’s something near and dear to my heart. I think that absolutely, if you want to be in business, you should be in the business of having profits because how are you going to pay your staff? How are you going to grow or do any of those things, how are you going to support R&D? All of those things come into play. So one of the things that I like about the way you talk about this is you’re very practical about, hey, if you do it this way, not only is it going to be much better, much safer, it’s going to be cheaper and you’re going to make more money. And so is there kind of a monoculture right now in the big commercial designers and people who are producing the large language models? That’s pretty... I mean, help me out here.

Mykhailo Marynenko

People who produce, who generally... I can say only for some of the open-source world I’m tracking, maybe not all of it. I don’t think that there’s any community about how you handle data in a sense. The better the dataset you get, the better you clean it, the better you generate some synthetic data around it, the better your model is. The more data you have, the greater the model is and the harder it is to train and the longer it takes. There’s a lot of these variables and balances between these variables, dynamics between these variables that make it happen. And I don’t think that this is the case. The researchers are busy with model architectures, not data architectures, because this is not an AI engineer’s pain, it’s a data engineer’s pain and infrastructure team’s pain in order to make this data be stored and accessible. So yeah, that’s the general issue with having models. And there’s another end to this. Models would not be... we are not yet at the point with the technology we have that allows you to trace the original training information to AI outputs. There’s a sort of compression going on that prevents you from doing this. And I don’t think we will ever be able to. You cannot recall most of the things that drove your decisions every day. And it’s fine. It doesn’t shape who you are in a sense. We want AI to be able to do so, to extend its capabilities, but not care about data, right? But I think that the only way to do it right is to let people be in decision for usage of their data and how their data spends. Even if their data was used against their will, people should be able to see how the data was flowing. And that’s the thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Obviously there are infinite workflows that can come from this. Let’s explore a little bit more how we are trying to, across the verticals at OSV, let them learn from one another, essentially.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Imagine that. Also one of the things we want to have inside Canvas is that basically Canvas should be able to provide you with an ability to connect your workflows together. If some person created a canvas, you would be able to embed other canvases or reference other canvases or to be able to send to something else as well. Also, there’s knowledge bases and things. How you can connect in a semiotic way of thinking about it is that if there’s something that interests our VC, we might notify our media. Maybe they want to write a book about them. If there’s something in terms of a book that would make a great company and we have a network of people who might be able to create it or a network of fellows who have finished their projects and are working at their boring job, for example, or we know some people or those people are generally available to our network, we might suggest, come together and create a company and we’ll be happy to fund you. I suppose that’s your part.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The idea really springs from, you know, most of these things like the market are complex adaptive systems and emergence comes from below, not from the top. I’ve always been skeptical about... I mean if you just look historically, top-down systems really don’t work at all because they’re just absolutely the wrong design. The information bottlenecks that get up to those people up there are insane. And I often say to people, could a central committee with a five-year plan ever design a Rubik’s Cube or an iPhone or a pet rock? Of course not, right? Markets can do that because they’re these living organisms where all of the emergence is coming... right. And where you can try. And this is why I’m such a big fan of your approach. To learn all of this stuff, you’ve got to be tinkering, right? When you look at the biggest breakthroughs that people like Claude Shannon came up with, it was because that’s what they were, yeah, that’s what they did. And it seems to me that the reason we haven’t had the kinds of breakthroughs in more, let’s call it just basic science, right, is because the whole thing got inverted. We turned it into a top-down structure and people applying for a grant so that they can conduct their research, it’s a poisoned well because the top-down structure that has emerged is so narrow that unless you’re doing this, you’re not going to get funded, which to me is insane because you should be funding... it’s like one of the things we’re trying to achieve on a tiny scale with the O’Shaughnessy Fellowship and grantees. We want those people to get funded because that’s where all of the breakthroughs come from anyway. Do you see that model toppling and a more organic one replacing it?

Mykhailo Marynenko

I think that there are very different points of view on this. There’s a lot of personal things that drive you, right? When you create something, when you build something, when you’re tinkering with something, there’s environment that drives you, there’s opportunities that drive you. There’s so many variables that come into this. I think that bottom-up makes more sense just because that’s how I see the world as a computer scientist and how I see structures emerge. And I don’t see any particularly useful, as I imagine, less computationally intensive and more appropriate ways to scan trees or graphs or a lot of different these kinds of things. So I agree with you. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And really one of the things that I... it’s a thesis, right? I could absolutely be wrong, but I think that’s where markets come in, right? Because we’re in a relatively free market here in the United States. And so we’re doing this, right? And so the way the information gets into the network is we do leads to really cool things. And then others are like, oh, maybe we should be doing it that way as well. Markets are amazing at that. One of the things I used to joke about is in relatively free markets, markets co-opt everything. You could take, look at the 1960s, right? And there were these huge movements that were anti-war, make love not war, flower power, all of that. And literally it didn’t take markets but a minute to commercialize all of that. And you can be incredibly obscure. You can be Ginsberg and write Howl and suddenly you’ve got a four-book deal. But in this environment, I also think that the old... as you know, one of the things, I have six grandchildren, I do not want them to grow up where a panopticon controlled by a few controls everything. That is a nightmare to me, right? That’s 1984, married to Brave New World, married to, you know, whatever dystopian way you can think about it. But as I was thinking about it, just on your argument alone, that in its very definition is top-down and is going to fail.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes. And essentially we will just see scaling bottlenecks. We already see scaling bottlenecks in a lot of these systems that heavily rely on private information that start to collapse or are about to. Again, things will take their own natural order somewhere, somehow. I always believe that there is always a path to good that nature follows that essentially will lead us to better technologies, to companies making different decisions. And even having a new trend in privacy that you can just buy a product a bit more expensive and you have your privacy, like the Apple way, or you can get a cheap phone that has everything that Apple has, like Google’s way, but you can store an infinite amount of photos in your Google Photos but you’re agreeing to all of the terms that are cryptic and you never know what’s happening with your photos in the background. So yeah. And essentially I really love how Apple designs their things. And I think that many people, even many engineers, see Apple privacy tech as a thing that just deeply dissatisfies them because they need to comply with all the App Store regulations and then they need to design user flows where users would be able to opt out of their telemetry or similar things. But even Apple’s architecture down to how processors work and how they are... and what I was mostly excited, and I hope they will not fuck this thing up, is Private Compute. They essentially architected a way for you to use bigger cloud compute in a sense that even engineers having directly physical access to that server would not be able to know what exactly did you compute there. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture and technology that goes down to how processors install, execute instructions and how your phone is in control of your own cryptography. Same way as iCloud has Advanced Data Protection that essentially encrypts everything on their side. There’s a risk if you lose the key, you lose all the data. Even Apple wouldn’t be able to access it. And yes, you pay a premium for it and this should be your choice. And I think that Apple is seeing the right way here. I see that many companies are starting to see like Apple does and I think that a lot of people will pioneer much better ways. Like we are thinking and questioning all of these things while we develop our things because it actually allows us to do more and allows us to make most of our research much cheaper than it was previously with how we handle, again, novel approaches to data and how we store it, how we process it, how we stream it into GPUs than probably anyone else in the market.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let’s talk about Apple just briefly because to me, if Jim of 10 years ago was going to put a bet, I would have bet that Apple was the one who figured out the AI or would buy the companies that would make that happen. What’s going on there?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Apple is too ahead of their time. I think that the design and the beautiful concept behind Apple Intelligence and its promises are amazing. I think that they overestimated their own capacity to deliver it. I think that they will still deliver it just in the next 10 years. But I think that Apple would be the first company that would properly actually design it in the right way. I think that Apple got into the space thinking that it’s already old enough, but it’s too young. And it’s definitely far away from being a product that lives up to their level of depth in design and user experience.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, because, you know, the investor in me thinks that the first company that is able to pretty much guarantee, nope, your data is truly private, we can’t get it, if you forget the key... that is going to add several zeros to their market capitalization.

Mykhailo Marynenko

It did.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I know. But then actually proving it to be the case, you’re going to add several more.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What we have today in terms of what struggles they have is one of the proofs they are genuinely having the freedom to work on things as they see it and they think it’s cool.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So before we ask that final question, let’s say everything is working the way we want it to work, right? So take me through a day where we get, let’s say, let’s not use an OSV person. We get an outside screenplay from somebody who sends it to Infinite Films. And what will Nick and other people who are working at Infinite Films, once this is working, what are they going to be able to do with just that screenplay that right now seems like, you know, what did Arthur C. Clarke say, that a significantly advanced technology is no different than magic. What is he going to be able to do once that system is working?

Mykhailo Marynenko

For example, we have an Infinite Media email or Infinite Films email, right? Intake from that email would go directly into your canvas, something that we have planned for Canvas to exist. The canvas would take in the script or the concept for a movie and you would be able to run your workflow once. Just take some script beforehand when you design your canvas that would be intake for movies, for example. You would be able to do all of the things like create audience reactions, try to extrapolate to a second part if it’s possible at all, then go do all of these things. Maybe create a dynamic set of criteria that would satisfy us enough to be interested in this and notify me if it goes this way. And then it fucks up a couple times. You correct it a couple times either in chat or manually if you value your time and essentially you get a working workflow that cost you five minutes to build and scales. Then later on if we hit an example that the system is not being able to handle, and this is the cool part about our part and our technology which is runnable graphs, a novel way to approach execution and things that can run and self-expand, we would be able to self-optimize the whole automation or Canvas’s network would be able to self-heal if things go wrong or out of the ordinary or things that haven’t been covered previously. And Canvas would either raise a warning for you that you might want to look at this or it would self-adjust and raise another warning that I looked at this and I needed to adjust because this is this and this was different compared to something that previously ran over the network of things I did.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So essentially the leverage being provided by these tools and technology... I often talk to people who have really deep, at least business domain knowledge here, and one of the things that I struggle with is they’re not seeing the inherent leverage here the way I’m seeing it. People say, dude, you’re comparing this to Gutenberg and saying this is more important than Gutenberg. I think it is. Do you agree?

Mykhailo Marynenko

It is, maybe, yeah. The last part that I want to mention, like what would happen next, you would be able to just send it in our organization inside Canvas. You can instruct it if you see any other canvases that might use this information...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Very, very cool. What are you proudest of?

Mykhailo Marynenko

I think that satisfaction would come when I actually deliver on most of the promises, right? A lot of things are highly experimental. A lot of things we discussed is the perfect world we want to see, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Sure.

Mykhailo Marynenko

And I think that we became much closer the past year and I think that we are ahead of the market in many ways. I think that contrary to the market, we have a lot of new unseen problems to solve as well. And things that I’m proud of is that first we’ve got not a lot of hardware but some of it, right? We’ve got our own space in the data center. We built our servers, we installed those, we implemented... it’s a thing I’m so far, one of the three things I’m most proud of, is our hyperconverged infrastructure, our software that manages our data center that allows us to scale like any other cloud would be able to scale, to be able to compete in terms of compute with cloud providers yet allow our engineers to think like our own hardware is a cloud provider so they don’t need to ever change their mental model about how they interact with servers or similar things. Besides this, we’ve made a couple of innovations in the space that are internal that are both allowing us to do big data and compete with bad boys like BigQuery at Google and similar things to scaling and having dynamic GPU allocation and resource orchestration that I think is quite novel compared to the market as well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Okay, so what haven’t I asked you that you think is super cool about the work you’re doing and how it relates to everything that we’re doing at OSV and beyond? And beyond. And beyond.

Mykhailo Marynenko

I think that unlike any other company I’ve had experience working with, OSV is my peers. I see insanely creative people that are capable of much more than opportunities previously allowed them to do and I think OSV is great. Innovate. Bell Labs or Apple is great because we have Jim O’Shaughnessy who can help us do our projects and at the same time we actually can drive business better. One can’t live without the other. And I think that the amount of creators, creatives and the way we as a team see the world is amazing and insane.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I have a lot of friends my age who say the insane part.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Well, okay, I think it’s amazing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, obviously so do I.

Mykhailo Marynenko

It’s amazing. I wouldn’t be able to meet a lot of tech guys who would be able to operate on these concepts with me, but yet most of the creative people are. And I wasn’t able to find one person in OSV who wouldn’t be as excited as I am about what I develop. So this is definitely my ego thing where I’m like, okay, I’m recognized. This is amazing. And at the same time, the technology we are building is so disparate in terms of how many different things we touch from movie production to podcasts to general media, to markets to finance, to writing technical, non-technical fiction and how these things are connected and trying to make a cohesive system of all of this is probably a billion-dollar question.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you know, well, what I think about that, I mean, I think that’s what we’re after here.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes, that’s the way also for the future of many things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I agree. What could go wrong?

Mykhailo Marynenko

What could go wrong? So many things can go wrong. We could completely overestimate a couple of current data capabilities. There’s a couple of R&D things that have shown promise, but it’s not a product, right? And we’re essentially at the stage where we polish a lot of things and we discover how things should have not been made, both existing that are on the market and products we would have loved to use and technologies we would have loved to use. And I think that the complexity of things we’re building from a technological standpoint comes with a lot of risks, but they are well justified in my opinion. I think that we are touching on so many different things and so far we are looking good on them, that even if we do fuck up, it would be a positive-sum fuck up in a way where we wouldn’t be dragged down, we would be able to move forward. I think we’ve made so many mistakes, but first of all, your policy, we never repeat the same mistake yet. And at the same time we were able to drive a lot of things we have today into a much different level. So I think we will make a lot of terrible architectural, design, product mistakes, but those are fixable. They would delay the time to market, they would maybe hinder some of the initial user capabilities.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I will tell a story about one of our portfolio company CEOs. He met you and I think very highly of him. And he came back and he’s like, yeah, no, you need to hire him. Because I think you were showing him on your phone a knowledge graph, right?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Oh yeah. I was showing him a part of the first R&D that was later able to now enable Canvas, Infinite Canvas implementation.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right. And you blew him away because he came over to me and he said, I know startups that have burned through millions of dollars trying for this and they’ve come up with nothing. And he goes, that’s why you should hire him, like right now.

Mykhailo Marynenko

I was hired.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I know.

Mykhailo Marynenko

That’s the first thing. Second is that I think that a lot matters in terms of why do you approach your work? I don’t approach my work because I needed to make the technology. I had real fucking use cases that I needed to cover. And I needed to not create a temporary solution that would grow into a shitty product. I needed to make something universal, something simple enough at its core that doesn’t require continuing to build legacy things on top. And this forces you to think a little bit out of bounds. I wouldn’t say out of the box. I am in the box. I’m in the OSV box.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We got a pretty big box.

Mykhailo Marynenko

We got a pretty big box. It’s enough. I don’t need to go outside the box yet. And essentially when you do go outside the bounds and you have the creative freedom to take your time and try to catch what you think would be the right thing and just follow... my God, I have an ability to follow my gut. It’s amazing. And this is what drove us to making something like you just described.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, we could not have done it without you, Misha. That is a certainty. And as you know, my belief is take super talented people who are very agentic and let them do their thing. I despise top-down command and control ways. If you want to duplicate and do what everyone else is doing, okay, fine, but what the fuck are you bothering for then, right? I am... I still wake up almost every day and cannot believe that I am lucky enough to be here at this point in history. As you know, we were talking about it the other day, I was going back through my journals and I’ve been writing about this since I was 21 years old. And I’m like, yeah, your age. And I’m like, finally, it’s finally here. And the unleashing of the creativity that you have, I think is the key. And I just wish more people would think like this because that’s where you get the really great stuff, right? You don’t get the, oh, you know, whenever you turn on one of the streamers, every upgrade is really a downgrade and it’s just the enshittification of everything.

Mykhailo Marynenko

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you have gone exactly the opposite direction, which is why I love the work you do and the way you think. And we are so lucky to be working with you. All right, we got the final question. The final question is, we’re going to wave a wand and we’re going to make you the emperor of the world. Couple of rules, you can’t kill anyone, you can’t put anyone in a re-education camp. But what you can do, we’re going to give you a magical microphone, we’re going to enchant your mic and you can say two things into it. But it’s not going to be just listeners of Infinite Loops who hear that. Everyone in the world is going to hear those two things in their dreams or however you want it to be. And unlike all the other times, they’re going to wake up whenever their next morning is and say, you know what? I just had two of the greatest ideas. And unlike all the other times when I didn’t do anything about them, this time I’m actually going to act on those two things. What are you going to incept into the world?

Mykhailo Marynenko

Don’t be afraid of breaking things and move at the speed you’re comfortable with, but don’t let everyone else slow you down.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love both of those. Those are actually quite unique. You might win. But the problem is, what you’re going to win is several of our books, which you already have. Misha, thank you so much for joining us.

Mykhailo Marynenko

It’s been a pleasure.

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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

Buy the book: Infinite Books | Amazon

Danielle’s Substack: The Femsplainers With Danielle Crittenden

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Apple Podcasts

Highlights

I Would Still Choose the Pain

Danielle Crittenden: I’m glad you brought this aspect up because so far, despite my advocating for motherhood, been quite bit of a downer on the cost or the potential cost of it. But I do include a conversation that I had with a friend of mine and he never had children, he’s gay. He got married when they finally could, and just children were never sort of in their cards. And anyway, he was sitting one night with me and I was describing this pain that I was having. And he knew me as this former… My nickname used to be the Minister of Fun. I was always the one planning stuff. And I stopped planning stuff. So he knows me as this former Minister of Fun and he’s looking at this absolutely shattered person.

And I said to him, I told him that I times felt I’d rather be dead. And he started, his eyes started to water and he said, “I have never experienced a love so intense that I would rather be dead than not have had it.” And that is the core of it […]

A father […] who is a year ahead of us, as it were. He wrote me, and I included this note in the book. He wrote me that for the first time a few months ago, the first time he could walk and think of his daughter Leah, without also being consumed by sadness. That, in fact, that sadness was turning into a type of gratitude that he had the fortune to know her, the 32 years that she had been in his life […]

So if you were to ask me, no Miranda, but none of this pain, or Miranda and all of this pain, I would still choose Miranda and all of this pain.

That’s Not on the Table

Danielle Crittenden: After she died, I just… I was just going over and over. “I didn’t speak to her yesterday.” And it turned out she was feeling much worse than she let on. And so, of course, you start beating yourself up on this. And then very early on, we spoke to another father who had lost his daughter exactly the same age, a year before ours. She had died, believe it or not, in childbirth, which you didn’t think still happens, but it does […]

I remember he was on speakerphone in our kitchen, and David and I were just sort of hunched over the phone, listening. He said, “If you could go back in time and say, you know, God, I’ll give my own life if you’ll bring back Miranda.” He said, “Would you do that?” And I said, not even hesitant, “Of course. We would rather we were dead than she was dead.” And he goes, “Well, that’s not on the table.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy: What a great way to do it.

Danielle Crittenden: It’s not on the table. And so you can. I think part of the delusion that you have is you keep thinking, if I go back and figure out what I could have done or she could have done, that would have been different than she’s going to come back. No, that’s not on the table. So you have to. It’s one of the first things you have to let go.

Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Danielle, welcome to Infinite Loops.

Danielle Crittenden

I’m so honored to be here. Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Your book Dispatches from Grief, which we are publishing through our Infinite Books division. Wow. I mean, is really all I can say. Your training in journalism is pretty obvious here. But the thing that I want to ask you about first is the raw honesty that you write in this book really kind of took me back. I love The Year of Magical Thinking. I love When Breath Becomes Air. And I put your book in that category with those books.

Danielle Crittenden

Wow, thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

First off, obviously, let’s tell our listeners the tale. It’s a sad one, but it is also an unflinching look at what grief really is as opposed to the feel good pop psychology. Oh, it’s actually a gift. So welcome.

Danielle Crittenden

The worst thing that has ever happened to you is something you can benefit from actually.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So American in its boosterism. Right?

Danielle Crittenden

I know, I know. Well, the story is that our 32-year-old daughter, we have three children, she was our eldest, Miranda, died suddenly one night in her apartment in Brooklyn where she lived. My husband David and I live in Washington D.C. And without getting too medically complicated, but she’d had a brain tumor five years before removed. It was non-malignant. It removed her pituitary gland. But that can be replaced by drugs, we were assured, and hormones. And from everyone’s opinion, she was going to live a perfectly normal life so long as she took her medications. And what they didn’t tell you was if you don’t get your medications exactly right, you could drop dead. And that is what happened. And so we got that call in the morning the next day that no parent ever wants to get.

And so I was just what I describe as being thrown suddenly into this alternative universe that people don’t expect things to happen to them like this until they do. And why would they? But I was just. This is a story and I wrote it partly, as you say, my journalistic upbringing. I grew up in a family of journalists and actually they would think journalists was a pretentious term. They were reporters, they were editors. Journalists went to Columbia.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Danielle Crittenden

My parents were like firefighters or something, you know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

H.L. Mencken types.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, yeah. Really tough, hard boiled. But my stepfather, who I write a little bit about in the book, he was just such an adventurer and every experience that happened to him, he would write about like it was, didn’t matter what it was, good material. And so I grew up learning that maybe whether it was the way to understand things or in my case, this grief was so horrific. And none of the books I turned to really could help me understand how bad it was. And so writing this down was a way of saying, my God, everybody, there’s this terrible thing that can happen to you, and the pain is incurable. And no one is telling you this. It’s sort of like a scoop, of course.

But everybody who goes through this knows that I think it was important for me to convey to others who don’t know it what it’s like and for those who do know it and are going through it to have some recognition or articulation of their pain. Because I just didn’t find that expressed anywhere. And I think a lot of the time, and especially others, you ask yourself, are you going crazy? Time passes and you’re not better? Am I failing at this? You are just hurled into a completely different existence and you become a completely different person. And so that’s what I was trying to capture.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, you captured it amazingly well. My eldest sister died when I was 10. And I watched what happened to my parents. And that was 1971, and they were Irish, right? So bottle up the emotions, don’t talk about it. And even from that tender age of 10, I saw what it did to them.

Danielle Crittenden

What did it do?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, they…

Danielle Crittenden

I wanted you to tell me. I knew about your sister, but I wanted to hear.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

They. They, unlike you and your husband, they siloed their grief. And I was the only. I was the martini baby.

Danielle Crittenden

As we were back then.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

All of my sisters were already away at either a high school or a college. And so, literally, it was just me in the house. Right after my sister died, the family came together very much like when I was reading your book. It actually made me very emotional because it brought me back to that time. But they were. You referenced Kübler-Ross and as a. I didn’t read it when I was 10, but I did read it when I was a bit older. And I saw every step that I just immediately mapped my parents to it.

Danielle Crittenden

But they never reached acceptance.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

They never reached acceptance, as it were. No. I mean, for example, Lael, it was my sister who died, was very much like your Miranda. She was very regal in her disregard for authority. Like Miranda, she would ask anyone anything. I remember picking her up at the airport in 1970, and there was a sailor there, and he had a beard. And we were in an elevator, and it’s quiet. And all of a sudden Lael turns to him and goes, are you actually in the Navy? If you’re actually in the Navy, why are they letting you wear a beard like that? I think it’s really cool. But have they really relaxed that? And what was cool is the guy immediately relaxed, like somebody just interested in him. But again, back to my parents, it was very hard. And they kind of suffered in silence.

And my mom was a smoker, smoked a lot more, drank more. And that one, that connection that I saw, you’re very open about. One of the other things that I really have to congratulate you on is you’re incredibly honest about.

Danielle Crittenden

I don’t know if that’s... Well, I mean, again, gets me into trouble a lot like your sister.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, but you’re incredibly honest. And talk about the body’s reaction. It’s not all grief is not all mental. I don’t know if you’ve read the book The Body Keeps the Score, but it goes into the body. And then that carried through when I got to the part of the book where the mother actually retains the cells biologically, I just thought that was really incredibly beautiful. But it made me understand my own mom much better.

Danielle Crittenden

Did she? Well, let me address the physicality of grief, which is again something I’ve learned that we hear. You read like stress can affect you. Obviously the worst thing, the most stressful things you can go through is divorce, selling a house, death of a child. And until you kind of experience the physicality of that kind of stress and what I now call grief, but with a capital G. Because when you lose a child, it’s different from losing a parent because it just upends the natural order. And this is true. In any case, when you lose somebody close to you tragically and quickly, like a spouse, I think it’s similar that your body goes into shock.

You start to hear and read a lot about the nervous system, which normally if you just say, oh, yeah, my nervous system is really upset, you sound kind of weird or, you know, but it is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m having a bad nervous system day.

Danielle Crittenden

I’m having a bad nervous system day. But it really is true. And your brain, and this is what they talk about in PTSD, when a trauma like this hits, the brain can’t process it. And you know, when we talk about non-acceptance, it’s the brain can’t file this trauma. And we can, if you want, get into EMDR therapy a little later, which is what helped me a lot. But so. And you get. I came across this very grim statistics set of studies where especially mothers who have lost their child, their mortality rate suddenly goes down because sometimes suicide, sometimes alcohol or addiction and then. Or they just give up.

I remember in your parents’ case in that day and when my grandmother lost her son in the Second World War and she just drank herself to death, she was dead within four or five years of her son’s death. People would say, well, she was never quite right after Bobby died, you know, and that’s. You’re not quite right. Not just because you’re having a mental breakdown, but you’re having a physical breakdown as well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And you are, as I said, incredibly honest about what that feels like. And why do you think you also have wonderful terms like the bureaucracy of death? I remember that because I went with my parents to pick my sister’s casket out.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And as a kid it was just all so weird.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And because, you know, I guess what happened with me was I had someone tell me much later, somebody who had studied death and families and how it affects the family structure. She said, well, what you’re not accounting for, Jim, is the day your sister died, you became an adult, your childhood ended because my instinct was to, you know, help my parents and help them now. Let’s spoiler alert. Things eventually got much better, but as you point out, never the same.

Danielle Crittenden

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I think that one of the reasons why I’m so impressed by your book is you just honestly say that. And I. But I think that people who are in that undiscovered country. Right. Like the people who have experienced it versus the ones who haven’t. Right. You call it griefsplaining.

Danielle Crittenden

Well, there is a certain type of person who hasn’t experienced it who might griefsplain.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Danielle Crittenden

But it’s more like those who know and those who don’t know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes, yes. And can you pick them out of a. Like how long does it take you to know whether they know or whether they don’t know?

Danielle Crittenden

Well, I couldn’t pick them out of a police lineup, just point to that person.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You’d have to interact with them, obviously.

Danielle Crittenden

No, it’s quite fascinating. So what I likened sort of the earliest part, like as you described, when you have to start coffin shopping and things like that, you’re just in a completely shell shocked state. And the description I have is imagine if a meteor hits your house and one day you’re there, you’re having coffee, you’re reading the newspaper, you’re taking the kids to school and the next day everything is a smoking ruin. That’s what it feels like, so you’re just shell shocked. And then people. It’s so horrible what has happened to you that people don’t. Most people don’t know how to react. And, hey, I get it. Some people get very upset that people say the wrong things, like, she’s in a better place.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, yeah, that.

Danielle Crittenden

But I think what it comes out of, and this is very human and very kind, is they want to make you feel better, like they’re trying to be helpful. And the people, you could say, who don’t know, don’t understand, the house is a smoking ruin. All I want to hear is, this is horrible. I’m so sorry. It’s fine. But the. The people who know just hug you. They listen to you when they say they can say, how are you? And they say it in a way that, how are you? What are you feeling right now? Is it different from. I think a lot of people would be afraid to say, how are you?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Danielle Crittenden

And so it’s just a kind. It’s more a bearing and a manner of people who have been through something doesn’t even have to be the same thing, but maybe have been through terrible illness or whatever, but understand that your life and you are not the same, and especially in the earlier phases, not capable of anything except trying to take the next step and the next breath.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you also talk about the repetitive thinking, the, if I’d only done this. Why didn’t I know why when I was on the phone with her? Why didn’t I ask her about, are you staying on your meds? And that is ubiquitous among humanity, I think.

Danielle Crittenden

And it’s your brain, too. This is part of the brain. The brain is. It’s like the little spinning orb on the Internet. And bandwidth isn’t connecting. The brain is trying to find a reason for this. So that’s part of it. And then part of it, of course, especially as a parent, you’re replaying it. Because I knew Miranda, in her case, looked very pale. She looked very sickly for about six months. And you say to a young woman of. Beautiful woman of 32, you’re looking a little thin. They’re gonna go, thanks. You know, so you think so? So I couldn’t say that. And, you know, as a mother, you don’t want to get into body issues and everything, but I’d say to her, Mandy, you’re looking awfully pale. And she’d go, yeah, no. You know, it didn’t worry her. And then she.

I made her get a second opinion from an endocrinologist because she was complaining about her endocrinologist. So we got a second opinion, and he checked her out. So this would have been in the fall. She died in February. And then all the numbers checked out, but she still looked to me very pale. And then she sent me a photo. She was in Los Angeles about a week before she died. She sent me a photo, and she looked like a skull. She just was so gaunt. And I said to Miranda, you look so pale. Are you okay? And she had been struggling with a cold, or so she thought. And so after she died, I just. I was just going over and over, and I didn’t speak to her yesterday. And it turned out she was feeling much worse than she let on.

And so, of course, you start beating yourself up on this. And then very early on, we spoke to another father who had lost his daughter exactly the same age, a year before ours. She had died, believe it or not, in childbirth, which you didn’t think still happens, but it does. Yeah, suddenly. And he said. And he was an agent in Hollywood, and he said. He said. I remember he was on speakerphone in our kitchen, and David and I were just sort of hunched over the phone, listening. He said, if you could go back in time and say, you know, God, I’ll give my own life if you’ll bring back Miranda. He said, would you do that? And I said, not even hesitant, of course. We would rather we were dead than she was dead. And he goes, well, that’s not on the table.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What a great way to do it.

Danielle Crittenden

It’s not on the table. And so you can. I think part of the delusion that you have is you keep thinking, if I go back and figure out what I could have done or she could have done, that would have been different than she’s going to come back. No, that’s not on the table. So you have to. It’s one of the first things you have to let go. I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent who somehow feels directly responsible for the death. I think. I don’t think I could survive that.

And I understand if it was your fault, per se, but if you had any inkling, like you got in a car accident and you survived and the child didn’t, or you turned your back and the toddler went in the pool, you know, just those sorts of incidents, or if your spouse was somehow seemingly at fault, I don’t know how a marriage could survive that. Even if there was nothing that could have been done, you know, so it’s a terrible, immediate, as you say, obsessive series of thoughts that just go round and round as you try, as your brain tries to grasp it and as you try to wonder how it might have gone differently.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And then it also feeds into just our very normal humanity. Right. Like when something catastrophically happens to us, especially a death of a loved one, you get enraged and as I was reading your book, I. I did have to set it down a lot of times. I. The, the line, nothing prepares you to see the body of your dead daughter. Oh, my God. Like, I literally had a. I had to stop because that is, I. I don’t have many fears, but one is that any of my children or grandchildren predeceased me.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, that’s the nightmare.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It really is. And especially you’ve experienced it. I watched my mom and dad experience it. And I just really. There’s a very. Like, when I read that line, I had to put the book down because I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to continue before I kind of calmed down a little bit. Did that happen? In a way. Like, I’d be really mad at the doctors. I’d be really angry that they didn’t say, hey, this is life threatening.

Danielle Crittenden

Yep. As you know, I’m Canadian by origin, so I’m not naturally litigious. I did call her endo once we were getting a report because I just needed to know. They never actually came to a conclusion, but it was clear from everything the coroner told me that her renal glands had failed from a lack of enough cortisol. Doctors listening to that say that’s not possible, I may have fudged it a bit, but that’s what I remember. And I remember talking to the officer on the corner on the line when he was on the scene, and one of the first questions I asked him in this horrible call you never want to receive, and as it’s coming clear, you’re saying she’s okay. Right. We’re taking her to the medical examiner’s building. And you’re going like, but you’re thinking, that’s not the emergency ward.

He’s making it pretty clear to me that she is dead. And so once I absorbed this, I said, I gave him a little bit of that medical history. And there was suddenly, oh. And he didn’t want me to take this as a fact. He was cautious in the way he conveyed this. But he said, yes, you can have a perfectly, seemingly normal person come in to the emergency ward. Complain of a. They’re having a flu, get tested, they’ll leave, and the next second they’re dead. And it was actually extremely helpful to me. And then the other thing I asked him, as any parent would, was would she have suffered.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, first question.

Danielle Crittenden

Any pain?And it would have happened around 3am which, by the way, coincidentally, my son, who was on the other coast in Los Angeles, since she was in Brooklyn, woke up violently at 3am with just, he said the most terrible feeling of dread. But anyway, they said around 3am and he said, no, by the time it would have happened, she would have fallen unconscious and it would have been quick. And those, you know, you never think those are going to be the upside of things you want to hear. You know, you start, you get into these weird categories or hierarchies of grief. Well, at least she wasn’t murdered, you know, or at least she wasn’t. Simultaneous to this, one of my husband’s relatives was an October 7th hostage.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, dear.

Danielle Crittenden

Who’s 22 years old. And he did not come back. But watching his parents not know his fate at that point, like not knowing is its own kind of cell of hell, you know. So it’s like every parent who in this circumstance has a version of hell that they are living different from other experiences. But you’re all in the same burning room. And. But then. Yeah, but then it’s. We’re Jewish. And there are very mercifully, I don’t want to say strict, but there’s rules that you follow after a person dies that I found very helpful. It was both terrible and helpful because you are really implored to bury a person quickly. You can’t just send them off, have them come back in a little urn, and then wait a year for a celebration of life or whatever.

Like, you have to face the reality of it right away. So by we learned she was dead, say, Friday morning. By Sunday afternoon, I was choosing coffins online. And later that afternoon, I was in the funeral home, the Jewish funeral home, walking into her and seeing her. And then the next day, we were on a plane to Canada to have her funeral and be buried near where our summer cottage is in Canada outside of Toronto, which is where David and I planned to be. And unexpectedly, she now is. So that speed of where you still have to make so many crazy decisions when you’re not in a state of mind to do it is yet somehow helpful to accept. You’re never gonna accept being resigned to the fact that this has happened and that phase of it is over quickly.

And then you’re just left in. Think of Brueghel’s depiction of hell. Of all these people, what do you want? Whipping today or swatting? Following swords of fire? Each day is a new day like that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

How did your other kids help? How did they process? Because, again, you’re the mother. And the normal relationship between a parent and a child, especially in times of incredible crisis and stress and everything is, you know, the mother is the mother and she takes care of those kids.

Danielle Crittenden

And she’s gotta hold it together.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

She’s gotta hold it together.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

How did that play out?

Danielle Crittenden

Well, I’ve always been first. I’ve always loved being a mother. Like, I love motherhood.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And by the way, that comes through very clearly in the book, I think. Which is a bit of a surprise, because it’s a book about grief, right?

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s. You know, I wanna say, young people today, you know, they’re not getting married, they’re not having children, and they’re missing out. And I say this in the context of someone who has now lost a child. They are missing out on the most profound and, as you said, human experience of existence. There is nothing. There is nothing like having children. It’s like what we’re put on Earth to do. It’s not to go to dive bars and it’s like, that’s all fun. But eventually it is to have children. And when you have a child, it. Speaking of alternative universes, you can never know what that’s going to be like till you have one. You can sit out and list all the negatives. They’re easy to see, but you don’t see the positives till you cross over.

And in a way, it’s like grief is the opposite. You don’t know how horrible it is, too, when you’ve crossed over. And as a mother, so I always felt it was. People will sometimes denigrate or criticize the fact that women tend to put themselves last, put everything else needs before theirs. And that’s just what a mother does. And I think it’s a kind of. I wrote. I think it’s a kind of superpower. The idea which I couldn’t have done before as a mother, that whatever was going on with me or my emotions, if some child was. Of mine was having a problem, I was on it. You know, you’re the strength. You’re the person who’s going to solve this for them or help them solve it, I should say. So.

When Miranda died and the siblings were all very close family, my son Nat was two years younger. And our youngest daughter, Bea, who was 10 years younger than Miranda, like you and your family, they all kind of. They of course looked to me and their father. And David was. I mean, he was shattered, but he was able to more visibly hold it together. And I just went off the rails, you know, I mean, I did everything, I kept my brave face on till she was buried. And then after she was buried, I lost it. And to feel as a mother that you. I couldn’t prioritize their feelings. I mean, obviously I tried and we all hugged together, but I, for the first time as a mother, I felt I couldn’t help them. And I knew they were in their own chambers of hell.

And I tried, but they. And I think it’s terrifying to see a parent and to see your mother crying. Like just even if you can imagine your mother crying at a sad movie or something, it’s very distressing to a child. I think I wrote about my wonderful stepfather, the journalist who. When our. One of our dogs died and he’d been in the Korean War and everything, and he kind of whimpered and I looked at him, I thought he was laughing. And then I realized he wasn’t. And I was so shocked, but so upset, like disturbed that something could wobble him. And so there was a period early on where, you know, I was. I’d gone from being this very fun loving person. Like really I enjoyed my life and was excited.

David and I, we excited to be empty nesters and we had these plans and suddenly I went from that to just curled up on a bathroom floor wanting to die, just wanting to die because the pain was so unbearable. And it’s physical pain, it’s in your chest, it’s in your throat, and you can’t close your eyes to the smoking ruin that is around you. People again, I read people ask if I could sleep. And weirdly, I could sleep. Sleep was a gift. It was when you woke up and you realized that even though your bedroom looked the same as it did five days ago, your entire world is completely different. And so being suffering that pain, looking as I did through books, manuals, websites, how can I stop this pain? And spoiler alert, you can’t.

You can drug yourself, which, by the way, Valium, everybody, I highly recommend. Don’t become addicted, but Valium is helpful. Very tempted to drink a lot. That works for a bit. Never was a big drug person, but you’re trying to numb your pain. And it’s also a supremely. You’re aware of it being a supremely selfish thought as a mother knowing, here I am lying on the floor wanting to die, and the brain telling me they’ll be okay, it’s okay, they’re going to be fine, but you just can’t go on. And then having just sort of not wanting to express that to them. Like, yeah, you guys are great, but I’m ready to die. Like, it’s kind of insulting to them. Like, you aren’t worth living for. And of course that’s not what you’re thinking, but that’s how you feel. And so they would be.

And I included. She’s a beautiful writer. And I included in the book some of. She took some journal notes at the time and what it was like to go into. David spent that first night back home in Miranda’s bedroom. And she heard him just howling through the walls because her room was next to his. And she went in and tried to comfort him. And again, that’s the reversal of things, right? The child comforting you. And so it was very hard. And that’s. If I felt like a failure at anything, that’s what I felt, a failure at that time. During that time. And I’ve, you know, gradually I was able to pull it together. But I think what you said about your childhood ended. I mean, Bea, our youngest, was 22. She was in.

She’d been studying her semester abroad, so she would have been a junior college. And suddenly she. She became. She was always solid, but she became unbelievably strong. And the things that she did with me, she wouldn’t let me do alone. Like going to Miranda’s apartment and cleaning it and packing it up. Like she. I was like, no, I’ll do it. I can do this. I can do this for everybody. And she’s, mom, you’re not doing it alone. I’m coming with you. I want to be there. That was, you know, such a gift. But I think, you know, you do get that strength back. And I hope I’ve been able to be there for my kids more in the way I used to be than I. Than I was at that moment.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. It’s just as. It’s obviously different being a father than a mother. I’m fully willing to acknowledge that we do things differently. Like, my own mother and I had this wonderful relationship and I was so lucky to have her unconditional love. And, you know, not so much with my dad, but the. As I was listening to you, it’s. It’s just seems so unfair because not only are you dealing with this hammer blow of losing your eldest, then you have this compounding guilt about my kids. They need me, and I can’t be there for. And it just. It just continues to compound negatively.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And, you know. You know, one of my instincts when faced with a crisis is to go to the. Go to the literature.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, that was mine.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

They must have figured this out. I gotta be able to find something. And that’s why I was so taken by your book, because I had read The Year of Magical Thinking and When Breath Becomes Air, different kind of book, but same category. And I’d read a lot about that. And I’m holding those out as they’re the real deal, and I’m holding your book out as the real deal. Why do you think that? Given all of the resources we have to study this process, is it just because we’ve so tried to remove death from our daily experience that you get these, as you said. Yeah. This most horrible thing in your life that just happened to you and will irrevocably change you. It’s gonna be good.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Or it’s. It’s. You know, you can. It’s gonna be hard for a bit. Yeah. Or also this idea of the stages, like. Like, I think it was my son who said, you know. Yeah, there are stages. They don’t tell you. You feel them all at once sometimes, you know. Yeah, it’s. No, I don’t. You know, people say that, like, we just don’t face death in our society. And, you know, maybe we should be more like tribes in Africa and really embrace death and our ancestors. And I think, well, maybe because we are a very lucky society, that we have a lot of cures for a lot of things that would have killed our own relatives 20 years ago. So it’s not that we’ve tried to remove ourselves from death.

Maybe death has been removed from us and we don’t all live on top of each other as we once did. And people live an extraordinarily long time, generally speaking. So I don’t blame people who don’t want to think. Like, when somebody says, oh, I just can’t even imagine, it’s like, nope, you can’t, and you are lucky. I’m glad you can’t imagine it, because you can. And I think part of the other things that people can’t imagine is this whole concept that you become a different person. Well, what does that even mean? You’re still you. You’re still Danielle. Okay. You’re really sad, Danielle. You’re not fun, Danielle, but you’re really sad, Danielle. But. And this speaks to fathers too, because I think fathers and mothers can react differently.

I mean, as you said at the beginning, one of the signs is that your baby’s cells stay within you. So you have this, which I find comforting. There’s always going to be a little bit of Miranda alive in me, which,.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

By the way, I just found that so cool.

Danielle Crittenden

And they will help you, a mother, fight infection.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, it’s amazing.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. And as you say, it’s so understudied. But a father, you know, in the dynamics of the family, everybody’s a new person because you were. Because not only has a hole been blown apart in your dynamics and your relationships, but you are never going to be the way you were with that person. And that person is never going to be there to bring out, you know, the qualities. So for Bea, our youngest, Miranda was like the coolest mother. Their 10 year age gap was enough that Miranda was very protective towards her, but it was also way more fun than I was. And Miranda was fun. And Bea could go to Miranda and tell her a thing that she would obviously not bring to me. But they had a certain bond and my son had a certain bond.

And of course David, who Miranda most resembled, they shared a sense of humor that none of us really got. I mean, it was a very funny sense of humor. But they would just laugh at. They look at each other and start laughing and we’re trying to. What’s so funny? We don’t get this. And so those are the things that you lose. And I just. And now. And from a mother’s and father’s perspective, you’ve gone from being a parent of three to a parent of two. And that alone brings up just everyday awkwardnesses, you know, because suddenly the most normal interactions like mothers, oh, how many kids do you have? And that you. Oh, I have three. Now you go, yeah. And you’ve got to learn to answer the most banal questions relating to the tragedy. I actually found after I was.

Wasn’t finding what I wanted in the books. I started to read a lot of Holocaust survivor memoirs because, I mean, there are people who lost entire families who had to do. Their days were physically way more awful than mine were. But I think that’s. You want to find some connection of recognition of somebody who has endured something that you are enduring and you want to know how they did it and what their thoughts were. And I think that was in the end, my goal with this is. And there is some hope expressed of how I came through those earliest days but it’s not the kind of hope that the grief explainers, the grief influencers would want to say. Oh, yeah, well, you get through it and you’re a better person and you will get through it. It’s fine.

It might take longer, but you’ll get through it. No, you won’t get through it. You’re not getting through it. You’re going to learn to live with it somehow. And that’s not easy. But there is this phrase out there that the important thing is not to avoid grief like your parents or another, to go through it. And there’s some truth, I’m sure, to facing it, but it implies an ending, a destination. And I don’t think that destination is there.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And that is again, very clear and honest in your book, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with it. Because the happy, joy, joy. No, honestly, no, it’s not going to work out like that. You’re going to carry that with you. I still think about my sister and she died when I was 10 and I’m 65.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But let’s talk about Miranda for a minute. Because I fell in love with her and there’s often in books about somebody who’s died, we tend to turn them into saints and. Or symbols. Right.

Danielle Crittenden

And only speak good of them.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And only speak good. And you didn’t do that. You were super honest, which.

Danielle Crittenden

Well, I didn’t trash her.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, of course you didn’t. But you made her real. Especially in my second reading of the book, I just. I felt so sad that I could never meet her because I love this girl. She’s vibrant on the page as she was in life. She was also difficult. I was a difficult kid. And that you write her full blooded is to me a real gift. Is that how you think about her right now?

Danielle Crittenden

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, there were two things. I write the opening chapter about sort of familiar grief. The death of a parent. The death of our parents. David’s father. Sorry, David’s mother died at 54, unusually young. My stepfather died in his 80s. So when I was writing about the death of our parents, whom we were all very close to, one of the ways we found that the way you keep a person alive is to remember them in all their dimensions, not make them into plaster saints. Telling stories of David’s mother, telling stories of my stepfather who could be so mischievous with the children. He was like a child himself. And he and Miranda were thick as thieves. In fact, when he was dying and she walked into his hospital room to say goodbye, which miraculously we all did and were able to do.

He pointed to the floor and he said, I’ll see you down there. And she was. She reeled back and then of course, started to laugh hysterically like that. You know, that was. And so she was very like him in many ways. So you want to remember them in their fullness. But when I was first writing this book, or, you know, what was becoming a book, I didn’t know what it was. I was just writing it. I kept Miranda very much out of it because I didn’t think I could do her justice. I wanted to focus on the grief process, or whatever it is experience itself of a mother. And I thought if I brought her into it too much, well, I’d never be able to capture her. And I don’t know, it just felt wrong to me.

And then actually, my very first book editor, I showed her an early draft and she said, I want to know more about Miranda. Okay? So I started to go into her and I’m really glad you say she becomes alive on the page because she was a difficult person to capture. And she did. She gave us. You know, I think I first started Zoloft when she was about 15. Zoloft also recommended. But she was just. I once described her as a Google, as she grew up, a Google pin that you could just drop into any city in the world and within 24 hours she would have made friends know where to eat, what to see, and not just the museum. Like, she would have had the exhibit that no one else knew about what to see. She was exceptionally cool. And she had gone.

We had gone on a family trip to Israel when she was about 21 or 22 and she hadn’t wanted to go. We had all gone sort of separately on various different journeys, but we’d never gone as a family. And. And she just said, why are we going to Israel? I was like, can’t we be a normal family? Just go to a beach? Why don’t we ever go to somewhere like a beach? And she loved history and archeology and things, but, you know, we always. We never took beach vacations. And so I said, well, there’s a beach. There’s a beach in Israel, in Tel Aviv. And anyway, sort of pulled her along kicking and screaming, which is how you brought her along on something if she didn’t want to go.

And she got to Tel Aviv and one look at it was the coolest place she had ever seen. I know the news now would not indicate this, but anybody who has been to Tel Aviv knows she thought it was like Paris mixed with an Arabic bazaar. And it was so youthful and coffee culture and people stayed up all night and they really embraced the life. And so she came back from this trip and within three months, quit her job, found some bogus program that would get her a student visa of some kind and taken herself over. And there she was, became a fashion model for a bit. And she gave me. She identified very strongly as Jewish, but she was not religious. And so she loved everything that was not religious about it. Anything that was not Jerusalem.

Like, when I wanted to visit and go to Jerusalem, she’s like, ugh, so lame. And she taught me to see the culture that was there. Like 200 different ethnicities all living, and the artisanship and the food and music and everything that was happening. So she could. She would make me see things and she did this wherever and whatever she was doing. Like, if I came and visited her in Brooklyn, she would just have this program of things that I would just never have done on my own. In fact, after she died, Nathaniel, said, now I’m never going to know where to eat. And she was. But her company, she was so effortlessly, piercingly witty. I mean, she’s like Oscar Wilde, a modern Oscar Wilde. Like, she would just toss off one liners that were so insightful, but just.

You would just be gasping with laughter when she would say things. She’s very well read. She didn’t go to. She went, lasted about three months in university, and that was it. And she worked in news, and she loved news. She wanted to be in the real world. She wanted to live in the world, and she wanted to live, live in the world. And she was just the best company. But she brought out things. She was a booster.. She saw. She had this gift for seeing people and what their gifts were and encouraging that. So she had a lot of friends, a lot of strays, we called them, like sort of lost girls who wanted help, sympathy. And so when she died, there were also a lot of people who came to her funeral.

Young people were just like, I don’t know what I’m gonna do without Miranda to talk to. Like, she was. She had a deep kindness and compassion to her. And I think that comes out of someone who had illness. You know, somebody had seen trauma. She lived. When she was modeling, there were a few intifadas that happened, and she’d be running with curlers in her hair to bomb shelters. So she really lived a big life in her 32 years. And you lose someone like that and it’s. Yeah, it’s a crater. Just a crater.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I’m very grateful that your original editor made you write about her.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because it. Again, so much of this stuff can seem kind of intellectual, abstract. You know, this is how you get through grief. Here’s the program. You know, everything is well. We’ll take this step then. This step. And there are some effective therapies that we’re going to talk about in a minute.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But having her there really helps understand why you went through what you went through. Right. And I’m not saying that in a pejorative way. I’m sure that a parent who loses a child who isn’t that. Right. Maybe they’re very studious or very quiet. They have their own special attachments that the parent has with that child. But the thing that I really think your book does so well. You do so well, is just the raw honesty of it. Right. Because she was all of that. But she was also a challenge for you. I mean, you literally had to send her up to your stepdad and have him take a crack.

Danielle Crittenden

Well, yeah. Her last two years of high school, she went. We shipped her up to Canada to live with my mom and my stepfather. And my mother, you know, has been extraordinary and she’s still alive. And she was the one who conveyed how much being a mother meant to her and was one of the best things she. Of her life. Aspects of her life. But my mom was. My mom was probably stricter with her, but my stepfather had been a lieutenant and sort of knew how to deal with an unruly troop. So he could. And as I think as a grandparent, you know, you can deal with. With sometimes a grandchild better than the parent can deal because the parents, you’re just too close and you feel too responsible where sometimes they need a little space.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

There’s that great joke. Why do grandparents and their grandchildren get along and bond so well? They have a mutual enemy.

Danielle Crittenden

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. No, look, it was a godsend to us and we. They really pulled her through and. Yeah, but I think any child, you know, and that’s the thing. I mean, you enter this alternative universe and you meet other people. Some people’s children have died from suicide, you know, or they. And then you could say, well, those were really problematic, you know, but it’s no less. Because in the end it’s. I said, when I learned that she had died, I said, what is the opposite feeling to giving birth. I mean, it’s. It’s crazy to think that you can create this life. And now this thing that you bore has been taken from you, has died. And that bond is not describable, but any child who is your child is going. You know, people have.

I had a miscarriage once and then I just learned every. Oh, join the line. Everybody has a miscarriage, but. And it was very early, but I remember just spending the entire day kind of in a mourning. And then babies and it doesn’t really matter the age. It’s. You just have that bond. And I think that’s part of what I was trying to get to, is the unnaturalness of when it happens.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And what would you. Now that you have your passport to this country.

Danielle Crittenden

a=And what, exile? Yeah. Deported.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

A passport you did not choose, you did not want.

Danielle Crittenden

I wish I’d been sent to Venezuela, let me tell you. Oh, Venezuela, how lucky.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I’d rather go to North Korea.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, exactly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What would you advise if a friend or a loved one experiences this? What are you going to tell them that is. Is different because you’ve been through the experience?

Danielle Crittenden

It’s a good question. Sadly, it happened last fall. A friend of ours, daughter died suddenly by an embolism. 18 years old, just getting off a plane and, you know, very unexpected to be joined by someone so close to me. And I think what you learn is not to tell them anything to say because they know you know, and you actually, I mean, obviously you are there for them. Never say that. This is just a rule of life. Never say, hey, call if you need me. Never do that for anything. Anything. You want to see me, call me, or I will call you. But hey, don’t hesitate to reach out if you need anything is a meaningless phrase. And so you don’t actually say that. But I’ve been solicitous, I’ve said, I’m here, you want to talk. But I don’t give her advice.

And they’re dealing with their own families and situations and I think this community of mothers that I’ve now joined, many whom I didn’t know at the beginning, who have reached out to me through various social media. And David wrote a beautiful article in the Atlantic a few months after she died called “Miranda’s Last Gift.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I read it.

Danielle Crittenden

Talking about Miranda through her relationship with her dog, Ringo. And so I’ve met people that way. And one of the universal experiences that people feel is loneliness. In this sense, I feel lucky that I have had a close family the marriage has survived through it, and our family remains close. And I’ve had the support of many very good friends, but that is not the common experience.

And I think, you know, I’ve heard from single mothers, sometimes families have lost their only child and there is. The drumbeat of the world goes on. And again, totally understandably, like you’re sad indefinitely, but after three or four months, you know, there’s not going to be. People just naturally stop asking or they forget or they remember to ask, oh, right, how are you doing? But again, I don’t fault them for that. The world goes on. Time goes on. It just doesn’t feel like it’s going on for you. And so to another mother in this situation, or a father, as it’s not on the table, friend was for us. They’re there to talk to you whenever you need them. And that’s completely understood. And then I will reach out and just check in, say, how are you doing? Let me know. Thinking about you.

If you want to talk, I’m here. You know, that’s what one does. And that’s. And in that case, in that world, you know, they are there for it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think one of the things that your book does is it gives the reader who’s experienced this permission. And by that I mean, you know, if you’re reading the happy, joy, joy, this is going to make you stronger. And you’re not feeling that. And I bet you’re not.

Danielle Crittenden

No, no, I’m not.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Your book allows them to see you and what you went through, but then it gives them. Oh, all right. So I’m not this crazed creature.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m not, you know, doing it wrong.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because we. We have so much of that, you know, the. These are the 10 steps you have to do.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. You’re not. You’re not through it yet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Danielle Crittenden

You’re supposed to get through it. It’s two years.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Come on, it’s. It’s been a while.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What’s wrong with you?

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And that only heaps more pain.

Danielle Crittenden

And if you’re lonely and you don’t have a lot of people around you who understand or close family who understand. I’m sure it’s a terrible feeling. Yeah. And people do say amazing things. I tell a story of the checking in at the hotel in Brooklyn.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. I love that.

Danielle Crittenden

Oh, my God. That was. There are times people say so much the wrong thing. It’s funny. And this was, I don’t know, a month after Miranda died because we weren’t there before they removed her, police sealed up her apartment. We had to go through this horrible legal bureaucracy of death to just get access to her apartment. And I was very much, among many things, haunted by the aspect that no one had been in there to clean up. And I thought, you know, there’s food rotting on the counter. Like, you know, this is. We have to be able to get. I could wait for her things. I just wanted to. So Bea, again, our daughter accompanied me and we checked in this hotel that was very near her apartment in Brooklyn.

And we got there late and were exhausted and were braced for having to go in the next day and face this. It was the first time we had to face anything like this. And we go to the check in and it’s this really jolly New York check in person. And he’s like, well, hello ladies, what brings you to New York? And Bea and I just. We look at each other and he’s like, business? Pleasure? And I was like. And Bea just says, neither. We’re not here for anything like that. Oh, we got plans. And I’m like, yeah, we have plans. We have plans. A show? No, not a show. And he goes, well. And he keeps going on. And finally, and this is one of these early things you have to learn is when to drop the nuclear bomb and when not to.

In the early days, you’re tempted to drop it all the time. Like you’re checking out at the drugstore and you want turn to the clerk and say, you know, my daughter just died. It’s weird, you just become compulsive about it. But this one, you know, this one I was trying not to because he was so jolly. And finally I just said, you know what? My daughter died. We’re here to clean up her apartment after her death. I’m thinking, okay, wow, I just exploded you. And he went, oh, well then, well, at least she’s in a good place now, right? And I said, well, she actually had a good place. She lived right near the esplanade in a one bedroom apartment. And he was like, yeah, that is good, real New Yorker, that is good real estate. I know.

And I said, so I think she was in a pretty good place. And he said, well, yeah, I guess, well, can I send you ladies some champagne? And I said, well, he said, we’re not really celebrating. And he goes, well, what do you want? And I said, oh, fuck it. White wine. Do you have white wine? He said, yes, bottles coming your way, ladies. And it was just, I mean, we did. It was actually the comic bits in the Shakespeare tragedy where the guards are all drunk. And, you know, that was that moment.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

For us when I was reading that part, I thought it was a Monty Python sketch.

Danielle Crittenden

So much of life turns into a Monty Python sketch. But, yes, no, it was.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it’s not their fault. No, they haven’t ever. They probably have no knowledge of what a person feels like, what they’re experiencing somatically, you know, but he. That was like a routine, honestly.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Couldn’t break the routine. Couldn’t break the bit. No, I mean, what I did get. I think my favorite targets if I was going to have annoyance or anger were the happiness gurus. There are people who study the science of happiness, and it’s great at a TED Talk or at a corporate retreat with billionaires about learning to experience and take strength and lessons from your misfortune. And then you realize nothing has ever happened to you. You never want to presume. One of the other things you realize is so many people are out there that you didn’t even realize are walking about in my state or some version of my state. As I said, this alternative universe is very well populated and more populated than you think. But then there are a lot of people.

I don’t want to presume that nothing bad has happened to this person, but nothing bad has happened to this person. Like, more than they got. They lost a job, you know, or they had a bad time in college, and I learned from it, you know, or I started my first company and it failed. But that made me better businessman, you know, like. Yeah, okay, good. Good for you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I really empathized when I was reading your views on that. I used to get cluster headaches, which they used to call suicide headaches for the obvious reason.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I had a male neurologist tell me, you know, it’s the worst pain a man can feel. And then mercifully, they went away. When I was in my mid-40s and I had an occasion to see another neurologist, female, and she was looking through my chart, and she goes, ooh, cluster headaches. And I went, yeah, my previous guy told me they were the worst pain a man could feel. And she goes, oh, no, they’re the worst pain a human being can feel.

Danielle Crittenden

And that’s coming from a woman.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And a mother.

Danielle Crittenden

And a mother.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, because I was present when all three of my kids were born. That ain’t for sissies.

Danielle Crittenden

Well, it is when you get. You have the wit to get the anesthesia right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, my wife chose not to do that.

Danielle Crittenden

I compare that to natural heart surgery, you know? I’m gonna go to the natural way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know you and me are so aligned because I’m like, honey, you know, a spinal block, it won’t. It won’t play with your mind. No, no.

Danielle Crittenden

Your wife is impressive. I was watching a movie by the time it was ready for Miranda to be born.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, well, you’re very wise.

Danielle Crittenden

She was born at the time it was fashionable to go to midwives.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Danielle Crittenden

In fact, I wrote an essay at the time. So I use my experience. I don’t let material go to waste. I wrote an essay at the time for the Wall Street Journal called “Knock Me Out with a Truck.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

My mom was the same way. She was like, when she heard that Missy wanted to do it without any anesthesia or any pain meds, my mom was just. She would say it directly to Missy. I think you’re really misguided here.

Danielle Crittenden

This is experience that. It’s not a returning. It is a returning to nature, but it’s like one of those ones you don’t want to return to.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But again, why it resonated so strongly with me was when you’re in a cluster headache, you literally can’t think.

Danielle Crittenden

It’s like a migraine or worse. Worse.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Basically, when people would try to ask me to describe it, the closest thing I could come up with was, imagine somebody heats up a drill, drills the side of your head, and then pours white hot molasses with chunks of glass.

Danielle Crittenden

I know that feeling. Yes. And.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I think. And that’s why I’m bringing it up.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because reading your book, I was like, oh, I know how she felt. Because it.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, it’s relocated to your chest.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Danielle Crittenden

And that then when we’re talking about the physicality.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Danielle Crittenden

No, I’ve not experienced that level of headache, but I have had a couple of things that I thought I was brain hemorrhaging, and it turns out it was sinuses. So just that is bad enough. So I know what you think, but you can’t. You. You can’t think. You can’t function. All you want to do is lie on your back. And with the pain, and especially the early pain, I originally compared it in the book to Prometheus, and David thought it was too literary. So he said, no, you have to cut that. But it felt like the story of Prometheus is he’s lashed to a rock, and every day eagles come in, eat his liver, and then. And then they come back the next day, and that’s what it felt like waking up every morning was Prometheus, your heart being ripped out of you physically.

And that was the pain that sends you to the floor. Like that’s.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And that’s what I found so helpful in your book, the pain. A lot of people think it’s just all mental or it’s all that. No, it’s. It’s not. It can collapse you as you write onto your bathroom floor. It can, you know. Broken heart syndrome.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

My mother in law suffered from it after my father in law died.

Danielle Crittenden

Did she?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it’s real.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, it is real.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It is very real.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And we moved her out here from Minnesota and she ended up living with us in the last years of her life. She died just last year at nearly 99. But that period right after my father in law died, we were incredibly worried because she had broken heart syndrome. And so, as I always do, I did a huge research project on it. And I’m like. Because my wife was like, this can’t kill you, can it? And I’m like, unfortunately it can.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And. And so that’s another thing I wanted to just hear directly from you. How do you. You do a great job putting it into words, but a love that is so strong that you would rather be dead than go through the grief and pain, real pain, not just mental, physical pain. I saw you on that floor and I’m just like, how do you get up?

Danielle Crittenden

Well, I think I do. I’m glad you brought this aspect up because so far, despite my advocating for motherhood, been quite bit of a downer on the cost or the potential cost of it. But I do include a conversation that I had with a friend of mine and he never had children, he’s gay. He got married when they finally could, and just children were never sort of in their cards. And anyway, he was sitting one night with me and I was describing this pain that I was having. And he knew me as this former. My nickname used to be the Minister of Fun. I was always the one planning stuff. And I stopped planning stuff. So he knows me as this former minister of fun and he’s looking at this absolutely shattered person.

And I said to him, I told him that I times felt I’d rather be dead. And he started, his eyes started to water and he said, I said, I have never experienced a love so intense that I would rather be dead than not have had it. And that is the core of it. Because in the end, when you. When I look back and a father, the same that’s not on the table father, who is a year ahead of us, as it were. He wrote me, and I included this note in the book. He wrote me that for the first time a few months ago, the first time he could walk and think of his daughter Leah, without also being consumed by sadness.

That, in fact, that sadness was turning into a type of gratitude that he had the fortune to know her, the 32 years that she had been in his life for 32 years. So if you were to ask me, no Miranda, but none of this pain, or Miranda and all of this pain, I would still choose Miranda and all of this pain.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes. And. And that is. That, to me, was one of the central messages of the book. That and especially your friend, who’d never had a child. I was not fully prepared for the birth of my first child. I was 24.

Danielle Crittenden

No one is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And. But the part I wasn’t prepared for was the just instant, unconditional love I had never felt. I had felt it from my mother.

Danielle Crittenden

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I felt what it felt like to receive it, but I’d never felt it for another creature. Right. I loved my wife, I loved my siblings. I loved my parents, all of that. But there is nothing like. At least I’ve never experienced anything like this love. And when I got. When I saw that in your book, I’m like, yeah. And we were chatting before we sat down, and you also have a new grandchild. Congratulations.

Danielle Crittenden

So that’s a gift of life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Danielle Crittenden

Joy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But it happens there, too.

Danielle Crittenden

Here we go. Getting attached again.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I wasn’t prepared for that.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Well, apparently grandparenthood, as I’m discovering, is like all of the love with none of the hassle.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s great.

Danielle Crittenden

Back to you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I highly recommend it.

Danielle Crittenden

Over to you, son.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Here you go.

Danielle Crittenden

Here you go. That was great. We had a great time. Yeah, no, I’m very excited about that. But that’s when I was talking about how they change you and the list of negatives that you can easily rack up when thinking about having a child. But I wrote that just as David and I had to teach Miranda how to be an adult, she taught us how to be parents. And when you have that first child and you people think your life shrinks, and early on, of course, you know, you’re much more constrained. And, yes, you know, you got to get them to sleep through the night and blah, blah, but they enlarge you. They bring out dimensions that you didn’t think you had, including that selflessness which a father has, too.

The sense of not just responsibility for another being, but just growing into a role. Like now you’re the father, you’re not the son anymore. That sounded more religious than I intended. It filled in the spirit. But no, you go from being the child to the parent at that moment. And then I spent a lot of the first year of Miranda’s life when my mom, who was so helpful and so great having her around, she said I just returned to her multiple times and go, mom, thanks. She’d say, what? What for? And I’d say, just thank you. Thank you. Now I know what you felt like, what you did, and I know what it feels like now. And it’s an extraordinary thing. And I think if you don’t have that opportunity, it’s hard to convey how, if you can do it, how amazing it is.

And for you, selfishly, there we could be a happiness guy, have a child and it’ll bring out the best in you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s good for you.

Danielle Crittenden

It’s good for you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But I also saw that in the book as the bridge. And by that I mean you’re very clear that you’re never going to be the minister of fun like you used to be. You might have a different version of it, but it’s never going to be like it was. But nothing is. But there is that when you get asked that question, no, Miranda, none of this pain, Miranda, all of this pain. I would make the same choice you made. That’s a no brainer to me. Right? And that is the part where you kind of realize, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And that was kind of a bright beacon for me, actually. In your book it’s like, yeah, most of the shit you read from the happiness purveyors and the TED talkers and that’s it’s bullshit.

But there is a way to survive this, right?

Danielle Crittenden

Well, and the child, even, you know, when we talk about difficulties, even the testing the child does of you makes you stronger. You know that’s why it was so strange for me to tumble back into a form of helplessness and not have the energy. I still don’t have the energy. I still don’t have the capacity. I’m like an older model of myself now. I’ve gone back. But the strength, the wisdom, what you learn about yourself and your capacities is something that being a parent, you can only learn through being a parent. And so, yeah, when you lose some of those skills, it’s very upsetting. But join the history of mankind, that has experienced this and worse. And as I said, you’re not unique. You’ve just join the whole world of people have experienced loss.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And then you also write about moving her because the cemetery that you chose in haste.

Danielle Crittenden

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Was really unruly.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. That was the one downside of this Jewish journey of death. It was rituals of mourning. It was. We chose a Jewish cemetery that we hadn’t realized was a little more Orthodox than we expected and certainly that Miranda would have not enjoyed. They were the Jerusalem side of the.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, that’s so funny. When I was reading it, that’s what I thought.

Danielle Crittenden

Like mom, this is not Tel Aviv.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

She got buried in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv.

Danielle Crittenden

What are you thinking? I heard her. I heard her. No, no. We had wanted to plant. So we, you know, again haste, it’s February and we had found this Jewish cemetery near. There were very few Jewish communities or let alone cemeteries in this area where we had spent their. All of their childhood summers. And so there was miraculously this small one. And I’d wanted to plant a wildflower garden for her and do a monument that was a little more her. Nothing garish, but like a very beautiful designed tranquil wildflower garden with little benches where you could sit stools. It was all very cool design. She would have approved of it and the committee would not allow it. It had to be a black stone in a row of flat lawn. And it was off this highway and it wasn’t near where our cottage is.

It wasn’t sort of in the area that would have been familiar to her as a child. And so I then found this beautiful non-denominational cemetery. I mean everybody is buried there. And. And it was historic cemetery in the town. I had never even seen it. It was just sort of tucked away. It’s like a nature park. And so we had to make this very difficult decision, which again is wrenching, not something you want to go through twice of moving her from that cemetery and reburying her in what turns out to. It’s like natural cathedral. It’s got trees and they let us do whatever we wanted with the garden. And it’s always got people going by. It’s used like a local park. People hike through it and dog walk through it. And that’s what I wanted for her.

And so we did go through the process of it’s all done. We were waiting on the side of the highway while they unearthed her. And we would not have wanted to be there, but we were not allowed to be there, thank God. And then they put her in another hearse, and we followed that hearse to the new place. And again, it was one of the things I was dreading horribly. But this time, seeing her, first of all, laughing at what she was saying, cursing us, is mom off a highway? Why these Orthodox people? What are you thinking?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You can’t do anything without me.

Danielle Crittenden

Mom. Mom. In fact, the first time I visited there in the summer before we moved her, I walked into this very sterile lawn place, and I couldn’t find her grave. And suddenly I found it. There was this unbelievable burst of what turned out to be wild mustard, but yellow, golden flowers, tall, six feet tall. And I was stunned. And they were nowhere else. They were in the neat rectangle of her plot.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s so cool.

Danielle Crittenden

And as I walked up, a little rabbit hopped out, and I just. It was like her protest, you know, this gushing thing of gold in this otherwise quite grim place. And I did start to laugh. And then. Okay, got the message. And so now she is in a very beautiful place where she. Where it’s sounds weird, a joy to visit her, but it feels correct. And it’s a place where you. Not you see yourself being there, too. And that’s weirdly comforting. It’s not something, again, anyone wants to think about. But once you kind of know where you’re gonna end up, there’s a lot of comfort in that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Danielle Crittenden

No hasty decisions. No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I found I’m not a religious person, but I’m not an atheist because I think that’s a religion all of, in of itself. Right, I know there is no…

Danielle Crittenden

… versus I love funerals where they tell you exactly where your loved one is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Danielle Crittenden

You know, and what they’re doing at that moment with Jesus, it’s great. I wish I had that certainty.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. I am comfortable with the uncertainty, though. Right.

Danielle Crittenden

Well Jews don’t have these strong visions.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so maybe I’m.

Danielle Crittenden

Maybe you’re Jewish.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Maybe I didn’t know that.

Danielle Crittenden

You’re Jewish adjacent.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Well, I had a good friend who. I have a lot of good friends who are Jewish. And one, we might have had a little too much to drink. And he said to me, you know, I never liked you goyim until I met the Irish. He goes, I think you might be one of our lost tribes.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Or as Fran Lebowitz said about Italians are Jews with architecture. Yeah. No, there are a lot of spiritual Jews. I’m a convert, and one of the reasons I converted and I was not under pressure to convert because David was Jewish was for that very uncertainty. Like everything about the religion matters. What you do in life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Totally.

Danielle Crittenden

You know, like fine for you to be a mass murderer and then accept Jesus on the deathbed.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, I always thought that was one of, I mean.

Danielle Crittenden

Get out of jail free card.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So I was brought up Roman Catholic and. But Roman Catholic light because my parents were not terribly religious either. But you know, the 60s and 70s and I was the wise ass with the priests and like, hey, Father, all, you know, Greek mythology makes much more sense to me than this.

Danielle Crittenden

I think you guys have stolen a bit of that too.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Of course they did. They stole it all these saints. But. But they’re from a marketing perspective.

Danielle Crittenden

Oh, so much better.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So brilliant.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So brilliant.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Not only when. And St. Paul, the original of the marketing geniuses. Right?

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

He would go in, he would commandeer the most populated synagogue, and his pitch was simplicity itself. Hey, all the special diet stuff. You don’t need to do that.

Danielle Crittenden

No, no.

How many commandments do you guys have? We just have 10. You just lost all your Roman Catholic views.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I know.

Danielle Crittenden

No, but. No, it’s okay. David and I, whenever. Literally whenever we’ve gone into one of those beautiful cathedrals and we just look at each other and you guys, Jews could never. We’re never going to win this one.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I tell you. It’s true. But the real secret that I actually admire about the religion I was raised in. What you mentioned, confession.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Wait a minute. Wait, let me get this straight.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, no, it’s way better. And actually the more evangelical you get, you can pray for stuff. Like, I once met someone who was praying for a sofa. Like the whole church was doing a prayer.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

A Mercedes Benz.

Danielle Crittenden

Apparently that can happen too. So we actually. Now you’re making me feel like the loser of all of this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, that’s Janis Joplin.

Danielle Crittenden

No, no, I mean that, that our religion is, you know, pretty grim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, yours is probably closer to the way things really are.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, I don’t know. I just. I’m in that sense, I don’t presume to know. But I also know that things have happened since she’s died.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s what I was getting at. The flowers and the bunny and the flower coming up in your own garden. I love that kind of stuff because who knows. Who knows how strange the universe that we live in actually is?

Danielle Crittenden

I don’t know that they’re not. Just like, we talk to each other online and you could be in Japan. Like, I don’t know that there’s not another dimension that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. And, you know, the light spectrum. I’ll believe it when I see it. And then, you know the big joke, laughing out loud, you know, here’s the part of the light spectrum the human eye can see. Here’s the light spectrum.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, yeah. No, no, I don’t question. And there have been things that haven’t. I haven’t gone looking for them, but I have a few of those odd things. And then I’ve very suddenly, at moments had her voice land in my head. And one time was that morning we woke up in the hotel to go to her hotel, sorry, her apartment. And I was just as, you know, dreading it. And just as I was waking up, I suddenly felt this strong wash of peace over my being. And I heard her voice say, you got this, Mom. And then I did, like, it just was like spiritual Valium or something. And then Bea and I, went there and we did it. And actually the other time it came into my head was I was thinking about this book. And it’s weird to promote such a book.

It’s weird to talk about this book in, you know, buy the book way. Like, I never wanted to write this book. As a writer. This was not my ambition, obviously, to write such a book. And I’ve been very sort of morally torn up about it. And I was lying just. I don’t know, a few weeks ago, I was thinking about this. I said, well, I was talking to her, as I sometimes do. I said, well, at least this keeps you alive in the world. Right. And again, I heard her voice very strongly say, and it’s not something I would have thought spontaneously, I heard her say, no, mom, you keep me alive in the world, and you only keep me alive if you live. And meaning not just live, but live.

If I’m just going to walk around as a sad sack, I am not keeping her alive. And I was very startled by that thought.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And you know what’s interesting about that is that’s ultimately what got my mom through too.

Danielle Crittenden

What hearing the voice was, well, that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Sounds really crazy, but yeah, not like that. But her saying, because again, as a young son, you’re very attuned to how your mom is doing.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. And I wouldn’t say that of most young sons, but in this case, maybe.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But under the circumstances, I was very attuned to both my parents. And there was a day, I don’t know, nine months, maybe a year after Lael, my sister died, where she just seemed different. And I went, you seem better, Mom. And she said something virtually the same as you just said. She was like, Lael would be so mad at me.

Danielle Crittenden

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

For moping around. Because Lael was this, like, your Miranda was this incredibly vivacious, fun, witty, you know, a liver of life.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And. And that was kind of the way my mom came back as well. It was like, you know what? I am doing a disservice to Lael. And I think that. But that requires time, right? Because it’s also.

Danielle Crittenden

You tell yourself this over and over, like. Yeah, well, Miranda would hate to think that she’d cause you to be this sad. Or as my son said very early on, nothing would be worse to Miranda’s memory than for this to shatter our family. Which is a line I keep a lot in my head. But there was something about the bolt of lightning of her voice saying that to me. And it’s not me. It didn’t feel like me telling myself,.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, no, I know. And that was very similar to what my mom transmitted to me after. And so again, I have no insight as to how strange the universe might be and what might or might not happen. But those types of things are really interesting to me because maybe it’s just us concluding that naturally after the grief. Right. I don’t know. But, hey, if you hear the child’s voice, listen is kind of the way I think about it. So how are you girded for, you’re going to be going on...

Danielle Crittenden

With your publishing company, Mr. O’Shaughnessy?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m sorry.

Danielle Crittenden

No, you guys have been. I just want your listeners or viewers to know that Infinite Books has been the most extraordinary publishing experience I’ve had. I’ve published four previous books, none on this topic. And just what you guys are doing, the modernization of publishing, but also the compassion and warmth everybody has and professionalism has been. I’ve just. It’s been amazing to me. And editor Jimmy Soni has. I mean, he’s like the old Max Perkins. If anybody. Who knows who that is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I know Max Perkins very well.

Danielle Crittenden

But also a friend. And he’s someone who Miranda helped research one of his books for, so he knew her. But he’s just been such a booster and such a support. And I can’t imagine going through this with any type of traditional publisher. I really can’t. So I’m grateful.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, thank you very much. We essentially, we decided Jimmy and I were comparing notes. And we just thought it was so funny that most of my books were written in the 90s. My last imprint was 2011. I’m writing a fictional book now, which is kind of fun. But mine were all nonfiction, and we were together, and Jimmy especially was just so struck that exactly the same things that had happened 20 years earlier to me were still happening.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. And still are. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And we just looked at each other, and I’m like, all right, Infinite Books it is then.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, yeah. No, it’s. I have friends publishing other books with other publishers, and I’ll just say something in passing, like, you know, they AB tested my cover, and they’re like, what? Wait, publishers do that?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, they don’t. We do. You know, the cover actually is really interesting because the AB test here, for anyone who’s watching, this is the cover that won. I think it’s a fabulous cover.

Danielle Crittenden

Well, it was one that took me by surprise. And thanks to AB testing, because the cover is showing a selfie I took of Miranda and me on a girls trip to Malibu. I think it was 2017. Yeah, 2018. And the. I had given that photo as one of several photos that you guys were looking at for author photos.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Danielle Crittenden

And I. We were trying very artsy, beautiful covers. And I really love the artsy, beautiful cover.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So did I.

Danielle Crittenden

And unbeknownst to me, your team mocked up and they went through about five or six covers, which also never happens, and they mocked up that one, and it won. Like, forget it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It won with a bullet.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Yeah, it was.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And Jean-Marc and I were like, this is interesting. Yeah, let’s retest it.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because we were like you. We won’t bore our audience, but there were a lot of really beautiful and very artistic covers.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

This just blew them out of the water.

Danielle Crittenden

I know I was startled.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so it’s just one of those things. If you can do that and you can get access to that, why aren’t you doing that?

Danielle Crittenden

It wasn’t. It wasn’t difficult. Like, you didn’t have to have whole teams of people do this. It was just do anything. You probably do it on AI now, you know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, actually, we do.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But we also do it with humans. Everything that we do, we run first through an in silico audience. And in silico, you can create characters, and I guess we could call them agents. Right. But you can create thousands of them.

Danielle Crittenden

Wow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And then give them the AB test. But we always make sure that we do it with humans as well, because you know, AIs know nothing of grief.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Well, also, they don’t. They’re not walking into bookstores or.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly, exactly. But what’s really interesting is Jean-Marc can attest to this. The AI picked this with a bullet, too.

Danielle Crittenden

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And he and I were just kind of like, okay, live by it. We gotta die by it.

Danielle Crittenden

Well, everybody, my mother, is overjoyed by the cover and, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Every person that I’ve shown this cover to has reacted so warmly to the cover. Yeah. Like, oh, that’s.

Danielle Crittenden

Well, because it’s such a miserable topic. And if you had this big, black, gloomy, you know, dispatches and font and, like, you’d kind of like, whoa, I’m not opening that. Like, it’s like a scary box.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. And it’s not.

Danielle Crittenden

You know, whereas this looks…

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I wanted to ask another question about the title. Right. Dispatches from Grief immediately, to me says, it’s like a war correspondent, Dispatches from the War Zone. Was that the reason for the title?

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, I never. It’s funny, it was always the title in my head after I started writing, because I was also writing it in a fairly. Not diary. It’s not a diary form, but an episodic form in that. So one section is just. It’s a dispatch about how modern social media is a source of terror, becomes a source of terror for you because, you know, you can put their old clothes in a drawer. But, you know, every time I’d pick up my phone, there’d be memories or, you know, my car would say, want to connect to Miranda’s iPhone? And every time that happened, I just burst into tears.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Sure.

Danielle Crittenden

And they’re like, no, curse you, Facebook memory. And so there’s a section on that. There’s a section on the griefsplainers and the. But structured in a, you know, along the journey in. What do you call it, in a natural way, but thematically as well. So in that sense, it had. And it wasn’t like me sitting down to write a book that said, this is grief. This is what it’s like, you know, it’s much more the old journalistic school.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Well, I think it was when I saw the title first. We usually test titles, too. We’re just like, nope, that nails it. And. But then I just started wondering on my way in today. I’m like. The image that I get is okay, you haven’t been here. I’m here.

Danielle Crittenden

It’s like my. My dad, right. That’s what we used to do. He would do that from Beirut.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, you know, exactly.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, this has been really. I gotta be honest, I was a little worried because the topic is tough and it doesn’t get any tougher. Right. But the last thing I want you to talk just briefly about is therapy that did in fact helped you. Because I’ve read a lot about it, but I want to hear about it in your words.

Danielle Crittenden

So therapy I eventually found, and keeping it brief, I did go try and get grief therapy. And I write about how incredibly difficult it is to get therapy quickly because everybody has a waiting list, doesn’t matter what your insurance is. And basically, unless you are willing to say you are suicidal and check into an emergency ward, it’s very hard to find help when you really need it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Parenthetically, the getting the answering machine when you called, I just, I got mad.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah. Oh, it was awful. And I’m calling up these places, the Grief Institute. You know, we help families. And I’d go, hello, I’m a mother, I’ve lost my child and I need help really badly. We will get back to you as soon as we can. Please understand, there is an 18 month waiting list for help. And you’re like, how is this going to. Crazy, just crazy. Eighteen months from now, I’m hoping not to need you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly.

Danielle Crittenden

Anyway, EMDR is therapy and it stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Which is a long way of saying that it originated by a psychotherapist. A woman in the late 80s was dealing with PTSD victims. And we think of a PTSD victim typically like a soldier who, you know, a car backfires and suddenly he’s back in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam and starts screaming. And so treating this level of trauma. She was the one who speculated that the brain doesn’t process traumatic memories the way it processes others. And she developed what began as. And this is the eye movement part, where you’d look at a dot, an electronic dot, and by watching it go back left and right, while you recalled the traumatic incident in detail. And that somehow had the effect of helping the brain process it. And until recently. And it worked.

It had a lot of effect, but they didn’t really know why. Today they use. I use hand buzzers connected to my computer, which buzz left and right, but you can still use a dot. But the reason they found out it worked is when they could now study brains, put them under MRIs. And people who have had trauma that they would watch, they would have people process first ordinary memories, the picnic, what I did yesterday. And then they would say, now the traumatic memory. And the person would start thinking of it, and they could see the brain put on the brakes. Parts of the brain started to light up that aren’t normally associated with memory. And essentially the memory became trapped. The brain couldn’t file it in its usual hippocampus correct drawer. And with the result, it stayed present. It stays present.

So when the car backfires, you are back being bombed. When the Facebook memory comes up, I am getting it flung in my face that my daughter is no longer here, and I am no longer communicating with her on social media, it seems, but with grief of this kind. It’s in everything. I couldn’t go to the supermarket without having a panic attack because I just start passing things that I used to buy for Miranda in advance of her visits and pass the energy drinks. And just the first time I went, I had to leave the store. I just left my cart, ran out of there. And so my therapy, which I still do two years later, and I’ve been doing it weekly, and eventually the goal is for you to get off it.

Like, it’s not like some Freudianism therapy where they want to keep you on the couch forever. It’s like CBT. It’s like these modern types of therapies that teach you how to manage whatever it is, like your addiction, your trauma. But because I think with a child, it’s so layered, and it keeps coming back at you. So many things in different ways that you go, I’ve been going through this and through this. When we talked about that early obsessions of obsessiveness, of what I could have done, we would talk through that, and I would talk all the way through and all the things I could have done and what didn’t happen and what.

And then by the end of the session, I came out, and my son, who was doing it as well, said, I don’t know what they did, but I feel better. And you come out. It’s like I compare it to a kind of like an exorcism that you come out and that thought suddenly doesn’t bother you anymore. I mean, you’re not happy about it, but it’s filed it. It’s somehow been able to file it. So to be able to even write about some of the things I write about, like going and seeing her dead body for the first time, going to her apartment, all of these things I’ve been able to write. And I guess writing them down is also a form of EMDR. My therapist said, think of if you ever get a song caught in your head, the way to get it out.

I didn’t know this, but apparently it’s true. You listen to it all the way through, and then it goes out of your head. And this is the premise of that therapy. And so when I asked my therapist early on, I said, what’s the goal here? I’m not going to stop grieving. I’m not going to stop missing Miranda. And she said, the goal is that one day you will manage your grief, and grief won’t manage you. You will manage your day, and grief won’t manage your day. And that, to me, said, okay, that’s a realistic goal. And if I can get there off the floor, walking, that’s what I need to do. And that has been to me.

So if anybody asks me or friends who are going through similar types of trauma, I always raise the EMDR, and unfailingly, a lot of them are already doing it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I think that obviously, we’re incredibly proud to be publishing your book. We think it’s very important. One of the things that, as we’ve already covered, that I love about it is its raw honesty. People don’t need people bullshitting them when they’re going through that kind of experience. And in a way, reading this, as opposed to happy, joy, joy, or, you know, you’re going to emerge in a better place. That just seems so false and so inauthentic to me. Whereas this is very authentic. And then it kind of allows the person to feel what they’re feeling. In other words. Right. It gives them, oh, so I’m not the crazy one here.

Danielle Crittenden

And it does. I refuse to call them gifts because they’re unreturnable, you know, but people say, well, you know, to be fair, in becoming the different person that you are. I think of these now, I call them to myself, Miranda’s gifts that if she had to leave me, she left me with these gifts. And it is. Are you more sensitive to other people’s pain? Yes. Are you more aware of other people’s pain? Yes. That makes you more patient. I never. Boy, I could have been a real Karen, you know, at one point, like, God, can you pack these groceries any slower? You know, it’s like, I have all the patience in the world, and I’m saying, how is your day going? You know, it sounds stupid to say it makes you appreciate life, but you have.

Because there’s a lot I don’t appreciate now, because I’m sad a lot of the time. But it does make you. It gives you a second sight. You have a second sight into how the people around you are and what they’re experiencing. And it makes you like she was having gone through her own traumas. Much more compassionate. Friend’s said she could look past your tattoos, you know, your angry T-shirt, and she could see. She could see you. And that’s, I think, the gift that she has given me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s a lovely gift for her to have given you. Realizing the fragility of your fellow humans puts you in a very different lens on humanity.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah, it does shift the. It does. It shifts the view.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Danielle, this has been fantastic. We do have a closing question here that we ask everyone.

Danielle Crittenden

Is this a surprise question? No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, no.

Danielle Crittenden

Is it a math. I can’t do math.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s not math. It is speculative, though, because for our purposes, we’re going to wave a wand and we are going to make you empress of the world. You can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a reeducation camp.

Danielle Crittenden

Jeez it’s no fun. What kind of wand is that?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We made it the unfun version. But what you can do is we’re going to hand you a magical microphone.

Danielle Crittenden

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you can say two things into it that will incept the entire population of the earth. Whenever their next morning is, they’re going to wake up and they’re going to say, you know, I just had two of the greatest ideas. And unlike all the other times, I’m actually going to work on doing these two things. What are you going to incept?

Danielle Crittenden

You mean I’m going to figure out what people’s goals should be when they wake up in the morning?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, it can be some of the answers that we’ve had are completely non-goal oriented. You just.

Danielle Crittenden

Ah man.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You get to be the magic genie in their ear.

Danielle Crittenden

Okay, so you’re telling them what to do when they get up or you’re suggesting you’re giving them a helpful suggestion that could be life changing? I would say. I mean, the obvious thing that is always said is, you know, embrace life. Nobody has a guarantee it could be over today. You know, live life as, is this your last day? Which one does after these things anyway. But I would say, so allowing for all of that, I would say be more patient with yourself and with others. I have to have two of these. Right. And appreciate those who you love and love you back. Just show appreciation. I think it’s important in any relationship. And I do this with David. I do this with my kids, especially now. Just thanking them for small gestures. Showing that kind of appreciation is good.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love both of those, and both are good advice. Danielle. Thank you so much.

Danielle Crittenden

You sure I can’t kill anyone? No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I’m sure. Sorry, that was. That’s kind of our number one question. Can you just make an exception this one time.

Danielle Crittenden

Just one person?

Danielle Crittenden

Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure and joy to be with you, so thank you.

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We explore why so much research still begins in animal models, how poor data distorts our understanding of disease, why clinical trials are one of the biggest bottlenecks in medicine, and how better systems could help promising treatments reach patients faster.

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

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Highlights

The Myth of “the Science is Settled”

Saloni Dattani: There’s this idea that often there’s a situation where people thought that the science was settled or we knew how things worked. And then someone comes around with a different theory that just puts it all together in a way that makes so much more sense […]

One is theory of continental drift. So until the 1920s or so, like, the idea was continents had always been separated. And there were so many mysteries around that people hadn’t really figured out. And, you know, why are these fossils seen in Australia and also India, and they look exactly the same, even though they’re so far apart? Or why do the, you know, the edges of the continents look so similar, but they’re so far. It’s hard to figure out exactly what was going on in the past and, like, put those lines of evidence together. And there was a scientist, Alfred Wegener, who put together […] this theory of continental drift and he put together some, like, five or six different lines of evidence that all of the continents were initially one and that they had drifted apart. And that explains the similarities between the fossils and the different places and the continental shapes. I think there were also some geological similarities that he had found and things like that.

But people initially dismissed him. So I think in the US there was this conference where they came together and they tried to form a consensus and they said, present all of these points of view. And ultimately they just rejected it. Meanwhile, and I think in Europe and other parts of the world, there were some sort of true believers of his hypothesis. And they continued doing research on it, and they found more and more evidence. But in the end, what convinced people was actually the US Navy doing research during, I think after World War II, maybe during the Cold War, where they were trying to find ways to develop ways for submarines or the Navy to escape being recognized by foreign ships. In order to do that, they had to find a way to navigate submarines without letting their location be known. And they developed the tools to do that. And in doing so, they discovered some patterns on the sea floor that didn’t really make sense. And eventually those patterns led people to rediscover this theory of plate tectonics, of continental drift. And it all sort of came together again after that. And then the consensus was formed that, you know, the continents had initially been one and they had drifted apart. And all of that happened within, like, a few years or maybe a decade.

And it was, it just seemed so crazy to me to learn about this idea that someone had proposed that idea decades ago, and then it was just rediscovered. And once you had the right pieces of evidence and once people had put it together once again, all of a sudden everyone believes it again. Like, and how quickly that consensus can change, that really surprised me.

The Clinical Trials Bottleneck

Saloni Dattani: And then in terms of drug development, I think there's another problem, which is that the bottleneck is often clinical trials and how to test drugs and understand whether they work, how effective they are, how safe they are and so on.

Currently, that process takes an average of about a decade. I find that incredibly depressing. There are medical breakthroughs in the pipeline right now that work that won't get to patients for another decade from now. And obviously being able to test whether they work is really important, otherwise we wouldn't know which drugs to prescribe. So that process really matters. But it could be done so much more efficiently than it is now.

And that's something I've been thinking about a lot and just how to improve different parts of that process. Because currently it seems like there isn't really a group focused on doing that across the board. There are people who are patient advocates for certain diseases. There are pharmaceutical companies who just want to increase their margins. There are biotech companies who want to make it easier to get into the field, but there are very few people who are interested in the whole pipeline. And how do we make it easier across the board for people to volunteer into clinical trials? Or how do we make it easier to design clinical trials so that they're, instead of testing one drug versus placebo, we can test five drugs in the same trial. That's very hard to find people to work on because it's something where you need to coordinate on a problem that's distributed between people

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Saloni, welcome.

Saloni Dattani

Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What is going on? Why is every innovation in healthcare exclusively for the mouse population?

Saloni Dattani

That’s a great question. It’s sort of strange to think about the fact that we do so much research in animals before we test things out in humans because there’s so many differences between us and mice and other animals. I think part of it is a bit of just path dependency. We started out by doing lots of research, not being very willing to subject other humans to experimental treatments and wanting some kind of barrier or test set to animal, for example, to test something out with. I think it does often help us to weed out potential medical breakthroughs or medicines that could have large side effects in humans and that we’re not ready to test in humans first. But at the same time, there are just so many differences between us. It’s like if you tried to test out chocolate in dogs, you would obviously get a very different result than you would if you tested it out on humans. And people don’t realize that these things might mean that we’re missing out on breakthroughs that work in us but don’t work in other animals.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I’ve watched you and listened to you and read a lot of your stuff and I know that you have an obsession with data and how data is conveyed. First off, in my opinion, and you can correct me because I’m the neophyte here, but in my opinion, my old world was revolving around financial data and I found out when I did a several year project that most of it was wrong and it was being sold to us at pretty high prices before we did the great data cleanse, as my team used to call it. Similar situation going on in science and medicine?

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, I mean, my focus is global health and in that we have a similar problem. It’s sort of different layers of problems. One is that a lot of data is just not actually collected at all. And what we have to do instead is extrapolate from what we have. So let’s say for data on diagnoses of mental health conditions or chronic pain or things like that, we usually only have data from a few rich countries sometimes. And if you want to try to estimate how many people in, let’s say India or Nigeria have these conditions, we don’t really have surveys or we don’t have the data that’s collected in those places. For many conditions like that, what happens instead is that you use the data that’s already collected in the rich countries, put it into a statistical model, use other information about demographics and how that differs between countries and then just try to extrapolate. Essentially, the less data you have, the harder it is to make those estimates. Also these relationships between some demographics and, like, maybe rich people are more likely to have these conditions in one country. That might not be the case somewhere else. And I think we’re sort of flying blind on that. The other problem is that even when we do have the data, it might just be a different type of data. We might have collected surveys in one place, but we have medical records in a different place, and these are completely different. Like, the types of people who might go to a hospital in India are not very representative of the whole population of India, for example. And so that really biases our understanding of a lot of diseases. But I totally agree that this is a problem across many fields, not just health.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And the thing that fascinates me, I’m thinking of the book The Weirdest People in the World. It goes across discipline. Right. Like most of the psychology testing we have, 85, I think, percent is done on Western people without any, 85% of the world is ignored. And I remember thinking when I was preparing to talk to you, like, in matters of health, it’s not funny. Right. Like, in certain areas, you can go, oh, ha.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But another thing that I’ve noticed is that a lot of the data that we do have that’s been collected on actual humans, not mice.

Saloni Dattani

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Is on men and not on women.

Saloni Dattani

Yep.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I always think of Semmelweis, the very famous example of making, forcing the men to wash their hands before attending a mother about to give birth. And how do you solve for all this?

Saloni Dattani

I mean, it’s difficult. The way that often researchers try to do this is they try to oversample certain populations. So let’s say with a general survey, you reach out to, let’s say, a thousand people. If they don’t pick up the phone, you’ll call them again. And what they do is for populations that typically don’t answer these surveys, they’ll do bigger sample sizes, they’ll try harder to contact them. And then you sort of put in more effort so that you collect the same amount of data that you want to have. But that’s quite hard. And it’s difficult to sometimes find the funding to do that or even know how to model these different populations, like how do we know which groups are being underrepresented in the data if they weren’t in the data to begin with.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right, exactly. And that also leads to a problem that we see in a variety of disciplines. The self-selected sample. Right. It’s like I go crazy when I see the, every millionaire does this, every successful entrepreneur. No, no, that’s entirely wrong because look at the sample. And is there a solution?

Saloni Dattani

I think that often the solution is to have either philanthropic or government run surveys where the goal is to create a dataset that can be used by a lot of people from different fields. And the goal is to create something that’s nationally representative. I think when it’s private interest, there’s often this, you’re only looking for a certain thing. You don’t have to fulfill every purpose with that data. Whereas when it’s being run by government, there might be 100,000 different uses for that data. And collecting that at a representative level is really important for that purpose.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And yet also the idea that you’ve got a variety of gatekeepers, and I know that’s a favorite topic of yours as well, and I want to spend some time on that. We might as well, right now, I wonder if the gatekeepers, the peer review, all of that isn’t actually disadvantaging people who might be doing what I call real science. And then there seems to be this pathway that is, let’s make it sound really cool so the media will pick it up so that it’ll get included in this congressional report. And when you keep digging down and down, you find that basically it helped mice.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, yeah. There’s also this idea in science called the Matthew effect, that people who succeed once, succeed again. And they’re sort of chosen to do follow up projects. And in a sense you can see why that would be appealing because the best predictor of what someone’s going to do might be what they’ve done so far. But it really disadvantages newcomers into a field or people with different perspectives. And I think that makes it quite hard to diversify the field to other types of research.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And is one of the answers that, like for example, we have a fellowship and grantee and we’re increasingly getting really fascinating, medical especially and it’s coming from groups who I don’t think would be able to get into a peer reviewed journal. And I’m to look at things and sure, maybe that type of thing because these are brilliant people who are coming up with novel non-consensus ways to look at things. And sure, maybe it’s a moonshot, but like penicillin. Oh, damn, I should have cleaned that up. Oh, wait. What?

Saloni Dattani

Yeah. Have you heard of this idea of science advances one funeral at a time?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes. Max Planck.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, it’s sort of similar to that idea. There’s this economist, Pierre Azoulay, who tried to study whether that aphorism was actually true. And he did find that publications and citations increased from a lab once the lead scientist had died. And it’s sort of a sad and depressing finding. But at the same time, I guess I can see how individual scientists who have a particular topic of interest might be so entrenched in that way of thinking or that type of approach that it takes them leaving the field for something new to happen. And that’s especially the case in academia where there’s this very narrowing funnel from doing your PhD to becoming a professor. A very small fraction of people make it to the end, and that affects the research agenda in a field.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I was always fascinated by examples where people that I really admired, primarily physicists, who, when you looked into it, like many of the episodes that happened with them were really like the movie Mean Girls. And I’m thinking specifically of Robert Oppenheimer when he was told that David Bohm, who was a brilliant physicist, was suspected of being a sympathizer for communists and was told by our government, suppress him. And so there’s written records of him saying to his colleagues, “If we cannot disprove David’s thesis of hidden variables, we must ignore it.” Does that go on a lot? Is that those kind of rivalries and crazy, really petty types of behavior?

Saloni Dattani

I mean, I would guess that happens in many fields, if not all of them, because humans. Yeah, unfortunately, academics are humans just like everyone else. And I think it’s often the way that you make change is change the incentive, sometimes change the structures. Occasionally I’ll see really talented researchers leaving the field because they find it really hard to deal with that kind of reward structure of publications beyond everything else. Yeah, there are so many ways that you could improve that, but it’s a difficult problem.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, now I’m going to put you on the spot.

Saloni Dattani

Sure.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let’s improve it. Tell me how we could change the incentives, how we could change the process so that we got much better outcomes from all of the money that we’re spending on the research and development of drugs and other therapies.

Saloni Dattani

That’s a very big question.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I know.

Saloni Dattani

I think I’ll probably start by talking about kind of the way that research is done in labs. So one of the reasons that I’m not a scientist anymore is because as a scientist, you’re kind of expected to do everything at once. You’re expected to write papers, figure out a research question, find the participants, find the animals, whatever to do the research on, sometimes write this programming code to do the analysis, present your findings, and then go through the whole conference and networking procedure. And all of that is just often one person or it’s expected of people to be these all-star scientists who can do everything. And I think it really slows people down because it’s hard to keep up with the advances in each part of these, each of these different skill sets. And it’s hard to do it all at once. If you’re a young scientist trying to learn how to code, that might take a few years to get good at. There’s a situation I often see where scientists are just learning the basics of how to code. They’ll make mistakes in really tedious parts of the process and not know, because they’re not computer scientists. Like they’re supposed to be thinking about the research and the question. And so I think spreading that out between people, having people do different tasks and work together on science as a team instead of individuals, I think that can make a big difference. It’s this idea of division of labor in science. If you can have one person who is the software engineer, one person who reads the literature, one person who writes and presents the findings, that kind of organizational structure could make things a lot faster. I used to work at an organization called Our World in Data, and our structure was very similar to that. So I did research and I did writing. But then I’d work with my colleagues who were pure data scientists. Their focus was trying to extract the data from these messy sites or PDFs or dashboards and get it into a usable state for me to use and for everyone to be able to see on the website. And that’s something that would take me years to figure out how to do. They would probably feel the same way about the writing and research process. But being able to work together on something like that means you can do multiple projects per year instead of just one big one that drags out. That’s the big one that I would see. And then in terms of drug development, I think there’s another problem, which is that the bottleneck is often clinical trials and how to test drugs and understand whether they work, how effective they are, how safe they are and so on. Currently, that process takes an average of about a decade. I find that incredibly depressing. There are medical breakthroughs in the pipeline right now that work that won’t get to patients for another decade from now. And obviously being able to test whether they work is really important, otherwise we wouldn’t know which drugs to prescribe. So that process really matters. But it could be done so much more efficiently than it is now. And that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot and just how to improve different parts of that process. Because currently it seems like there isn’t really a group focused on doing that across the board. There are people who are patient advocates for certain diseases. There are pharmaceutical companies who just want to increase their margins. There are biotech companies who want to make it easier to get into the field, but there are very few people who are interested in the whole pipeline. And how do we make it easier across the board for people to volunteer into clinical trials? Or how do we make it easier to design clinical trials so that they’re, instead of testing one drug versus placebo, we can test five drugs in the same trial. That’s very hard to find people to work on because it’s something where you need to coordinate on a problem that’s distributed between people, if that makes sense.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And it’s a logistical challenge.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Trying to get the various. But what do you think about things like innovation, like Claude code, that somebody joked that even an idiot like me could probably write code in Claude code? Do you think those kind of innovations will help?

Saloni Dattani

I think they will. I think they’ll definitely help in some areas. What’s hard, though, is that human biology is really complicated and we just don’t have the data that could be used to, like the things that Claude code is often good at is where we have a lot of data. We have, like, writing collected on this topic, or there’s a bunch of code available online. We just don’t have that for the human body. In the same way, the data is very fragmented between different hospitals, different diseases, the different types of measurement. They’re all in different places. There are very few places where you can get information across the body on how a drug might interact with some organ. Even the datasets that do exist are generally on healthy volunteers. So there’s a big dataset called UK Biobank, for example, and it tends to be highly educated, healthy people like we were talking about before. And you wouldn’t be able to see how a drug affects a particular system in their body. And we aren’t collecting that data in datasets like that. And even if we were, we actually don’t have the tools to collect them at the right level. So one thing that I learned recently that was incredibly fascinating was just how fast things happen in biological systems. So proteins, which are used across your body for all kinds of things, they’re made by turning a gene into RNA and then protein, and that sequence of protein folds into the right shape for it to do its functions. And the speed at which the folding happens is on the level of microseconds, on average. And that’s incredibly fast. And we don’t have any way to capture that. And that kind of speed is also how fast enzymatic reactions happen, how fast collisions or interactions happen in cells. We don’t have any way to capture things at that level, and we can only really approximate them. And so there’s so much knowledge that we actually don’t even have. We don’t know what is happening at that granular level to be able to predict what is going to happen in a system. And you can make some rough approximations, but that still means there’s a lot of uncertainty.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. When you mentioned the Matthew effect, I remember reading a scholar who made the reference to our immune systems as basically following the Matthew effect, and I found that really fascinating. I guess I could see that basically his point of view was that our cells all have the suicide switch which gets flipped if they’re not being useful. And that when you watch this way, for example, when we have a novel virus like the coronavirus, you see the immune, if you were going to animate it, you would see a couple of cells, like taking a punch and then they’re not working. But then when one got through all the way it moved was towards that, which suggests power laws to me. And it does seem like our bodies are complex adaptive systems and that we might be able to glean some useful information by looking at how complex adaptive systems function in general. But I’m fascinated by the bottleneck. How would you go about, given all the tools that we have, and I asked you to design a new system and said we’re going to underwrite it, we’re going to make it as ubiquitous as we can, what does that system look like?

Saloni Dattani

It’s sort of interesting because I’m often thinking about incremental changes that we can do within the system that we have. And sort of redesigning the whole thing is much harder because it depends a lot on what balance of risks and benefits people are willing to make. And different countries also do this differently, and it’s hard to think of how to do it from scratch. I think that the thing that I would keep in mind is it really does matter to know how effective drugs are. And if we want to do anything with them, we do have to have some way of testing that. And that can’t happen after the drug is already available, because it becomes really hard to test the difference between having it or not before it’s available, it’s easier to randomize it to certain people and not to others. And that allows you to tell a difference without, while excluding for other confounders. Right. So that somehow needs to be in the process, and probably in some way you need to have some scaling up, where you start out small with easy experiments that are cheap. I don’t think that doing them in animals is a great idea because they don’t necessarily translate very well to humans. But also the ethics of doing animal testing, I think, are bigger than people imagine. If there’s some way to do very small initial trials, just see what happens with patients who are more willing to or have severe conditions, they’re willing to try experimental drugs. If there’s a way to do that at a small scale, learn from what works, scale that up into larger trials, and run those trials much more efficiently. I think that’s the sort of process that I would like to see. And the one thing that I would mention is the way that we’re running clinical trials right now. It’s like everyone is just doing their own version of it. Like every pharmaceutical company who is running a trial is doing their own trial for one drug, comparing it to placebo. And there are people who have designed better ways of doing this. So, like I mentioned, instead of testing one drug at a time, you could do a larger trial where you’re testing five drugs versus placebo at the same time. Or let’s say it’s just a whole population and within a certain condition that you have, we have different drugs available. We don’t know which one works better. You just get randomized to the ones that you might be prescribed anyway. And that would help us understand which drugs work better than others if this was happening at a larger scale. So each individual company just gets to adapt a module of this trial instead of developing their own one each time. I think that would make the process a lot more efficient.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And what do you think about. I know that there are benefits and detriments to AI. My cousin is married to a guy who’s a medical doctor but also a PhD in computational science. Ended up working for McKinsey and working primarily for pharmaceutical companies. And what they would do is go into the drugs that didn’t work and use AI back when it was called machine learning. And what they discovered was really interesting. For example, he was telling me about one drug that showed no efficacy at all. It was for a particular condition. I don’t remember what it was, but overwhelmingly female. And after running it through all the machine learning and everything, he came back to the pharmaceutical company and said, actually this drug will be incredibly efficacious in postmenopausal women who are slightly overweight.

Saloni Dattani

Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And when he told me that, I’m like, are you sure? That seems like really cherry picked to me. And I worry about. And I never followed up with him to see whether they released it and tried it in trials. But what about the ability of using artificial intelligence intelligently?

Saloni Dattani

I mean, I think there’s a lot of. It is just like you said. I think there is some grain of truth in that. A lot of times when we don’t know how to treat a condition yet, the way that people go about it is trial and error. They just see what works. Just try a bunch of hundreds or maybe thousands of different compounds, see if they have any effects, sometimes in the lab, in cells or in small scale trials. I think that is a legitimate way to just spread your risks if you don’t know which hypothesis is correct. We’ve managed to find a lot of really important drugs through that process. AZT, the first HIV drug.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s right.

Saloni Dattani

Came from this trial and error process. It was originally meant to be a cancer drug, didn’t work as that, and then was discovered as being an important HIV drug. There are others where people thought that it might work for certain things and then it turned out to work for something else as well. So there’s this new schizophrenia drug that was approved last year, I think called KarXT. I think it has a different brand name, but that was initially tested for Alzheimer’s disease. And they found that it seemed to specifically reduce the hallucinations that some patients would have. It was forgotten for a while because it also had these nasty side effects of diarrhea and vomiting. Eventually scientists figured out a way to combine that pill with a different pill that prevented those two.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Ameliorate. Yeah.

Saloni Dattani

Now it’s a very important type of schizophrenia drug with a different mechanism than most of them do. And that’s something that wouldn’t have been found through this process of trial and error. And I can totally see how AI would be really helpful in using the whole, going across this whole library of drug compounds that we have and different diseases that we have and trying to find potential matches. There actually were a few Covid drugs as well that I think were found through this method of just, let’s just screen thousands of different drugs and see what works in the lab. And what’s difficult though is this cherry picking, as you mentioned. It’s hard when you run so many tests. Some of them are just going to work by chance in the lab and they won’t work in humans. And you still do need this process of let’s actually follow up, make sure that it’s not just a false positive, run a trial on humans to see if it actually works. And so I think that’s why, biology and clinical trials are still going to be the bottleneck. Even if we have AI to massively speed up like this pattern recognition of trying to find potential drugs, that last step of being able to predict will this actually work in humans is still really hard.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, and that seems to me to be the kind of ultimate bottleneck here. You mentioned that there are drugs right now that you’re pretty certain, you have a high degree of, you’ve established a high probability that they work and they’re not going to be around for like 10 years. Give me a couple of examples.

Saloni Dattani

So I don’t know specific ones. I just think probabilistically there are definitely ones in the pipeline right now. And the way that I would say that is because there are a lot of drugs that have only recently been approved that were in the pipeline for years or decades. And just knowing that process hasn’t changed very much, that’s still likely to be true. So, for example, the malaria vaccine approved three years ago, I think it was developed in the 90s.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Now, I did not know that.

Saloni Dattani

It really shocked me when I learned that, I mean, like half a million kids die from malaria every year.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m a big fan of Africa and.

Saloni Dattani

Right. It’s a huge problem. And yet the problem was funding and clinical trials. So the vaccine was developed in the 90s by, I think, researchers who were initially at the Walter Reed Army Medical Research Institute. And because it’s a disease that mostly affects the poor, there’s no commercial incentive to develop that vaccine, like, if a drug company produces it, they’re not going to earn a profit. It’s essentially an act of goodwill that they develop it at all. And so you needed philanthropic or government funding to test this drug at all and to scale it up. And that came in the early 2000s for initial field trials. They did those initial field trials, I think late 90s, early 2000s, but it was still like, it wasn’t an incredibly effective vaccine. It has an efficacy of about 40%. That’s how much it reduces malaria. Still pretty important for one of the biggest diseases worldwide.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Totally.

Saloni Dattani

But there was this question of, could we get something better? I don’t know. Is it worth taking this through larger trials? The researchers who worked on this malaria vaccine struggled at every step of the process to get faster funding to continue testing. That took another. I think it was only in 2015 that they finished doing tests for this vaccine. And part of that process even involved the researchers themselves trying to find funding to build clinics in Africa because there weren’t enough clinics to actually run the trials at all. If you have a drug or a vaccine for a disease that doesn’t affect us here, you have to be able to develop the tests or the hospital sometimes, or distribution. Yeah. Hire the nurses and the doctors who will run these trials on the ground. That process took such a long time. I found that incredibly depressing. But it’s also the sign that if we fix this, there are actually so many opportunities, so many medical innovations that we could find as long as we fix this pipeline. The bottleneck is not necessarily scientific difficulty. It’s not that things are impossible to develop. I think sometimes it’s economic incentives or it’s just the process of how we’re testing drugs that is stopping us from developing treatments and cures for some diseases.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And why do you think there seems to be this incredible reluctance to allow humans who have all of their faculties, they’re not like Alzheimer’s and they’re not mentally impaired in any way. Why are we not letting them put themselves in trials of their own free will?

Saloni Dattani

It’s both a question of the risk aversion. And I think for a company, you wouldn’t necessarily want things to go wrong and for that to become known. Right. And so you do want to have certain, you want to pass certain thresholds before you feel safe, like safe enough to test this in a human population. And so there’s, part of it is that reputational risk. I think the other part is just often the difficulty is not necessarily whether people want to participate, but that it’s just difficult for them to. Like, it’s difficult to find time to go into a clinic every two weeks for three hours or something. And that’s often why a lot of people who participate in research are university students or people who are unemployed or they have time. And it’s not just people with those conditions, but it’s people who also have the time and don’t have alternatives that I think we need to make it easier and more appealing to be part of these trials, like having health coverage or making it simpler, paying people to participate or making it part of the general process of getting treatment. If there are three different drugs that your doctor could prescribe and they don’t know which one and all of them seem roughly the same, that should just be a clinical trial instead. And if we randomize those drugs, then we’ll actually learn information that could help people in the future.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We got a proposal for our fellowship program from somebody who is trying to design a system where people can participate in clinical trials from their homes.

Saloni Dattani

Right. I’m a big fan of that idea.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

When I saw the, because we get thousands of applications and I saw that pull quote, and I’m like, why aren’t we doing that now? And is it a sense of the inherent nature of, a lot of things are life and death, and obviously reputational damage comes in all of those things, those negative things. But the precautionary principle taken to an extreme destroys, like, society, it destroys innovation. It destroys all of those things. And there’s gotta be a balance where you’re not being reckless and you’re not saying, well, we’ll just give it to everybody. We’ll put fluoride in the water and just see what happens.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Is part of that the coming back to the media, the focus of attention?

Saloni Dattani

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It seems to me that the media have the steering wheel, so to speak. And I don’t think I’m being too out of left field here. I don’t know that they’re steering all that well.

Saloni Dattani

Well, especially when it comes to science journalism…

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s just bad. And how do we make it better? There’s so many smart people.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Who can also write well and communicate well.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah. I mean, this is the reason that I started writing essentially.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I was going to say, other than you.

Saloni Dattani

It just seemed to me like there was this huge gap between what scientists knew or what we understand versus what people were aware of from reading the news, especially in science. This idea of all of these kind of clickbait headlines of this drug worked in mice or this drug worked in a rabbit and therefore cancer is cured. And it just leaves me really depressed because there are genuinely big breakthroughs happening that people haven’t heard about and it’s these other flashy headlines that they read instead. Or, you know, chocolate is going to give you cancer and the next day you read chocolate protects you from heart disease and you have no idea what to really think. I don’t know what the reason for it is. I think partly, I wonder if it’s an expertise thing that a lot of science journalists don’t have a background in science. They have a background in journalism and they don’t necessarily know how to read the literature. They don’t know how to evaluate what’s good and bad research. You could also blame at least part of it on the audience. Like people are clicking on the headlines that seem the flashiest. But I think it’s also this thing that a lot of media in science journalism doesn’t really treat the reader as an adult. It doesn’t, the way that I write, I sort of don’t expect people to have any background knowledge in biology or health, but I do expect them to be interested as long as I keep it at their level and bring them up to speed on this issue. I sort of have this view that anyone can love science as long as they understand it. And if I can bring you from the basics to something really in depth, then that’s my goal has been achieved. I just think that there are so many interesting things out there that people are just not aware of because they haven’t been explained it to in an easy, in an accessible way that is engaging and interesting. And that’s part of the reason that I started writing and started the magazine Works in Progress.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it seems to me that, I guess I used to have a friend who would say when people would ask him about business, everything is sales and marketing.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And in a way there is some truth to that in this field as well. Right. Like, I totally get if you are going to maximize, if you’re trying to maximize the objective function for clicks.

Saloni Dattani

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You’re going to be led to a particular type of story. And if you’re trying to maximize it for understanding you’re going to be led to a completely different type of story. I wonder, is there an example of something that is truly an incredibly innovative drug or process or procedure that history will look at and say that was like kind of like hand washing and antibiotics that’s happening right now, that nobody right now is just meh.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, there’s actually a lot there. There are a lot that are just on the cusp of either becoming available or some versions of them have become available. I’ll tell you about two. They’re both types of drugs that are not pills, but they last really long in the body. So one intramuscular shot or something like that lasts for months or maybe a year with a single drug that’s very potent, very effective, very safe. And that completely changes the way that people get treatment, get prescriptions. It makes it so much easier to take treatments for a chronic disease, for example. So one of them is sort of in the sphere of HIV drugs. So PrEP, which is the way that people prevent infections by taking oral pills every day, usually that is increasingly being replaced by a new type of treatment that is long acting antiviral. So it’s an injection into the stomach usually. I think that lasts about six months, protects people to nearly 100% efficacy. It’s more effective than the daily pills because people forget to take the daily pills. But also that particular drug just seems to be incredibly effective. And that has been a breakthrough on types like drug chemistry, like formulating drugs. The way that it works is that it forms a little depot in your stomach and then slowly diffuses out of that over a period of months. And even very tiny concentrations are enough to prevent the HIV virus from infecting your cells. And that is a huge revolution that I think people are sleeping on and aren’t really aware of. So it’s not even just that one drug. We’ve developed lots of different new versions of doing this for other conditions as well. So contraceptives, for example, are another example where it lasts very long. But we’ve now figured out ways to do this for multiple different drugs. You either have the drug in a little oil droplet or in some kind of sugar or something, and eventually over a long period of time, it dissolves into the body. There’s another type which is called siRNA, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. It’s like the cousin of mRNA. What that does is it’s a small molecule of RNA that can go into your cells and silence a particular gene from producing its protein. With Alzheimer’s disease, for example, one protein, ApoE4, seems to create a much higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. And there are liver conditions and there are things like high cholesterol, where often it’s just this one protein. It might not be that the whole disease is controlled by that one protein, but that one protein might be a key part of a pathway, like it might be the bottleneck in some way to that disease process. And if you’re able to silence or slow down the production of that protein, that could make a huge difference to the development of that disease. And so these new drugs, essentially they get into your cells, they find that specific gene and they silence it. And it’s like, shut up, you’re not going to produce this protein anymore. And the way that they’re formulated is that when they enter a cell, they get immediately trapped in a little bubble like thing and occasionally one of them seeps out, like one of them leaks out and it’s able to silence that gene. And because that happens so infrequently, the effect lasts a long time, like months, sometimes years. And scientists have developed a bunch of new drugs, mostly for liver conditions so far that use this method and they’re incredibly effective and incredibly long lasting. So there are new cholesterol drugs that reduce cholesterol levels by like 60, 70% with this one injection that lasts for 4, 5, 6 months.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And are those commercially available today?

Saloni Dattani

There’s, I think there are two that are available already. There are a lot more that are in the pipeline that will be in the next few years.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I was reading about one that just specifically limits Lp(a) and it has a huge, I mean it’s like 90 plus percent reduction in Lp(a).

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, exactly. So that’s another one that’s still in the pipeline right now. I’m guessing it will be approved this year or next, but yeah, reduces lipoprotein(a) by 95% or more, which is really extraordinary. Right. In that case, that specific type of LDL cholesterol is almost entirely determined by that one gene. If you can silence that one gene, you can make a huge impact on the development of that type of cholesterol.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I’m very excited about all of this stuff because like the original statins I had high cholesterol and way back when I said, no, I’m going to do this slow release niacin and oat bran muffins and got it way down. But back then statins had pretty bad side effects. And how much of that hangover do people have. Right. Like hearing this and reading that thing that I read about that I’m like, I can’t believe that we’ve made this much progress. How much of the old problems. Let’s just stay on statins for a minute. Original statins. Not the greatest thing in the world, what we have today. Like, put it in the water.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah. I think it’s often this earlier drugs, often, especially when they’re taken orally, they tend to have digestive side effects like nausea and vomiting, diarrhea. What’s different about these drugs is that they’re injected into the muscle or just underneath the skin, and that means they don’t have those digestive side effects. You still do have to be careful that they don’t also have other effects that you don’t know about. So that gene that is harmful for one disease might be beneficial for some other part of your body. And trying to specifically target the treatment to only reach your liver, for example. That’s been the difficulty that scientists are having right now in developing new drugs for other conditions. But it’s sort of crazy to think you could find a gene that’s responsible for a disease and eventually we’ll be able to target these incredibly precisely and have such large effects.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I kind of think that 100 years hence, we might be looked at like we look at, like, the barbers who bled people. Am I overly optimistic about what we might be able to achieve in the next longer period of time? Like 100 years?

Saloni Dattani

I think scientifically, I often think about that because I write and read a lot about the history of science and medicine, and it’s shocking to me just how much people didn’t have 50 years ago, 100 years ago.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It is wild.

Saloni Dattani

It’s wild to think, people didn’t even know what the structure of DNA was until the 1950s. They had no antibiotics until the 1920s. They didn’t have statins until the 1980s. Like, the one that really blows my mind is CPR was invented in 1960.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. It was, like, in the 60s. Right.

Saloni Dattani

And it’s just crazy to think what was happening before that. Like, people might have some idea of, I don’t know, change the person’s position if they had a heart attack, but generally they wouldn’t have any idea what to do. That, to me, is. And that’s not even a medical. That’s not a drug. It’s like a procedure. And that’s true for so many other things that we really underrate, how little we understood in the past. And that doesn’t mean that people were stupid, they were trying really hard, but it was hard to figure out these things on the frontier without the tools sometimes or to make progress. It took just so long. I think that’s why I’m sort of optimistic in the sense that I think we’re going to make a lot of progress on diseases that people currently think are untreatable. But the difficulty is often still going to be the financing or like, how do we get this to people who need it and how do we get it through clinical trials? How do we make it commercially viable for companies to develop this drug with these long duration drugs? That I think is still an open question because they change the whole price, drug pricing insurance thing massively. If you have one drug that you only need to take once, it lasts for a year or two years, the pricing of that is going to be very different from a pill. It’s like much higher upfront costs. Should you do a subscription model or should you do something else? And I think we haven’t really worked that out at all. And this isn’t also like vaccines because not everyone needs to take these drugs. It’s not something that the government can just pay for everyone or subsidize for. So I think that kind of question is going to be the bottleneck.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And the cynic in me says that if they could find the right pricing mechanism, man, there might be all of a sudden. Yep, all you have to do is get the shot once, get it every year, you’re good to go. That’ll be $10,000.

Saloni Dattani

I mean there’s also, there are these new gene editing technologies, for example, that essentially cure like sickle cell disease or blindness or deafness that are caused by individual genes. But their pricing is just enormous. Like some of them are like $3 million for a one-off treatment. And while you might be able to okay that if you spread out the pills over a whole lifetime, maybe it would cost that much or you spread out the dialysis or something. But how is someone going to afford all of that to be paid at once at the start, like when they’re young, it’s just a hard thing to solve, I think. And it’s that pricing that people need to work out.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it also is part of the third rail. Right, because if you really wanted to get the drugs into the system, you would accept that only rich folk were going to be able to use them and experiment on them. But I think that the whole class of orphan drugs that have no market. Right. Well, they have a market for the people who have that particular disease. And it is interesting to me because that’s my history is in asset management. And it’s a market failure. And there’s just no other way to look at it. It is a market failure where you have something that will cure a not insignificant group of people and you don’t put it on the market because that group of people can’t pay for it.

Saloni Dattani

Right. I have a few ideas of how this might be solved. And it’s still very difficult, but there are certain ways that we’ve tried already. With the orphan drugs, for example, there’s this idea of doing a priority voucher. Essentially a drug company that develops a drug for a neglected disease or a rare disease will get a voucher. That voucher allows them to, for any other drug that they have, they can move that to the front of the queue on being reviewed by the FDA, for example. Well, that’s smart. And so it becomes a huge commercial incentive to develop this drug and then use the voucher to speed up the process for another much more commercially viable drug. And that helps to develop those drugs in the first place. I think what’s hard about it though is that it’s really zero sum. You’re really just shifting around the prioritization within this queue that already exists. So that’s quite hard. And it also means that once you’ve developed the drug, you might not have any incentive to actually manufacture it afterwards. So there’s another idea called an advanced market commitment. And what happens there is instead of, well, instead of funding the development of the drug or individual drugs or paying at the end, what you do is you have, let’s say governments or philanthropies agree to pool some amount of money. And they say if you develop a drug that meets these criteria, then we will pay you out of this fund and we’ll pay you based on the volume that you manufacture and that actually gets to people. And what that means is firstly, you’re not betting on what will succeed. You don’t know which drugs will make it to the end. And you’re letting the drug developers take their own risks on that side, but you’re signaling that if you produce this, there will be a market for it and we will pay you this amount. And often that is enough to get drugs to the finish line, because companies know that, oh, there is actually this reward at the end that if we produce this, it’s not going to go away. They’ve made a commitment. And secondly, it means that you’re incentivizing not just drugs to reach that threshold, but drugs that patients actually want, because the only way that they get paid out of it is based on how many doses are actually administered to people. So this type of approach has been used for some vaccines, like the pneumococcal vaccine for a type of pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia. And rich countries had already, like, there were already vaccines for the strains that affected rich countries, but Africa has other strains of this bacteria, and there weren’t any pneumococcal vaccines that targeted those strains in the 2000 and tens, I think seven countries and the Gates Foundation came together and they put together this pool of funding and this advanced market commitment. And they said, if any pharmaceutical company that can develop a vaccine that meets these standards of effectiveness and safety, if you develop that, we will pay you this amount per dose that is administered to kids. And so that was effectively a subsidy for creating this vaccine. It was sort of a signal if you develop this, there will be a market for you and we’ll pay you to scale it up. And what that meant was that millions of kids got these vaccines that wouldn’t have been developed otherwise and also that were scaled up much faster than other vaccines have been because the average vaccine that is used in Africa or South Asia, there’s really very little incentive to manufacture that at scale. And the prices that governments are paying are usually at this, like, not for profit level. Right. Companies are not expected to get a profit. They don’t have any incentive if you don’t give it to them. And I think it’s important to make that, to sort of fill that gap with how do we make this actually profitable, how do we make it worth it for companies to develop this and in a way that actually reaches people that, like, last barrier of making innovations that people can actually use, I think is underrated.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I would think that in countries like America, you could also add to that mix tax incentives that would be favorable for the company to pursue an orphan drug or one with a limited market that accountants could find all sorts of ways to abuse.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the other problem is that a lot of these diseases, they have, let’s say, something that affects one in a million people or one in 100,000 or 5 million, and that’s each of these diseases has such a small market for it, and it’s hard to find researchers who are invested in developing a drug for that particular disease. But collectively, there are so many diseases like this, it’s, I think it’s estimated like 5 to 7% of the population has a rare disease. That’s a lot of people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s huge.

Saloni Dattani

And if there’s some way to make some kind of mechanism that would work for a lot of those diseases at once, that might help solve the problem. Like, let’s say some company developed a gene editing platform or this siRNA concept, and they have to develop the overall system or the mechanism for the drug, but then they can swap out the specifics of which gene it targets or which organ it targets. And if they can do that based on the specific rare disease that someone has, that would be much more viable, I think. And trying to find ways to approve drugs that do approve platforms or mechanisms that do that, I think is the way to unlock treatments for rare diseases.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And delivery systems, as you mentioned earlier, are also incredibly important. But it seems to me that those types of things which are outside of the drug, but the drug needs them to work. Right. I think that there’s got to be some way that type of process could also be made to be more pursuable.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, yeah. That reminds me of. I don’t know if you know, but there’s been, like, an enormous amount of progress in treating childhood leukemia for a similar reason. So before the 1970s, the survival rate for someone with childhood leukemia was about like 15% or so would survive more than five years. Now that figure is around 80 to 90%. And that is a huge change in the last 50 years. And the reason is not. I mean, some of the reason is new medical innovation, but a lot more of it is about the actual treatment regimen, like how that works, so which order to prescribe the drugs and what doses to give. And what was really hard about that as well, in the same way, was that individual patients with childhood leukemia are fairly rare, and it’s hard to run trials for them. Like one particular hospital might not see enough patients to run a trial. And it’s very hard to find all the right participants to run a trial at all across the country. What researchers did, and I think this was led by doctors and researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital. What they did was they created this clinical trial network across the US and later Canada and Europe, where they tried to find patients with leukemia, children essentially across the country and enroll them into the same trials. And that meant that instead of seeing like one or two patients with this, you would have hundreds of patients with these conditions that can be participants in this trial for otherwise very fatal disease. And just testing out which regimens are going to work better for which patients is like being able to decide that these are patients who have a high risk of relapse or who have a high risk of side effects from that drug. And tailoring the treatment based on that would have been incredibly hard without doing a much larger trial across different sites. And from what I understand, that has been the big driver in like improving these survival rates. And it’s just developing these treatment regimens based on much larger studies. And I think it’s incredible.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And again, in my adjacent quantitative work in finance, why is it so difficult to get people to understand the difference between a large sample and a small sample?

Saloni Dattani

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because it baffles me, honestly.

Saloni Dattani

It’s so important. You can’t tell the difference between noise and what is really an effect without a large enough sample. That might also depend on how effective the drugs are. Something that is extremely effective, you can tell the difference between two small groups. But something that is only moderately effective, you need a much larger group. Or if it’s a rare condition or something that only happens rarely, you will need a large sample size to be able to see the difference between these two groups. And the fact that we’re doing all of these different trials fragmentedly, it means that all of that becomes a lot harder.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So if I hate czars, but I’m going to make you one anyway, but only for a day, what are the three probably highest leverage things that we could do? And let’s make them incremental. They don’t require a huge investment or a switching up of the infrastructure. But what are three high leverage things that we could do fairly easily that would improve outcomes at least noticeably?

Saloni Dattani

I’ve thought of one. Hopefully I’ll think of the other two while I’m describing the first one. The first, I think is make it really easy for people to participate in clinical trials. And the way to do that, I think could be just people who are patients seeing doctors for any condition. If there’s a way for them to just show their interest in being contacted by a clinical trial researcher later on, maybe that’s just a checklist in their usual form or something like that. And if that could be done across the country so clinical trial researchers can easily follow up and they can see in some sort of secure, private way, here are some patients that have these diseases that are the ones that we’re investigating, and these ones are interested in participating in clinical trials. If even just something simple like that would make it so much easier for researchers to just find participants for their trials. Because I think that there’s actually so much interest, and it’s just hard to match patients to trial researchers. They don’t know where they’re happening. It’s currently very hard to do that. Another one that I would suggest is either federally funded or just some sort of coalition of people doing, developing different drugs, run clinical trials together. And that doesn’t have to happen in the same way for each of the, like, you don’t have to start testing each of the drugs at the same time. You can actually do this sort of relatively flexibly. But just deciding one protocol and saying, regardless of which drug reaches this threshold, we will test them all in the same way. We’re going to look at the same outcomes, maybe whether they have a progression in their tumor or something like that. And we’re just going to run them all in the same trial, start the trial in the same way, recruit from the same hospitals, but instead of just doing this for one drug, we do this for five or seven or something like that. This has been done in the past, but it’s just been hard to set the stage for it, hard to coordinate it. During the pandemic, there was this big trial which did this called the Recovery trial, where they tested, I think, more than a dozen drugs in the same trial in two years. And that made it. That meant that you could see the effects of, you don’t know which ones are going to succeed at the outset, but while you’re running this trial, you can compare the different drugs against each other, and you can compare them to just one control group. You don’t have to recruit five different control groups just to test five different drugs. And it just makes the whole process a lot more efficient and simple. So that’s a second one that I would suggest. What’s the third one? A third one maybe a little bit harder, but we already do have the data to do it is actually having a platform that people deposit data into once they’ve run their trial and that other researchers can then reuse.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think that’s, I think that we’re not doing that just blows my mind.

Saloni Dattani

We are doing that in small fields and we’re not doing that across the board. And it’s very hard to access that data right now. But currently, if you wanted to try to understand, has this been done before, what were the results in a different trial, or you want to see across multiple, like 10 or 15 trials, what were the characteristics of those trials that made them more efficient or meant that recruitment process was faster? We don’t have a way to do that right now. And just having some kind of environment, it has to be sort of secure and private so you’re not able to see the patient’s individual data. But if there’s some way to have a platform where other researchers can just learn from trials that have already been done, that would save them a lot of time.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think all of those are really good actionable ideas. The third one, though, it just blows my mind that we are not doing that. Like we have an AI division at O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and one of the things that we first thought that we would do when we’re at scale would be, would it be cool to have AI just generate null hypotheses? Because no one likes to learn via negativa. No one wants to write a research grant saying, I suspect that I’m going to reach a null set here and prove that this doesn’t work. And yet there is so much information that you can glean via negativa. And so our idea was we’re just going to have the AI just generate hypotheses after hypotheses, send them to a central database that everyone can access and.

Saloni Dattani

Like, duh, yeah, that’s very cool. It’s wild to me as well. These negative results are actually extremely helpful in helping you one, reprioritize, do things that don’t redundantly run the same types of trials that other people have been running and failing at. But also they will often help you understand what exactly is going wrong. If five trials succeed and one fails, it’s helpful to know why that failed. And if we don’t publish those negative results or we don’t have a way to reanalyze them, that becomes much harder. A lot of the, I feel like a lot of advances in the history of science have been people trying and failing dozens or hundreds of times. And those failures are really important. And knowing this didn’t work in rabbits, but it worked in dogs. Why is that? And just following up on those successes and failures. This is another problem that I think that academia has, which is that there is this bias towards positive findings. And that means that people can’t learn from what didn’t work and they can’t understand why those things didn’t work, and they can’t reprioritize their research in the same way as they would if that information was available.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And you know, in quantitative research, a lot of stuff doesn’t work. And so. But we kept a research graveyard because we learned a tremendous amount from what didn’t work. And it seems to me that is applicable across discipline and our reluctance to learn that way. I guess it’s just part of human OS.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, everyone wants the positive result. You know, they, I’m the one who came up with this breakthrough. But the only way, in my opinion, that you get there in a variety of fields is you make a lot of mistakes. And the mistakes is where the learning is. And it just baffles me why we are so opposed to that particular type of thing.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, I mean, I’ve often also seen and heard this from scientists where, if their hypotheses failed, they sort of see it as like a personal failure. Oh, I didn’t figure out what it was going to turn out to be. And, you know, it’s very strange, and it’s sort of sad in a way. And I think that it’s not necessarily their fault. It’s this system where we reward things that succeed and don’t reward things that fail for actually telling us something about what doesn’t work. If there’s a way to give scientists credit based on just the methods that they’re using and not the results that they’re getting and have some way to easily store these null or failed results, I think people really undervalue that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it seems to me to be like one of the easiest arbitrages available to really increase not only our knowledge, but our processes and our tests and everything that we do. Right. And so I just find it kind of inconceivable that we haven’t done that yet.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, I mean, it’s also, this is coming back to the problem with journalism. I mean, I can totally understand from like, an editor’s perspective, you don’t want to publish stuff that says, and guess what? This drug didn’t work either. And like, I totally understand that, but there has to be some place to put those results.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Saloni Dattani

That people can learn from, because.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But, yeah, of course, you’re right about that. You know, the cat sat on a mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is a story. So we’re drawn to stories, we’re drawn to conflict, but it just seems so overwhelmingly valuable and that we’re not doing it. And then ultimately, the story you pitch the editor is, hey, it was only because we learned how we failed here, here, and here that we got here. Then you got a story.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so it seems a little bit a failure of imagination on the people doing the research.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Now, of course, as you mentioned earlier, you can’t be all things, but that’s why I very much like your idea. I’m a huge believer in cognitive diversity, because there’s no way to get a guy to come up with a list of things that would never occur to him. Right. You’re going to fail. But putting together very different skill sets, different ways of approaching a problem, of thinking about that problem, I think that could be incredibly useful and beneficial. So I love the idea of the team approach, but it also seems to me that does the entire scientific process, because the other thing that journalists do that just drive me crazy. And I understand that it’s driven by people with a particular point of view that they’re trying to advance, but anytime I hear somebody say the science is settled, it drives me absolutely insane.

Saloni Dattani

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It is. That is the exact opposite of the scientific method.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s never settled. And like Feynman, the physicist is like, no matter how beautiful your theory is, if the tests say it’s wrong. And so. But the true scientific method is like, to me, if you were going to try to find a music match for it would be punk rock would be like, no, I’m not going to take your word for it. We’re going to test, and we’re going to test and find out what transpires.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But that seems like, again, the media, in my opinion, is mostly responsible for scientism, not the scientific method, but science trademark.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah. I mean, I guess I sort of see, it makes me think of two things. One is sometimes it takes a really long time to reach those consensuses at all. And the idea that it’s just all fixed after that is still not true. Being able to find those exceptions or something doesn’t work in this particular area. And not treating that as a false positive or something, but actually trying to follow up on that can actually help you understand things at a different level of the phenomenon. And then there’s this idea that often there’s a situation where people thought that the science was settled or we knew how things worked. And then someone comes around with a different theory that just puts it all together in a way that makes so much more sense. There are two things that I’m thinking about. One is theory of continental drift. So until the 1920s or so, like, the idea was continents had always been separated. Right. And there were so many mysteries around that people hadn’t really figured out. And, you know, why are these fossils seen in Australia and also India, and they look exactly the same, even though they’re so far apart? Or why do the, you know, the edges of the continents look so similar, but they’re so far. It’s hard to figure out exactly what was going on in the past and, like, put those lines of evidence together. And there was a scientist, Alfred Wegener, who put together.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’ve heard of him.

Saloni Dattani

Yeah, yeah. This theory of continental drift and he put together some, like, five or six different lines of evidence that all of the continents were initially one and that they had drifted apart. And that explains the similarities between the fossils and the different places and the continental shapes. I think there were also some geological similarities that he had found and things like that, but people initially dismissed him. So I think in the US there was this conference where they came together and they tried to form a consensus and they said, present all of these points of view. And ultimately they just rejected it. Meanwhile, and I think in Europe and other parts of the world, there were some sort of true believers of his hypothesis. And they continued doing research on it, and they found more and more evidence. But in the end, what convinced people was actually the US Navy doing research during, I think after World War II, maybe during the Cold War, where they were trying to find ways to develop ways for submarines or the Navy to escape being recognized by foreign ships. In order to do that, they had to find a way to navigate submarines without letting their location be known. And they developed the tools to do that. And in doing so, they discovered some patterns on the sea floor that didn’t really make sense. And eventually those patterns led people to rediscover this theory of plate tectonics, of continental drift. And it all sort of came together again after that. And then the consensus was formed that, you know, the continents had initially been one and they had drifted apart. And all of that happened within, like, a few years or maybe a decade. And it was, it just seemed so crazy to me to learn about this idea that someone had proposed that idea decades ago, and then it was just rediscovered. And once you had the right pieces of evidence and once people had put it together once again, all of a sudden everyone believes it again. Like, and how quickly that consensus can change, that really surprised me. The other one that I was thinking about was in immunology. So until the mid 20th century, people really didn’t know how vaccines worked. They were making effective vaccines. They didn’t really know why they worked. I think in the 19th century, there was this idea that something causes or a vaccine basically depletes your body of the specific nutrients that a disease needs to thrive. And so if you develop a vaccine of, like, similar in some way to the actual microbe, it’s going to deplete your body, and then the real microbe won’t be able to thrive on it and multiply. And it was really only in the 1950s and 60s that people figured out what was the process for immune cells to multiply into the billions and recognize certain pathogens and then multiply. As you said before, where it’s this power law, as long as one or two of them recognize that they can multiply and create this memory that lasts a long time. In the 1940s and 50s, people had developed a new theory of how all of this worked called clonal selection theory, that if you had one matching, you had an immune cell with a matching antibody to antigen from the pathogen, that immune cell would be stimulated in some way, it would multiply, and then you would have the memory for this in the future. In 1960, after that theory was developed, there were immunologists who essentially said, the field of immunology is basically solved. We have figured out all that there is to know, and all that’s remaining is just a few little details to be worked out. What’s amazing to me about that is this happened just a few years before people figured out that there were different types of immune cells. They’re B cells and T cells, and they do totally different things. And all of the sort of higher level of this understanding that we have now has actually changed our ability to make new vaccines and drugs and things like that substantially. And yet back then, people thought it was all worked out. And even though they had a theory that did explain the evidence, they just hadn’t figured out the level that would help us make new breakthroughs.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And unfortunately, that is seen across discipline as well, where people have the idea and everyone dismisses them and says, that is the way it works. And then a couple hundred years later, again, back to Semmelweis. Right. With hand washing. And that was because of a social convention was seen as unmanly for men to wash their hands. I mean, how crazy is that?

Saloni Dattani

That is crazy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, this has been absolutely delightful. Where can people find your work who are listening or watching us now?

Saloni Dattani

I think a few places. One is Works in Progress magazine, where I’m an editor. We publish ideas that are new and underrated to improve the world. And that is a print magazine, and it’s also a website. I also write a Substack newsletter called Scientific Discovery where I write about breakthroughs and just how sometimes how little we understand, sometimes how much we understand and what the remaining problems are. And then I also run a podcast on medical innovation called Hard Drugs. Hopefully a very memorable name. And we talk about breakthroughs in biology and medicine and unsolved diseases and how we can make more progress on them.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I can personally attest that is a very interesting podcast. I watched and listened to several earlier today, and I was actually like, wow, this is really cool.

Saloni Dattani

Oh, I’m glad you enjoyed them.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

All right, our final question here at Infinite Loops is a little unusual. We’re going to make you emperor of the world. You can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a reeducation camp, and your tenure lasts only for the time it takes you to give us two things that you’re going to speak into a magical microphone and you’re going to incept the entire population of Earth with the two things that you say. By that, I mean, whatever their morning is, they’re going to wake up and they’re going to say, you know, I’ve just had two incredible thoughts, and unlike all of the other times, I’m actually going to act on both of these thoughts right today and hopefully forever. Okay, what two things are you incepting in the world’s population?

Saloni Dattani

This is a lot of pressure. What do people usually answer to this question? I’m very curious.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Not telling.

Saloni Dattani

All right. Well, I do think one of them is consider completely changing your career into biology or medicine. I think there are just so many unsolved diseases, and we have had a huge amount of breakthroughs in the technologies and the instruments that we can use to develop new treatments. But you actually need the people to run these trials and do these tests and do the research on these rare diseases or common diseases that we haven’t thought about in a different way. I would say it’s just a very exciting time for biology. There’s the breakthroughs in genome sequencing and AI and protein design and siRNA drugs and all of these different tools that make it possible to do research like never before. That’s one. What’s the other one? Well, I guess the other one is since last year, I’ve been pledging to donate 10% of my income to effective charities. And I think it’s something that more people should consider. I actually find it really rewarding. I’ve sort of wanted to donate to things and just not really put aside time to think about where exactly that should go. And I think there are often just really effective ways that you can improve the lives of people in extreme poverty or people with untreatable diseases by donating some of your income to effective charities that work on those things, or scientists or privately owned initiatives, things like that. But just having that sense of deciding what is important to you and what is effective and setting aside some of your income to that, it’s something that people should consider. I don’t think everyone should do it, but the reason that I decided to do it was after I heard about some of my friends doing it and I just thought that sounds like a great idea. One of them actually asked me, why don’t you do it as well? And I really struggled to think of an answer. So maybe that will resonate with other people too.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think that both of those are great. And especially the setting aside 10%, if you put some of your own skin in the game, it makes it more interesting, but it also makes the world a better place. And we could certainly use for the world to be a little bit better.

Saloni Dattani

Right. There are so many of these market failures where sometimes you just need people working on the problem and they hadn’t thought about it and they don’t have the resources and those aren’t going to, they aren’t going to be solved on their own.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I agree. Thank you so much for coming on.

Saloni Dattani

Thank you. This was really fun.

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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

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Highlights

Concentrated Harm Vs Diffuse Benefits

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The houses that we have are very costly right now. What’s the solution? Why can’t we come up with one?

Brian Potter: Yeah, a lot of this comes down to sort of ideas of concentrated harms and diffuse benefits. So a city overall or a state overall will benefit from population growth or a bigger, stronger economy, more division of labor. It’s nicer to live in a bigger city. But if you’re building a big apartment building next to a housing development or whatever, the people, even though that big new apartment building might have a small impact on the overall rents in the city and overall contribute to making the city slightly more affordable. The cost of that thing, the disruption and the increased traffic are all going to be concentrated right next to that one spot. So the people there are going to rationally oppose it because they’re getting, you’re talking a small diffuse benefit over the entire city versus the concentrated harm that one group of people really does not like. So they rationally oppose it. The benefits are diffuse enough that it’s hard to marshal a lot of support in favor of it. And so you have this sort of fundamental asymmetry.

Hamilton vs Jefferson

Brian Potter: One is this very good book by a guy, Marc Dunkelman, called Why Nothing Works. I’m not sure if you read it, but it’s a lot about Robert Moses and the aftermath of him and sort of the reaction to the book and how he suddenly started to be perceived so negatively. And Dunkelman kind of sees this huge transition in US politics overall where there’s these two competing tendencies. One is this sort of what he calls the Hamiltonian tendency, after Alexander Hamilton, to sort of have a robust, muscular government that is capable of doing a lot of things successfully. And then there’s also this sort of Jeffersonian impulse that’s fundamentally suspicious of government power and wants to check it and restrict it and constrain it and prevent it from inflicting harm intentionally or accidentally on US citizens. It views the government as basically a big danger to its citizenry.

And over the course of history, the relative strengths of these tendencies have sort of waxed and waned. And from maybe the 50s through the early 70s, it’s really a sort of Hamiltonian that was sort of in ascendancy. And you wanted to have these government agencies that could successfully deliver a lot of things. The US just won World War II off the back of government intervention. And people saw, “Oh, the government can come along and successfully do all these big major things.”

But then starting in around the late 1960s, early 1970s, that sort of gave way and people started becoming much more suspicious of and much more worried about the government’s power and authority and started to put in all these restrictions and laws and rules in place that basically made it much harder for the government to sort of do anything at all. And this comes from a huge number of ways and forms. So a lot of the environmental rules that sort of started popping up in the late 60s and early 70s, National Environmental Policy Act and Clean Air Act and all these things, which are good rules in many ways, at least in the way that they were originally envisioned. But they also serve to really restrict, especially things like the National Environmental Policy Act, what the government is able to do. They give citizens a lot of ability to intrude and – not intrude, but halt government efforts through things like litigation and stuff like that. And so he sort of sees this as we’re sort of on the end of several decades of this Jeffersonian impulse reigning supreme. And so it’s left us in this world where it’s very hard for government agencies to actually accomplish anything because we’ve bound their hands in so many different ways based on just sort of these suspicions and reluctance to let the government have the authority.

The Changing Politics of California

Brian Potter: So in the 1960s, I’ve written this essay about growth in California and how for a long time California was a very fast-growing state. And up through the 50s, California took pride in being a fast-growing state. They were, for a long time they had this big sign that was on one of their bridges, I think maybe the Bay Bridge in the Bay Area, but I don’t remember. But anyway, it had the population of California next to the population of New York. And it was tracking when California would surpass New York as being the most populous state. So for a long time, California was like, “Oh, we’re a big growing state and that’s good basically for our society. Growth means more people, more jobs, greater division of labor. We’re getting wealthier. That’s what we want.”

But then at some level, eventually that kind of tipped and the consequences, there had been enough growth that people were wealthy and successful enough that they started to be very unhappy by the consequences of all this growth. So as this growth was taking place, you had all this environmental ruination and just huge swaths of forest being cut down and water being polluted and all this stuff that people were like, “Oh, what hath we wrought? All these sort of, we’re rushing, go, go, go. And we’ve made ourselves rich and successful, but now we’re sort of ruining the environment that drew us here in the first place.” And so in the 60s you see this very wide scale, very grassroots switch to being opposed to growth. And jurisdictions started electing political leaders that would enact anti-growth policies and all these things. And sort of California still grew after that point, but its growth was much more checked and it became much more fraught after that.

And I sort of, people, when there’s a rising tide that’s lifting all boats, people are very happy to sort of be a part of that. But eventually, if they start seeing the consequences of that or get to a point like, “Oh, I’m, this is starting to sort of affect me or the place I live in negative ways,” they’re going to start eventually turning against that. I’m thinking of China, which I’m not an expert on China, but I understand a lot of what the Communist Party derives its legitimacy from is that they’ve been able to successfully deliver really robust economic growth. And these people remember what it’s like to be wretchedly poor and they’re very happy to be in a society that’s growing much richer and more successful. And we have all these things that we didn’t have before and we’re a much more powerful country than it used to be. And so they really rely on being able to sort of continuously deliver these improvements. And they think that if those sort of growth maybe runs out, maybe things are going to start to, the people are going to start to sort of reconsider what they think is important.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So Brian, the book The Origins of Efficiency, did you write that before or after your experience at Katerra?

Brian Potter

That was after. That was several years after.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I know that, but to me this was all new to me. I haven’t really thought in terms of the practicalities of trying to make actual construction more efficient. The experience at Katerra, I know I followed it somewhat when things were happening, but talk to me about what happened. You were there and I know you wrote a long piece on it, which I read, but I’d rather have you explain the whole concept to our listeners and viewers.

Brian Potter

So Katerra, for those who don’t know, is this really well-funded construction startup that formed in the 2010s. I joined there in 2018 and their goal, or what their goal had evolved into by the time I was there, was to revolutionize essentially the construction industry by way of prefabricated factory-built methods. Which is an idea that is perennially popular. Every 10 to 20 years someone comes along and says, “Oh, I have a brilliant idea. I will revolutionize the industry with these factory-built methods that nobody has ever thought of before.” And then they inevitably just don’t work out the way that they imagine that it will. And so I joined them in 2018 after I had spent 10 years of my career in the construction industry. I had thought the industry was incredibly backward, incredibly inefficient. And I had thought that these Katerra guys were basically on the right track to try and fix it. And so I joined them, building and managing a team of structural engineers while I was there. And for a while it was very exciting. We were growing super fast and hiring all these people and the company was getting bigger and signing all these deals. And then it just sort of started to kind of go sideways. The costs kept ending up coming back super high. We were trying to dial in our manufacturing processes and there were all these difficulties in the factories and stuff. It just kept being too expensive. You had to design and redesign and redesign these products that we were offering over and over again. And they just kind of weren’t coming together the way that we hoped. And Covid hit and sort of threw a wrench into everything and there started being a series of layoffs. They started before Covid but Covid certainly didn’t help. Many rounds of layoffs winnowed the group down. My entire team was laid off and they were just trying to sort of pivot into some sort of model that would work. And they sort of struggled and staggered along for a few years. I eventually left after about two and a half years there and went to another engineering job. And sometime after, they eventually sort of gave up the ghost and declared bankruptcy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It seems like there were multiple causes, right, for the failure. Because when I was reviewing it and reading your “Another Day in Katerra Dies,” I instantly thought of Sears Roebuck and the success that they had kind of mid-century. 1908 through the beginning of the 20th century through 1940, they sold, I think, close to 100,000 mail order houses that became quite popular. And some of them are actually considered really beautiful houses today. So I thought maybe that’s where they got the idea. But no, I’m wrong about that.

Brian Potter

No. So that’s sort of, there’s a whole history of prefabricated construction that has been tried and sometimes done successfully, but attempted multiple times and in multiple ways in many different periods and places. So the Sears mail order home was one subset of that. There was actually a whole constellation of these mail order home builders. It was actually based on this idea of people would sell what were called knockdown boats, which is basically they would assemble a boat out of wood and then just disassemble it into the pieces and mail you the pieces and you could assemble it and stitch it together yourself. And basically somebody said, “Hey, I should do the same idea, but with houses.” And they would send you essentially all the parts to a house and you would have to sort of stitch it together yourself. And they were in that business from the early 20th century up through the 1930s. And then I think they ended up going out of business essentially because they ended up losing huge amounts of money on the mortgages. And I think they ended up losing so much that it erased the entire history of profits from the business. But there’s lots of different, people have tried the prefabrication thing over and over again. It really became popular in the US after Ford had such major success with mass production and dropping the cost of the Model T by such huge amounts. And they had large continuous process factories before that. But with Ford and mass production, this was the first time that you had this really complex good being produced in large quantities in these sort of continuous methods. And that had really dropped the price of it. And so people said, “Hey, these methods have made this complex big thing, a car, way cheaper. We should be able to apply the same ideas to complex big houses, which are essentially just stitching parts together in the same way that a car gets stitched together. The same idea should work.” So it’s in the 1930s where you really see this idea of prefabrication as a way to reduce cost start to take off. And so it starts to get more popular in the 30s. People try it again in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, and it just keeps reiterating the same basic thesis where it’s like, “If I move my process into the factory, it will become much more efficient and I’ll be able to lower my costs and prices dramatically.” And Katerra was just the latest of a long history of the same basic thesis.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And as I was reflecting on that, I thought that there was kind of a parallel. The external event that wiped out Sears was, as you said, the mortgages. And the mortgages didn’t get paid because, oh, Great Depression. And with Katerra, I know that we’re going to talk about other factors for why they went down, but the pandemic hit and that couldn’t have been friendly to the project at hand, right?

Brian Potter

Yeah. That certainly hurt things and disrupted things. And I’ve heard folks there who claim that if the pandemic didn’t hit, they would have been able to muddle through and maybe not have the transformation effect on the industry that they had hoped but would have been able to emerge as a successful business. It may even be true, but I don’t know for sure.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What are the lessons that are applicable beyond engineering and beyond construction? Is it just when you get $2 billion in funding and you spend like a drunken sailor, that leads to really bad things? That’s a pretty obvious one that I’ve seen in a lot of startups. WeWork being a classic example. Or are there, in reading your stuff, I think you have very good reasons from the engineering point of view why this didn’t work. But you’re the expert.

Brian Potter

Yeah. I mean, a big one is just that in startups you’re always trying to hit what’s called product market fit, right, where you have basically created some sort of product, some sort of good or service that people are clamoring to buy. And you don’t want to, it’s very risky to scale up your operations before you’ve hit that because you don’t really know what it is you’re supposed to be building. And if you build this big organization that’s devoted to producing X and it turns out we need to produce Y, it’s very expensive to sort of make that change. It’s especially expensive if you’re building physical things in the physical world, building $100 million factories that you then decide, “Oh, we actually don’t need this. Oh well, shoot, I spent all this money on this factory.” That happened at Katerra very early on. They were very big into this material called cross-laminated timber, CLT, which is like these big heavy timber panels, sort of like a super plywood basically. So instead of plywood being three-quarters of an inch thick, these would be 9 inches thick or something like that, used for the structural floors and walls of a building. They bet very heavily on this. They had built what I think was the largest CLT plant in the world. But by the time the CLT plant came online, they realized, “Hey, this product’s very expensive. It’s very hard to sort of achieve the goals that we want using this thing.” And almost as soon as they got it online, they were sort of trying to get rid of it, as I understand it, because it no longer fit with what they were trying to do. And there were just tons of examples of this. They had brought all these trades in-house and then they sort of later thought, “Well, maybe we should be outsourcing more of this work,” trying all these different products. But they were constantly trying to find traction and find their footing, which is very expensive to do when you have a 10,000-person company and you have hundreds of millions of dollars in capital equipment that maybe now you’re not sure you actually need to use. So they never really truly found product market fit in the sense of, “Here’s the thing that we’re selling and this is what people want to buy, and we’re going to scale up our operations to produce this or deliver this service.” They were constantly trying to sort of figure out what that needed to be.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And another thing that I thought about was maybe there was also a failure of investor-company fit. And by that I mean were the people running the company getting a ton of pressure from Silicon Valley, the hyper-growth strategy that might work with digits, but doesn’t work so well with atoms?

Brian Potter

Possibly. They got a lot of their money from SoftBank, which is famously for, “I just want you to grow as big and crazy as possible” and writing just truly outrageously enormous checks. I certainly wasn’t privy to those conversations, so I don’t really know, but it certainly fits the pattern.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So did you as an employee feel from the management and from your boss or whatever, was that a constant pressure? “We got to go faster, we got to build bigger”? Or were you relatively immune from that kind of pressure?

Brian Potter

The pressure early on was just for growth at all costs, basically, scaling up our operations in anticipation of growth. So I was trying to hire as many, find as many good engineers and good CAD operators and stuff as we could and setting up the department in preparation for handling the huge influx of work, setting up standards and getting our software in place and all sorts of stuff like that. And it never really quite all materialized. We were doing it in anticipation of this huge work. And the volumes of work were just never really that high. And people were like, “Are we ever going to really actually build any buildings?” And we did. It wasn’t like we were doing nothing. We were certainly putting lots of buildings up, but it was never the huge amount that we had been prepping for. And then there was sort of a, as the company grew, figuring out exactly what the role of our department was in it, which kind of changed over time as they started tweaking how they foresaw the business model evolving.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, the other thing that I’m taking away by going through all your stuff is obviously we have some obstacles to the idea of American abundance, for example, particularly in this industry. And is it bad policy, fragmented institutions? Can we lay it all at the feet of Robert Moses, who famously was profiled as the villain in The Power Broker? I actually read a lot about that. I’ve read the book. I read it a long time ago, but I actually read a lot about it in anticipation of talking to you. And I’d kind of forgotten that he, and the reaction to him, more specifically, the reaction to the book about him, The Power Broker, how he ruined New York, caused a lot of the NIMBY attitudes and the procedures and everything else. But was that there before? Has this always been a problem in terms of building in America?

Brian Potter

Yeah, it’s interesting. So there’s two things, I guess, that have shaped my view on this. One is this very good book by a guy, Marc Dunkelman, called Why Nothing Works. I’m not sure if you read it, but it’s a lot about Robert Moses and the aftermath of him and sort of the reaction to the book and how he suddenly started to be perceived so negatively. And Dunkelman kind of sees this huge transition in US politics overall where there’s these two competing tendencies. One is this sort of what he calls the Hamiltonian tendency, after Alexander Hamilton, to sort of have a robust, muscular government that is capable of doing a lot of things successfully. And then there’s also this sort of Jeffersonian impulse that’s fundamentally suspicious of government power and wants to check it and restrict it and constrain it and prevent it from inflicting harm intentionally or accidentally on US citizens. It views the government as basically a big danger to its citizenry. And over the course of history, the relative strengths of these tendencies have sort of waxed and waned. And from maybe the 50s through the early 70s, it’s really a sort of Hamiltonian that was sort of in ascendancy. And you wanted to have these government agencies that could successfully deliver a lot of things. The US just won World War II off the back of government intervention. And people saw, “Oh, the government can come along and successfully do all these big major things.” But then starting in around the late 1960s, early 1970s, that sort of gave way and people started becoming much more suspicious of and much more worried about the government’s power and authority and started to put in all these restrictions and laws and rules in place that basically made it much harder for the government to sort of do anything at all. And this comes from a huge number of ways and forms. So a lot of the environmental rules that sort of started popping up in the late 60s and early 70s, National Environmental Policy Act and Clean Air Act and all these things, which are good rules in many ways, at least in the way that they were originally envisioned. But they also serve to really restrict, especially things like the National Environmental Policy Act, what the government is able to do. They give citizens a lot of ability to intrude and – not intrude, but halt government efforts through things like litigation and stuff like that. And so he sort of sees this as we’re sort of on the end of several decades of this Jeffersonian impulse reigning supreme. And so it’s left us in this world where it’s very hard for government agencies to actually accomplish anything because we’ve bound their hands in so many different ways based on just sort of these suspicions and reluctance to let the government have the authority.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I had a guest on who wrote a book contrasting and comparing America and China and his thesis was America is now a lawyerly society, whereas China is an engineering society. And then obviously the conversation took the normal course that you would expect. Very similar to the Hamiltonian-Jeffersonian divide. If America was suddenly faced with a World War II type mobilization for housing or for energy, for whatever reason, could we do it? Do we have the capabilities? What capabilities would we discover, in your opinion, that we still have? And what capabilities do we think we have that are mostly a myth from your point of view?

Brian Potter

Yeah, it’s a good question. I have, I guess, a sort of constellation of thoughts on this. One is that, to go back to Covid, in the very early stages of Covid people thought that we would see that sort of emergency mobilization type of marshaling our resources to respond to Covid or something like that. People thought, “Oh, we’re suddenly going to sort of get our manufacturing in gear to manufacture PPE and stuff like that, or really sort of rise to sort of meet this challenge of this virus.” And in some ways we did. Operation Warp Speed was able to produce vaccines extremely quickly and start manufacturing them quite quickly, far faster than anybody thought was possible. But in many ways we didn’t. We never really, “Oh, we’re going to bring, we’re going to scale up our manufacturing operations and start producing all this PPE stuff that is in really short supply.” We never, there was never a huge upswell of American mask manufacturing or anything like that. And for a lot of Covid stuff, even though there’s this big emergency, it didn’t really inspire this sort of transformation in capabilities. We really just kind of muddled through in a lot of ways. We didn’t end up with a CDC that was massively competent at dealing with this pandemic. If anything, the pandemic showed how rotted our institutions were and how incapable we were of fixing it. So that’s one perspective, that we can’t, we’ve really atrophied our ability to sort of respond to these major threats or changes in the world. But then I also look at the sort of AI buildout where we’re in the middle of one of the great infrastructure construction efforts in history. Basically just the amount of capital that’s being deployed to just build all these data centers and install all these chips and get all these capabilities online is really truly astounding. You can see these graphs going around. It’s comparable to any major US project basically, Manhattan Project or Apollo or something like that in terms of the money and the resources that are being deployed and the physical infrastructure that is being built. Only a few things, stuff like the railroads are really exceeding it. So it also shows that in the right circumstances we can still deploy infrastructure and resources to build capabilities really astoundingly quickly if there’s motivation to and if stuff is not blocking the way. One big part of it is just, I think for that buildout, for a long time, a very long time, local jurisdictions really liked having data centers around because they paid a lot in property taxes, but they didn’t demand all that much in the way of new government services because it’s basically just a big building with computers in it. It wasn’t dramatically raising the population. And so it didn’t change how many schools we need to provide, how much traffic is on the roads, fire services, police services and stuff like that. It didn’t really stress all that stuff very much. So you just had this big business coming and paying you a big check for property taxes and not really demanding very much of you. That’s really starting to change partly because the new data centers are so big that they are placing stress on the infrastructure, power and water and all this stuff that has become popular to talk about, but also just because the construction is so vast. And also I think the AI capabilities are so, they’re making so many people nervous that people are really starting to oppose data centers in a way that they haven’t before. And so the sort of local restrictions on building these things, even in places that used to be really popular, like Virginia, it’s just becoming stronger and stronger. And so, yeah, the AI sort of shows, “Oh, we still have these capabilities when they are not restricted and when the incentive is correct.” But also shows how quickly the forces that can shut these things down can move.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I’ve done kind of a deep dive on the history of innovation and what I found was really interesting. It happens all the time, literally the most obvious is the Luddites during the weaving explosion of innovation. But it goes on and on. And I think a lot of it has to do with just kind of a basic fear of the new and good storytelling. I mean, back to The Power Broker, he wrote a good book and he crafted a villain and people responded to that particular villain. And there’s a villain being crafted right now about AI and you get people emotionally reacting to it. But on the subject of AI, do you think that with the AI we have right now available to us, what benefits do you think it can bring to your field?

Brian Potter

What do you mean by my field?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, engineering, building, the whole real world, construction, etc.

Brian Potter

Yeah. So I guess there’s a few things. I mean, one is, at a high level you can, AI is just a new tool for automation. We’ve been automating work for centuries. AI is going to sort of make dramatically new types of automation possible, but it’s still going to be the sort of automation that we’ve seen before. It’s tasks that used to have to be done manually you can now do automatically by some machine, sort of reduce the labor burden. It used to take 60, 70, 80% of people working to work in agriculture to produce enough food just to feed society. We’ve sort of, thanks to automation and other technological improvements, that’s dropped to 1 to 2% or something like that. So it frees people up to do sort of new other things or maybe have to do less, lead more fulfilling lives or have to do less back-breaking unpleasant labor or whatever. And yeah, so a big part of it is just going to be tasks that used to have to be done manually are going to be sort of automated. So a lot of design and engineering tasks, I foresee getting sort of automated away. People find new, perhaps find new higher leverage tasks that they can do now that these other specific things can now be done by machine. In terms of the physical side, people are trying to use basically AI technology to sort of drive robots around. There’s all this investment going into humanoid robots, which are, a lot of these things, or not necessarily humanoids, other companies are working on, but the same basic idea of using these sort of big, huge neural networks essentially to drive these sort of robot arms or humanoid robots or whatever. The progress is not, we’re not at the same level of just the chatbot AI models or whatever where it’s increasingly capable of doing any information processing task. These things are not as good at driving a robot around yet as they are answering a question about the history of nuclear power or how a government agency works or where you should shop to find a good pair of shoes, any sort of information processing task where these things are already extremely capable. Those capabilities aren’t nearly the same place as they are in robots, but they’re getting better and there’s lots of investment and lots of enthusiasm. And many people think that it’s going to be on a similar sort of evolution where eventually these things are going to be able to move around quite capably in the real world and be capable of automating a lot of physical actions and operations. The same way that we’re, with current AI models, we can now see the possibility of automating a huge swath of intellectual work, if not all intellectual work.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And do you think that AI will have the ability to assist the human designers to, for example, could you think, working with an AI, do you think that they could solve that pre-manufactured problem that Sears ran into, you guys ran into? Or no, maybe?

Brian Potter

I don’t think the problem with these prefabrication efforts was around insufficiently clever design of the building basically. I think it has to do more about, I’ve written quite a bit about this, but it has more to dowith the fundamental constraints of how you put a building up, difficulties achieving economies of scale and kind of, you have different jurisdictions with sort of different requirements, the sort of fundamental nature of building a, putting a building on site which has to meet your site requirements, all these sorts of things like that. It has very little to do with just not being smart enough to design a pre job created building properly or something like that. So I don’t think it’ll have effect on that side of it. I do think that if you could automate a big fraction of construction work, you would be able to sort of drive down the cost of building a building just by using these automated labor, robots or whatever instead of sort of manual workers. And finally sort of address this construction productivity problem that we’ve had for decades, which is just construction productivity, labor productivity never really seems to improve. If you have sufficiently good AI, sufficiently good robot control, you can finally address that problem.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And another question I had for you when I was reading your stuff was is it simply a matter of the new rules and regulations, etc.? I mean, I think of how fast we built the Empire State Building. I think about how fast we built monumental projects in the past. Is it just regulatory environment, social environment that we can’t build them like that anymore?

Brian Potter

I mean, we can still build stuff fast if we choose to. A lot of these data centers are going up quite fast. You can build certain things, power plants, certain industrial facilities, they can go up quite quickly. So we can build quickly if we need to. Or again in certain cases where we haven’t made it outrageously difficult. Regulation is certainly a big part of it. I kind of view it as you have these steadily encroaching regulations, steadily more difficult bureaucracy that needs to be navigated. The rise of this Jeffersonian impulse that makes it just harder to do anything that has to sort of go through a government process. But it’s, a big part of it is just on sort of the technical side, just the fundamental nature of buildings and it’s just difficult to improve for kind of various reasons or has historically been anyway.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And what efficiency that you know of, which I might call a forbidden efficiency in the field, one that would actually work, but that would instantly trigger cultural or political rejection?

Brian Potter

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know of any sort of instant things like that. I would say the big theme of my work generally, especially around construction stuff, is that there are not super easy solutions and that any sort of thing, “Oh, if only we could just do this,” you can find examples of someone trying that and it not working. Or, “Oh, here, you can try this and it’s not going to do what you intended to do because of these various complicating factors.” Or you may think the binding constraint is this. But in cases where this constraint has been relaxed, “Oh, it turns out you still don’t get the improvements that you hope to see.” So I, fundamentally, a lot of my work is, I would say, pushing back on that idea and just, a lot of these difficulties are due to sort of the inherent nature of the process and not due to sort of one difficult roadblock that we’ve erected that if we just change this one thing, all of a sudden our problems would be fixed. Most of our problems are not like that, I don’t think.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So what innovations and/or procedures have you seen over the last, let’s call it 10 or 15 years that either surprised you because they worked or surprised you because they didn’t work?

Brian Potter

In construction or more generally?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let’s go generally, but then also touch on construction.

Brian Potter

Sure. I am quite surprised at how quickly we’ve managed to sort of scale up this, the buildout of these computing power and data centers generally. I thought, basically our sort of NIMBY sensibilities were so strong that any major infrastructure project was going to be just inevitably strangled by these sort of things that just made it hard to build anything really large in really large volumes to deploy very quickly. And we built things quicker than I have anticipated. And now we’re starting to see sort of backlash to that, so maybe that will slow down. But up until now I’ve been impressed about how quickly stuff has come online. In terms of stuff that I was surprised that doesn’t work, my whole history researching construction, I’ve over and over again run into an idea of something that’s like, “Oh, surely if they did this it would definitely work.” And then learning of some case where it didn’t work. One example is that we’ve talked a little bit about prefabrication and, “If only you could get prefabrication done at scale or something like that, then you would be able to sort of achieve these cost savings that people are constantly hoping that prefabrication will do. If only it were able to be used really widely.” But then I learned about countries that have basically deployed prefabricated home building really widely and they still don’t see cost savings the way that you would sort of hope or expect them to. So Sweden is the typical example here where they built some huge fraction of their single-family homes and apartment buildings are built using factory-built building construction basically, something like 80, 90% of single-family homes and 40% of apartment buildings or something like that, prefabricated construction. But their costs are not low. It’s not like they’re producing the Model T of homes over there in the sense that, “Oh, these homes are just so massively cheaper than anything you could build by hand.” Their homes are more expensive than the homes that we build in the US from what I can see. So yeah, and just over and over again running into things like that. It’s like, “Oh, maybe this idea would work.” No, it didn’t really. “Oh, if we relax this regulation it would have this big transformative effect.” Not really. Yeah, it’s very tough.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And if you had to explain America’s building problems with a non-construction analogy, would it be like healthcare, medieval guilds, enterprise software, political?

Brian Potter

Yeah, I would, again, kind of two things. We talked about this once a little bit before, and I went into half of them. But one half is this Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian impulse and sort of the rise of sort of Jeffersonianism. And then the other is just, we’ve talked about this a little bit ago, but once something becomes, I’m almost not sure kind of how to characterize it. But once people reach some certain level of affluence or success or once something becomes, gets reached to some level of disruption, people are willing to tolerate it up to some certain point. And then once it goes beyond this point, people start to get really upset about it. So in the 1960s, I’ve written this essay about growth in California and how for a long time California was a very fast-growing state. And up through the 50s, California took pride in being a fast-growing state. They were, for a long time they had this big sign that was on one of their bridges, I think maybe the Bay Bridge in the Bay Area, but I don’t remember. But anyway, it had the population of California next to the population of New York. And it was tracking when California would surpass New York as being the most populous state. So for a long time, California was like, “Oh, we’re a big growing state and that’s good basically for our society. Growth means more people, more jobs, greater division of labor. We’re getting wealthier. That’s what we want.” But then at some level, eventually that kind of tipped and the consequences, there had been enough growth that people were wealthy and successful enough that they started to be very unhappy by the consequences of all this growth. So as this growth was taking place, you had all this environmental ruination and just huge swaths of forest being cut down and water being polluted and all this stuff that people were like, “Oh, what hath we wrought? All these sort of, we’re rushing, go, go, go. And we’ve made ourselves rich and successful, but now we’re sort of ruining the environment that drew us here in the first place.” And so in the 60s you see this very wide scale, very grassroots switch to being opposed to growth. And jurisdictions started electing political leaders that would enact anti-growth policies and all these things. And sort of California still grew after that point, but its growth was much more checked and it became much more fraught after that. And I sort of, people, when there’s a rising tide that’s lifting all boats, people are very happy to sort of be a part of that. But eventually, if they start seeing the consequences of that or get to a point like, “Oh, I’m, this is starting to sort of affect me or the place I live in negative ways,” they’re going to start eventually turning against that. I’m thinking of China, which I’m not an expert on China, but I understand a lot of what the Communist Party derives its legitimacy from is that they’ve been able to successfully deliver really robust economic growth. And these people remember what it’s like to be wretchedly poor and they’re very happy to be in a society that’s growing much richer and more successful. And we have all these things that we didn’t have before and we’re a much more powerful country than it used to be. And so they really rely on being able to sort of continuously deliver these improvements. And they think that if those sort of growth maybe runs out, maybe things are going to start to, the people are going to start to sort of reconsider what they think is important.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Of course, the irony about China’s rapid growth is it was probably mostly driven by Deng’s opening up China to limited capitalism, right, for those 20 years when he took over. And that was basically the engine that drove much of China’s growth. If we return to a more Hamiltonian aspect here in the United States and you got named head of housing and you could flex your muscles a little bit more than you could under a Jeffersonian administration, what would you do? What would be your platform?

Brian Potter

It’s tough because a lot of these sort of restrictions on building things are at the state or regional or local level. A lot of it is local city supervisors or whatever or design review boards that are listening to local residents unhappy about some new apartment project or whatever. So a lot of this has to be done at, and it’s in such a way that it’s hard for federal tools or federal policies to change that in huge ways. There’s sort of carrots and sticks that they can do, but it’s hard for them to sort of mandate things. But a big one is just encouraging sort of state-level setting of or reducing sort of a lot of these growth restrictions that maybe local jurisdictions have and stuff like that. And what federal has a lot more ability to influence is stuff that goes, like large-scale, certain large-scale infrastructure construction projects. Sort of a lot of energy building, transmission lines, pipelines, big solar installations. Federal government has a lot of leverage there that it can do and so wide-scale reform in how permitting of stuff that goes through this federal permitting process, reducing the burden of environmental review and things like that could really have a huge buildout or huge impact in terms of how much energy infrastructure that we can build and things like that which is really going to become very important.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And the federal government owns a lot of disused land that, there’s nothing on it. Why haven’t they pivoted to some of these, you brought up solar. Why not use some of that federally owned land? Again, you’re the czar of this building thing. Would that be something that could be generative?

Brian Potter

They do use that land for a lot of energy stuff. A lot of oil and gas drilling is done on federal land. Part of it is, again we have this all this burdensome process for doing all these things. And the oil and gas industry is very large and successful and they’ve had a long time to kind of work the process in a way that some of these newer, more nascent industries haven’t had time to quite work it as well. So there’s a lot of favorable environmental law and rules around permitting for oil and gas stuff that maybe doesn’t exist for other stuff yet. But some of that’s changing. I think they’ve, I think recently changed some of these rules that makes it easier for sort of geothermal energy drilling which uses, which there’s these novel geothermal energy technologies which basically use sort of this oil and gas drilling methods to sort of drill into the earth and manually create these fracture networks and then inject hot water, hot liquid underground and basically extract thermal energy from underground and use that to drive a turbine or whatever. And there’s some promising companies that are using this technology and I think they’ve recently changed some of the rules or they’re in the process of changing them. I have to look up the specifics, but to sort of give some of the benefit, the permitting benefits that maybe oil and gas have been able to take advantage of to apply to sort of these geothermal methods. So it’s, some of it’s changing and evolving, but all this stuff invariably moves quite slowly and never quite as quick as you’d like it to.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And again, listening, it seems to me that the mismatch here is a lot of what is throttling our ability to build more houses, etc., is all happening at the local level, right, where they have endless review, endless ability to challenge, to sue for a variety of reasons. So basically what I’m hearing you say is even if you had that Hamiltonian power at the federal level, you would be bound in some way or face a lot of bottlenecks from what’s going on locally. I mean, is that just a permanent problem? Is there a fix for that?

Brian Potter

That’s a good question. I wish I knew of an easy answer to that. But other than long-term change of hearts and minds, I work for the Institute for Progress and there’s sort of broader interest in sort of progress studies more generally of which the group I work with is a part. And I think you’ve talked with many people sort of in that vein. And I think a big part of what those people are interested in is cultivating this sense of, “Oh, progress is good and expanding our capabilities is good and economic growth is good” as part of changing these attitudes in sort of a broad way. Because a lot of it just stems from these ideas that have been inculcated into people’s heads. And if you can sort of change how people think about these things or recognize what actually is responsible for this world of incredible plenty that we’ve created and how if we sort of, we could continue to sort of improve that if only we were allowed to. There’s a big emphasis on sort of that sort of work.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I’m just speculating and would love your opinion. Aren’t there pockets where you could do a project? You mentioned earlier that people were in California particularly really pro-growth because it was seen as the rising tide, lifting all the boats, etc. Are there pilot projects that could be done somewhere where there was a significantly disadvantaged population, where you could do some form of building, some form of different way of building a village or what? I mean, I’m not the expert here, I’m just thinking out loud where you could say, “See, look, this was a very disadvantaged area and now because we’ve done this, look at it thriving.”

Brian Potter

Yeah, this is a perennially popular idea. And you see variations of this concept show up in a bunch of ways. There’s this, there’s a big interest nowadays in finding, founding new cities, right, and finding these new cities that would be designed to be growth or prosperity engines. There’s a lot of existing cities in places where in the US where maybe they would be fine with a little more growth that have offered bonuses to tech workers, remote tech workers, like, “Hey, if you’re a tech worker that can work remotely, we will pay you $50,000 or something to relocate to Tulsa, Oklahoma or Delaware.” I forget exactly where they were, but there’s a variety of these places that are trying to sort of encourage people to come into this city. For a long time people were so fed up with the difficulties of changing things in San Francisco that a lot of the venture capitalists and tech population there were like, “We’re just going to relocate all of this to Austin or to Miami or something like that.” For a long time people were really trying to make Miami the new tech hub. And I think it proved really difficult. Austin has been a major success story. But I think Miami basically didn’t really work out. And basically it proved pretty hard to sort of dislodge the ecosystem that had grown up around San Francisco and move it anywhere else. All these things, there’s network effects and built-in advantages, right. It’s like once something’s successful and there’s all these people and places that are located in this place that you want to be, there’s a very hard marketing problem of getting everybody to just, no individual person has an incentive to leave, right, because everything here is already where I want it unless everybody else goes all at once. But if everybody else sees that everybody else is staying here, then they’re going to stay here too. These sort of things have proved to be quite durable and difficult to change. I’m not, same with the cities thing. I think it’s hard to sort of spin up a new city from scratch, because if nobody else is there, there’s no reason to go there. And if there’s no reason to go there, there’s no reason for anybody to start. It’s these sort of difficult chicken and egg problems that are kind of hard to break out of.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And of course, the example of the famous ghost cities in China would be another example of, “Yeah, we’ll build the city,” and then no one goes.

Brian Potter

Yeah. Although I think they actually, I think actually China’s somewhat of a counter-example. I think they were having such big urban migration that they sort of, a lot of these were cities were built in anticipation of population growth. And people said, “Oh, you’re building this stupid city in the middle of nowhere. That’s wrong. What’s wrong with you?” But there was such huge migrations, a lot of them did end up basically filling up as they anticipated, but that’s in a different situation because they were in this big transition from rural population to urban population. They were having all these people move from the countryside and move into the cities when they’re in the middle of a situation like that. You can build these new cities in a way that you can’t if you’re already in a highly urbanized population with all these sort of existing industries and sort of networks in place that are going to be resistant to being dislodged.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I like you leaning into the network effect because I think you’re absolutely right. Do you think that there’s any mitigating thing you could do if you were trying? You mentioned Austin succeeded where Miami failed. I’m curious. I’m certainly not an expert in this at all, but why did Austin, was it simply that Austin was so much closer to the place they were drawing population from?

Brian Potter

I don’t have a super deep knowledge of the situation on the ground in these two cities. And I don’t know how much Austin has been, it’s grown quite a lot. I don’t know how much success it’s had in relocating the venture capital ecosystem. As far as I know, the San Francisco Bay Area is still by far the biggest and largest and nothing else in the US is really close. But I do think that Austin has been very successful in growing just because they’ve made it very easy to sort of build housing there. I think Miami, for all the people that were trying to turn it into the next San Francisco or whatever, I think they actually are somewhat NIMBY and it’s not actually amazingly easy to sort of build new housing there. So I think a lot of it can probably, at least in terms of major growth stories or whatever, can be traced back to that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It also seems to me as we’re chatting and as I was reading your stuff that a lot of this comes down to social outlook, social views, etc. And if you look historically, I guess you can also see a waxing and a waning of trends. Like for example, for a long time immigration was desired in the United States. You’d let everybody in and then you had this backlash in the beginning of the 20th century or even the late 19th century with the Know Nothing Party and all the people who didn’t want anyone to come. Is this kind of sinusoidal thing affecting what, the building and whatnot in the country today?

Brian Potter

Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t, I actually, I should know more about this because IFP has a very robust and strong immigration team that tries to work on encouraging policies that would make maximum use of high-skilled immigration. Because the US has been, that’s been such a huge story around the US’s successes, right, is that we’ve been able to attract the best and brightest talent from around the world and bring them into an environment where they can really make maximum use of those talents. So it’s great for the US, it’s great for the people that come here too. And I really don’t have a great sense of how those perceptions have evolved over time and how it’s changed on, how that’s been reflected in the level of policy and how versus what the sort of typical citizen thinks about it. I’m just not informed enough to know about it. But yeah, the late 19th and early 20th century, it wasn’t necessarily amazingly popular even as we’re getting a really large number of immigrants. So I don’t, I just don’t know enough about it to speak unfortunately.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I know maybe a little bit more about it because I’m Irish and one of the central aims of a lot of these movements was to keep the Irish people out. And I just sometimes see a parallel there to not in my backyard. That type of attitude, it being prevalent in the discussions today about the fact that we need more houses. The houses that we have are very costly right now. What’s the solution? Why can’t we come up with one?

Brian Potter

Yeah, a lot of this comes down to sort of ideas of concentrated harms and diffuse benefits. So a city overall or a state overall will benefit from population growth or a bigger, stronger economy, more division of labor. It’s nicer to live in a bigger city. But if you’re building a big apartment building next to a housing development or whatever, the people, even though that big new apartment building might have a small impact on the overall rents in the city and overall contribute to making the city slightly more affordable. The cost of that thing, the disruption and the increased traffic are all going to be concentrated right next to that one spot. So the people there are going to rationally oppose it because they’re getting, you’re talking a small diffuse benefit over the entire city versus the concentrated harm that one group of people really does not like. So they rationally oppose it. The benefits are diffuse enough that it’s hard to marshal a lot of support in favor of it. And so you have this sort of fundamental asymmetry. I ran into this in my neighborhood not too long ago where some developer wanted to build a retirement community sort of kind of near our neighborhood. And it was going to be a multi-story building or whatever. And people need places to live, including older people that, if you don’t build those things, the cost and the difficulty of finding, of living in a retirement community goes up. And so the more you build, the more affordable these things become. But that benefit is spread very broadly and then the harms are all concentrated right in this one spot. And so all a bunch of the local neighbors were very opposed to this new building that was going to get put up. So again, there’s these fundamental, it comes back to sort of these incentives or the perception of what the incentives are.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think that framework is an excellent one to look at a lot of problems. The diffuse benefits versus the upfront costs. And what we notice is it’s hard, right, to think about the diffuse benefits that a particular project. And it’s really easy to look at the harm, right. It reminds me of the idea of learning via negativa. And by that I mean it’s really easy. Let’s take a drug, right. If there’s a drug available in Europe and not here, you tend to look at it from, it isn’t available here. So you’re not thinking about it, you’re not worried about it, but you’re also not thinking about all the lives that drug that is available in Europe could have saved in the country, right. So it just seems our human OS has a really hard time dealing with that kind of construction, right. Like, how am I supposed to have an opinion on something that isn’t available here? You want me to think about what all the benefits of, what it would be, all the positive benefits if it was available here? Yeah. And we kind of go on the fritz. So I definitely like that framework of sort of the obvious and immediate costs that present themselves versus the diffused benefits that might also temporally happen at a different rate and a different amount of progress. Do you think your time at Katerra was one that basically, no more moonshots, or do you think, do you have an idea for some moonshots that might actually work?

Brian Potter

Oh, good question. No, I don’t think it soured me on the idea of moonshots. What Katerra inspired me was, “Wow, it’s really shocking how little people understand about what actually is required to make this process work better.” People have been trying essentially the same idea over and over again. And, “Oh, move our process to a factory.” And every single time they tried it, it didn’t work in the way that they thought that it would in the sense of, “Oh, I’m going to be the Henry Ford of housing.” That never happened. But somehow people, the lesson never stuck and people just kept trying it kind of over and over again. But it actually, at a high level it makes me feel like, this is one of the major strengths of US society, right, is that we’re in an environment where people are willing to invest enormous amounts of money on this speculative idea because they think it will be a success and that it’ll be sort of transformative in the ways that they hope for. I’m glad that we live in a society that’s willing to take those really big swings. For any individual one, you can argue that, and of course, Katerra, you would argue correctly, this one is not very well thought through, you should sort of maybe retarget what you’re doing. But I really like at the high level that it’s a place where those things occur. And I would like sort of many more moonshots and more investment in sort of these speculative, transformative ideas that maybe aren’t the popular, the hip thing. You tend to see a lot of clustering around common ideas at the same time. Right now all the money is going to robots and AI. And a few years ago all the money was, “I need cryptocurrency or whatever.” I would like to see a more robust ecosystem of funding that can fund projects which don’t, aren’t necessarily attractive to venture capitalists for whatever reason, but still have the potential to sort of be quite transformative. And you’re starting to see more of these things spring up. So I would like to see many more moonshot type projects of all sorts.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Give me an example of one that you would like, that you’ve seen and you’re like, “Wow, that would make a great moonshot.”

Brian Potter

One that I’ve heard about, and it’s not even one that I’ve strongly advocated for because I think it will probably happen eventually. But I’ve read about it from some robotics experts is that we don’t necessarily yet have the robot equivalent of a GPT-3 moment where this new model comes out and all of a sudden it is massively capable because it’s trained on such a huge corpus of data or whatever. But then there’s speculation, actually doing this maybe wouldn’t be that much work. You train, you get, you pay enough humans to do teleoperation of various tasks and you feed it enough video data or whatever and maybe you could actually get a robot GPT-3 and have this general-purpose, highly capable robot model. And it would take many millions of dollars to do, but maybe less than you might expect. And that seems like a really valuable thing at least in terms of potentially advancing robot capabilities. But there’s so much money that’s getting put into these robot companies that I have to imagine that somebody, if not multiple somebodies are working on that right now. It’s not amazingly easy to find these moonshot ideas. It’s not amazingly easy to find ones that are promising enough that you think someone should fund but not so obviously promising that people have missed it already. You tend to have to, at least in my experience, you have to have some sort of discipline-specific knowledge or whatever. And I’m a little bit too much of a generalist and I just stay a little bit too close to the surface level of things to have a really deep understanding of a lot of what these needs are. So a lot of these operations that are finding these missed sources of valuable potential things are, they’re doing so by finding a lot of domain experts and asking them, “Hey, what do you need in this specific area? What would be really transformative?” But it’s not amazingly easy for someone without that domain-specific knowledge to articulate what they are.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And what’s a normal day look like in your day job as Senior Infrastructure Fellow at the Institute for Progress?

Brian Potter

Yeah, almost all of what I do is researching and reading and writing things. So yeah, typically on a normal day I will get up and the morning will be spent working on whatever the current writing project is on my docket. So usually that’s whatever newsletter project that I’m working on. And so mornings are almost always dedicated to writing. I find that I can really only write for about three or four hours effectively in a day. So I try to block out my time in the morning to basically do that. And then in the afternoon I’m basically just doing research on whatever upcoming project I’m working on. So this is reading a book or looking up sources or doing some sort of data analysis or increasingly it’s asking AI to dig up sources for me or do some analysis for me or write some script for me. But usually at a high level, it’s writing in the morning and reading and research in the afternoon basically pretty much every day.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Do you have an example where working with a colleague at the Institute from a completely different section of what they’re working on, where you guys having lunch together, chatting about things where the cognitive diversity between the two of you and you were like, “That’s a great idea. I never thought about that”?

Brian Potter

So I work from home, so I don’t actually work in their office. I’m working out of my home office basically every day. Institute for Progress is in Washington, D.C. and I am located outside of Atlanta, so a little bit of a commute. But often I will, other people suggest topics of essays I should write or topics that I should research. And I’m always open to those. And some of those suggestions have been some of my best and most popular and most interesting essays that I’ve written. So yeah, some of those suggestions for topics that I should look into have been very valuable.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So you got to give us at least one that we can put in the show notes. Which one along those lines that got very popular?

Brian Potter

I think my most popular essay that I’ve ever written is about the history of airplane manufacturing by the US during World War II. And basically how we built the huge number of airplanes that we needed to produce, which is not necessarily my normal beat. I write a lot about manufacturing stuff in general, so it’s not totally outside of it, but it’s not about buildings and infrastructure. But I think somebody, I don’t actually remember the specifics, but I think somebody basically suggested that would be a good topic to write about. I said, “Ooh, that is something good.” I have a sense of what a topic would be good to write about if there’s this combination of, again, it’s kind of the same thing with investments. You want it to be promising enough in the sense that there’s a lot of sources and research that I can dig up about it, to read and learn about it, but not so promising that somebody has already written something really good about it. So I’m trying to sort of hit that relatively narrow target of investable writing and research topics. And so again, I often draw, it’s often useful for me to draw on what other people can see because I can’t just necessarily see everything myself. And so that was a particularly good one. I’m working on one that I’ll, or I’m going to start working on one in a couple weeks that was suggested by somebody else that I think will be similarly good for kind of similar reasons. It’s that right combination of neglected, but still enough to really do a good and thorough, interesting research about it and it’ll be quite interesting. But I can’t reveal that one yet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Come back for more. We’ll have the one on the airplanes in the show notes. Brian, this has been absolutely fascinating for me. We are coming to the end of our conversation and we have a tradition here at Infinite Loops where we make you, just for a day, the emperor of the world. You can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp. But what you can do is we’re going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next morning is, they’re going to wake up and they’re going to say, “I’ve just had two of the greatest ideas.” And unlike all the other times when I wake up with these great ideas and then ignore them, I’m going to start acting on these two today. What are you going to incept in the world’s population?

Brian Potter

Oh, gosh. I mean, one easy one is just build housing. That’s a really easy one because that stems from this grassroots local opposition to building new things or even, build more stuff, build more housing, build more infrastructure. If I could find some way to communicate that basic idea that would be really powerful. And all of a sudden we can build all the housing we need and build all the transmission lines and all the solar panels and everything. That would be truly transformative. And I don’t know, maybe something about make AI safe. We’re in this world where AI capabilities are advancing monstrously. And I think many of the concerns that people have about, “Oh, what happens if you build this thing that is massively smarter than everybody else in the world? It’s not necessarily going to have your best interests in mind.” Just like when humans became massively smarter than other animals, they did not necessarily have the best interest of other animals in mind and it did not necessarily work out for the other animals all that well. Even the ones that humans weren’t necessarily interested in hunting or whatever. And so if you could ensure that everybody took that problem really seriously, I think that would be a major win as well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Two great ones to think about. I love in particular, if you incept the “build more houses,” maybe all that would have to change would be the attitude, right, so that they physically wouldn’t have to go out and build the houses, but they could drop their opposition to many projects. Brian, where can people find your work?

Brian Potter

Yeah, I write a newsletter called Construction Physics that you can just search Brian Potter, Construction Physics and it will come up. I’m the author of a book that’s called The Origins of Efficiency. It’s found on Amazon. If you search The Origins of Efficiency, it will come up there. And those are the two main places where, yeah, my two main major outputs.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Perfect. Brian, thank you so much for being on Infinite Loops.

Brian Potter

Thank you for having me.

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The Strength of Greek Cultural Software

Alex Petkas: I think one of the unique powers of Greece is that it produced a kind of cultural software that wouldn’t have been produced had it been centralized, because the Romans never produced that kind of cultural software. Or they did very late and only by kind of copying the Greeks.

I mean, Roman history starts in the 700s BC with the kings, the founding of Rome and Romulus and driving the kings out. And then the Republic is established around 504, I think. And they don’t have any meaningful writing until the third century BC, until the late third. The early 200s is when we get some of their first writing, the plays of Plautus and there’s a little bit of stuff, but they don’t have literature. And even the plays of the early Roman poets are just kind of copy translations, very creative and well done and funny ones of Greek plays. And then it’s only in the, I think in the following generation or so when the Romans finally write history, their own history. It’s been Greeks writing Roman history up to that point.

And Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian that we’re aware of, wrote history in Greek because to write history is a Greek thing and you’re writing it for an audience that reads Greek. You’re trying to tell your story for a literate audience. The Carthaginians know Greek, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians know. Everybody knows Greek, but nobody bothers to learn Latin because there’s nothing written in it. I mean, obviously you want to negotiate with some Roman emissaries, you might want to learn Latin, but they’ll probably know Greek so that you can speak Greek with them as Scipio and Hannibal. They speak Greek amongst themselves.

Jim O’Shaughnessy At that time every educated person either in Rome or elsewhere spoke Greek.

Alex Petkas Yeah. And this is very much a product of this decentralization of Greek city states all over the Mediterranean, needing to communicate with each other, vying for status, prestige, entertainment. There’s a kind of competition and cooperation between them. They’re always allying with each other and then breaking alliances and stabbing each other in the back. And it’s all very fun and bloody. I’m sure it was maddening to live through for a lot of them.

But the earliest Greek literature we have, Homer is written in this kind of Frankenstein dialect that nobody spoke. Aeolic, Ionic, Doric, because he was trying to, because this epic dialect that Homer spoke, which has centuries of tradition behind it that we can’t necessarily see, because the writing didn’t exist, but it was written in such a way that Greeks from various regions could pick up enough and feel like their own ways were evidenced in the poem. Even if it wasn’t their local dialect. They could probably pick up the gist of it if it was their local dialect. Of course they could certainly understand it. But it’s this kind of blend that is a very Panhellenic, as they say, a pan-Greek cultural form. The Greek epics. And the most important Greek literature that we have from the centuries after Homer, things like Herodotus and Thucydides, the histories, the Greek tragedies, Athenian tragedy, the characters, when they’re speaking, speak in Athenian Greek, but the choruses speak in Doric Greek, which is the dialect of Sparta on the one hand, and then Thebans on the other hand. And the Spartans, they kind of admire and love and hate, and Thebans, they think are just contemptible pig farmers, but nonetheless, there’s a tradition behind it.

And so they, for that reason, this sense of the power of the network is there. It’s not a political power, a military power until Philip and Alexander united in this generation after Plato. But if that network system, if that software, that cultural DNA didn’t exist, then I think the Romans would have had a very difficult time uniting the Mediterranean because they very much used the Greek power, the Greek cultural power to rule the Eastern, which were much richer, much more civilized, educated, talented provinces when they established their empire. And they kind of used the Greek model to eventually develop their own literature under Caesar and Augustus. Virgil’s poetry kind of takes its cue from the Greeks. And I wouldn’t say that Roman literature is inferior to the Greeks, although the Romans constantly talk as though that were the case, but it was something that they learned from these people who had mastered cultural power but had not quite mastered political power. And maybe if they had mastered the centralized political power, then they wouldn’t have had the cultural power that was maybe the more lasting thing in the first place.

Zeal vs Envy

Alex Petkas: Many people who read Aristotle read the Ethics or the Politics or the Metaphysics. But one of my favorite books of his is the Rhetoric, because I kind of fancy myself a rhetorician. It’s not easy reading, but if you skip to the second book out of three, he goes through this amazing catalog. It’s the first catalog in Western intellectual tradition that I’m aware of that is a real kind of study of human psychology or something that we would recognize as a study of human psychology. And he’s talking about the emotions of a crowd that an orator would have to persuade. And one of the emotions that he talks about is zeal, or it’s usually translated as emulation, which I think is kind of an old fashioned word for us. I don’t really think we use it as an operative concept, but it’s zelos in Greek, which is where we get the word zeal. And it is a feeling. Aristotle describes it as “a type of pain felt when a man sees present, among others who are like him by nature, things good and honorable which he himself is capable of attaining.” And it’s a simple concept, but extremely powerful, extremely generative. And it connects with all kinds of deep cultural forms and structures like heroism and competition that are extremely salient in Greek culture in particular, but also in human excellence in general. And so I felt like somebody needs to write a book about it, and that’s what I’m doing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy Yeah, I love the concept for the book. And when you were going through his definition, it made me think instantly of Girard and mimetic desire.

Alex Petkas Yeah, definitely. And Girard, if you really do your homework, you can find some essays of his that take a kind of positive look at zeal or mimetic desire, which is very much a species of mimetic desire, in his terminology, the mimetic meaning, of course, imitative. And the idea of Girard is that we desire what we see others desiring. And zeal is a form of that imitative desire. But Girard is usually pretty negative on mimetic desire, to say the least […]

But Aristotle has a very positive notion of it and he distinguishes it from this other species of mimetic desire, well, not his terminology, but envy, phthonos in Greek, which just sounds nasty in Greek, as I think in English it sounds like there is a louse, a bedbug. So it starts with that phth sound and then it rhymes with murder or phonos. So phthonos just sounds wicked. Wicked word. And envy is always bad for Aristotle. It is the pain you feel when you see others succeeding. In short, not over the fact that you haven’t succeeded so much as over the fact that they are succeeding. So it’s the desire to kind of, it’s the tall poppy emotion.

And I think Girard doesn’t strongly distinguish between positive and negative mimetic desire. It’s just all one thing with many ramifications. But Aristotle says envy is characteristic of bad men. It’s characteristic of the old. And zeal is characteristic of the young and of good men. And it is something that spurs you to achieve more, to excellence. Whereas envy is about destroying other people to bring them down to your level […] I think that we need a positive spin on mimetic desire because it’s part of human nature. And Aristotle sees following out the strong aspects of human nature as a key to bringing out our excellence, to happiness, to virtue and so on.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy: My guest today is Alex Petkas, host of the Cost of Glory podcast, co-founder of the Classical Society, a refugee from academia. You have a PhD in Classics from Princeton and were a professor, but decided these guys just sit around and yap. They don’t do anything. And you decided, I want to be filled with zeal. I want to do things. I want to be high agency. Alex, welcome.

Alex Petkas: Great to be here. Jim nailed it with that description.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So let’s start first on your book. Is the working title still Zealots, a book for those obsessed with greatness?

Alex Petkas: It’s something like that, yeah. We still have to tidy up a couple chapters and come up with a proper title, but yeah, it’s about this concept that I found in Aristotle. And many people who read Aristotle read the Ethics or the Politics or the Metaphysics. But one of my favorite books of his is the Rhetoric, because I kind of fancy myself a rhetorician. It’s not easy reading, but if you skip to the second book out of three, he goes through this amazing catalog. It’s the first catalog in Western intellectual tradition that I’m aware of that is a real kind of study of human psychology or something that we would recognize as a study of human psychology. And he’s talking about the emotions of a crowd that an orator would have to persuade. And one of the emotions that he talks about is zeal, or it’s usually translated as emulation, which I think is kind of an old fashioned word for us. I don’t really think we use it as an operative concept, but it’s zelos in Greek, which is where we get the word zeal. And it is a feeling. Aristotle describes it as “a type of pain felt when a man sees present, among others who are like him by nature, things good and honorable which he himself is capable of attaining.” And it’s a simple concept, but extremely powerful, extremely generative. And it connects with all kinds of deep cultural forms and structures like heroism and competition that are extremely salient in Greek culture in particular, but also in human excellence in general. And so I felt like somebody needs to write a book about it, and that’s what I’m doing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I love the concept for the book. And when you were going through his definition, it made me think instantly of Girard and mimetic desire.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, definitely. And Girard, if you really do your homework, you can find some essays of his that take a kind of positive look at zeal or mimetic desire, which is very much a species of mimetic desire, in his terminology, the mimetic meaning, of course, imitative. And the idea of Girard is that we desire what we see others desiring. And zeal is a form of that imitative desire. But Girard is usually pretty negative on mimetic desire, to say the least. Might cause the apocalypse. Yeah, probably will. Besides that. But Aristotle has a very positive notion of it and he distinguishes it from this other species of mimetic desire, well, not his terminology, but envy, phthonos in Greek, which just sounds nasty in Greek, as I think in English it sounds like there is a louse, a bedbug. So it starts with that phth sound and then it rhymes with murder or phonos. So phthonos just sounds wicked. Wicked word. And envy is always bad for Aristotle. It is the pain you feel when you see others succeeding. In short, not over the fact that you haven’t succeeded so much as over the fact that they are succeeding. So it’s the desire to kind of, it’s the tall poppy emotion. And I think Girard doesn’t strongly distinguish between positive and negative mimetic desire. It’s just all one thing with many ramifications. But Aristotle says envy is characteristic of bad men. It’s characteristic of the old. And zeal is characteristic of the young and of good men. And it is something that spurs you to achieve more, to excellence. Whereas envy is about destroying other people to bring them down to your level. It’s like Nietzsche’s ressentiment. So I think we especially need in this Girard, well, I mean, in our niche, I guess, in sort of tech and culture, people are aware of Girard. And I think that we need a positive spin on mimetic desire because it’s part of human nature. And Aristotle sees following out the strong aspects of human nature as a key to bringing out our excellence, to happiness, to virtue and so on.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I’ve always thought of rhetoric as also linked to the ability to persuade, right?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Fundamentally, that’s what it is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And so that’s kind of like I’m obsessed right now with this idea that all innovation, all technology especially is dual use. Right? It itself, like AI, for example, itself is a tool and neutral. And you can, unless it’s been nerfed, right? And no, I think blowing up the entire world is a great idea, Jim, when it goes into sycophantic mode. But the difference, because as I was getting ready to talk to you, I was thinking, why did the term zealot become a negative term?

Alex Petkas: Yeah, well, I want to talk about dual use technology because this actually relates to the foundational myths of technology in Greece. So let’s put a pin in that and circle back to it. But the zealot concept, I’m pretty sure that it has to do with the way that the term is brought into English, which is via the Bible. So in the times of Jesus, Roman Judea, there are a lot of upset local Jews who are seeing the Roman overlords importing, kind of sneaking in pagan cults. And they see a lot of the local Jewish leaders being nice to the Romans so that the Romans don’t stomp them, as they tend to do people who don’t comply. And Herod the Great is a great figure in this story, building a temple to Augustus and having statuary in it. And in the Greek translation, this is interesting, of the Old Testament, which is called the Septuagint, it was done in Alexandria, Egypt in the second century BC. There is this concept that occurs over and over. The Hebrew root is kana, which is sort of like, well, the passage where you might have heard this, “I’m a jealous God. You will have no gods before me.” That whole idea that God, that Yahweh doesn’t like you going and honoring other gods, like as though you were a kind of faithless wife. And that kana is his response to you being a faithless wife, Israel. And he says, “I’m a jealous God.” And the Greek uses that word zeal. It’s literally “God is a zealot. I am a zealotes. I’m a feeler of zeal.” But it’s that kind of competitive jealousy that also is a shade of the Greek meaning. It’s clearly not the shade that Aristotle is using, but it is a competitive emotion, a rivalrous emotion, zeal. And so they decided to translate kana and the kanayim are the zealots in Roman Judea. And the zealots are, of course, there’s probably good versions of them. I mean, depends on your perspective on history, the people who held out at Masada against Titus were kanayim of some branch. There’s all these splinter factions and so they’re trying to vindicate God’s honor and God’s right in Judea and drive out the bad idols. And so zealots, Simon the Zealot, these concepts become associated with a certain kind of religious extremism and it’s in the kind of Puritan movement in the 17th century was a big generative period for this discourse of the zealot. The Puritans are these over excitable zealots and they’re trying to rip all the beautiful paintings and the roods and the iconography and get rid of the monasteries. So there’s a sense in which it plugs into modern English religious politics and gets energized in this way against zealot. And zealot has kind of become a bad word in our day. But in the pre-Hebraization of the Greek language that you get with the New Testament and the Septuagint, a zealotes could just be a follower of a philosopher. Somebody who feels zeal for their master or feels zeal for say the heroes of the past. It would be a positive thing to be a devotee of something in a good sense or at least without the religious connotations. So there’s interesting history there but I think we have a chance to kind of revive this term or at least the concept for today.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And we put a pin in the idea of looking at tech, innovation, etc. today through the eyes of the Greek myths. I know that is something near and dear to your heart but as I was kind of thinking about it, it does seem to me that at least the well known ones, right, Prometheus and his punishment for bringing fire to we mere mortals, Daedalus and Icarus, don’t fly too close to the sun. It seems like a lot of the myths would be what David Deutsch would call littered with the precautionary principle.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, I think that’s right. We were speaking earlier about this. I was at a launch of a short film by Jason Carman and the Story Company that I know you are a fan of just last week in San Francisco and the basic premise of the film, which I’m not giving anything away and everybody should go see it, should be on YouTube today. I think it’s called The Greatest Lie. The premise is imagining a future in which there are no books or rather in which everybody for the most part has forgotten how to read. Whether because the technology was too entertaining and it seemed pointless, or because the powers that be decided that people shouldn’t read books. Probably a combination of both. And so books are burned. And if you have books, this is a crime. And you could think of other familiar sci-fi stories that relate to this issue, but there’s a character in there that plays an important role. I won’t give away, but his name or his nickname is Prome, as in Prometheus. And so I think these myths still have a whole lot of resonance to draw on. But Prometheus is an interesting myth because it definitely relates to this dual use thing. So Prometheus brings fire down to mortals because Zeus didn’t want us to have fire. And fire, of course is how you cook meat. It’s important for civilization, for blacksmithing work. Of course it can also destroy your village or a forest. But I think the context is really interesting of the Prometheus myth. So the first telling that we have of it is in this Greek author Hesiod, who is writing around the time of Homer, probably a little before the Homeric poems were codified. Hesiod’s writing in maybe 700 BC, shortly after the invention of writing, which is also a very important technology. I want to put a pin in that one too. But the context of the Prometheus story is Prometheus, so the myth goes, invites the gods to a feast with humans, there’s a big party. And the feast is really clearly depicted as a kind of proto sacrifice. It’s like the paradigmatic sacrifice event, the feast in which the gods and humans both have a share. And Prometheus kind of tricks Zeus in the context of this feast. He’s like, well, we’re going to sacrifice, we’re going to slaughter this cow or sheep or whatever it is, and we’re going to split it up based on, the gods get the first choice, right, because they’re the best. But Prometheus pulls a fast one on Zeus. So he thinks, and he divides up the animals such that the bones get wrapped in fat, white, glistening fat, which is apparently the better looking portion. And then there’s another portion which is the actual nutritive meats of the animal that get wrapped in this ugly cow stomach. And Prometheus brings the portions before Zeus and he says, “Zeus, which one do you want? I mean, oh, king.” And Zeus apparently knows that Prometheus is pulling a trick on him, but he kind of wants to complete the story or he wants to kind of shame humans. It’s not really clear what his motives are, but he picks the one that looks better that Prometheus clearly wanted him to pick, which is actually just fat and bone. And it’s not very nutritive. And then the humans get the better portion. And so when he opens up his present, he gets angry, even though he knew it was going to happen. And he punishes humans and Prometheus, humans kind of get punished for just receiving the better proportion, even though they didn’t necessarily have agency in it. And that’s when he decides to withhold fire. Says humans are not going to have fire for that reason, to kind of get them back. And it’s then that Prometheus goes up and he sneaks in, he steals fire in a fennel stalk and brings it down to humans. And so this fire is the foundational myth of technology in a lot of ways. It is part of this trade that we made with the gods. Technology is a thing that was withheld from us. And then we kind of got back in the context of setting up our relationship. What is the permanent communication structure going to be between humans and gods? Sacrifices. This is how we give them things in order to honor them by sacrifice and we hope to get blessings and benefactions from them in return. But somehow in the context of that story, technology comes out. And I think that this partly relates the Prometheus story to how technology represents something that we get from what is from the divine or from what is most divine in us. But it was kind of a violation. There was something that was problematic about it. And of course, the second part of the story is in punishment for Prometheus stealing technology again and bringing it to humans. Zeus punishes not just Prometheus by tying him to a rock in the Caucasus and having a bunch of birds eat out his liver, and it grows back every day. But he also punishes humans by giving us Pandora and her box. And she opens up the box and all the bad things come into the world. Sickness and misery and wars. And so that violation is responsible for most of the bad things that happen in the world. Civilization is a product of technology. It’s not just gadgets and fire. It’s also the ability to order a city, the ability to have agriculture is a technological feat. And we lost something. There was maybe an earlier time in the kind of hunter gatherer days when life was better before all the miseries of technology came. So it’s very problematic, but it’s this perennial technology didn’t come about late in the human story. It’s like as soon as we were humans in any recognizable sense, we had it and used it. So I think the myth gets at that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Correct me if my memory is wrong, but isn’t what’s at the bottom of Pandora’s box hope?

Alex Petkas: Yes, and very importantly so. It’s not all bad. I think she keeps hope in the jar, is the idea, so that we can kind of, we have some kind of control over it. It’s not just floating around in the world, but we still have hope in the jar. And that’s the balance part of it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And as I’m listening to you, it’s just to me, why are so many of these origin myths so negative? So as I was listening to you about Zeus getting pissed off, right, because he’s bringing fire down to the humans, like Adam and Eve, right? The apple is knowledge. And if you bite the apple, that’s it, man, you’re out. You’re out of perfection. And you have to go into the world. What do you think it is? Because obviously these are all human problems, right? And we create these myths. Why do you think that there is such a preponderance of the negative having to do with innovation, moving forward, learning more? I mean, all the things that we humans seem to be particularly gifted at. Is it just political? Right? Because if you’re looking at it on just the surface, you’re going to think, well, of course the king doesn’t want the population to be able to overthrow him or whatever, so he’s going to always put the brakes on anything. I’ve been thinking about it in terms of mesh networks, distributed value networks of which the Greek city states were one. We’ll talk about that later. But why the preponderance? Is it just a, hey, I’m at the top of the hierarchy, I’m writing the myths. The myths are going to be, settle down, don’t ask for too much, know your place? Or is it something more?

Alex Petkas: I think that is one perspective and that’s probably right. But I think another perspective is also possible and probably equally right that in the Adam and Eve story, God’s threat, which is true, is that you’re going to become like God. You’re going to become more godlike. Seeing their eyes are going to be opened and they’re going to have this understanding like I do. And I think that to go to the Icarus example, Icarus is not necessarily anti-technology 100% because he’s flying. Yeah. Daedalus makes the wings for him and his boy and they actually do escape. They’re trying to get away from the evil tyrant Minos. And it works. They escape the island of Crete, Daedalus gets to safety. Icarus was doing fine until he did something crucial that was mistaken, which is he tried to go up and be like a god. He tried to fly up to the sun and cross a certain limit. And I think that is potentially the cautionary tale, that there is a kind of deeper wisdom to it. That technology, when we first discover something or invent something, we think that it can do everything. We think that it can turn us into God, that it can help us to transcend human nature. At least in the Icarus story, the warning is not about being ambitious. And I was reading a biography of Alex Karp lately, and this is apparently Karp’s dad used to take Alex and his brother to the Philadelphia Art Museum. He loved to go to the painting of Icarus and Daedalus. And see, “You see Alex, that’s what happens.” He was always trying to tamp him down.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That also just immediately ties back to tall poppy syndrome. Yeah, Rousseau. Another one like man in his natural state was so much better, so much wiser, so much more noble. But then of course you come to American thinkers and Emerson basically says man is a god in ruins. And that’s a bad thing. We don’t want to be a god in ruins. We want to, and it does seem to me that a lot of those myths, when you look at American philosophers and thinkers, they look at it a little differently. Or am I just reading too much into it?

Alex Petkas: I think that’s right. I mean, Tocqueville talked about the particular genius of the American people is this culture of tinkering and frontier pushing, not just physically, geographically, but technologically. I think that we just have this much more immediate sense that whether it’s the railroads or the steamship, that it’s this incredibly powerful tool for mastery and prosperity and flourishing, that by the time we were doing that in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe had already kind of had its stable system. It was the American ideal of masculinity is one thing you could call it. There’s a great article on this by Matthew Gasda in the American Affairs journal a couple of months ago. To flourish in Europe in the 19th century was about finding a good patron, performing well for him for the most part. Whereas in America there’s this culture of self-reliance and one of our greatest levers in that effort is mastery of technology and extending human agency further beyond its frontiers. Not that they’re completely empty. That’s another whole story when we could get into, of the conquest of the Americas. But I think that to go back to Icarus, there is this recognition in Greek culture that the technology is powerful and it’s good, but it just always comes with drawbacks that tend to be underestimated by the people who first get their hands on it or first develop it. And there’s another great story about writing that Plato tells. I’m sure you’re familiar with this, but it’s in his dialogue, the Phaedrus, which is a great dialogue about rhetoric, actually, and in the context of this, Socrates and his interlocutor talking about writing as a technology. And he tells a story that he heard from the Egyptians at some point. And his interlocutor says, “Are you making this up, Socrates?” And he’s like, “Quiet, listen to the story.” But the story is Thoth and Amun are these two Egyptian gods. Thoth and Thammuz is what he calls them in the dialogue, but it’s Thoth and Amun Ra. And Thoth is a trickster god. He’s an inventor of many things, geometry, astronomy. And he’s very excited about all his inventions. And he finally gets his bag of goodies together and he goes to the king god, which is Amun Ra or Amun. And he says, “Amun, I got all these great tools, you’re going to love them. And here’s the one I’m most proud of. It’s called grammata. It’s called letters, writing. And this is a cure for forgetfulness. We’re never going to forget anything again because we can write it all down and it’s never going to go away. We can put it in stone even.” And Amun says, “Thoth, you are like a father who is biased toward his child. You have birthed this technology, but you don’t see its weaknesses.” And there’s an interesting word play there in the Greek, because technology or an art, also the word for it in Greek is tekhne, T-E-C-H-N-E or the ch is a chi. But the word for giving birth or bearing a child is tekein with a kappa. So tech is a kind of common sound between the two words. They’re not actually etymologically related, but they’re close enough that it’s extremely plausible. And so Plato kind of plays on this. It’s like every technology is like a child of a father. And the people who bring it forth tend to be overly biased toward how beneficial it’s going to be and not see the weaknesses. And so Amun says, “No, you’ve got it exactly the opposite. This is not a tool for remembering, it’s a tool for forgetting.” Right, because we’re going to write things down and not need to remember them anymore. And it’s like we’re all going to be master cartographers because we have Google Maps. Exactly the opposite. We’re going to rely on this technology. It’s going to kind of become this second brain for us, which means it’s not your brain at all, it’s somebody else’s brain that you’re just leveraging somehow. So I think that myth kind of captures Plato’s own anxiety about the technology of writing, yet he’s doing this as the greatest writer of his generation, by far. And he elsewhere says that no serious philosopher would commit his most important doctrines to writing. “And I have never done so,” because the more important thing for Plato is to implant your ideas in other people. And so Plato was deeply skeptical of writing on the one hand, and yet he leveraged it to this incredible unprecedented scale to found a philosophical school that lasted a thousand years. Lasted longer than anything, any other Greek institution, arguably into the times of Justinian in the Byzantine period. And he still obviously has powerful effect on us today through his writings. And so he used his dialogues to attract students to himself, to kind of give people a sense of what Platonic philosophy was about, but he didn’t ever, I guess he kind of knew the limit. He knew that to try to fly close to the sun and to lay out your doctrines in a straightforward treatise rather than in dialogues where you’re kind of hinting at what you’re about, but you’re not ever firmly saying it, that would be crossing some boundary, maybe that the technology is not really for. So I think that is actually a good model, maximum skepticism, maximum leverage. At the same time, to kind of keep those very much in tension, ideas in your mind. At the same time that you need to know the limits in order to decide what is really promising, what’s really worth investing in, whether it’s as an investor in the strict sense, or as a culture, but also to see the incredible possibilities and to use them and to experiment and to try it out.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And I mean, there’s just so much, there’s a lot of rabbit holes you just opened up for us because back to fire, right? So we didn’t ban fire. We, on the other hand, came up with fire codes, fire engines, fire departments, fire alarms, fire extinguishers. Because as a new technology is birthed, we don’t know yet what the downsides are going to be. But as I mentioned earlier, I definitely look at all technology as dual use. And it can be used both for good and bad. It depends on which human hands it happens to be in. You can use AI, for example, for mass persuasion at scale, negatively. Right? To get people, take their agency away from them, have them become learned, helpless creatures. Or you can use it to do the opposite, to have the greatest tutor in the world and educate at a level that our old way of doing simply was impossible to do. So I’m also fascinated by the idea that, and back to rhetoric, right, a lot of the Greek myths are also very insightful about human nature. Right? I think I’m thinking of Discordia or Eris, I guess. And she did the golden apple.

Alex Petkas: For the most beautiful. Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. For the most beautiful. And that, to me also just really strikes a chord on human nature. And so I always try to look at a lot of these myths through, what do they teach us about ourselves? Because after all, we came up with them and the power of myth and symbols. I think of Marduk, right? The Babylonians, they really wanted to rule all of Mesopotamia, but they had a problem. And their problem was their god was a puny god. It was just like nothing. It was a local god. And so they’re like, wait a tick, let’s do a rewrite. Let’s rebrand. And so they came up with this myth that I’m sure you’re aware of, where their god tore, I can’t remember what kind of mythological creature it was, but it was this badass creature. And the god tore it in half and threw half of it up and created the heavens and the stars, and then threw the other half down and created the Earth. And then subsumed, I guess, 50 gods. I don’t really remember how many. And it worked. Basically, Babylonia, everyone in Mesopotamia is like, man, their god is the real deal. I guess they do have the right to rule all of Mesopotamia. And so it does seem to me that many of our myths are used for very human purposes, either controlling other humans or ruling or whatever. But I definitely think that there is so much to them that really describes us.

Alex Petkas: Absolutely. And I mean, the Greek equivalent of the Marduk story might be Zeus, who is not born the king god. He’s born to the king god. And the king god tries to eat him as he ate his other brothers and sisters. Kronos is kind of chaotic, wicked tyrant, and there’s lawlessness and chaos about the Earth. And there’s, of course, the prophecy. The reason he’s eating his children is that there’s a prophecy that he will be overthrown by his child and that his child will become more powerful than him. And so just to make sure, he makes sure he eats all of the other gods, the brothers of Zeus and sisters of Zeus. And then Zeus’s mother, Rhea hides Zeus away in a cave in Crete and she feeds Kronos a stone wrapped up in swaddling cloths. And then Kronos eats it and vomits forth the other gods. But then Zeus grows up. And it’s interesting in the story of Zeus’s kind of rise to power, which again we get from Hesiod in Theogony, it’s a great poem. He summons various deities to his side to help him overthrow his father. And one of them is Zeal. Zelos, there’s power, Kratos, Bia, power, victory and force. Nike is victory. And then Zelos are these children of Styx that he summons to help him overthrow the wicked tyrant. So I mean, these are kind of stories that encapsulate so much of human experience, throwing off a kind of crusty old establishment that is looking after its own interest rather than the interest of the people that it’s supposed to be serving. Zeus overthrows it through the power of force and zeal. We use these for good as well as for evil. But in Zeus’s case, it was for good and it established justice in the universe. So these things are very powerful. And they’re as relatable as ever today, as you can see, I think in The Greatest Lie movie.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I mentioned earlier that I’ve been kind of really fascinated with distributed value networks. The tech people call them mesh networks, but essentially what they are, systems that distribute cognition, risk, value creation across autonomous specialist zones. And if you look historically, that type of network, think of a spider web as opposed to a bicycle wheel, right? So the bicycle wheel would be Rome, hierarchy that the Roman Catholic Church adopted and most nation states adopt. The spider web is basically, you have to have conditions like the Greek city states if we want to make it geographic, where there is no central power. Right? So if you contrast all of the different Greek city states, each one was very good at something very different. And I had the thought that a great example of the power of that is the Persian Empire, they had great bureaucracy, they had great military, but they never produced a Socrates, whereas the Greek city states because there was no central power, we got all of the great ideas from them. And it carries forward. You have the Republic of Letters that gets captured when they form the Royal Society. You had, Raphael had within his workshop, it was a mesh network. He had people who worked for him who were specialists in faces and hands in a variety of things. And so you keep seeing Gutenberg, right? We wouldn’t have the printing press if Germany had been united because the Chinese had movable type centuries before, but because the emperor, no, no, no. Right? He squashed that. So I guess my thesis is, why do we always seem to default to the inferior network? And is that simply because a powerful entity comes in and captures all the value of that particular network? Like what happened as we watch as various empires displace one another. What do you think?

Alex Petkas: Yeah, that’s a fascinating issue. And, well, I think of the Greek city states versus Rome. A lot of people on my podcast, I do this combination of Greek heroes and Roman heroes based on the stories of Plutarch. Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, cataloging the greatest heroes of Greece and the greatest heroes of Rome, pairing them up. I think he was writing in part to sort of help the Greeks understand the Romans and help the Romans understand the Greeks by kind of bringing them for a fireside encounter with each culture’s greatest heroes. But my listeners sort of debate amongst themselves and in various forums like, are the Greeks more impressive? Are the Romans more impressive? Is Caesar more impressive? Is Alexander more impressive? Who are we most like? Or who do we have the most to learn from? And so there’s a constant comparison between these two cultures going on implicitly in Plutarch. And I think about this a lot as someone who’s more of a Hellenist than a Romanist, even though I’ve spent most of my time on my show doing the great Romans like Caesar and Cato. And I think one of the unique powers of Greece is that it produced a kind of cultural software that wouldn’t have been produced had it been centralized, because the Romans never produced that kind of cultural software. Or they did very late and only by kind of copying the Greeks. I mean, Roman history starts in the 700s BC with the kings, the founding of Rome and Romulus and driving the kings out. And then the Republic is established around 504, I think. And they don’t have any meaningful writing until the third century BC, until the late third. The early 200s is when we get some of their first writing, the plays of Plautus and there’s a little bit of stuff, but they don’t have literature. And even the plays of the early Roman poets are just kind of copy translations, very creative and well done and funny ones of Greek plays. And then it’s only in the, I think in the following generation or so when the Romans finally write history, their own history. It’s been Greeks writing Roman history up to that point. And Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian that we’re aware of, wrote history in Greek because to write history is a Greek thing and you’re writing it for an audience that reads Greek. You’re trying to tell your story for a literate audience. The Carthaginians know Greek, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians know. Everybody knows Greek, but nobody bothers to learn Latin because there’s nothing written in it. I mean, obviously you want to negotiate with some Roman emissaries, you might want to learn Latin, but they’ll probably know Greek so that you can speak Greek with them as Scipio and Hannibal. They speak Greek amongst themselves.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: At that time every educated person either in Rome or elsewhere spoke Greek.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. And this is very much a product of this decentralization of Greek city states all over the Mediterranean, needing to communicate with each other, vying for status, prestige, entertainment. There’s a kind of competition and cooperation between them. They’re always allying with each other and then breaking alliances and stabbing each other in the back. And it’s all very fun and bloody. I’m sure it was maddening to live through for a lot of them. But the earliest Greek literature we have, Homer is written in this kind of Frankenstein dialect that nobody spoke. Aeolic, Ionic, Doric, because he was trying to, because this epic dialect that Homer spoke, which has centuries of tradition behind it that we can’t necessarily see, because the writing didn’t exist, but it was written in such a way that Greeks from various regions could pick up enough and feel like their own ways were evidenced in the poem. Even if it wasn’t their local dialect. They could probably pick up the gist of it if it was their local dialect. Of course they could certainly understand it. But it’s this kind of blend that is a very Panhellenic, as they say, a pan-Greek cultural form. The Greek epics. And the most important Greek literature that we have from the centuries after Homer, things like Herodotus and Thucydides, the histories, the Greek tragedies, Athenian tragedy, the characters, when they’re speaking, speak in Athenian Greek, but the choruses speak in Doric Greek, which is the dialect of Sparta on the one hand, and then Thebans on the other hand. And the Spartans, they kind of admire and love and hate, and Thebans, they think are just contemptible pig farmers, but nonetheless, there’s a tradition behind it. And so they, for that reason, this sense of the power of the network is there. It’s not a political power, a military power until Philip and Alexander united in this generation after Plato. But if that network system, if that software, that cultural DNA didn’t exist, then I think the Romans would have had a very difficult time uniting the Mediterranean because they very much used the Greek power, the Greek cultural power to rule the Eastern, which were much richer, much more civilized, educated, talented provinces when they established their empire. And they kind of used the Greek model to eventually develop their own literature under Caesar and Augustus. Virgil’s poetry kind of takes its cue from the Greeks. And I wouldn’t say that Roman literature is inferior to the Greeks, although the Romans constantly talk as though that were the case, but it was something that they learned from these people who had mastered cultural power but had not quite mastered political power. And maybe if they had mastered the centralized political power, then they wouldn’t have had the cultural power that was maybe the more lasting thing in the first place.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, that’s kind of my thesis that one of the reasons why America became the country that it became was for most of our history, the federal government was very weak. The central authority in America was, it was the United States of America. And every state had lots of rights and were, in the earlier parts of our history, were far more powerful in many respects than the federal government was. And so what you got was an unintended mesh network because you could get away with doing something in South Dakota that was prohibited in Massachusetts. And then when we got very centralized, kind of the imperial federal system that we live under now. I’m not saying that innovation has dried up, but it certainly slowed from the pace of just the hyperkinetic everybody doing something different and all of the items that came together to address what became the United States, the richest country, most powerful country in the history of the world. And so I’m always fascinated by that. But let’s bring it back to now, right? So if somebody’s 22 and she’s listening to this podcast and she’s like, wow, Greco-Futurism. I don’t know anything about that. Where would you point her if she wanted to learn more about this thesis and how it’s applicable to using as kind of a framework for looking at all of the innovation and technology and the both yearning for more of that and also the desire or the fear of that. Right? That is all, any innovation always produces a sizable minority that wants it to be destroyed. I mean, just browse Twitter, browse Instagram. AI is awful. It is godless. And generally speaking, people think that’s unique to AI or now, but it’s not at all. I mean, they said the same thing about calculators, about computers, about photography. Right? And what’s interesting is the pattern remains virtually the same. When photography came on the scene, everyone who was making their living as a portrait artist was a little put off by this new technology. And what’s interesting is if you map it out, you see the same response to photography as we’re getting now to AI. The people who were at the top of the heap, who they fear that this new technology is going to nuke them and remove them from the top of the hierarchy. One thing you always see is a movement from the end product, the painting. Is the painting good? Does it capture the likeness? Does it capture the soul? All of those ideas that people would debate on whether that particular portrait was good or bad, right? The artists themselves move from focusing on that to process. Right? And you see it now with AI like, oh, no, you can’t, if in writing, in filmmaking, in all of these things. Well, they’ve shifted entirely from hey, did you like the movie, did you like the book? What moved you in the book to no. Was the book made only by human hands? And, but then what happens of course, is as it gets better and people become more and more acquainted with it, that goes away. And everyone was like, oh no, I was always in favor of. Because back to portrait painters, right? What they didn’t anticipate at the time. And this really links to the idea that as a new technology, whether it be writing or our tech of today, we don’t know what’s going to happen with that new technology. And so I think that we are generally an emotionally based creature and that the ruling emotion is fear and especially fear of the unknown. And so we get very cautious. But then as people use it more and more again, back to portrait painters, we got Bacon out of it. You didn’t have to do a perfect likeness of your subject. And in fact, this whole new school of portraiture emerged that is wild and incredible. And actually many people think, yeah, I can look at a photograph of that guy, but his portrait of that guy really captures him. So, but back to our 22 year old. Where are you going to point her? What are you going to tell her to read and watch?

Alex Petkas: Well, I think that one of the things AI really raises for us maybe at a deeper level than most, if any technology paradigm shift we’ve had before is what is really human? What is human intelligence really? What is universal about us? What do we need to preserve to remain human? Because it’s probably the case that if we’re going to be happy and flourishing, it’s going to have something to do with being us, the humans flourishing and not just seeing our robots flourish as Matrix pay pig energy suckers or givers for the robots. And that’s one of the reasons I think it’s good to go back to these earlier cultures to kind of strain away some of the dross of what are our priors and assumptions. And one of the things that I think good sci-fi does is kind of isolate interesting elements of what is essential about human flourishing that we’ve, that we are at danger of losing or have the hope of recovering. I mean, this is there in the Dune series, the force shields that they have in their battles and make it so that you can’t just shoot somebody dead with a laser because everybody’s got laser guns now. But your force shield’s going to stop it. You actually have to go up and penetrate through that shield with a sword. It kind of brings back this kind of warrior honor culture among these peoples. And Dune has these resonances with ancient myth like the House of Atreides that’s taken right from Agamemnon’s house in the Iliad and the Odyssey. So I think good sci-fi kind of looks back to what is deep and universal about human nature very often and takes cue from the myths and the ancient histories. But this is something, I think there’s a pattern that is already inherent in Homer. So we mentioned earlier about the way that Homer is drawing on this ancient tradition of oral poetry that existed for hundreds of years, probably thousands of years actually before Homer, because we can see common patterns and common, even phrases that originate from this proto-Indo-European dialect between Homer and the Vedic poems of India that was discovered in the early 20th century. These parallels. And one of the things that an oral culture preserves in its stories, that they spend so much cognitive fuel remembering, reciting. They have festivals at which poets are heard. They have a whole tradition. Why are they putting so much effort into memorizing and retelling ceremonially these stories at the highest level of society? What is the agenda there? And I think that if you look at the content of heroic poetry across cultures, and Homer’s the one that I’m most especially familiar with, it’s these stories of the gods and myth that we’ve talked about that kind of deal with perennial human problems. But it’s also just really vivid examples of heroes, of humans who have pushed the limits of what is possible to do as a human being. Achilles, facing the choice of a long, obscure life versus a short, glorious life, he can do either, but he can’t do both. And choosing the short, glorious life because he desires something greater than comfort and ease, and that ends up serving the community because they end up winning the war in the Iliad. And similar story with the Odyssey, Odysseus has a choice between being the lover boy of this nymph Calypso, but living in obscurity on this island where she promises to make him immortal, but her name actually means the Hider. She sort of obscures that. That’s like a similar choice that Odysseus is making. And he chooses to leave the island and go home and rescue his family and establish his household. But all the heroic myths tend to deal with greatness on some level. They tend to deal with stories that kind of expand the conception of what a human should be capable of. And I think that’s kind of the purpose anthropologically, if you will, of what these stories that still resonate with us from the past. Plutarch is another example of this with more historical heroes. I think they are interesting and important and kind of powerfully affecting for present generations to kind of serve as an exhortation to us to think big, to dream big, and to know what is possible to achieve as an individual human or as a culture, as well as to be aware of some of the characteristic failure modes of ambition. Greek tragedy is the great database of this kind of thing. But it’s an idea that I find really interesting from, I’m kind of borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche and I’ll summarize it in this way that people need to look, if people want to build an ambitious future where we’re flourishing and it’s not dystopian, but that it isn’t kind of a preservation of the status quo and easy comfort and managed decline. You need to look as far back into the past as you want to look into the future, which should be far, I think if you’re ambitious. And Nietzsche describes this in the Uses and Abuses of History, or the Advantage and Disadvantage of History is an early text that he wrote before he came out as a creative destruction philosopher. But he talks about the monumental style of approaching history very much in these terms. That history is above all, he says, “for the active man, the powerful man who is fighting a great fight, struggling a great struggle, and needs examples and teachers and comforters and finds none of them among his contemporaries.” And so I think that kind of captures this essence of this Greco-Futurist spirit that I think you can kind of see in Dune, you can kind of see in Star Wars. In some sense there’s a kind of, it’s from a galaxy long ago.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Far, far away.

Alex Petkas: Far, far away. And long ago, that looking deep into the past is this source of inspiration for doing very different things on the surface. I mean, American founders looked to the Roman Republic and the Greek city states for encouragement and also for cautionary tales. And they aren’t really doing something all that like a Greek city state at the time. Even if your ambition is something technological or financial, there are these universal constants of sacrifice, above all the power of the will to achieve things that people who don’t have that will are just not going to achieve. And if your enemies have more willpower than you, they’re probably going to win. If they want it more, if they desire it more, if they have, if they’re inspired, almost possessed by this vision of what they can achieve. Even if it’s bad and you’ve got the better vision, if you don’t have the inspiration, you’re probably going to lose. And that’s one of the things that you get from kind of consulting these great examples and believing you can do it too. It circles back to this concept of zeal, that’s what the heroic stories are for. That’s why it’s interesting to engage with the past if you are fundamentally a futurist. And that’s why I think this particular fusion of Greco-Futurism. But I would call the founding of the American Republic a Greco-Futurist project. Plutarch is the most cited of all the ancient authors in the Federalist Papers, much more than Plato or Caesar or the Bible. And it’s because he kind of is the encapsulation of this historic monumental spirit that I think is one of the most powerful tools you can have in forging a new future.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, I had Matt Clifford on the podcast and he had an interesting idea in that we were talking about the great man theory of history. And his observation was that after Napoleon was defeated, basically much of the philosophy of the continent was, we probably want to dampen the variance a little bit here. We want to give ambitious men like Napoleon a different staircase to climb. And that’s how we got MBAs, and that’s how we got all of that. And then of course, the Internet came along, the greatest variance amplifier until AI, which now even amplifies variance more. If you use it right. I underline if you use it right. Right? Because if you don’t, it’ll push you to the middle. And you’ll get the classic AI slop, right? If you simply tell an AI, hey, write a science fiction story that inspires me, it’s not going to inspire you. If, on the other hand, you use it as a tool and you can do all sorts of searches, it can synthesize old stories, it can say this, right? As a tool, it’s very effective just on its own. And that brings us kind of back to the conversation, how do we focus on human flourishing? My idea has always been the centaur model, right? Which is man, humans plus our innovations, plus our technologies and things like AI. We need both Apollo and Dionysus, and instead we split, right? You’re either Apollonian or you’re Dionysian. And I just think that’s wrong. We need Athens and Sparta. We need Rome and Greece, right? Because the Romans had indoor plumbing, man, and that’s very nice. And they had roads and they had aqueducts, and they were very good at all.

Alex Petkas: Fish ponds and.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly, right. But they had to borrow much of, didn’t they simply rename the Greek gods and just say, those are good, we like those.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, yeah, we have 12 too. Sure.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah, we got those. Just different names. Just different names. But I mean, do you agree, I think that the, this, the splitting it into a dichotomy. Right? And that is not the right path, in my opinion. I could, of course, be absolutely wrong.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Well, Chiron the centaur is the teacher of Achilles, actually.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, that’s right.

Alex Petkas: And all the other centaurs were kind of wild men, disrupting parties and stealing away women and some famous scenes on the Acropolis friezes. But Chiron was one of the reasons why he was the perfect tutor for Achilles is he had sort of tamed the beastly nature in himself and became very learned in rhetoric and poetry and probably geometry. Use your imagination of what great wisdom the wise Chiron had. But he still preserved that beastly element in him, but it was tamed. And that was part of what I think a guy like Achilles needed to maintain the kind of wildness and the sort of, the fact that we’re animals. We are inescapably animals. And that is a source of some of our greatest weaknesses. I mean, if anybody has small children and get them close to sugar, the drives can really powerfully take over, but it’s also a source of our greatest strength and taming ourselves too much kind of gets to the duality of technology. When Enkidu in the Gilgamesh epic comes into the city for the first time and he meets a lady and they have a nice time together, she gives him some beer and it’s very nice and he gets in a good mood but he goes back to the wild and he can’t talk to animals anymore. He used to be able to have a conversation with a rabbit. So we need to kind of preserve these originary elements of what and understand what are we designed to flourish as. And what can we design our society to enable us to flourish as. How can we expand the possibilities without cutting off the kind of more earthy elements which have to do with getting together and hanging out around the fire? If our techno-optimist future doesn’t include getting around fires on the beach, I think we’ll be considerably more miserable for the fact. So you have to take these things along with you somehow and preserve the kind of wild DNA, ecstasy of a, I mean, I’m not saying go to a rave party but there is a kind of.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Conviviality, you could go to a rave party.

Alex Petkas: I’m not saying I didn’t in my teenage years for sure. But you also, and with the temptations or with the benefits of building great financial empires out of AI businesses and great military supremacy, we have to think of what is that makes us human and what’s going to make us flourish and what’s going to enable us to keep building more ambitiously. Because if people get demoralized because they’ve over indexed one material benefit of technology, they’re going to kind of sap their spirit and lead into inertia and managed decline. We need to preserve that full extent of our nature that the Dionysian amidst, I think a very Apollonian present and future where there’s so much order and so much law and there’s so many procedures to learn and society is so ordered. It’s so hard to kind of go outside the bounds that we need to have those wilder elements and the kind of more earthy elements along with the ride, or we’re going to not want to be on the ride at all in the first place.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, but I would again argue that the very technologies that we’re talking about could give us that ability to be less orderly. Right? You can use them for cultural credit scores or you can use them to deconstruct a bunch of stuff and find synthesis between ideas that we as humans simply can’t. We can’t look at a data array of 500 million different things and pick out like, hey, these 10 come together in a completely new and interesting synthesis. Right? And back to fire again. Fire allowed us to cook our food. Right? And what did that, what happened after that? The development of our prefrontal cortex. Right? So essentially we became homo sapiens. Right? Very wise animal. Right? And it seems to me that when we started cooking our food, we weren’t thinking, oh, this is going to give us an entire new executive function to our brain and make us the apex predator of this planet. You see where I’m going? So it’s like we’re trying to, I think many people want to try to define things before they’re ready for definition. Right? It’s like we often kill the baby in the cradle because we think we know what will happen. Right? That’s the idea of prophecy. And if you do a deep dive on prophecy and its base rates, I’ll give you a hint, they ain’t good. And so what is the world’s oldest profession? No, not prostitution. It is declaring that the world is soon going to come to an end. And so we have this inherent trait in our humanity that is highly indexed on negativity bias. And look, are there evolutionary reasons for that? Yeah, and they were probably really useful at that time. Right? We are all, in my opinion, the descendants of cowards. And by that I mean we’re the descendants of the ones who, when they saw the bush rustling, they didn’t go, oh, I wonder what that is. They ran the fuck away because it could be a saber tooth tiger, but we are so far removed from that. And yet that is so much still in our base code. It causes trouble if you’re trying to find the right mix. So I’ll turn the question back to you. If you were designing the curriculum or you were designing the way for our society to optimally move forward, what’s it look like?

Alex Petkas: Well, I was thinking about this as we were talking about the drawbacks and the fear, the FUDing of every technology as it comes about. And in the case of writing, there’s been a lot of, and reading, there’s been a lot of discussion about how, long before the rise of AI or even the Internet, the rise of television and the telegraph, even Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great landmark work. And this that we’re losing the ability to, that we’re losing something important about literacy. It’s kind of like a rehash of Plato’s concerns about writing making us forget everything. Well, when writing came about, there were still maybe even more developed mnemonic techniques that orators used, that scientists use, that philosophers use. I mean medieval memory palace is actually ancient, ancient invention and through the tool of writing you can actually get that tool of incredible memory feats to more people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And writing lets you time bind your ideas and send them forward into the future. If you have nothing but an oral tradition. As people die out, memories change. Right? The grandson’s recitation of the particular great poem that his grandfather taught him is necessarily different because it’s being filtered through him. I’m not saying that’s bad or wrong. I’m saying that writing allowed Plato to send his ideas. And here it’s 2026 and we’re still talking about them and we’re still riffing on them. Right?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. And writing was crucial for the development of science too.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: No writing, no science.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Geoffrey Lloyd is a great scholar that’s worked on this, the origins of Greek science. Without writing you can’t really have a scholarly dialogue across space and time. And it’s very difficult, prohibitively difficult. And the development of formal logic that Aristotle was one of the great innovators, sort of hard to do if you can’t look at a statement as a kind of objectified thing, put it on a board and say what is the real logic behind the statement? Does the conclusion follow from the second premise? And things like that are really crucial for the development of a scientific culture that actually refines definitions and concepts and arguments precisely. But one of the things that I think that we are in danger of losing and where I think the cautionary tales are important to pay attention to so that we can spend some time at least prioritizing what we should preserve is the degrading of literacy. Not just in the ability to read, but in deep literacy, which something Postman talks about. Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows is interesting on this that reading long books for hours on end is a cognitively very unnatural thing to do. It’s not what our hunter gatherer brains are primed to do. To sit there and read a book while a squirrel crawls across your peripheral vision. That requires a lot of discipline. It requires a kind of habit of attention to develop. It’s like a muscle that we have to work out. And literacy is one of the things, deep literacy. Reading for long periods of time is one of the things that trains that faculty in us to pay attention for a long time to something that our lizard or hunter gatherer brains find kind of boring. But our higher cognitive faculties know that there is gold in this and it’s going to take a while to get through it. But we’re going to be able to refute some scholar when he comes to town, or we’re going to develop some theory of how the atom works. We need to preserve the attention abilities, the cognitive abilities that you tend to have from a highly deep literacy culture in order to maximize our potential to leverage AI and to think to use it intelligently. So I would like to see us, and I think this is one of the interesting things in a lot of these cautionary tales. There’s a kind of problem identified where an entrepreneur can come in and say, all right, there actually is a solution here. It might not be throw more AI at it. It could be like, let’s start more debate clubs. There’s a lot of debate clubs popping up. The Hamilton Society in San Francisco has gotten a lot of attention lately. What I think they’re doing is really great. And reading and long form conversations in a kind of public spectacle spirit used to be a really crucial part of American culture in our high 19th century. The Lyceum Institutes all across the country, there were thousands of these institutions where just seamstresses and factory workers would go and hear Emerson speak. And we used to have these institutions and there were incentives built in to get people out there. Reading used to be a very social activity in the ancient world. Most of the texts that you’ve ever heard of from antiquity were meant to be kind of performed. Not just plays, but even Livy’s History of Rome or Virgil’s Aeneid or Plato’s Dialogues. They’re kind of meant to be social events that gather people together where some person will read or a couple of people will read and everybody else listens and they discuss afterwards. And it’s a time to kind of connect with people and meet business partners or political allies. I think that people are craving a lot of that social interaction and there’s an opportunity for endeavoring people to go and create some of these things and work out the incentives in the right way that will make life richer as we hopefully free up some more of our time from the drudgery of sifting through spreadsheets.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I wonder too how, for example, I’ve always been a big reader, right? And I always thought that was more just because I was voraciously curious more than anything else. But when I got scolded for working ahead in a particular reading assignment in grade school rather than send me to the library. I’ve talked about this before, but they made me sit and make a Christmas tree with my hands at my desk. I think it is the beginning of my anti-authoritarian and rebellious nature. But when I went and complained about it to my father, he walked me into our library at home and he pointed at the Encyclopedia Britannica and he went, read that. And I did. And I’m a huge fan of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. I’ve read all of the books and I don’t think that’s weird, I just think it’s. But I do wonder, is it just inherent in the individual or is it something that can in fact be taught? Right? And I guess one way you experiment with that is you do exactly what you’re doing and what others are doing with the Hamilton societies and everything. So, for example, one of the things that I use AI for extensively is steel manning, particularly steel manning ideas I don’t agree with. And I do that because we all have confirmation bias. It’s naturally built into us. And I think maybe that’s one of the best things that Elon Musk has done with Twitter, putting Grok on there. Because I’ve gotten into the habit of, I’ll see a post that I think is foolish, right? I’ll just be like, this guy’s an idiot. But I’ve gotten into the habit of hitting the Grok button and saying, steel man this argument. And almost always, not always, but almost always I’ll be reading it and I’ll be like, you know, that’s a very good point. So the idea of having those tools available, I definitely think debating is going to get better, but I sense one of my worries is a cognitive chasm, right? You’ve got the EU trying to regulate the shit out of AI, trying to cut its nuts off and make sure that it can’t do anything that they don’t like. And that movement is here in the United States too. It is not in China. Unless of course, you want to talk about Tiananmen Square. But if we don’t handle it right, there will be a cognitive chasm that opens up and I don’t know if we let it get very wide how you bring the side that was not using these tools. Right? Somebody who’s got access to an AI that can build steel mans of their opponent’s argument so that they can anticipate and get ready for that argument is going to kick the shit out of somebody who doesn’t have that tool in a debate society. Right? And another thing, AI is getting better and better at understanding patterns. Right? Those are the primitive patterns. What happens when we can understand through all of his writing, Plato. And an AI is like you type into the AI, okay, Plato. What do you think about modern event this? And it’s going to be pretty good.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, it’s scary. I mean it’s not scary, it’s exciting.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I don’t find that scary. I find that incredibly exciting.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, I do too. And I mean I use AI extensively in research and I think a lot of it has to do with asking the right questions. Not what, tell me a sci-fi story, make something up that’s going to inspire me. But what are the things that have inspired the people that I admire and why? And bam. Then now you have a very intelligent presentation of what book you should read next. And I keep.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I should also emphasize which in an ideal world you should simply use as a jumping off point for your own ideas. That’s a great idea. I would have never thought of that on my own. But these other ones I don’t like. Right? But using it as a jumping off point, you’re going to be starting from such a higher level. Back to the debate. If you’ve got the ability to have the equivalent of a very smart colleague who’s like, yeah, you didn’t think about this or this, and they’re going to come at you with that in this debate. And if you’re not ready, you’re probably going to lose. And just the preparatory ability and the ability to see new. I mean honestly, to see nuance again, to see the type of thing we’ve gotten so black and white and so tribal and people aren’t thinking anymore, they’re simply brainwashed into a, and I don’t mean all people. I mean many people get captured by these ideological frameworks and they go, in my opinion, brain dead and blind because they’re not thinking.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. And one of the ways that you can break through ideological frameworks is storytelling.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally agree.

Alex Petkas: This is one of the reasons, I think that sci-fi is such an interesting genre that’s going to get more important as things accelerate, which it tends to be triggered by the acceleration of new ideas. There’s sort of precedence for science fiction in classical Athens. Look at the plays of Aristophanes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The Clouds I was going to bring. Yeah, I love. Yeah, The Birds, The Clouds. They’re really funny stuff.

Alex Petkas: It’s hilarious. And Aristophanes is at his best when he’s making fun of Socrates in The Clouds. And I think that, well, it’s a good illustration of how the introduction of new ideas always brings about this anxiety. And you need to manage that through storytelling and example giving. And one of the things that science fiction can do is, well, fiction in general kind of mediates between the rational mind and the emotional and appetitive. It’s the faculty of imagination that kind of mediates between these two things in ancient psychology. And you can kind of get people to put aside their priors by telling a story about the future that just shows them what it could be like, that could be good. Or there are some things to be concerned about that they can warn us for the present. But science fiction is not just a product of the age of science. It’s just a kind of subset of fiction that we really developed it through the art of, through these older ways, oral storytelling, and also especially literacy that allows you to craft these narratives at scale. Francis Bacon, the other Bacon in the 16th.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: It was him who inspired the fellowships at O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Really, the idea of the sending. I guess it was Atlantis, sending out all of the people to investigate and everything. And I was reading about that. I’m like, huh, maybe. And then of course, everyone’s like, Jim, that is uber geek mode. We’re definitely not going to be presenting it that way. But the thing on science fiction, one of the things that we do at Infinite Books is science fiction got very. And for people who are just listening, I’m holding up a copy of a science fiction book called White Mirror that we published through Infinite Books. For a while, it just seemed to me that I’m a huge science fiction fan, by the way. And so much of it just got so incredibly negative. Everything was a dystopia, everything was bad. Right? And stories matter. I could not agree with you more.

Alex Petkas: Aristotle calls fiction more philosophical than history, actually, because it allows you to see the universals.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yes.

Alex Petkas: And it allows you to reveal character because you can understand better why people did what they did because you can make it explicit, whereas it’s often never really told in history because you don’t have access to people’s minds. But through the imagination, you can get into that and it can be so much more instructive about what are the real problems at stake. So, and this is connecting with the old ways and for a new age, we’re always going to have to do that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And one of the projects that I ultimately want to get around to here at O’Shaughnessy Ventures is there is a huge body of, it’s not exclusively American, but it’s mostly American that maybe starts in 1860 and goes through the early 1920s of pragmatism. William James, for example, we are doing a project right now. A lot of William James papers are not digitized, and we found that out. And we have a project going up in Boston where we’re doing that. And I think that training data is vital. And I think that if you have an AI, again, just remembering it’s a neutral technology that depends on what its training data is. And I think that if you use better training data and not Reddit chats, you might end up with a much more powerful AI system than the one that has been universally trained. I could absolutely be wrong, but that’s why I think it’s an experiment worth doing.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. I mean, it’s all kind of in the user and how you use these things. But what if you had an AI that was just based on the Western canon and nothing else? What kind of answers would that thing give you for your problems?

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I’m fascinated by that.

Alex Petkas: Plato’s jealous. Rolling over in his grave at the kind of interlocutors that we’re able to summon.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. Well, this is such a fun topic for me. I’m looking at our time here. When will Zeal, the book be coming out?

Alex Petkas: We’re aiming for by the end of this year. Yeah. So I’m not sure we’ll have to talk to the book team to see how quickly we can get it out from final draft to hitting the print and in your mailbox and in your Audible AirPods, but hopefully by the end of 2026. The book will be out.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Terrific. I’m very excited about it and I will put it in the show notes. But where is the easiest place other than your podcast for people to find you online or in person?

Alex Petkas: Yeah, well, I live in Texas, so look me up if you’re ever down. And Twitter is probably a good place to follow me. I’m not that active these days because I’m trying to actually write the book and not get distracted by all the interesting things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Believe me, I’m writing a book now too and have the completely non-social media computer to work from.

Alex Petkas: Indeed, indeed. I’ve just got one. So, but at Cost of Glory on Twitter is where I post and costofglory.com is my website, which you can find the podcast through. It’s on YouTube as well. We’ve been doing some great videos.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I know it well. Well, now we come to the final question, which is we’re going to make you emperor for the day. We’ll make you a Roman emperor since you know, but you’re a Roman emperor with every technology available today. But what we’re going to let you do is say two things into a magical microphone. You can’t kill anyone, you can’t put anyone in a re-education camp, but you can say two things into this magical inception microphone. Everyone on the planet is going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is and they’re going to say, I just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the other times, I’m going to act on them. What you got?

Alex Petkas: Get to the garden and find resonance with a historical figure that speaks to you somehow in a way that you haven’t ever been spoken to before. I’ll leave that kind of enigmatic and cryptic, but those are two really important things to me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Of those two things, inceptions, what historical character do you identify with?

Alex Petkas: For the longest time it’s been Plato for a lot of the reasons that we’ve talked about. I think that he was so attuned to the dangers of objectifying knowledge and to treating knowledge as something on the page or in the machine rather than something that is in a person who has agency and will and desires. And I think that I’m really inspired by him building something that was intangible and yet lasted for a millennium. And I’m trying in my own little way to do something similar to compare small things with great.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know what else was cool about Plato is he was a killer marketer.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Oh yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: He was maybe the first and best because naming the dialogues after rich patrons and the ability to raise money. He was a multi-dimensional success story, I think.

Alex Petkas: And if you read his dialogues, I mean, from the Republic to the Symposium, I mean, there’s these constant prods at the reader, suggesting that he knows his audience so well and he’s trying to, he’s not just trying to get you to think about this idea, he’s trying to tempt you to come pay him a visit in Athens. And it really worked.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And it works, I think there. Yeah, I’m big on looking at historical characters that I admire and trying to see them in a different light. Right? I read a lot of philosophy because I was really interested in it, but I never really took, I took some courses, but it was obviously not my degree. But I personally think a philosophy degree, moving forward into the world that we’re moving into, not a bad degree to have.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Second that philosophy and maybe a classics degree. I’m not sure if I’d, you should definitely learn ancient Greek. If you’re out there and young and energetic, that’s never going to go old.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Alex, this has been super fun.

Alex Petkas: Really enjoyed it, Jim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

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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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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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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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— 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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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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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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In 1985, when Jonathan was seven, his missionary parents moved the family to San Blas — then the heroin capital of Europe — to start a drug rehabilitation center. Jonathan and his brothers grew up alongside former bank robbers, prison survivors, and people living through the AIDS epidemic. These recovering addicts became like older siblings to them. What began with one man in a small apartment grew into a global movement operating in 20 countries.

Jonathan’s memoir, Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction, is out now and published in the US by Infinite Books (order here | read the first chapter). It's a candid, powerful, and hopeful book — I'm honored we get to publish it.

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

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Highlights

Bringing Addicts Back to the House

Jonathan Tepper: And so the book starts with, and I still remember it very vividly, we had to fold all the pamphlets, which took forever, and we’d go out and it had our home address and our home phone number. And our job was like, bring addicts back to the house. And so they would do it like on a Friday evening in general, but they would do it on the weekends. And that was how we started meeting all these strange cast of characters who eventually, the drug center started and they realized the need was so overwhelming, and they started a drug center with one addict. And these men and women became like older brothers and sisters to my brothers and me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So again, when I read that section, I’m like, in a 2026 sensibility, that sounds a little dangerous, right? Because didn’t the pamphlet also have a skull and crossbones on it? And like this thing saying it’s going to be your last love of your life or something.

Jonathan Tepper: Well, I remember vividly it had a skeleton with a skull and this sort of hand, its claw sort of motioning at the reader. And then it had basically the heroin represents, sorry, the skeleton represents heroin and death. And it was like frightening for me to read it as a kid. And of course that was the point, which is like you’re giving it to the addicts, trying to scare them to get off heroin. But many of the addicts I think knew that you could die of overdoses. The life on the street was not one that was particularly pleasant. So many of them really did want help. But yeah, that was sort of my, not the earliest childhood memories, but it was among the earlier memories that are very vivid.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Let’s see if we can put you back into that young boy’s body. I mean, were you scared? Were you excited? I mean, what were the emotions?

Jonathan Tepper: I think it was probably more excitement than anything. And my brothers and I just thought like we tended to have this view that my father was invincible. He’d been like a college wrestler in the US and he could do like 30 one-handed push-ups and walk up flights of stairs doing handstands. He was just sort of very strange, very strong figure. And so going out trying to meet addicts was just this adventure. We were going to find them and bring them back.

“He grabbed the barrel and dared him to shoot”

Jonathan Tepper: But there were some of the addicts when they did come to our house and it comes out in the book, like Mahara, one of them, his nickname was Crazy and he got the nickname because a dealer had stuck a gun in his face and he grabbed the barrel and stuck it in his mouth and dared him to shoot. So they all thought he was crazy and they might have been right, but he would squeeze my hand and wouldn’t let go and so I would yell and hit him back.

So some of the addicts were pretty rough and brutish and most of them had held people up at knifepoint or one of the characters in the book was like a bank robber. We knew people who had killed others over drugs. It was not a particularly safe place.

People Didn’t Understand HIV

Jonathan Tepper: We had been playing out late, got back and I thought my father was going to punish us for not coming home on time for dinner. And then they sat us down in the living room. We thought we were going to get a lecture and they actually wanted to tell us about the HIV virus that was spreading.

And so almost all the addicts had shared needles on the street. And often it was very small groups of people where you might share with one or two friends, and then the blood hadn’t dried. And if someone else had the virus, which they didn’t know at the time, of course they would have got it. But then, as you mentioned, my friend Jambori was in Carabanchel, which is the largest prison in Madrid, and they theorized that’s probably why the virus spread so quickly, which is that you had sort of whatever one person was going to have that 200 people might get.

And so my parents told us about it in 1985. So it wasn’t like it was unknown. The Surgeon General report had come out that year. But as you pointed out, even if there was knowledge there about how it transmitted and how it didn’t, people who were HIV positive or had AIDS were viewed as lepers. So in the US, it was primarily the gay community. Initially in Spain, it was very much the sort of heroin addicts, intravenous drug use. In Africa, it was a heterosexual disease. So each region had different groups, but they were all essentially sort of social pariahs and lepers.

And so one of my early memories of my father telling me of going to the hospital where a lot of the family members didn’t even want to touch their own children in the hospital because they didn’t know if they could get it or not. And I thought, if my parents explained it to me and told us that we could give women in the drug center a kiss on both cheeks as one does in Spain, or hug the men, I thought, well, surely they must have read the Surgeon General report too, or at least known about it […] And so it wasn’t even a matter of scientific knowledge being available. It’s that most people still didn’t understand.

Get Your Copy of Shooting Up

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Jonathan Tepper, welcome to Infinite Loops. We’re going to talk a lot today about your incredible, moving, and cinematic book, Shooting Up. Jonathan, it’s almost like when I read it the first time, I’m like, first off, this is a movie, but the prose itself is just incredible. Let’s set the scene. It’s 1985, you’re seven, and mom and dad tell you and your brothers, hey, guys, we’re going to move.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah. So my parents were Christian missionaries, and they had lived in Mexico before we arrived in Spain. So I’d really, at that age, only really known life as a missionary kid. And basically your parents sort of tell you where you’re going to live, and it’s not necessarily the US wherever your relatives might be. And so they moved to Madrid.

And my father wanted to work with university students and be a student chaplain. But they settled in the neighborhood of San Blas because the rent was cheap. And at the time that had the highest rate of heroin use in Europe, and there was a very large gypsy camp, and it was like a central drug dealing point for the whole of Madrid.

And so my parents settled there and immediately started helping the young men and women who were hooked on heroin and the dream of becoming a student chaplain sort of out the window, not least because a lot of the students had very little interest in what my father was bringing them. They’d had quite a lot of Catholicism under Franco and so on. And so the late 70s and early 80s was a time of la movida in Spain. But there’s this tremendous need in the neighborhood. So my father and mother decided to give us pamphlets.

And so the book starts with, and I still remember it very vividly, we had to fold all the pamphlets, which took forever, and we’d go out and it had our home address and our home phone number. And our job was like, bring addicts back to the house. And so they would do it like on a Friday evening in general, but they would do it on the weekends. And that was how we started meeting all these strange cast of characters who eventually, the drug center started and they realized the need was so overwhelming, and they started a drug center with one addict. And these men and women became like older brothers and sisters to my brothers and me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So again, when I read that section, I’m like, in a 2026 sensibility, that sounds a little dangerous, right? Because didn’t the pamphlet also have a skull and crossbones on it? And like this thing saying it’s going to be your last love of your life or something.

Jonathan Tepper

Well, I remember vividly it had a skeleton with a skull and this sort of hand, its claw sort of motioning at the reader. And then it had basically the heroin represents, sorry, the skeleton represents heroin and death. And it was like frightening for me to read it as a kid. And of course that was the point, which is like you’re giving it to the addicts, trying to scare them to get off heroin. But many of the addicts I think knew that you could die of overdoses. The life on the street was not one that was particularly pleasant. So many of them really did want help. But yeah, that was sort of my, not the earliest childhood memories, but it was among the earlier memories that are very vivid.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let’s see if we can put you back into that young boy’s body. I mean, were you scared? Were you excited? I mean, what were the emotions?

Jonathan Tepper

I think it was probably more excitement than anything. And my brothers and I just thought like we tended to have this view that my father was invincible. He’d been like a college wrestler in the US and he could do like 30 one-handed push-ups and walk up flights of stairs doing handstands. He was just sort of very strange, very strong figure. And so going out trying to meet addicts was just this adventure. We were going to find them and bring them back.

But there were some of the addicts when they did come to our house and it comes out in the book, like Mahara, one of them, his nickname was Crazy and he got the nickname because a dealer had stuck a gun in his face and he grabbed the barrel and stuck it in his mouth and dared him to shoot. So they all thought he was crazy and they might have been right, but he would squeeze my hand and wouldn’t let go and so I would yell and hit him back.

So some of the addicts were pretty rough and brutish and most of them had held people up at knifepoint or one of the characters in the book was like a bank robber. We knew people who had killed others over drugs. It was not a particularly safe place. And my wife and others reading it, like the mother of a dear friend of mine reading the book before it got published, they said, I was very angry at your father when the book started out. And so it is quite shocking to think of putting 7, 8, 9, 10 year olds in those positions.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you had a grandmother who actually voiced that.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah, she came to visit for Christmas. And I still remember it very vividly. Raul, who was the first addict in the center, was visiting and he hadn’t showered and his breath stank of alcohol. He was a bit hungover. And he went to give her a kiss on both cheeks, which you do in Spain as a greeting. And so she recoiled and was like holding her bag. And then she told my father that he was going to ruin our lives. And I was very relieved that none of the addicts spoke English and so didn’t know what she was saying. But I don’t think she ever changed her opinion throughout her life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And what was your dad’s reaction when she said that?

Jonathan Tepper

So I think he’d already had many conversations with her. And my father had a very odd experience, which I recount a little in the book. But he studied economics at Cambridge, England, and got his MBA from Harvard in 1971. And then he had a religious experience and ended up becoming a minister. And so I think my grandmother thought that he had thrown his life away to leave an education that could have taken him down one path in life and go down a completely different one. And she believed that most of her life. I think they did reconcile towards the end.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And not only an interfaith conversion. He was raised Jewish on Long Island, right?

Jonathan Tepper

Yes, yeah, he grew up in Massapequa, Jewish. And so it was after Harvard Business School that he had a, he did a lot of LSD and particularly with chemists at MIT. He used to make it. And that was back in the day when everyone did it. He said that he wasn’t doing LSD that day, but as it was, he had a vision of heaven and hell and that changed his life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Did it get him reading William Blake?

Jonathan Tepper

I think so. He was a very, even though he was doing economics and business, he was sort of hyper-literate, like my mother. And that’s another big theme in the book is like they were always reading literature to us at dinner. And so he did read quite a lot of William Blake and Dante and then a lot of sort of things of a philosophical and theological nature, like St. Augustine, City of God and Confessions and so on. And those like our long devotionals for breakfast and dinner, which we deeply resented at the time because we just wanted to go either do our own reading, books that we found more interesting, or just go to bed.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But that was an aspect of the book that I found really interesting because I’m a big believer that education never stops. And the idea of your formal schooling, that’s just the beginning. And some of the smartest people that I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking with, et cetera, had experiences not identically similar to your own, but they grew up in families where everyone was reading all of the time. And I really took that as okay, I understand why Jonathan became a Rhodes Scholar.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah, I do think that. And it comes out in the book. At one stage, my parents didn’t even have enough money to send us to even like the missionary school that didn’t cost all that much. And my mother homeschooled us for two years. But the thing that she said was that the job of a teacher isn’t to teach the students something. It’s rather to inspire the desire to learn. And if you have that, then you can teach yourself.

And just, I think when parents have a lot of books around, just by serendipity, the children are going to end up picking books up and reading. And so there’s a high correlation between like the number of books in the home and the educational attainment of the kids. And so I think that’s one of the big things I got from my family life at home.

And one of the things that appeals to me as an investor is this sort of constant education. There’s something out there that you can study and find, and it doesn’t matter what your interests are. You could be interested in butterflies or I was interested in college, 15th century Spanish Ladino, which is 15th century Spanish mixed with Hebrew. And if you want to go away and find the books in the library, they’re there and you can do something with it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, like Charlie Munger said, I’ve never met any person in life who was a success who was not constantly reading. And that’s, my former life was asset management. And you could tell, you could tell when you were at the conferences, you could tell when you were chatting with other pros who was a massive reader and who wasn’t. And it’s something I subscribe to as well.

Let’s get back, though, to those early days, because that I just kept thinking to myself, wow, I don’t know how I would have done as a boy in your position. What about your brothers? Was there a lot of difference in the way they interpreted things going on? Like, what were the conversations?

Jonathan Tepper

Like there were four of us, even though only three of us were on the cover of the book, because the youngest at that time, Timothy, would have been like at home with my mother looking after him. But our nickname in the neighborhood was Los Hermanos Dalton, which is the Dalton brothers. And there’s a French cartoon which was aired on Spanish TV at the time called Lucky Luke. And the bad guys were this band of brothers in descending height. And it’s based on the Dalton brothers out west who were bank robbers and so on.

So we took it as a compliment that we were the band of four brothers. And so I think a lot of our interactions with each other, there’s a lot of complicity in our adventures and things we did. I think they also viewed it as an adventure. And my father and mother said that we didn’t have money, we didn’t have drugs, like the addicts weren’t going to do anything to us.

And then furthermore, I think because we were just so strange, we were like blonde-haired, blue-eyed boys, fish out of water. The addicts sort of looked at us like mascots or like pets, tagging along as a drug center was starting more than anything. So I think they had, they had similar to me a sense of excitement and adventure more than anything.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And the other thing, I lived through that period as a young man. So I was 25 in 1985. And I remember viscerally, remember when AIDS came on the scene because like the shunning, the people who would not admit, Tom Hanks made a great movie called Philadelphia about it. What was going on? Because Spain, much more, as you mentioned, Franco, Catholic, much more conservative country. What were the reactions when, because another part of the book that blew me away, one of your guys had been in prison and he said that there was more heroin available in prison than out. But they shared two syringes.

Jonathan Tepper

Yes. Like, yes. And I remember vividly, it’s in one of the chapters in the book. There’s some things where you have to jog your memory a bit or you have to sort of fill in the blanks and connect the dots when you’re writing a memoir, which is inevitable as long as it’s done trying to capture the spirit of the conversations or the way things were. But I remember it very vividly. We had been playing out late, got back and I thought my father was going to punish us for not coming home on time for dinner. And then they sat us down in the living room. We thought we were going to get a lecture and they actually wanted to tell us about the HIV virus that was spreading.

And so almost all the addicts had shared needles on the street. And often it was very small groups of people where you might share with one or two friends, and then the blood hadn’t dried. And if someone else had the virus, which they didn’t know at the time, of course they would have got it. But then, as you mentioned, my friend Jambori was in Carabanchel, which is the largest prison in Madrid, and they theorized that’s probably why the virus spread so quickly, which is that you had sort of whatever one person was going to have that 200 people might get.

And so my parents told us about it in 1985. So it wasn’t like it was unknown. The Surgeon General report had come out that year. But as you pointed out, even if there was knowledge there about how it transmitted and how it didn’t, people who were HIV positive or had AIDS were viewed as lepers. So in the US, it was primarily the gay community. Initially in Spain, it was very much the sort of heroin addicts, intravenous drug use. In Africa, it was a heterosexual disease. So each region had different groups, but they were all essentially sort of social pariahs and lepers.

And so one of my early memories of my father telling me of going to the hospital where a lot of the family members didn’t even want to touch their own children in the hospital because they didn’t know if they could get it or not. And I thought, if my parents explained it to me and told us that we could give women in the drug center a kiss on both cheeks as one does in Spain, or hug the men, I thought, well, surely they must have read the Surgeon General report too, or at least known about it.

And I met the, as part of the fact-checking process at the end of the book and making sure that everything was accurate, I referenced a doctor at Ramón y Cajal, which is the main hospital in Madrid. And I used to spend a lot of my time there. And it’s in the later parts of the book. And they said, well, the editor was saying that you mention him, what’s his name? And can you run it by him? And so I thought, sure. So I got in touch with Dr. Luis Boufón.

And then it was extraordinary. He said, reading your, he said he was moved to tears reading the book. But he said, Jonathan, he said, I feel like we were passengers on the same train in different carriages, looking out on the same landscape. And then he sent me videos where he had appeared on Spanish TV. And they were like from 1992 or 93, and some of the videos and people were asking him basic questions like, if you swim in the same pool as someone who is HIV positive, can you get AIDS? And so it wasn’t even a matter of scientific knowledge being available. It’s that most people still didn’t understand or have it and still treated people like lepers.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I just got, as I was reading that part, I kind of thought, man, already heroin addict. So they’re already at kind of the bottom of the social order. And then heroin addict with AIDS. Like, how did the people that you knew well, who were in that category, how did they deal with that?

Jonathan Tepper

So I think for many of them, they didn’t talk about it. There were some people I know who died without their families even knowing like why they had died. They died of pneumonia. I know a couple people even to this day who, their families don’t know that they got the cocktail and survived. One, I won’t mention their name for obvious reasons, but like didn’t want to be in the book, even though I had contemporaneous documentation and notes from their story.

So it is something that caused shame and to some people still causes shame. But a lot of the leaders in Betel, it’s not that they go around announcing it in the street, but they’re certainly not embarrassed by their past. It’s just part of their life story as they work helping other people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And the other thing that I was struck by was like, your mom and dad back then. I remember some of the more strident Christian evangelical types like literally saying that this was a plague sent from God.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah, that was Jerry Falwell.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And like your mom and dad to their credit were like, that’s absolutely incorrect. But did they get any like pushback from their fellow missionaries?

Jonathan Tepper

So my parents would go back to the US like once every four years. And so it’s not like they had extensive interaction with a lot of American Christians during that period in the US, but at least my parents’ supporters were always supportive and loving and weren’t put off by it. A lot of the missionaries in Spain from the mission were very supportive of Betel.

But I do think that, so my theory is the closer you are to something, the more people become real and there’s empathy that’s created. And I think that a lot of the people who fall on others in the US, basically, it’s easy to hate someone or caricature someone that you don’t know. And so I think a lot of it comes from distance rather than people who are close to it. So most of the people who were very close to my parents actually like knew people by name, and it’s very hard to hate someone that you know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Now let’s go to the makeshift drug rehab that was part your apartment. Talk a little bit about that. What was that like?

Jonathan Tepper

So in the very early days, they would have the Friday night meetings, and then the addicts would come in all throughout the week. So often we’d come home from school and see there’d be addicts sitting in the living room chatting with my parents, planning to take them to a drug rehab center. And my parents realized they needed to start a center in Madrid because there was almost no centers at the time, and most of them were outside of Madrid.

There was a young Australian missionary named Lindsay McKenzie, and a New Zealand missionary, Mike Hall. They ended up marrying each other, but Lindsay, basically, and Mike were working with my parents. And it was Raul, that sort of stinky, sweaty man who gave my grandmother a kiss on both cheeks who said he needed help and asked if he could move in with Lindsay at his apartment down the street. And so he moved in with Lindsay into his apartment.

And then Raul was a very charismatic figure. He used to like help hold people up at knifepoint. But everyone knew him and respected him. And he then invited eight of his friends into Lindsay’s apartment. And so you had Lindsay, and it’s a packed apartment. We’re not talking like a big one. It’s a small apartment living with eight recovering men. And a lot of the women in the building, naturally, the elderly mothers, like were objecting to like watching men come in to detox with menacing tattoos and unshowered.

So they left the building and found an abandoned farm near the airport, moved in, and then they invited their friends in. So there were like 30 men living on the farm. And so the drug center, just the need was so great, grew almost exponentially in the early days, just through this transmission of love and compassion and trying to help people detox. And so Raul was the first and brought his friends in, and that was like a chain reaction.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And now it’s one of the biggest in the world, right?

Jonathan Tepper

It’s very large. I don’t know the exact numbers of competitors or other charities, but it’s in 20 countries and there’s 2,000 addicts living in the program and it’s been going for 40 years.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And all of that started in your mom and dad’s and Lindsay’s apartment.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The thing that I think you do really well in the book is you mentioned earlier, we have this tendency to other people. Right. And like that dehumanizes them. It makes them objects as opposed to humans. And you do a really great job of bringing the humanity to the surface of all these people.

Jonathan Tepper

Oh, thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right. Like literally most people hear, yeah, robs people at knifepoint or gunpoint, robs banks. And they immediately label, put into a category and look no further. Was that natural in you or was it just proximity? What was it?

Jonathan Tepper

So like, these are all, I mean, it should be obvious to say it’s a memoir, and there are quite a lot of memoirs where there’s a lot of fabrication involved. But these were people I genuinely knew. And I often knew them as sort of fun characters who’d been in my living room or I’d seen out at the farm before I even found out their life story or the fact that they had robbed people at knifepoint. Quite often I’d hear their story later. And so to me, these were like older brother figures before they were ever, I mean, I knew they were all heroin addicts, but before I knew that some of them had been more violent or more criminal and locked up than others.

And I think that, to your point about writing, I think it’s very easy to caricature people. And even, you can edit this later if you want. But even like J.D. Vance, for example, like, I think the way he presents his family, his mother, his family, or even the whole region is like basically sort of caricaturing and pathologizing like a class of people in terms of addiction.

And in my view, the best thing you can do as a writer is to try to render people honestly, which is to say that everyone has some strengths, some faults. People are ultimately very complex, no matter who they are. And I think it’s not only bad writing to render them as flat and caricatures, but it’s also sort of very anti-humanistic, because ultimately these people are there. We all have a shared humanity. And what I was trying to do is to make them come alive to the reader in a way that I remembered them. And I hope I succeeded.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, no, spoiler alert. He succeeded. What did your brothers think about the memoir when you said, yeah, I’m going to publish it? What did your, your mom has died, but what about your dad?

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah. So I started writing this, believe it or not, about 20 years ago. And so I was working as analyst at SAC Capital, I was living in the Upper West Side, and one weekend I went to Barnes and Noble on 82nd Street and saw this book with a beautiful cover by Bruce Davidson. And it’s titled Flying Over 96^th Street, Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy. And I picked it up and the prose is beautiful. And it was a story of a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. His parents had moved him to East Harlem in the 1950s, and he grew up in the 50s and 60s during the Civil Rights era.

And I just thought it was like such a beautiful evocation of a time and a place and his friends, some of whom had passed. It was sort of very elegiac. And I just thought, someone needs to do this for my friends. My friends had passed. And so that was the impetus for writing Shooting Up.

And so my brothers and mother and father had read an early draft which was not as good as the final draft as things work, but they liked it. They didn’t say all that much. My mother loved it, thought it was full of hope, which captured the spirit of Betel through my eyes. My father liked it too. And then I basically just put it away when it got some rejections. And you and I can talk for hours about the publishing industry, but years later, great mentor of mine in London who’s a retired fund manager, he was talking about his parents and he said, and I mentioned Shooting Up.

And he said, you really should get this published before your father dies. My father’s now 79. He had a minor stroke last year, but he’s still working, helping people, running the drug rehab center. And so I didn’t want to bother my brothers, but I sent them the final version, asking them what they thought because obviously, and I wouldn’t like censor or change things, but at least I wanted them to know what was in there.

And even though there’s quite a lot of painful and honest things about the whole family and about each brother and myself included, my brother told me it’s like very sad but very beautiful and thank you for doing it. And so my brothers are very supportive. My father half-jokingly says that he thinks I was too hard on him because he comes across as a bit of a very charismatic visionary figure, but also a disciplinarian. And I call him the autocrat of the breakfast table, which I stole from Oliver Wendell Holmes. So no plagiarism. It’s just people who have very strong father figures will recognize that. And I told him I could have added more, and the conversation ends. But he thinks that I told the story sort of as it was and from the inside.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, your dad definitely comes across in both ways, though. Right. Like, I didn’t leave the book thinking, oh, his dad was awful. Quite the contrary. Right. Like, he’s a very charismatic guy, and you could see why he would do what he did. Let’s talk about your mom for a bit, because she’s very different than your dad.

Jonathan Tepper

Certainly. So it’s funny. One of the like, the cultural sort of touchstones in Spain is Don Quixote, and DQ is ultimately, you have sort of the idealistic knight and then you have the sidekick who’s Sancho Panza, and he’s the realist and doesn’t charge at the windmills and is trying to restrain the lord. And I often thought of my parents as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. And I made a reference to that in the book. And I mentioned like my father might have been the ringleader of the Tepper Circus, but my mother kept the show on the road.

And she really was that way. Like, she mastered all the details and made sure everything was packed and made sure that we showed up at the right place at the right time and knew everyone’s names. She was incredibly kind and loving, and she tended to talk a lot less than my dad, but she was very wise. And whatever she said was pithy and like to the point. And you remembered it. And so it’s funny, when people read the book, it’s not that they don’t quote my father, who talks quite a bit through the book, but like most people come back with a couple lines from my mother. And that was, I think, the nature of her.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I was noticing. I read it on Kindle, the pre-version, and the ones that I was highlighting were mostly your mother.

Jonathan Tepper

And that was her way. And the funniest thing was like, after when I was doing the editing and adding more to round out some of the characters, I realized I still had almost all of her emails. And so I then was able to put some of those emails into the book. And like, that’s her speaking for herself. It’s like not me inventing or anything like that. And you can really hear her voice and what she was like.

And she was just this extraordinarily kind, loving woman. And when she did pass, there’s 1,500 people came to her funeral and thousands more watched on the Internet. And it was clear, like, spending decades helping other people day to day. And it’s not in a grand way, but just a consistent, loving way. How many people she really was able to touch.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And that was a strong takeaway for me, too. It’s just like, if you can just, those incredible but yet simple acts of kindness, just look what happened from that whole thing. And it’s a theme that I think about a lot because you never know. It’s like, oh, why should I bother doing this or this, talk to that person as opposed to label them and look away. Right. Because some of the stories in here are just like, that’s why I say cinematic. I can see this. I can see them on the screen. And that’s because your writing is so good.

But parenthetically, as one who has both a book publisher but also a film company, I’m really learning that it’s almost all the writers. And you do such a great job of that. Let’s go forward a little bit and talk about Timothy.

Jonathan Tepper

Yes. So there were four brothers in my family. David the oldest, but two years older than me, than myself. I’m the second oldest. Then Peter, who’s about almost two years younger than me, a little less than that, and actually less than that. He’s like one year, two months, and one day.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

In an Irish family, you would call them Irish twins.

Jonathan Tepper

Yes. So we’re like Irish twins. And Peter, like, very close to each other. We were always like a grade apart. My school was so small that they would often pair the grades. So he and I spent a lot of time together in class. And then Timothy, who was five years younger than me. And we were all very tight, very close. We’d wander around the neighborhood, play soccer together or football.

And in, it’s a turning point in the book, obviously a little bit of a spoiler for the listeners, but it came out in a big adaptation in the Telegraph. But Timothy, I was extremely close to him. So we had a house where David and Peter shared a room. I shared a room with Timothy, shared a bunk bed. I used to walk him to school every day. And then my father would have these long breakfasts and we’d often listen to the news before that, and he would explain things to me. And then whenever I’d go on the walk to school, I would then try to impart that to Timothy and try to teach him things.

I was chatting with one of Timothy’s friends recently, and he remembered I taught them Newton’s laws of motion and helped them with their science project. And so I was always trying to teach Timothy things. And we both absolutely love jazz, and we listen to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. And it was, missionaries go back to the US, it varies by mission, but in ours, it was once every four years.

And it was summer of 1991, went back to the United States, and we were on a road trip, and my brother David was driving the car, and there was a car accident. And so a lot of the book obviously has to do with HIV and AIDS, and there’s the loss that begins there, but when we lost Timothy in the car accident, then we felt very acutely the pain of losing a son or a brother. And we had a much more profound empathy for the families who had lost sons and daughters to overdoses and who had lost sons and daughters to HIV.

And it completely changed my life. I was 15 at the time. I just turned 15. And I think like, you never recover. You never become the person you were before again. You don’t get over death. And when I wrote this book, what I really wanted to do was to try to write a book that would be something that might touch other people and let them know that they’re not alone if they’re suffering.

The people who are suffering who have lost someone or who experience grief, literature and books were a big part of our life. And C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed was a book that we read at the dinner table. I hope that Shooting Up might be one that people can read. And to those who have lost that, it can let them know they’re not alone. And then those who haven’t lost it might give them a sense of what grief is like to those who live through it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, that section hit me particularly hard because I lost my oldest sister when I was 11. And it, like, I was kind of shocked as I was reading about it in your book, how it all just flooded back in. And your remark about it changes you forever. Like, literally now, from the vantage of adulthood, I realized that, I was 10 because it was in 1971 and my birthday was in May. So I, but I stopped being a child that day.

And the effects that has, both good and bad. It’s not all bad, right? Like you get some personality characteristics that you probably wouldn’t have had otherwise, the ability to cope much better, the ability to calm down in a crisis, et cetera. But it is one of those things that people who haven’t experienced it, it’s kind of like your first child. I would tell all my kids, you really don’t know how much I love you unconditionally, and you won’t know it until you have a child.

And then the first of my children to have a child was my son Patrick. And he came out holding my grandson Pierce and looked at me and he goes, I had no idea how right you were. And so like those incredibly emotional moments in life, you really kind of have to experience them. How did your mom and dad deal?

Jonathan Tepper

So I think that it was a great line I read as I was finishing the editing and I hope I added it to the book, but if I didn’t, I should have. And someone who had lost their son said that our grief is as unique to us as fingerprints. And I think, and I thought it was a beautiful line and very true. And I think that everyone responds differently. There’s no one way of responding to grief.

And divorce rates go up significantly after the death of a child, particularly because marriage is hard enough anyway. We have different personalities. But you then factor in sort of people responding differently where people either withdraw into themselves or things might be misinterpreted or there’s all sorts of things that happen. And it was a very difficult period for my parents.

One of my father’s friends, when he read the final draft, the proofs, said we should really leave out some of the things about your parents after Timothy died, don’t mention them. And I just thought, one, like it’s dishonest. And two, I think that like no one’s going to read the book, or no one so far has read the book and said, you know what, your parents were such awful people, having a hard time after your brother died or fighting. Like people, the universal reaction from what people have told me is, I can’t believe your parents kept on going.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That was my reaction. Right. Like I, I remember obviously when you’re 10, you’re seeing the world from a very different perspective, but I just remember the what I would call stone-faced and like trying to help. I remember my mom right after my sister died, lying on the couch and just like with the blanket over her. And I just would do anything I could to try to cheer her up. My sister said that’s why I got so funny, was because, come on, Mom.

But I think your line about it being dishonest to leave that out is bang on because it’s messy. It’s really one of the most complicated and horrible things to go through in your life. And to leave all of that out would be incredibly dishonest. And it wouldn’t get people who haven’t experienced it, thank God, to understand. Wow, I maybe I better prepare for this.

Jonathan Tepper

And I’m sorry for your loss. And I hope that, I hope the book, for those who haven’t experienced it at least brings them a little closer to understanding sort of what people who have experienced it go through. But I also think that to your point about honesty, I think readers have an inbuilt bullshit detector.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, absolutely.

Jonathan Tepper

And if you’re not presenting an honest story, whether it’s about the junkies, complex characters that have good and bad, or my own parents, then they think they’re reading a hagiography or they think they’re reading a book that’s meant to preach or teach, and it’s very definitely not. It’s a human story. And to that extent, the best thing that you can do to honor the memory of people is to present them as they were with the good and the bad.

Get Your Copy of Shooting Up

Jim O’Shaughnessy

100% agree on the readers having bullshit detectors, and 100% agree, obviously, because we published it here in the United States, that this is the kind of thing that changes people, I think. And I was, when Jimmy brought me the project and I read the book and I’m like, wait a minute, he can’t find a publisher in the United States? What the heck is going on?

Let’s talk about that a little bit. Because I used to, on my first book, I went to a Barnes and Noble or a Borders. This is pre-Internet, right? And I got one of those really thick books about publishers, houses and agents and all that. And literally on a typewriter typed 100 letters saying, I want to write this book. Will you publish it? And I kept, and I got lost in a move, but I kept all the rejections. So I had 100 responses. Many didn’t even bother responding. 98 were no. And some of them were hysterical. How dare you even consider sending us this letter. Please don’t ever contact us again. What was your experience, because the UK publisher, you had that.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah. So the, I mean, and it’s not like people were falling over themselves in the UK either to publish it. And the typical response was, it’s a beautiful story, it’s very moving, but I’m not sure there’s an audience for it. Right. And ultimately, a lot of publishing today is that you have to have a platform, often social media, or you have to be a writer who already writes for a big publication where people are weekly or monthly getting your pieces, and it’s very easy for you to plug that or at least piggyback on your existing readership. And I run an investment fund.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Jonathan Tepper

And I’m not on social media because I’m trying to look after the investments, work with my analysts and so on. Not my analysts. We as a team. But that’s what I spend my time doing. So I don’t have a platform as such. I used to be on Twitter. I shut that down when I started my fund. And so I can see like why. And then I don’t write every month for the New Yorker. So it just got a lot of rejections.

But also, I think my agent put it very well. He said, publishers are not angel investors. They’re venture capitalists. They’re trying to go out and find something that’s already working. And so my agent was like, do an excerpt that goes viral. I was thinking, like, well, I mean, that would be nice, but I don’t know which chapter that might be.

And so the irony is that people, strange. So the people have read the advance review copies, they’ve given it away to friends, people I don’t even know who then sent me notes, long notes, telling me how they’ve been moved to tears. And then they’ve been sharing it with people. I was just in London two days ago for the London book launch, and I had sent it to an Anglican bishop who I thought might enjoy it because it’s a crossover book in the sense that you don’t have to believe anything to believe it. But my parents were missionaries, and I thought, this is something that this particular bishop, who’s been involved in some of these areas might enjoy reading.

He doesn’t read anything he said. And so he basically gave it to his assistant. The assistant thought, oh, this looks interesting. Picked it up, read it, loved it so much. Gave it to his wife, gave it to his daughter. The whole family read it. Then he insisted the bishop had to read it. The bishop absolutely loved it, recommended to everyone he works with and is now like promoting it on social media. His name is Graham Tomlin. Just a terrific guy.

But I don’t know them. And so I know that the book resonates. So this idea that the book doesn’t have an audience is crazy. And you can see if you look at like J.K. Rowling or John Grisham, tons of rejections. John Grisham had to buy half the first print run for his first book to help the publisher, because it was too risky. And then you have like Elie Wiesel had 15 rejections. And it took André Malraux, who was a Nobel Prize winner, to get his publisher to publish it. And then, of course, the rest is history, where Wiesel got the Nobel Prize.

But like, there’s, it’s going back to our industry with Keynes. This is like a beauty contest where you’re not picking the most beautiful woman, you’re picking who other people might think is the most beautiful woman.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Totally. And that is interesting because what I used to do is what you’re doing now. And I think that one of the things that drew me to the market and Wall Street was I just looked at it as the most intoxicating puzzle. Like, I want to figure this out. And I used to say, like, investing is the Olympics of business. Right? Because you don’t need domain knowledge on just one thing. You need to be across every industry. And how did your experiences inform the way you make your investments? I’ve got to believe that they had a fairly big impact.

Jonathan Tepper

So I think one of the major impacts, as we were talking about earlier, is the self-education aspect. And one of the things that attracted me to investing is I enjoy new challenges and learning. And I think that with the investing world, the world is always changing. So even if you’re looking at the same companies, you’re learning more every day or every month, and then you’re often looking at new industries. And I genuinely enjoy the process of learning.

And the previous company that I worked with my colleagues, which I was a founder of, Variant Perception, provided research to asset managers and family offices. And it was like a couple years before I started the fund. I was spending an enormous amount of time trying to understand the question of why were corporate profit margins so high? And the typical way I would have done when I was being homeschooled is like, let’s go find all the books. So I went away and tried to do as much reading as I could on this question.

And that led me down the rabbit hole of looking at industrial structure and going away and trying to read 100 books on that and tons of scholarly articles and annual reports that led me to write The Myth of Capitalism. Wrote another book, our internal sort of monopoly guide, looking at how industrial structure affects investing, which you’ll never see the light of day. We have it at Prevatt, but it’s like these things I often think by writing or at least clarify the thinking. And that really comes from, I think, learning.

And I forgot to mention it comes out in the book, but my older brother, when he went off to college two years ahead of me, he sent me all these college textbooks. So I learned and took all the advanced placement tests through that. But it’s like you can teach yourself anything if you have the drive and the books. And that’s sort of what I think I’ve brought to the investing angle.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I definitely think that of the most interesting and best investors that I’ve been lucky to meet, that is the one throughput. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s really good at investing that is not just a voracious reader. And by the way, not just reading business stuff. Reading widely, because I used to joke I got more ideas from the Tao Te Ching than I did from Ben Graham’s tome. I’m kind of partially joking there.

Jonathan Tepper

No, but the irony. So there’s one book that I would highly recommend to the viewers of this podcast. It’s called Ben Graham, the Einstein of Money.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s a great book.

Jonathan Tepper

It’s an amazing book. And when you read it, you realize, like, no criticisms of Buffett, but Buffett’s a very limited man in terms of what he reads. Like Munger and even Graham were his sort of sidekicks who brought other things to bear. But Graham was a polymath. He read extraordinarily widely for fun. He would translate from Greek into Latin and Latin into Greek, and he was fluent in many languages and decided when he had made all his money to move to the south of France, spoke fluent French.

And you realize that like, some people, I think incorrectly have sort of beatified, St. Warren and I know, and I’m deeply grateful for everything I’ve learned from him. But a lot of people I’ve found, even with like, I live in the Bahamas, but Sir John Templeton, where they like the caricature of the person rather than the person himself. And so they fixate on, well, Buffett just stays at home and reads annual reports. That’s all I should be doing. When in fact, like, a lot of the people in Buffett’s life and his mentors and best friend were reading widely across all areas.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Totally agree. And Graham, as a man, was always kind of my hero. Like, his life was so fascinating. And you’re absolutely right. He was an incredible polymath. And I loved the whole moving to the south of France, doing plays, translating Greek and Latin. That was my inspiration. And listen, Warren Buffett. Yes. St. Warren, I get it all. I kind of admire Warren for what he really is, as opposed to the cartoon version of him.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah. And I think most people, at least when I’ve spoken to people, they might own The Snowball. I don’t think they’ve read it. And if you read The Snowball, you realize he’s a lot more complicated and interesting than whatever caricature version people have from reading quotes, way more.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And like, people, I would know the Buffett groupies. Right. And they would literally get angry with me because I would say what to me was obvious, like, Warren Buffett gets to be Warren Buffett because he gets a premium because of all of what he’s done that no other investor could ever get. Do you think any other investor could have saved Salomon Brothers? No, but what does he get for that? He gets deals that no one else can get. Right. It’s like when he backed Goldman during the financial crisis. He was very extractive. Yeah. And I always would contrast the Uncle Warren playing the ukulele and eating See’s Candies as like, that’s a really good disguise. You’re a killer.

Jonathan Tepper

Well, I think like, it was Michael Lewis wrote “The trials of St. Warren,” which you can find online, I believe it was with Esquire. He since sort of walked it back, maybe because he wanted to interview Warren again. I don’t know. But Warren Buffett is a very contradictory character in the sense that a lot of the things that he tells people not to do, he does himself. And actually, if you look at his portfolio, his average holding period is about 12 months. When he talks about the holding period forever.

Now there’s a Pareto distribution to that, which is he has some enormous holdings he’s held forever. And then he has quite a lot of turnover historically, away from that. And so he’s just a much more interesting character than most people are even aware of.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And as you point out, The Snowball, all you gotta do is read that book.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And then you will see the real Warren Buffett. Is it true? I don’t know. This just came to mind that he wouldn’t talk to the author ever again after the book came out.

Jonathan Tepper

After the book was done. And that’s like another thing. I was very aware when I was writing my own book, not to get back to it, but more like the perils of writing honestly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jonathan Tepper

Is that often people written about honestly don’t enjoy it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Somebody asked me, why don’t you write an autobiography? And I said, because I don’t want to be canceled. I said, if I ever do write an autobiography, it will be published posthumously. And I think that’s very true. And that’s, again, we should get back to it. Because one of the things when I read this the first time, and I’m like, hell, yeah, we’re going to publish it, was like, you are incredibly honest in this book. And in an era when everyone is pretending. Right. Like virtue signaling and all that kind of stuff, this is just so refreshing to me.

And I learned just so much more reading your book. Like, the characters just come alive in a way. And it’s the juxtaposition. Right. It’s like most people see somebody, and a lot of these guys are pretty rough characters. Right. But underneath, that’s where all the good stuff emerges. Do you keep up with people that you met during that part of your life?

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah, they’re basically like family, believe it or not. So a lot of the early, most of the early generation did die of AIDS. Yeah. And there’s, and I insisted on having photographs in the book.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jonathan Tepper

Even though a lot of memoirs don’t have any photographs, I just thought one, the story is so crazy, off the wall, to use the words of one of the blurbers. But these are real people. I thought you have to put the photos in because like, it really happened.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jonathan Tepper

So a lot of the early addicts during some of the photos died, but the sort of second generation, and once the cocktail, the highly active antiretroviral therapy in 1995 came out, then if someone was HIV positive, it became like being a diabetic, it became treatable. Chronic, but treatable. And so almost all the leaders of Betel today came after that initial period. And they’re alive. Many are HIV positive. Not all of them. Many are still working away helping people.

And they’re like a family to me and my brothers. My father, after my father had a stroke, helping look after him. And so what’s funny is like, they’re very honest about their own lives, the vast majority of them, with one or two exceptions. And they feel that if they weren’t honest, they couldn’t help other people. Right. So it’s like they can say, well, I came from this background and things are going okay for me now. And provides hope to the new men and women who come into the drug rehab center.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What does your father think, looking back? Has he changed any of his views dramatically?

Jonathan Tepper

I mean, I think he’s mellowed a lot.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Age tends to do that to you.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah, he was like very strict and disciplinarian and it was very little, no TV for the first eight years and then very little after that. And then a lot of like long devotionals and so on. I think like, probably once he felt his job as parenting was sort of done, or at least he’d succeeded partly. I think then he sort of relaxed quite a bit more and. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t even know all the ways he’s mellowed, but he very definitely has. And I describe him at the end of the book as an old lion. And I stole that quote from Kermit Roosevelt when he texted his family that Theodore Roosevelt had died. And he wrote, “the old lion is dead.”

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Yeah. How has it impacted your parenting style?

Jonathan Tepper

I mean, my son is only 2, so I think I’ll discover more in the years ahead as to how I might parent. Like, right now, he’s sort of pre-literate, but he knows all the letters of the alphabet. I’m trying to, like, I only speak to him in Spanish. I want to make sure that he’s fully bilingual. I feel very fortunate that I grew up bilingual in Spanish, English, and then that sort of led me to do French and Italian, and I feel it.

There’s a quote I have in the book which comes from the Jewish writer Chaim Bialik, where he said, “reading the Bible in translation is like kissing the bride through a veil.” And I think that while you can read translations, there’s something about the essence of the culture and just a feel that you only get when you’re in the language. And so I want to make sure that Nathan, even though he’ll never have the childhood that I had, you can’t repeat that, he at least has some of the elements that are there.

And I also hope that even though we live in the Bahamas, as he grows up, he can be very involved in charitable work and even go back to Spain. And I’d love for, I used to spend my summer times working in the drug rehab center. I hope he can do the same.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And being multilingual, that is one of my greater regrets, that I never learned how to speak another language. Silly me. Took six years of Latin and it got me really good at the derivation of English words, but that was pretty much it. And I could say sic transit gloria mundi, but that was kind of it. Jumping back to investing and analysis, does it change the way you think about markets by being multilingual?

Jonathan Tepper

I mean, I certainly think that the US is very fortunate that it is so large that you don’t really have to go out of the US to invest. And then many US companies are multinational, so even there, if you want to reach the rest of the world, you don’t have to invest abroad. So in that way, like, if all you did was stick to the US, like, you’d be pretty well served.

But I do think that speaking other languages, living abroad, makes you more aware that there are companies outside the United States that they might have wonderful business models that are worth looking at, that are worth digging into. And then obviously, it was Spanish, Latin America. When the fund started, it was 2020 and COVID was happening. And so we were looking at all the, and typically, I’m a very contrarian person, so I’m generally not chasing whatever is the hottest thing. I’m trying to figure out, what do people hate and why are they wrong? And you’re trying to buy a bargain.

And so COVID happened and you had particularly like airports, airlines, online travel agents, restaurants, anything that like where you couldn’t travel and people weren’t going out, they were losers. So one of the largest positions of our fund when we started was Grupo Aeroportuario del Centro Norte, which is the ticker’s OMAB. And we held that and did phenomenally well. But it’s like, I think a lot of American investors might not have bothered because it’s, I mean, they do have annual reports in English, but it’s not in the US and if you want to start doing a lot of due diligence on it, some of it’s in Spanish. So.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And staying on that theme, how do you think your experiences that you so eloquently write about here, how do you think they changed or informed the way you invest?

Jonathan Tepper

Lessons from the book?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, no, just lessons. Not from the book, but from that experience growing up, meeting and interacting and having those people essentially become family members.

Jonathan Tepper

Yes. No. Well, so it’s interesting. The drug rehab center is totally free, and the way that it operates is by running secondhand furniture stores, gardening teams, painting teams. It runs businesses, and the addicts run those businesses. So I grew up basically working in business, helping in a very small way as a teenager, but working in businesses. So I was just very fascinated by business models, by, cash is king. Right. Like there.

And particularly when you start looking at gap accounting or accounting manipulation. Like, when I think of investing now, I’m thinking like, well, where’s the cash? Right. And the addicts had never studied accounting. Right. Many of them, to this day, don’t know accounting, but they bring the receipts in and the cash in at the end of the day to the central office, and they intuitively knew that the business should have more cash at the end of the day than it did when the day started. And I think a lot of businesses don’t actually understand that. And so that was like a very key lesson. I’m like, if people who dropped out of school when they’re 12 or 13 know that, and it works, like, that’s probably something to it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s like Dave Chappelle’s, you can never outwork a crackhead.

Jonathan Tepper

They’re like very industrious. You just have to channel that industriousness in the right way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Did any of the people who beat heroin go on to like be really successful entrepreneurs?

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah, quite a few. They would generally be set up like sort of small businesses, but like, quite a few, for example, did plumbing and heating, painting, a variety of different businesses. And I can think of like one in particular. Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago, but like, he ended up, believe it or not, employing a lot of other heroin addicts, former heroin addicts, and then the children of his friends who had been heroin addicts in his business. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And when revisiting and polishing the draft, because you started writing this a long time ago. What changed? What opinions, when you read them from something you wrote like 20 years ago and then reread now, and you’re like, ooh, I don’t think that anymore at all.

Jonathan Tepper

I think it wasn’t so much that like I didn’t, that I changed things. I think that one, like, when I started writing the, and I’d done quite a lot of writing before, but it was all essentially nonfiction and economics and history. And so I’d written like two honors theses in undergrad, I’d written my Oxford dissertation and all of that. You’re telling the reader what they need to know about history or economics. You’re trying to do it as clearly and cleanly as possible.

Memoirs, even though they are real, have to be novelistic in their approach, which is to say that great writing is show, don’t tell. And you’re trying to sort of paint a scene and you bring the reader in and you don’t tell the reader what it is they need to know. Like, the scene itself will tell them. And that’s good writing. And so there wasn’t enough of that in the first draft.

And then secondly, I think, like I mentioned Flying Over 9^th Street, my dear friend Tom Weber, when I handed him my first draft, he said, Jonathan, he said, I’m not sure you’re old enough to write a memoir. And I thought, I was very upset at him. And I realized like, some of the things that were missing in the early draft were some of these sort of being very honest about my parents or myself and so on. And it wasn’t that I was like trying to be dishonest, it’s just that when you’re writing it, you’re trying to protect everyone and you’re trying to be too thoughtful and does that really belong there?

But then with some added time and perspective, you realize that is the essence of life. And I hope to be a better human is that it isn’t binary. Right. Like, there are people in your life that might upset you one day and that you might love dearly the next. And it doesn’t mean you ever have to write them off and you can love them. And it’s the same way about family. And some people were like, that have interviewed me about it. They’re like, well, did you turn on your parents’ evangelicalism and Christianity? And like, well, why would I have to like reject them? It’s like they can live, have lived the life they led and I can live the life I lead.

But I think for a lot of that, binary thinking was there. And so I think just having more honesty and more layers of complexity made the final book, I hope, better.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, I think it definitely did. And we’re so sympatico on the way we look at so many things, because that came through absolutely in the book, like, I agree with you that this yes, no, 0, 100 binary, that isn’t really even thinking.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because anyone with eyes and ears and who interacts with other human beings or looks in a mirror knows that it’s a continuum. And just because you might not, now, I disagreed with my father all the time. That doesn’t make it that he was a horrible man. It was just like he also gave me some of my best qualities and some of the things that I got really good at was because of him. Right. And this kind of black and white, that’s a horrible way to, if you want to learn anything about other human beings or life in general.

Jonathan Tepper

And I find currently, like, even though the book’s not about it and friends and family have told me to stay away from it, but thinking of our current political and cultural moment, it’s one of the things that I find most disappointing and distressing is if you read one website, it’s like you’re living in a parallel universe and you read another, it’s sort of that way. And they’re not even in the same sets of facts. And so people don’t even speak to each other. And then there’s this sort of demonization of the other side. And so it leads people to be unable to speak to each other, to not even have the same vocabulary, to not see the shared humanity. And I think that’s deeply depressing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, again, we’re very sympatico on that too, because it’s just, it is sort of society at the beginner level. Like, othering other people because they happen to have a disagreement with you about a political position is insane to me. And like, this whole movement, it kind of reminds me of like, when you look at the totalitarian societies, one of the things was separation from family. And you believe everything. I mean, all you got to do is, I use a meme that shows a drawing of George Orwell and it says, did I call it or what?

Because this putting into camps and categories is just so low. It’s not even thinking. And I just hope that we can get to a different place because I completely agree with you. I’ve always believed that if you could figure out all of my social or political beliefs by hearing one of them, then I’m brain dead. I have been completely brainwashed. I’m not thinking about anything ever at all. And I’ve just descended into brain death, because that’s crazy. And yet it’s the litmus test. If you’re not for this, then you’re against it. If you remain silent, you’re part of the problem. What if I just don’t have an opinion? Right.

Jonathan Tepper

So one of the things like that people have asked about as well, and I think an example, my parents showing love to everyone. My parents never asked anyone what their political views were before they showed them love or they didn’t have to have, particularly if you think of America with the culture wars. Unfortunately, there are no wedge issues. Well, we can only love you if you agree with us on this. It’s sort of contrary to the essence, I think, of the Sermon on the Mount and showing love. So I hope, even though the book has nothing to do with politics, if people come away with a greater sense of empathy and shared humanity, it’ll make me happy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I think it will achieve that because, as you say, you’re not writing this at all in a political sense, but it does carry over. Right. And like the litmus test, making everything conditional is not a good way to interact with people. I will show you compassion and love if you vote for my guy, then you’re not really showing them. You’re making it a transaction, and that’s the reward. But it’s not a reward, really, because it’s fake. It’s not real compassion. It’s not real love. And so I definitely think that that really comes through in the writing as well.

What’s been the reaction from a reader, you mentioned the bishop, but that you’ve just kind of like when you got it, either heard from the person or got a letter from them or read something that they wrote about it, where you’re like, yeah, that, I nailed it.

Jonathan Tepper

So I think the, like, if no one ever bought the book, and I certainly hope people do and enjoy it, but the main character or one of the main characters, Raul, I’m still very close to his wife, Jenny, and his daughters were three and five when Raul died. And I had gone off to college at that stage, and I gave them the final draft of the book. And I didn’t realize because they were so young, they didn’t have a lot of memories of their dad, Stephanie and Kelly.

And they both sent me these sort of beautiful notes telling me that they felt that the book had brought their father closer to them as he comes across in the book and all his humanity and a lot of anecdotes and stories. He’s a wonderful character, and he was like so much more interesting than I could even put on page. But the fact that they felt that they could discover more of their dad and felt closer to him, and I just thought my job as a writer is done, not one for like making him more real, but two, the fact that they could be closer to someone who they didn’t have that many memories of. And I was, that, for me, that was, that was it. That was the highest, the best thing I ever got.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Are you contemplating any more of this type of writing, or are we going to stick with markets and nonfiction?

Jonathan Tepper

I think markets. It’s funny. Infinite described it as my first memoir, and I’m like, I don’t have another one in me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, you never know. You’re still a young guy.

Jonathan Tepper

I think I probably need another 10 to 20 years of the investing world and then maybe write. It’s funny. My friend Edward Chancellor, I had dinner with him last Friday in London, but he just worked with Jeremy Grantham on the Perma Bear book, which is Grantham’s memoir, effectively, even though Edward did a lot of the writing with him. And I was thinking maybe if I’m old enough, there might be a book like that. But no, I’m going to focus on the investing, focus on my investors, our companies, and it’ll be quite a few more years before I do a memoir. If I do one, we’ll have to see.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Do you like writing? Or is it like Dorothy Parker said, I hate writing. I love having written.

Jonathan Tepper

I’m probably more in the Dorothy Parker camp.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, me too.

Jonathan Tepper

But at the same time, I do find that I don’t think by writing, but I clarify and extend the thinking and then you can get sort of further validation in terms of like research. I do enjoy that process, but I currently find, for example, that the, my writing itch is scratched by writing my quarterly letters to investors. I don’t need to turn it into a book and that’s what I do.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I sort of do think by writing. I started keeping journals when I was 18, and I still have them all. And one of the things that I think it really does help is, when it’s just knocking around in your head, it’s still amorphous. Right. And when you’re forced to actually write it out, you realize very quickly, well, that’s really stupid. I can’t believe I was thinking about going down that path.

Jonathan Tepper

You make a very interesting point, one of my dearest friend, Turi Munthe. We’d started a business together, Demotix, which we sold to Corbis Bill Gates at the time. So I was like, he’s very close. And we spent so many hours together. But he sent me a long blog post about this issue, which is that even though I love this podcast, he said that the danger of the modern world is that many people listen to podcasts and don’t read. And obviously we’re talking about the importance of reading, but you can say whatever you want in a podcast and you never have to sort of formally lay down the logic or the steps or show the footnotes.

And so you can end up with a lot of crackpots and insane theories in podcasts that never get tested. And writing itself is a test of you have to remember what was three pages before. You have to make sure there’s a logical connection. You have to get the research right. So I think that writing itself does have that very powerful influence. And it would be a very sad thing if we essentially revert to almost a pre-literate Homeric age where we all live on podcasts and have no written record.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I actually agree with that. I generally speaking, when I’m looking at other podcasts, not this one, I read the transcript rather than listen. And maybe that’s just because I just love to read. But I think you’re absolutely right. I think podcasts are really great for like what we’re doing right now. People are going to get to know you. They’re going to get to know the book and like, oh, I should pick that up. Right. So they’re great at getting to know people or getting to know ideas, but they should lead elsewhere. Yeah, right. They should lead to, I mean, if you’re really into it, you should write about it.

Jonathan Tepper

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because you’re absolutely right. It has to have the footnotes and it has to be tested and it has to be all of those things. I think that they’re really great for exposing people.

Jonathan Tepper

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

To new ideas or new people or whatever. But then you got to take the next step. And obviously I wouldn’t have started a publishing company if I felt that people were going to stop reading. As a matter of fact, I actually think when I talk to much younger people like Zoomers, I’m seeing a tendency to what they are loving are long-form content, actual physical books, as opposed to on a Kindle or an iPad. So I definitely, fingers crossed, have hopes for that.

One of the things that we do on Infinite Loops that I, and I was trying to guess what you’re going to say after reading your book, what we do is we make you emperor of the world. You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp, you can’t kill anyone. But what you can do is we’re going to give you a magic microphone and you can say two things into it. And unlike every other idea that the people of the world have ever had, the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their next day is. And your two things you say into the magical microphone, they’re going to think are their own idea and they’re going to say, you know what? Unlike all the other times I’ve had these great ideas, either in the shower or when I got up, I’m going to act on both of these two things right now. What are you going to incept?

Jonathan Tepper

I mean, I think there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. I think the big problem in society, not that we don’t have good values, it’s that we don’t live by them. And I think that do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. If everyone woke up the next day and did that, I think the world would be a much better place.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So the golden rule, that’s your first one. That’s a good one.

Jonathan Tepper

I think that would solve a lot of problems. I agree. And then probably I would say don’t hurt others. I think so much of fascism, totalitarianism or chauvinism, you do away with that. Now, obviously the world doesn’t work that way, which is why you do need militaries and you do need the police and you do need people to protect you and you do need, as Orwell said, sort of men who commit violence to others at night. But if I did have that magic wand, probably those I’d do.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Those are two wonderful ones. The book is out now. I highly, obviously I’m biased because we’re publishing it, but I’ve read it more than once and it is an amazing read. Available everywhere in the United States, in the UK and the way things are these days, they can get it if they’re not in one of those two locations.

Jonathan Tepper

Instantly via like Kindle, iBooks or whatever their preferred platform is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, Jonathan, fantastic book. I think it’s, I loved it when I read it the first time. I loved it even more when I reread the final edited version.

Jonathan Tepper

Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Thanks for coming on.

Jonathan Tepper

Thank you so much. Been an absolute pleasure. I’m a huge fan of yours. So it’s great.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I of yours.

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We get into what it means to build a creative life on your own terms, the Taoist approach to growing an audience, how to navigate financial uncertainty while raising a family, and why seemingly boring daily routines fuel extraordinary creative work.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights 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

• Paul’s Newsletter

• The Pathless Path Premium Hardcover

• Good Work

• Infinite Books

Links

Highlights

Creatives Are Scared of Releasing their Work

Paul Millerd: I always think of these hypothetical conversations with creatives from hundreds of years ago. Somebody like Van Gogh, who died sort of in despair, didn't get to share his work with the world. And he would just be talking to you and saying, ‘Wait, you can just post your stuff to the Internet? That must be so expensive!’ ‘No, you just post it for free.’ ‘Wait, what do you mean?’ ‘But everyone's scared of doing this. They don't want to do it.’ ‘Wait, what do you mean people are scared. It's free. They can just...’ They would freak out. Or even women throughout history, they would say, ‘Wait, I can just share my actual name and write and create as a woman?’ ‘Yeah, people do it every day.’

A Writing Life is a Boring Life

Jimmy Soni: Most of my life is epically boring. Like epically boring. It's the reason there should never be movies made about most people who do writing. It'd be interminable to watch. I mean, it would be awful. You sort of sit around on the thing and type away. But that boredom or that appearance of non-excitement of just a kind of basic boring life is what enables stuff to happen on the page that is epic and amazing and lights up and hits all of our dopamine centers. It allows you to have the discipline that creates the work product. Because if you are going to parties every night, you're going to be exhausted. If you are trying to network with everybody, you end up having very shallow relationships with a lot of people who aren't going to enable you to do the creative thing you want to do.

Letting the Universe Take Over

Paul Millerd: I literally approached my first book as a Taoist. I didn't ask anyone to share it. This seems crazy. I literally did not ask a single person to review the book or share it… I did gift it to people, but I never asked a single person to share it. Now I have asked a few people with this recent one, but still not that many people. The idea is let people network. Let the universe take over. And so Ali Abdaal was a reader of mine, found my blog through his brother. He supported my pre-sale. He put a hundred bucks on the Gumroad pre-sale. So I said hey, can I just send you a stack of books? So he started gifting my book. People loved it. He ended up quitting his job in medicine. And he made 10 small videos, posts, mentions of my book. I never once asked him to share my book. And so all these things keep happening.”

The Books Business is Positive Sum

Jimmy Soni: …the broader business of books, the best thing about them to me is that they are win-win. It's a positive-sum business. Like what I love is promoting my friends' books who are authors. Because I know that if there's... even at the level of rank self-interest, if there are more readers in the world, there's more likely to be somebody that picks up something of mine.

Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.

Jimmy Soni: It's one of the best things about being in this business is it makes me feel great when more people speak highly of your work and vice versa. It really is the case that it's the rare industry where one person's win is not another person's loss. And I think there are actually precious few industries like that. It's not competitive in the same way.

Paul Millerd: We're competing against TikTok and Netflix. We're not competing against other books.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Well, hello everyone, it’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Tonight I am very excited because you’ll note I said tonight. It’s tonight here, but it’s very early in the morning where my guest Paul Millerd is. You are in a completely different time zone. It’s your morning, we made you get up really early and this is just kind of easy for us. And I also have my colleague Jimmy Soni, the CEO and editor-in-chief of Infinite Books. Welcome guys.

Paul Millerd:

Excited to be chatting books.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

So Paul, this is great. Let’s start. For most people who don’t know, let me give you the proper introduction. You self-published a book called The Pathless Path. You have 2,500 reviews on Amazon for a net 4.5-star rating. Good for you. And your newest book is Good Work: Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition. You already have 170 ratings there on Amazon. You’re doing something right. But you also, and I’m holding this up for people who are just listening and don’t see this, you really are missing out because Paul just put out one of the most beautiful hardcovers I’ve seen, which we’re going to talk about. Absolutely gorgeous. This is the kind of book that you really want to have on your shelf. Paul, congratulations. It is a thing of beauty.

Paul Millerd:

Thank you, Jim. And you have copy number one. So if it becomes a collector’s item in the future...

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, we were talking, Jimmy, you weren’t on yet. We were talking about that. Saeah brought it to our OSV offsite, but she had pre-cleared it with Paul that it was cool for her to bring it, but I got to see it before Paul got to see it, so I did feel very special. But it’s gorgeous. Paul, let’s start with that. Jimmy and I are very aligned on this issue about physical books and making them really beautiful because their books are beautiful. And often when print-on-demand and things like that, you’re just not getting a beautiful book. It’s still very educational and it’s still really good for what you want the book for. But there really is something about a beautiful book, holding it in your hand. Was that what motivated you, Paul?

Paul Millerd:

So as background, I self-published a book, The Pathless Path, on my own almost four years ago now. I didn’t really even think about marketing and selling it while I was writing it. It was just this extension of I like writing, let’s double down and go deeper on books. I think through the process of writing it and launching it, I got into the world of other authors, the publishing industry, all these sacred beliefs about how you do a book and put things out. And found myself opposed to many of the ways of being and ways of marketing and sharing books. My book was literally called The Pathless Path about reimagining different paths in life. And so after my book was out in the world and started taking off, I just kept experimenting with different ways of sharing it, having fun.

One of the big things I did was just gifting the book to lots of people because I found people like talking about it and gifting it to friends. And so about a year after I launched the book, Penguin reached out to offer me a book deal for the book that already existed. Long story short, I’ve written about this, you can look it up. They offered me 70 grand for The Pathless Path and 130 grand for a second book. They basically wanted me in their orbit and I was making about $10,000 a month in royalties from the book at that point because it had just started skyrocketing. So after agent’s fees, they were offering me an advance of about four or five months of income. And their idea was to take it out of print, put a new cover on it, do something to it.

They wouldn’t give me details and then relaunch it. And so I just got a bit annoyed by this and frustrated. But also after the call, I was just so excited. I’m thinking, wow, these are the best and I’m doing pretty good. What if I double down on self-publishing? And people would say, oh, well, self-publishing people, you can’t do a good hardcover. They just do it way better. And basically I am a competitive person. I just said, hold my beer, let’s see what we can do.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Well, Jimmy, I’m going to let you chime in because you and I have very aligned ideas about why we would go to all the trouble to start a more traditional publishing company. But we had a lot of the same reasons that Paul has, don’t we?

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, I mean, I was laughing and had to mute myself while you were explaining your story because you sort of gave the thesis for what we’re trying to do. And I think, I mean, look, this is a rare podcast where I get to be one part audience member because I want to listen to you, one part just asking you questions. So I guess I’m part host and I’m also a part contributor. So I’m going to try to balance those roles as best I can. But you know, you experienced something that I obviously experienced as well with traditional publishing. And I think before we launch in, the disclaimer that’s important is I worked with really great people, really great individuals within traditional publishing, but I think the institutions have become a big problem.

I mean, what happens is that you have these super talented editors who would kill for their books and go the extra mile and do the work, and graphic designers who are doing incredible stuff, and copy editors that are just second to none, but they’re locked in a system that is basically designed so that they can’t do their best work either because they have so much of it to do that there’s no attention to quality control, or because the relationship between author and publisher doesn’t... for an author like you, who’s entrepreneurial, you’re like this entity they’ve never seen before. Like, wait, Paul, you know how to sell, market, create your own books, do everything. We’ve never seen that before. And so when you justifiably ask a traditional publisher, well, where’s the beef?

What exactly are you going to do with my book to make it so much better? And their answer is, well, just trust us. That’s not really a great answer for somebody like you. But I want to add the disclaimer that there are phenomenally talented individuals within that industry, but the entire industry, the entire process needs to be rethought for a digital age. Because in point of fact, like Paul, like Infinite Books, our publisher, we have to offer something to you that you can’t do yourself or cobble together with freelancers. And it has to be so good. And the royalties have to be in your favor because of what you just explained. And so that is the trick. And what I’m curious about is, there are probably people in your ear saying, take the deal with Penguin.

What were you thinking about when you were having those conversations with them? Did you ever get to a place where you’re like...Maybe I should do this?

Paul Millerd:

My story is 10 years in the consulting industry and then realizing the people above me are participating in committees and meetings and trading off creative choices for things they don’t truly care about. And I quit that path because I really cared about creating and doing things that mattered to me. And so I had four or five years of doing that on my own before I talked to a team like Penguin. And so it actually wasn’t that hard to walk away from that. I also had played Prestige Bingo in my 20s, I like to call it. I literally worked at McKinsey. I went to business school.

Jimmy Soni:

I’m a McKinsey alum as well. Recovery McKinsey guy here, too. That’s pretty funny. I didn’t know that, actually.

Paul Millerd:

Well, the funny thing is I loved McKinsey. The people there were great, and it pushed me to be better. But what I encountered... I had also worked at companies that weren’t all that great. And what I encountered in talking to the publishing firm is I met people that just weren’t up to my standard. And exactly like you’re saying, though I spent nine years as a strategy consultant, it is not the people, it’s that the incentives do not enable the level of caring I wanted from the industry. And so looking from the outside in, there’s no way they can actually help me. The only way they could have helped me is if they offered me a big enough advance that they would then have internal pressure to actually deliver bold results for my book.

And so it’s really interesting being in some of these book group chats. Almost categorically the people who got enormous advances, their books are crushing it because they got the best teams and they got the best energy behind it from these traditional publishers. So they can really deliver, but they’re not going to care about a book they spent 70 grand on.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I think as far as disclosures, I am the first to also say I love books. I love everything about books. I’ve written four books. What Works on Wall Street literally made my career possible, and McGraw-Hill published it. And I’m eternally grateful that happened. But the more authors I would talk to, we all had the same complaints. And when I first met Jimmy and we were talking about it, I’m like, man, it sounds like, if anything, publishing’s gotten worse from when I was doing my books in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And it just seemed to me that traditional publishers, again filled with really super talented people... but the people aren’t the problem. It’s the design of the company and the way that they do the things that they do that we think offers a huge arbitrage opportunity.

And like every author that we talk to, it’s just like we kind of have met. Hello. Because Jimmy and I are both authors. I’ve done four. Jimmy’s a much better author than I am, but we have the same complaints. And then when we go and talk to others, it doesn’t matter if you’re talking to... I got one of the biggest advances for a personal finance book ever given in the late 1990s for How to Retire Rich. And yeah, man, they gave me... I was this featured speaker at the big conference at the publisher. They put me on the road. The book tour was grueling. They really threw all of their weight behind me. And the book was a bestseller. Yeah, but...

But then I got an opportunity to be on Oprah Winfrey, and my agent called and said, how many books do you have left? Because you’re going to be on Oprah. You’ve got to print more books. And they were like, yeah, no, we earned out on that book. We don’t need to do that. And I was like, are you insane? Literally, I would go to Amazon after I was on Oprah. Only for five minutes, mind you, but afterwards it went to number one on Amazon until it literally sold out. And I just thought, what kind of analysis are they doing where they’re just like, yeah, nah, we’re done with that one. We’re moving on.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah. I think when you’re talking to authors, you’re winning people over because you have an optimistic vision. The thing I noticed about this industry, which I wrote about in the essay I put out called Reclaim the Book, is that it generates cynicism at scale. So the way I think about creative work is creative work should inspire more creative work. I’m so inspired by people like Jimmy. Most people, especially in the business world, don’t know about the range of books he’s done. You’ve done books that are truly creative. You’ve done books just because you felt called to do them.

And you’re going to keep going. And so you’re exactly the kind of person a theoretical creative industry would want to rally behind and partner with over the long term because I guarantee you’re going to continue doing more cool stuff. But what I find is all these authors... I was talking to somebody last week, I was like, we should partner on this small book. It would be great. We’d crush it. “I don’t know if I can do that. I’d have to ask for permission from my publisher. I’m just scared to ask because my book’s not out yet.” Another person said, “My book didn’t sell out. They’re not even printing anymore. It’s not even worth talking about.” Another person said, “Oh, they gave me a weird subtitle and I feel awkward talking about it. So I just don’t promote the book anymore.”

These are the most creative, driven writers of our generation. What are we doing? And so part of this is I want to inspire more people to actually orient around decisions that maximize their creative longevity, creative bets. And doing things like this, we’re not getting some of the best writing. Our best writers are choosing rightly to just stay on Substack because they don’t even want to engage with books because they see it as it’s going to be too exhausting or it’s just going to be draining. It’s going to take too long and this is not good.

Jimmy Soni:

No, and I’ll double down on this one. And I appreciate the very kind words, Paul. And likewise, I’m an admirer of yours. And the way that you’ve literally lived the title of your book, lived the pathless path, and then have inspired goodness knows how many people to do the same. This cynicism at scale thing is an important thing to combat because people... I think people underestimate the psychological toll it can take for somebody who submits a proposal or submits a piece of writing or has a novel. We had an author that we’re still talking to. If I said his name, you would recognize his name.

He’s had multiple New York Times bestsellers, sold a lot of copies of his books, and he decided that he was going to do a book in a genre that was different from the one that he had tremendous success in. I mean, made his publisher millions of dollars. And he went to his agent and he went to his publisher with this book in a different genre. And I’m being, understandably, very careful about the details here. And they said, “Well, you’re really not that kind of writer. You should really stick to the books you’ve been writing because those have done so well.” And it actually... even for all of his success, it actually... I think it took an emotional toll. It actually hurt him because it was these people who he trusted with his creative...The fruits of his creative labor saying, “No, we don’t think this is very good.”

Right? Despite having no evidence that it’s not very good and having a lot of evidence that everything else he’s done has been phenomenal. And I think people, when you’re dealing with these things, people are like, oh, well, everybody could just do what Paul and Jimmy and Jim do and just go off and be intrepid and do the thing and launch the thing. And I think there is this audience that we hopefully are speaking to where there are people who get that rejection and they’re just going to... that’s it. The project’s dead. It sits there and it dies. And it’s one of the reasons I really admire what you’re doing, which is speaking directly to those people, to say there is a different way. Because that psychological jab is powerful.

It can set people back decades in their work. And I think it’s important to address it. I hate to say it, but this is one of the things that publishing does very badly. They say no to projects that have a lot of potential. And we see it again and again how there are so many successful books they said no to, or that they placed a $10,000 bet on or a $50,000 bet on. And then they go on to make multi-million copy bestsellers out of those. Those authors are successful, but it’s still so tenuous, even for them. And I think this is something you’ve identified that’s really important to kind of talk about out loud. Because if we don’t, the industry doesn’t change.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, it’s this industrial age mindset that says you have to fit into a specific job type, a market niche, things like this. And maybe that made sense in 1980 when there was just less distribution and you really did need to hammer specific marketing channels. But the Internet changed all of this, and we’re just pretending like it doesn’t exist. The publishing industry still prices ebooks incredibly high, and they’re not taking advantage of price discrimination and pretty basic economic principles to push different things to different audiences and maximize the scale of things. The Pathless Path was ultimately a niche book that resonated with a very specific kind of person.

And through ebooks, I was able to sell a ton at a low price and then build a lot of interest to where people are now buying things like paperbacks and now my hardcover, and so you can bootstrap a career. But there are just all these things that are not factored into the traditional system. And a lot of people take those ideas and just assume them for work they’re doing on an independent path too. And I’m still pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and all the things you can do. It’s still so early. There’s so much opportunity and potential for doing different things and just hammering home very specific niches and delighting these people. And so I’m willing to burn a lot of personal capital and actual financial capital to figure this out, mostly because it’s fun.

And so if it inspires other people to take weird paths, that’s great.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. And your point about us being locked into a mindset that may have been appropriate for the industrial era is such a great point. One of the things I often say is, yeah, publishing is using best practices, but the problem is they’re from 1925, not 2025. And a whole lot of incredible innovation has occurred over that time period that gives you so many different paths to go down to get a book in front of the right audience. We now have the ability to literally segment. You say you’re a niche book, right? Well, the tools now exist to get that type of book in front of the very people who are going to want to read it. And this whole idea of using a shotgun approach or throw everything against the wall... sure, I understand that.

Before the Internet, before AI, before all of the various tools that you can have to really get a customized marketing plan that doesn’t just last for two weeks, it lasts for years and years. Because that’s the other part. Like the example I gave with my book. Like, no, we earned out, we’ve moved on. And that is so shortsighted because you are a testament to this. The public was able to read your much-reduced-in-price ebook. You start building an audience and guess what? They start telling their friends and they’re like, oh, I should check that out. And then all of a sudden, I’d really like a hard copy of that. And then, voila, you’ve got a real franchise. I just... it offends me as a capitalist that they’re leaving all of that just sitting there unaddressed.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah. So imagine how many books... I know you’ve purchased the rights from some books from the big publishers. There’s so much potential and you don’t need that many readers or fans. There might be 5,000 readers of a book, but they’re maniacs and they want 10 more books or 10 different versions. And so the real enemy is not actually the traditional publishers. It is the fact that the narratives and propaganda around this industry have a psychological hold on people. And so because of that, authors don’t even consider alternative paths and people don’t consider building new publishing houses and new options. However, I sense in the last couple of years there has been a shift. I’m already seeing multiple firms like yours which are making the bold bet. And it’s still such a challenging industry. It’s really hard to make money at scale.

The natural trend line of a book is maybe up and then it either plateaus or goes to zero. That’s incredibly hard to build a business. And there’s a reason all these big publishers are making money off a long backlist and use that to fund the business. But if you start thinking beyond books and start thinking of writers as people who are creative people, there are just so many other avenues.

Jimmy Soni:

I think the other part of it is the natural graph on a book doesn’t have to follow that trajectory. If you are a careful steward of a book, whether as an author or as a publisher, and you continue to do promotion knowing that there’s an asymptotic limit of potential readers, but you’ll never hit it. And so you should just continue to promote and promote in ways that are not smarmy and weird. Just organically finding your audience, connecting with that audience, pushing it to that audience, and then finding new audiences. You know, my last royalty check for The Founders was bigger than the one before that one. And that’s a powerful signal.

It means that in my latest... the latest six months or whatever, because the royalty system itself is just so screwed up and you get these pieces of mail that have hieroglyphics on them. You have no idea what they say. I mean, it takes a PhD to understand a royalty statement from a big publisher. If someone’s figured it out, drop me a DM on Twitter because we’ll hire you. But the point is that I knew then that what I was doing was working because I had found a new audience for this book, knowing that the book is evergreen, that there’s always going to be interest in a subject like this. And I think that is actually one of the things that you identified as well, that you can make the business work.

You just have to not spray and pray and publish a thousand titles a year and hope that a few of them are super successful and then write the rest of them off. Which is a model that just doesn’t work in this industry. And also, you’re taking people’s blood, sweat and tears that they pour into creative projects and saying, well, we’ve got 10 titles that we’re going to make work this year. And the rest of you, good luck to you. You should be so lucky as to have published with us. Which is just super unfair. And it’s what you said.

It’s the myth-making, it’s the artifice, it’s the storytelling around the industry that has made this seem like, well, you should be so lucky that a publisher wants to work with you because there’s no other way to do this. And then you’re consigned to the dustbin. And then authors get frustrated and they never come back and do another project.

Paul Millerd:

Well, it’s also just sort of sad because there probably was a really cool win-win offer. It looks something like, oh, we’re going to double down on your book. We’re going to keep it in. We’re going to let you keep ebook rights. We’re going to release a workbook for you. We’re going to get that out in two months. We are going to release journals. We are going to do some really cool stuff with the brand and help you double down on that and make money from it to help spread the meme. But they just have one move. And so the Internet really... I mean, Jim talks about this in every episode. The Internet changes the economics and dynamics and possibilities of literally everything.

And we have not caught up yet mentally to actually build businesses that are thinking about that from first principles outside of the tech world. And a part of keeping my book was just betting on that future, knowing that, okay, my book is spreading. The emails I get from people are insane. They send me long essays about how it’s changed their life and seeing other models of books that have sold for a really long time and realizing, okay, I care about this book. The industry is going to keep presenting more and more interesting options. All I need to do is just wait and keep doing what I’m doing. But for them, my level of caring about the book is actually incidental. In their business case, it doesn’t matter. And so for me, I valued the caring so highly.

And I don’t see it as a cost to talk about my book and promote my book because it’s literally just part of my life. It’s so fun. I love this so much. I love writing. I want to keep doing this. I want to keep living in this way. If somebody came to me with creative and interesting and bold, optimistic ideas, I’m down to collaborate with anyone. But those people aren’t walking through this door.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And the other thing that we know by studying both writers and the industry itself is you guys, you and Jimmy are the ideal authors because you both think like entrepreneurs, you think in strategic terms, you reason from first principles, you love to promote your own work, et cetera. What we’re hoping that Infinite Books can also unlock is the author who prefers to... they’re not as aggressive as you or Jimmy. They’re incredible thinkers, they’re incredible writers, they’re really creative. But they’re a little more reticent about the whole marketing aspect. And for those types of authors, we think that the package of services that we are going to be able to offer them is going to make it as fun for that type of person as it possibly can be. Like, nobody...

Nobody wants to go on, as Jimmy said, a spray and pray. Nobody wants to go on a podcast where the host has literally no idea about your book. They just... they got it pitched to them. They’re like, oh, yeah, this might be a good guest. And somebody else does the research for them and they’re reading the same 12 questions that they get on every other podcast. And that’s not a fun podcast to be on. A really fun podcast to be on is one where the podcaster read your book, loved your book, knows your book so well that he or she is going to ask you questions you’re going to be like, wow, nobody’s ever asked me that about my book.

And then the whole process is just far more enjoyable, far more fun. The author, him or herself becomes far more engaged. Because it’s not just... I remember doing the drive-time radio on satellite. So I sat in an office in Manhattan and we started with East Coast drive time and then went west. And I did, I don’t know, 35 interviews. And it was just so obvious, with a couple of exceptions, it was so obvious that the radio person I was talking to had no idea who I was.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah.

And, well, you’re quoted in my book, Jim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yes, I am.

Paul Millerd:

So this is perfect.

Jimmy Soni:

So, Paul, I have a question for you.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, go ahead.

Jimmy Soni:

What prompted the... was the hardcover the natural... how did you approach the hardcover differently than the paperback? What were some of the principles, the thoughts that you used as you were designing it? Because it’s a beautifully designed... it’s an object. It’s an objet d’art. It’s actually something that people would feel proud to feature in their homes. And I’m curious what that process was like for you that was distinct from doing just the paperback.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah. So the paperback and ebook I just sort of put out. I think after I launched, I actually learned a lot about how to format and design a book. I definitely made a bunch of upgrades over the first year as the book started taking off and learned a lot through the process. I think it was always this question of, okay, printing hardcovers is not super easy. You can do them through IngramSpark. They’re not... I think paperbacks are on par with the ones traditional publishers do through Amazon, unless they’re investing more in a special paper or something. But the idea was, okay, how could I do something that’s really interesting in hardcover?

And it started out mostly with a question of how could I create something that’s interesting and high-end, a bet on books itself, because people have always said, oh, you should do speaking gigs, you should do courses, you should do all these things. And I actually just wanted to make money from books. So it started with that. After I turned down the deal with Penguin, I saw this book from the Steel Brothers. It’s this reimagined version of Walden and the front cover is just text and it had these bolded words and it was just beautiful. And I joked that I felt mimetic desire for a book instead of somebody else’s life or something. And so it started with that and I started talking to people after I talked to a couple hybrid publishers who were talking to me about print-only deals.

I eventually found Saeah and as soon as I talked to her, she had a very similar vision and care about the book itself. Now when I first started, I was very scared to spend money. I’ve been working on my own money and securities and going through a process on that. And so originally it was like I’ll spend 10,000. And I think throughout the process my goal from when we started is I want to create the sexiest book people own. And so in order to actually do that, I had to abandon business thinking throughout the process. And I joke, MBA Paul was in my head like this isn’t going to net out, this isn’t going to be a smart decision. But part of the process was, okay, I do have some cash flows. I could take money from my royalties.

I did have this crazy year where I earned way more than I was spending. What if I just say screw it and go beyond the rational business model thinking of this to actually push the limit of something that is truly extraordinary, beautiful. And so Saeah will keep giving you options to spend more and do more beautiful things. And I just basically kept riding the wave and checking my bank account and saying, okay, I’m not going broke, I can still fund this from cash flow. I had a huge moment of panic the two weeks before I launched it and announced it. But now that it’s out there, I’ve pre-sold close to 200 books and I’m feeling good about it. That’s about probably 20 to 30% of my investment. And I’m feeling a lot better about it.

I think in the next couple of years it’s sort of this idea. I’m going to pivot more to direct sales, continue to sell this. People are going to continue discovering The Pathless Path, my other book. I’m going to start selling Good Work and The Pathless Path direct through Shopify as well. So I can start experimenting with bundles, putting the audiobook on there. And so there’s a lot of potential there. I can also sell this journal I created that’s part of it. And so it really is a pathless path on this journey. Will it work out financially? I don’t know. But I think I can still win even if it doesn’t turn out financially because I’ve now just basically made this crazy bet and people will be like, well, Paul’s just this insane person that’s going to do these things he cares about.

And ultimately, yeah, as a branding exercise, maybe it’s expensive, but it can work. And there were also other people that have proved that this can work. Craig Mod with nonfiction books and Brandon Sanderson with fiction books. I don’t have as big a reach, an audience or as impressive friends as these people. But my entire path has always been how can I do the thing before I’m theoretically ready. Everyone thinks, oh, I need more money or a bigger audience to do the thing. And I’m always just more curious about how can I do that now before it makes sense.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

So what was the pivot point where you mentioned you were really anxious about spending that amount of money? Was there a certain satori or aha moment where you’re just like, fuck it, I’m going to do it?

Paul Millerd:

It was a continued series of fuck it. I think I realized through this process I just care so much about the creative decisions and the delight of... I mean, as a writer, I don’t think about making money ever really. I’m walking around all day thinking about sentences and paragraphs and how do I pull together a paragraph and package that and oh, how could I reword that? And it’s hard to still make money. But that’s how I felt about this book. It’s okay, I want to get these texts on a page that’s never been done. Hiring a high-end illustrator is very expensive. But she showed me some of the first drawings. The cover was one of them. And then it’s just like, oh man, this is what I want to be spending my money on.

I’d rather be spending my money on this than Amazon ads or any other growth strategy. So I think for me, it was one, just spending in the direction of my creative impulse. And that gives me energy just as a human. And then two, I don’t know if the fear fully went away. I think launching and getting people actually buying it is very energizing for me. I’m not a launch person. I don’t like promoting stuff before it’s actually out. It’s way more fun once it’s out and people can engage with it and talk to other people and talk to me about it.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, that’s it. I mean, you’re speaking my language and Jim’s language almost word for word. And I think just to put a little bit of a message around it for people who are listening, who might have a book project that they’re working on or a writing project, or it might be some other project. What I love about your story is it has all these echoes of other great creatives who, when they couldn’t find the system that worked for them, built the system themselves. So it’s sort of Steven Spielberg being a renegade. Or it’s one of my favorite stories is Dr. Dre doing The Chronic where he recorded himself, did the art himself, did everything himself, and nobody wanted it. And it became one of the best-selling rap albums of all time.

This is Dave Chappelle walking away from the Chappelle Show. One of the biggest shows at that time on Comedy Central, and I think one of the biggest on television, period. Walking away and coming back and having an even bigger second act, doing what he does now, but then even then deciding to do it on his own terms. And I think one of the things that unifies you and unites you with those people is if you are a creative who knows that the creative impulse or the thing itself can give you that kind of energy, but the system hasn’t quite fit itself to you, you’ve just got to blow up the system or find fellow travelers like us who are actually willing to blow up the system with you.

Because I think that connects this part of the conversation with the earlier part of the conversation, which is if you don’t protect that impulse, if you don’t blow up the system, then you end up looking back with so much regret all these years later that you didn’t take that kind of risk. And I think there’s something to that I think is bigger than just books. It is actually about taking those systems and reconfiguring them to fit the creative impulse that you feel. Which is exactly what you did.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, it’s about living a life, essentially. And all these people will say these things like, oh, a publisher is the best chance to reach the most amount of people. And so my goal is actually not to reach the most amount of people possible. That’s just sort of a cliché people say. My goal is to reach the most amount of people possible while also protecting my energy to keep playing this game I enjoy so much. And that second part, we have systems and structures which do not fit that in on a spreadsheet. I know because I used to build the spreadsheets in Excel. There’s no line item for the energy or capacity or desire to keep going on a path. It’s literally incidental. It doesn’t matter to the system. And so throughout history, every creative has battled this.

The great thing about today is it’s never been easier and cheaper to share your work with the world. People literally risked death even 30 years ago. People literally had to drive to the library to quench their curiosity. It’s so easy now. And we shouldn’t sell it out. It’s such a privilege to make any sort of living from creative work. And I really take this so seriously. And I just can’t imagine selling it out because I already sold out my desire for caring once in my 20s and I don’t know, I had a job once where I was working for other people that made me do stuff I didn’t want to do. I don’t want to do that again if I can help it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I think that is a growing movement among creatives of all types where they’re just sort of looking like you’ve done and like, you know, that traditional system just doesn’t fit me and they just happen to be lucky enough... I still say this all the time. I am just so happy that I am alive at this point in history, because this has the makings of a second Renaissance, in my opinion. This literally is unlocking so much creative work to be done. And as Jimmy pointed out, in the old days, those people took real risks. Yet Galileo, nevertheless, it moves. And you’re going to recant or we’re going to burn you at the stake as an apostate and a heretic. And gosh, nobody today is going to get burned at the stake.

They might get canceled, or people might be mean to them on Twitter. But come on.

Paul Millerd:

I always think of these hypothetical conversations with creatives from hundreds of years ago. Somebody like Van Gogh, who died sort of in despair, didn’t get to share his work with the world. And he would just be talking to you and saying, wait, you can just post your stuff to the Internet. That must be so expensive. No, you just post it for free. Wait, what do you mean? And but everyone’s scared of doing this. They don’t want to do it. Wait, what do you mean? People are scared. It’s free. They can just... They would freak out. Or even women throughout history, they would say, wait, I can just share my actual name and write and create as a woman? Yeah, people do it every day.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

It’s that context I just find so meaningful. It’s so easy to, you know, oh, this is awful or that’s awful. And look, I’m not minimizing. Of course there are a lot of problems in the world, but I think it’s worthwhile to point out all of the incredible progress that’s been made. We were talking about it the other day. My sister, when she got married in 1971, had to go to court to keep her maiden name. She had to go to court to keep her maiden name. And that same year was the first year that a woman could get a credit card without her husband’s permission. They used to require the husband’s permission in the United States. And when you think about that, at least...

I don’t know about you guys, but I was 11 when all that was happening. But that blows my mind that it was that short a time ago. And we have made real progress on a lot of issues that should be celebrated, that we should be just cheering on. And the point about women in all of history, if they wanted to write a book, they did it under a man’s name for the most part, because it just was not an option. So the optionality of the world that we live in today, I just don’t think it’s ever been this great. And, you know, I’m curious, Paul. I just had Ken Stanley on who has the great book, Greatness Can’t Be Planned.

And I agree with a lot of his philosophy. So on your path right now, are you seeing any pivots? Are you seeing any... you know, ooh, that looks like some fresh ground. I’d like to start a path on it?

Paul Millerd:

It’s pathless Jim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

No, I think the irony of course is that you now have quite a beautiful path, as your book shows.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, as you were saying that I was just looking over, I have my traditional Chinese version here. This was published in Taiwan in July, which is wild. And it’s an important part of my story. My wife is Taiwanese. She’s connected to this place. She’s putting her book out in Chinese in Taiwan soon and then we’re going to co-translate it together in English. And the thing about this is a lot of these things are not rational ways to be spending my time. But the longer you’re on a path like this, your income becomes separated from specific action. I don’t get a specific wage for putting in effort on a certain day. And so eventually you learn to just trust your instincts on things. And so my book was published in Taiwan. I don’t really make much money by promoting this book.

Maybe I’ll make some money if it goes bananas here, but I’m doing all sorts of events here mostly because it’s really fun and I’m connecting with all these people and it might lead to serendipity. I mean, it wouldn’t be an Infinite Loops podcast if we don’t reference moving from a deterministic world to a probabilistic world.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

You saved me. I don’t have to say it.

Paul Millerd:

I know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

So thank you.

Paul Millerd:

I have my Infinite Loops Bingo.

Jimmy Soni:

We have to take a shot now. That’s part of the drinking game, actually.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And repetition, repetition. And when you say it for the 110th time, they’re like, what? What’d you say?

Paul Millerd:

But I think the interesting thing about the probabilistic world is you can actually play that in nihilistic mode or optimistic mode. And the optimistic mode is when you’re aligning it with your creative impulse and what you actually care about versus, oh, I’m just going to spray and pray podcasts and hope it goes off. And I don’t care who I talk to. And so I try to lean into that second direction. This is a long way of answering. I think I am trying to lean more into books right now. I still do make some money from doing workshops, teaching, consulting, sales to corporations and running a course around that. I’m really good at it. I do enjoy it when I’m in that mode. But I think when I think 10, 15 years from now, I want to write several more books.

I want to do more experiments. And I’ve really just been following my energy recently. I’ve had several people reach out to me, talking to me about potentially being a book coach for them and even publishing their books. So that’s a direction I’m thinking about. I don’t really know, though. I think I’m not wired to make all-or-nothing bets. This hardcover bet is sort of the biggest one I’ve made by probably a scale of 10x financially. But I suspect this is going to open a lot of doors, both in my own imagination, because I’ve sort of challenged myself and pushed myself to grow, and then other people who might be inspired to work with me and do things like that.

But yeah, I think books, I want to just keep doubling down on books, moving in that direction, trying experiments. And I have no idea how I’m going to make money and fund this path two years from now. But I’ve so surrendered to that, to being okay with that, I’m excited to find out. And the great thing about a writer is you can write about that and then people are like, this guy is not going to quit. Just read his book to absorb this energy.

Jimmy Soni:

So I have a question about this, Paul, that is a bit of a... again, bringing it to a domain that will speak to people who are listening. But it’s something you said that I think is really interesting, which is you have a wife. I believe you’re also a father. And so I’m curious. This game was different when I was doing it and I was much younger and had nobody depending on me. And I could take these kinds of risks. And it was okay because I could get to ramen profitability on a book and it didn’t matter. And if something failed, it didn’t matter. And I knew I could always sort of pick myself up, dust myself off, get started again. But the stakes become higher in your situation and in the situation of other people who are listening.

When you do have people who depend on you. What’s the kitchen table conversation like about creativity for you, with the kinds of risks that you’re taking creatively? Because I find that to be super interesting. There’s a Cyril Connolly quote I hate that’s like the greatest enemy of art is the pram in the hall. And I couldn’t disagree more. I think my daughter’s been a huge boost to my career, like the most rocket fuel for my creativity ever was my daughter being born. But I’m curious what it looks like when you’re navigating a family dynamic and also trying to live a pathless path where somebody else in your life might say, well, we need a path here.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, so I didn’t marry that person. My wife is probably more comfortable with the unknown and financial uncertainty than me. And so step one, marry the right person. I can’t solve for somebody that doesn’t support this path. I think too, like you said, once you have a kid, there becomes this sort of, I have enough resources and knowledge and background. I can make money if I have to. But the point of my path is not to just optimize for money. If my kids and wife need financial resources, I’ll go do a consulting project. I don’t care. But in the meantime... so we do a quarterly check-in. My wife does not worry about money. She just sort of trusts the universe. But we do a quarterly check-in. I send it to her.

I started because I was saying we should probably talk about money a little. She just sort of trusts me and supports me in whatever I want to do. It’s priceless to have that. But I do a quarterly check-in and I’ll do, okay, business income minus cost of living. What are the savings? Okay. What is the cash I have? And then maybe some money I’d be willing to tap into. How many months does that give me? As long as that’s above 12, I’m going all in on my creative stuff. And sometimes I am doing projects to make money. I still have that other business. I will do workshops for companies and my goal there is to design it around my writing life. So I price high around finite projects. So I’ll do a two-hour workshop with a company, I price high.

If they’re not interested, I don’t do it. And so I’ll do a series of those throughout the year opportunistically. But that’s not where I’m spending my energy and trying to build that business. So the interesting thing after I finished my last book is that I basically stopped working for a year and took care of my daughter as my wife started writing her book. We decided as a family... I did have extra income from The Pathless Path coming in after my daughter was born that we would bet everything on the creative vision of a life we wanted. And so I was taking care of my daughter three to four days a week during the work week while my wife was writing her first book and she had a lot to learn. She had to level up as a writer. She had to develop better practices.

She had to grow as a person around her creative work. And it was a huge cost because I was not focusing on my work. I wasn’t promoting my book. I was struggling with a loss of connection to my work. But it just felt like the most interesting choice.

It’s really hard to explain to somebody that maybe is in a traditional job, but at the end of the day, the bigger risk is not doing this, not surrendering to these creative projects. I mean, the satisfaction from finishing my first book was so incredible that I sort of realized at the end of my life, if I can knock out 10 of these books, that will literally be a good life. And so I am just... me and my wife just desire less material possessions than most people. We are living in Asia now, so we can basically live a really good life on way less money. And we’re constantly designing and experimenting our life to fit our creative work being a priority over the paid work. How long can we make it work? I don’t know.

But I’m going to keep going as long as there’s money to fund the journey.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

You know what’s funny is I just watched the documentary on Scorsese on Apple. I don’t know whether you have seen that.

Paul Millerd:

I haven’t seen it, but...

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

But you sound a lot like him. He just was completely driven by his passion to make movies. And there’s a lot of stuff about him. I’m a big fan of his work. But there’s a lot of stuff in that I did not know. I did not know, for example, that asthma kept him inside. He grew up in a very working-class lower east side of Manhattan in a time when it was a rough place to grow up. But what was really interesting about it was he just would not give in. There was a great line when he was showing The Departed. They had this group, all of those young directors who really changed American cinema in many respects. George Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, they all...

They all got together and showed each other their work and they kept that tradition up. And I was really taken by a remark that Lucas made to Scorsese after the end of The Departed, which has both Matt Damon and DiCaprio as its two leads. And they both die in the movie. I don’t think it’s such an old movie. Yeah, I don’t think I’m spoiling it for anyone. And Lucas, the first thing Lucas did after watching it, he looked at him and he goes, great movie. But you do know that you could make 10 million more at the box office if you let DiCaprio live. Because he was playing the good guy. And Scorsese was like, I thought about it and I knew he was right. I knew he was right. And he goes, but I just couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t do it because that would ruin the entire movie the way I had envisioned it. And so, listening to you, Paul, it just reminds me a lot of that. But then I also have the question for you, what’s been the reaction of your more traditionally minded friends and family? It sounds like you got super lucky with your wife and her attitude. But how about others? How about family and friends?

Paul Millerd:

I don’t have any normal friends anymore.

Jimmy Soni:

My friends are all on this podcast, guys.

Paul Millerd:

No, but really, I have intentionally sought out people on weird paths. I think it is vital for this kind of journey. You do need people. I call them digital mentors, too. When I hear Jimmy talking to David Perell on How I Write about his journey, I’m walking around and I’m like, hell yes, this person exists. I love it. He makes coffee table books and weird books about carousels. This is the way. It’s so important to have these inspirations in your life. And you don’t even need to be really friends with them. You just need to know they exist. They give you proof that things are possible. And so, yeah, I’ve been lucky to have a lot of great friends. I think a lot of people in my family are from more traditional paths.

My parents are definitely a little triggered by my path. I think they would still prefer I go back and just try to make more money in a traditional job. But I think there’s also a nice thing about a lot of people in my family and maybe some of my friends not really caring about my path. And I can just sort of be Paul and not fully this creative person. I think a trap sometimes in the creative circles is that your work and your identity become fully as one. And so, yeah, I’m sort of grateful that not everyone is just seeing me as this person that is this creative online person. But, yeah, I mean, I’m eight and a half years into this. The first few years were very hard.

I really struggled with a lot of the insecurity, and I literally felt like a bad person, like I had broken some sacred covenant that adulthood is supposed to be spent in employment and on this steady career trajectory. But that is ultimately what my art and writing is about. Sort of transcending that and finding this inner sense of contentedness and accepting that you may never fully fit in and attract, but you know you can make choices that feel good. I feel way more grounded on this path than I did on my previous path, which doesn’t make sense to people who haven’t experienced this sort of contentment and alignment with a sense of work and the people in your life. But yeah, it’s very weird.

I don’t know how I’m going to make money a couple of years from now, but I feel way more secure about my life because I’m not spending my days doing things that are undermining my ability to show up and care about my life.

Jimmy Soni:

You made a point I want to really underline and it connects two of the things we talked about. It’s funny, I’m in the middle of a book project about Kobe Bryant and there’s a moment in an interview that Kobe did with GQ where he was asked the question, do you have friends? And this would seem to be for one of the most famous people on the planet, somebody who could be picked out of a crowd in any crowd in almost any country in the world, would be an easy question to answer with yes. And he has to pause in this interview and he looks, I guess he looked down and he looked up and he said, I have like minds. He said, I don’t have friends. He said, I have... and he elaborates.

He said, I’m very fortunate that I live in Los Angeles because he said, what I am surrounded by are people who are as obsessed with their craft as I am with mine. And the benefit is that they might not be friends in the traditional sense of the word, but when we get together, we have the best conversations you could possibly have. He said, am I the person that’s going to remember that it’s your birthday? No. Am I going to remember significant milestones in your life? Probably not. But if you are one of those people who are my friends, who are one of these like-minded people, we will have the best conversations you could ever have. They would last you, they would fill your cup up for a lifetime. And so that, Paul, really resonated with me because it’s very similar for me.

I do not have what people would regard as normal friendships. They might get together once or twice a year. You might have one five-hour conversation and then not speak again for a year and a half. Something like that. And I think there is something about that that is part and parcel of this kind of life because you simply cannot connect with... at least I have trouble connecting with people who have more traditional working lives or whose working lives have an off switch. Because I’m sure that it’s true for you that I’m like you, I sort of wander around the world and I’m seeing books I could write or seeing paragraphs that need to be improved or seeing authors that I could work with to get their work out there. It doesn’t stop there.

It doesn’t ever turn off. And you have to actually find people who are willing to tolerate that. It’s almost a tolerance for that kind of insanity. I am very fortunate that my girlfriend is very similar and can very much deal with, okay, this is going to be an always-on kind of thing and we’re always going to be engaged in this kind of stuff. But you’re right, it’s very hard to find friendships and romantic relationships and even colleagueship that can support that kind of life.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah. I was on a phone call with Billy Oppenheimer, who’s working on a book right now called The Work Is the Win. And we were just talking about book structure for two hours. And I got off the call and I was just like, how could I explain this to somebody that doesn’t write? But I joke that writing is not a strategy as it has become popular online. It is an affliction.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I can attest to that, having written more books.

Paul Millerd:

Right. I have no choice. There’s no strategy in it. It’s like, if I don’t write, I become grumpy. Me and my wife, both of us, we haven’t written for a week. We both just need to go to our separate rooms and write some words so we can get back to normal.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. And it’s kind of like, what... as the conversation is progressing, what I’m seeing is the uber structure of... it’s just a different way of looking at the world and of looking at life. Because I’m very much like you guys. I don’t have an off switch either. And I’ve only worked for one other company that I didn’t start or own, and that was Bear Stearns, because I had this opportunity that was pretty huge offered to me, and I’m like, okay, I’ll give that a try. But even when I was there, I had an exit strategy. And it was so weird for me because that was really the first time in my life that I came into contact with the people who did the ladder. And like, wait a minute. You’re a senior managing director and they just hired you? And I’m like, yeah, how’d you do that? I said, well, they asked me what title I wanted and that’s what I told them.

Paul Millerd:

See, if I had to go back to the workplace, that would be me too. I’d be like, I’ll be C-level. I’ll work three days a week remotely, four hours a day.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Right? But I haven’t really ever given this a lot of thought, but it’s so true. When I started my first company, we just moved to Greenwich. The company was already started, but I was just trying to get it going. And we had dinner with this couple. Our kids were at the same school, and so the guy was from here and he was saying, so what do you do? And I said, well, I have this company, O’Shaughnessy Capital Management. Oh, yeah, asset management. I went, yeah. And he goes, well, so who backed you? And I went, what do you mean? And he goes, who backed you? And I said, nobody. I just started it. And he looked at me and he goes, no, that... he literally said, now this is 1991.

And he’s like, no, that’s not possible. He literally said, that’s not possible.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And I went, well, it really is because I did it. But the incredulity of it... and now as I’m listening to you guys, we must be a real massive pain in the ass to have to deal with by all the other people in our life.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, it’s funny because at home I just feel so normal. Our daughter has a very basic routine for a toddler. We have a structured sleep schedule. Our father-in-law helps us with watching her these days. We cook, clean, change diapers. My life is very boring. But then I share some of the details of what I’m doing and how I’m living and people are just shocked. But to me and my wife, it’s just... I don’t know, it’s just our life at this point. I met her in Taiwan seven years ago. I wasn’t making any money at the time, I had no plan. I hadn’t really committed to writing yet. And so we’ve sort of been able to build it together. And so we have this weird cocoon of this alternate reality, but it totally just feels normal to us.

Jimmy Soni:

Do you think that the normal parts of your life are part of what make the other parts of your life that are kind of wild and ambitious possible?

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, I think I sort of joke that I’m the conservative lifestyle person in the broader creator economy. I’m married, I never go out, I don’t drink, I spend a lot of time with my daughter. I really care about family and commitment. And then, yeah, I can just be a nut shitposting on X and calling out the traditional publishers and doing all these things because, yeah, my life is stable. My relationship is very strong. I have great friendships. And yeah, so I do think there is a balance there. I notice when some people in the creative world also have a very creative life, I might say it can lead you to the ditch. You can burn out, you can really lose yourself.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I think that is kind of an internal balance. As I was listening to you, I was just thinking, wow, this guy’s like a natural Taoist.

Paul Millerd:

This is why I live in Taiwan. All the Taoist temples I can walk around and see. Yeah, yeah. I love when you talk about Taoism because I think for me it really is... the pathless path is the most Taoist phrase and it really just resonates with me. And it’s such a... I think modern culture is very Confucian, but Confucianism, balance is Taoist. The Taoists went to the woods and sometimes they were poets who just got drunk and did nothing in the woods in China. And you need that. You need that balance. I think too many people are structuring their lives in ways which is essentially Confucian. Find the rules out and follow them.

I think many of us crave that Taoist mode and we’re not giving it energy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

There’s a story that I bet is apocryphal because I’ve not been able to locate the art, but I read a story about a triptych, a painting that was called The Vinegar Tasters, and it’s Asian, Chinese. And the first vinegar taster is tasting it and they’re making a really sour face. And then the second one is tasting it but looking at the label over here in his hand of the ingredients. And the other, the final guy is just tasting it and he’s got this beautiful smile on his face. And the author said that this represented the three dominant schools in Chinese philosophy. The first guy was a member of the legalist tradition of China. The second guy was a Confucian. And the guy with the big smile on his face was the Taoist.

Paul Millerd:

I love that.

Jimmy Soni:

The other thing that I think, and I don’t know how old your daughter is, but I think the other way to think about it is because there are a number of people who I think they see, let’s say a life like Truman Capote’s, or somebody that was a famous writer or a famous author. And they envision them basically going to cocktail parties every night and having these kind of high-flying lives. And one of the things that you rightly identified and I think is true for me as well, is that most of my life is epically boring. Like epically boring. It’s the reason there should never be movies made about most people who do writing. It’d be interminable to watch. I mean, it would be awful.

You sort of sit around on the thing and type away. But that boredom or that appearance of non-excitement of just a kind of basic boring life is what enables stuff to happen on the page that is epic and amazing and lights up and hits all of our dopamine centers. Because the truth is it does require... it allows you to have the discipline that creates the work product. Because if you are going to parties every night, you’re going to be exhausted. If you are trying to network with everybody, you end up having very shallow relationships with a lot of people who aren’t going to enable you to do the creative thing you want to do.

And so you’re making an important point that’s worth doubling down on, particularly for people who are listening, who are parents. Because I think parenting gets a bad rap in its connection with creativity. When I became a parent, my creativity went on overdrive because my time had to be... I didn’t just attend to it, I had to be much more judicious about it. And when I did that, I knew... there was one time where I knew what a half hour’s worth of writing could produce in total words because I just didn’t have that many hours to spare. And I just had to get very good at putting things out in the world. And so there is something about that’s...

That’s super important for people who are listening who say, well, this is great for Paul, Jim and Jimmy, but I have two kids, or I have this or I have that. And it turns out, no, in some ways, the more boring or the more quote-unquote mainstream your life, the more unconventional you can be with your artistic pursuits or your creative pursuits or your side hustle or your business or the risk you want to take. Because you do get this foundation that actually allows you to then just rest, recharge, and get back after it the next day.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, my second book I wrote working three mornings per week, nine to two. And to pull off writing a book, I had to basically cut everything out of my life. I stopped socializing. I got really healthy and really got focused. Now it was a challenge. I sort of lost some of my creative spark coming out of that, I think, because it was almost too much structure for me. But that’s the great thing. I mean, I’m really glad I started this path before I had kids because I had more room to experiment and try different modes of living, because it’s very costly to experiment with different ways of working and spend a month trying a different way. But, yeah, it’s a really cool journey. And I wonder, people put up people like Bukowski.

Oh, he just comes home, gets drunk and spins out words. But was the art because of the drinking, or is he just drinking because it was so painful to be a creative in that era? I think it’s easier to be a creative in today’s world such that you don’t actually have this incredible pain of being such an outcast. And so you just don’t need the drinking to cope anymore because there’s enough people to accept you. And so part of me wonders if you just take all these people. I was saying to a friend the other day, I wonder if you took Bukowski today, he might heal his traumas, stop drinking, go full Huberman, and just start pumping out more books.

Jimmy Soni:

Right.

Paul Millerd:

Because he was always at war against his publishers and editors, too. And he still did a lot of great stuff. But how much? Maybe there is more there.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I think there is. I think Bukowski is a special case here for sure. I kind of put him in the Hunter Thompson category.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah. But I think people hold them up as, oh, you have to be this unhinged person to create. No, no, no, and it’s art-constraining. There were probably 10 other people that could have done great work in Bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson’s time that were just like, oh, I don’t want to be this reckless drunk that abandons my family, so I won’t even take that risk.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And that is such an important point. And one of the things that motivates me and Jimmy and everyone at Infinite Books... you’re absolutely right, Paul, that in the ‘50s, it just wasn’t... we didn’t have the optionality there. I wasn’t alive in the ‘50s, but there was no optionality. And, you know, things like venture capital, for example, it sprung from this group of engineers who wanted to start their own company, and literally that just wasn’t done. They called them the Traitorous Eight because, golly...

Paul Millerd:

You weren’t supposed to start a company.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the original names for venture capital I love, we actually call our venture division one of them, Adventure Capital. But the one that I love was Liberation Capital. And it was such a new concept that it took some crazy New York banker who was like, yeah, I’ll give you guys the money. And then they’re like, now we’ve got to figure out how to actually run a company as opposed to being just great engineers. But I think you are so right in the contention that there maybe were 10 other fabulous creatives back then that just didn’t do it, because they’re like, yeah, no way. No way. Because maybe my wife or my husband will leave me. I can’t afford to take that risk.

Jimmy Soni:

And it’s another one of these... and, you know, if this podcast has a title, it’s the puncturing of dangerous myths. Another dangerous myth is this myth... and because it’s perpetuated in all kinds of places where you see the documentary about the rock star, and the rock star has a total train wreck of a life. And you conflate the level of debauchery with the level of creativity. There’s a show that I love, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, that had its moment on Amazon, and there’s an artist that she’s connecting with in that show, and the artist is just reclusive.

He’s drinking at 9 a.m. but he’s this exceptionally talented artist, and he takes her into the back and shows her this piece of art, and he gives this big, long speech about how what he had to do was blow up any kind of traditional life in order to create this beautiful piece of art that the world will never see. And you know, all the rest and it’s just a bunch of hooey. Like, honestly. And it needs, and these myths need to be punctured because it keeps otherwise very talented people from... it keeps them from doing the thing they want to do because they look at shows like that or scenes like that or stories and documentaries and think, well, I’m not going to blow everything up, so screw it. I’m not going to write the book.

I’m not going to make the film. I’m not going to... I think there are... I wish it were possible to tell the more boring stories of creatives who live perfectly humdrum lives, but then have these exceptional breathtaking works of creative achievement because the more we do that, the more it’s okay to be boring in your day-to-day life and to take those kinds of creative risks. So I think this is one of the other myths we need to puncture is that you need to have a coke habit in order to be very good at making art.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And you know, go ahead.

Paul Millerd:

One of the reasons I share is because so many people reach out and say that... I’ve always tried to put stuff out before being successful already. When I published my book, I had 3,000 followers on Twitter and Substack. And so I actually wasn’t... I didn’t even come close to half of my former salary at that point. And so I wrote a book about living your dream life without having any outcomes or extrinsic success proving I could make it. And so I think for many people I was this normal example of just doing things. I do have some impressive background, but I was kind of struggling and working through my path still when I put that out. Same idea with the hardcover. I don’t have a massive million-person audience. I’m not going to break even instantly on launch day.

It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be challenging. But all my writing and talking about traditional publishing, honestly, I’ve probably hurt the feelings of some traditionally published author friends. I’ve noticed some people either avoided talking to me or engaging with me and that is totally fine because the amount of people early on their path or in the middle of their path or didn’t think they were ready that say, oh, now I can write a book, now I can do these things. I love those people and I will support the underdog over the fancy, impressive people any day of the week. And those people are so awesome. I get so many messages saying I’m starting a book because of you and it’s just awesome. And those people are going to inspire even more people.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And do you think that... my friend George Mack, who’s a young guy who is...

Paul Millerd:

I love George.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Really? Yeah, George, great guy. And his concept of just increasing the surface area of your luck. And have you found that by doing what you’ve done and what you’re pursuing now, has this opened or expanded the surface area of luck for you in your life?

Paul Millerd:

Oh yeah. I literally approached my first book as a Taoist. I didn’t ask anyone to share it. This seems crazy. I literally did not ask a single person to review the book or share it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Wow, I did not know that. That’s really interesting.

Paul Millerd:

I did gift it to people, but I never asked a single person to share it. Now I have asked a few people with this recent one, but still not that many people. The idea is let people network. Let the universe take over. And so Ali Abdaal was a reader of mine, found my blog through his brother. He supported my pre-sale. He put a hundred bucks on the Gumroad pre-sale. So I said hey, can I just send you a stack of books? So he started gifting my book. People loved it. He ended up quitting his job in medicine. And he made 10 small videos, posts, mentions of my book. I never once asked him to share my book. And so all these things keep happening. Mark Manson just shared my book recently.

That was from a guy I met three years ago. He kept sharing my book. So I said let me just pay you to buy the books or send you a big stack. He ended up giving one of those two years later in an internship he was doing to Mark Manson. He’s sharing it. And so this kind of stuff happens to me all the time. And now it’s just sort of fun to just non-do my path. I always ask myself the question, what if I do less? What are the interesting things that could happen? And so I’m certainly leaving opportunities and financial upside on the table. But it’s just fun. It’s just interesting to find out what will happen. And so long story short on that too, Ali Abdaal wrote the foreword to this book.

That’s literally the first thing I asked him to do for me after four years of sharing the book. And it’s just really fun to do these things in a very natural long-term way. It fits the way I can show up in the world and continue to stay energized.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Well, Paul, we are... oh, go ahead, Jimmy. I’m getting there.

Jimmy Soni:

I just wanted... no, no, I get it. And you know, you and I are up way past our bedtime. At least I am.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I don’t go to bed, Jimmy. That’s why we work so well together. I’m generally going to bed maybe two hours before you’re getting up. That’s true.

Jimmy Soni:

But what I was going to say is it is one of the things about the book industry that I love. So we started this conversation by talking about the problems in the industry and some of the challenges. Great people, bad dynamics, incentives. But the broader business of books, the best thing about them to me is that they are win-win. It’s a positive-sum business. Like what I love is promoting my friends’ books who are authors. Because I know that if there’s... even at the level of rank self-interest, if there are more readers in the world, there’s more likely to be somebody that picks up something of mine.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Right.

Jimmy Soni:

So there’s literally no... it’s why I always found it funny, by the way, when publishers were like, well, you shouldn’t really launch in the fall because you’re competing against all the other fall books. I’m like, what are you smoking? Are you talking about...

Paul Millerd:

I read 20, 30 books a year.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense competing against the fall books. This isn’t March Madness. It’s not a bracket. It’s not the Pathless Path against The Founders.

Paul Millerd:

We should do a bracket on Twitter though.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, but you call it September Madness to see which of the fall books perform best. But the point is that it’s actually one of these rare industries where it’s positive-sum.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Right.

Jimmy Soni:

It’s one of the best things about being in this business is it makes me feel great when more people speak highly of your work and vice versa. It really is the case that it’s the rare industry where one person’s win is not another person’s loss. And I think there are actually precious few industries like that. It’s not competitive in the same way.

Paul Millerd:

We’re competing against TikTok and Netflix. We’re not competing against other books.

Jimmy Soni:

Exactly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, totally agree. And you know, I’ve been lucky in life that now I can do just... as Jimmy knows, I will only do win-win type businesses. Because I have that luxury right now. And that is such an important point. This is, as an industry, despite all of the problems and everything else, there are very few other industries where it really is win-win-win. Because the more readers in the world, at least it’s my belief, the better the world. And the whole idea that you just outlined, the, well, you can’t release then because, goodness, the competition... what are you talking about? Well, this has been...

Paul Millerd:

A lot of people have been saying Anne-Laure’s book is a perfect complement to my book. I’ve had five, six people reach out and say this. So it’s like, this is great. I’m just going to promote Anne-Laure’s book because they’ll then want more after they read her book and it just keeps going.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, it’s fantastic. Paul, you are an inspiration to us. We love the work that you are doing. The more of you in the world, I think, the better the world becomes because a lot of times people just need that nudge. Like, okay, wow, I’m a lot like him. And look at him, he’s having a blast. He gave up the fancy job at McKinsey and he enjoys life so much more. And the more of that energy that gets put into the world, it’s my belief, the more people accept and absorb that energy. Talking about Bukowski, there’s that great quote about a free soul. When you’re with a free soul, what does he say? A free soul is very rare, but you know it when you’re with one because you feel so very good.

And I always loved that line of his because it’s true. If you know a free soul in the world, when you meet them, you do feel so much better. And I think you’re one of those, Paul. So I’m delighted with the path that you’ve... your pathless path. I think this is one of the most beautiful hardcovers I’ve seen. You did a really great job designing it. And I love everything about it. It’s just super beautiful and I recommend it to everybody. We’ll sell you out yet and you get an opportunity. You get two more inceptions, Paul. Jimmy.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, I forgot about this. I didn’t prepare because...

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I knew I was going to catch you on this one because people coming back on the podcast forget, oh, my God, he’s going to give me the emperor of the world again. So we’re briefly making you emperor of the world. The rules are you can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp. You can’t force anyone to do anything. But what you can do is incept them. You can say... and we’re not going to kill you at the end for the... we’ll make the extra 10 million. Because remember, at the end of The Departed, the star of Inception was killed. I’m just kidding around. So you are the emperor of the world. I’m giving you the magic mic. You could say two things into it, and you’re going to incept the entire population of the world.

The next day, whenever that happens to be, they’re going to wake up and they’re going to say, you know what? Unlike all the other times when I had these great ideas when I woke up and never acted on them, these two... these two I’m going to act on. What are your two additional inceptions for the world’s population?

Paul Millerd:

I think one of my big ones is I need to take a sabbatical in midlife, ideally in my 30s or 40s. Three to six months, a break from work, sort of to reset, reinvent, reimagine. I think it’s sort of a cheat code in today’s world. And then second one would be, I must own more beautiful books.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

There we go. That’s one I certainly like. And I know Jimmy is going to love that one, so love it.

Paul Millerd:

Infinitebooks.com, pathlesspath.com.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

There you go. I love it. Paul, thank you so much for getting up early for us. And, Jimmy, thank you for staying up late for us.

Paul Millerd:

Jimmy’s got to start writing in three hours, right?

Jimmy Soni:

Exactly. In three hours.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

So, yeah. So really fun having you both on. Thanks a lot.

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Today, Packy returns to talk about why writing is still the most powerful way to think clearly, how optimism becomes rational when you spend time with people actually building things, and what happens when the internet punishes you for being early and wrong.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights 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

• Packy on Optimism.

• The Internet Contrarian.

• Elliot Herschberg on GitLab Founder and Cancer.

• Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory.

Links

Highlights

The Best Ideas Are Written

Packy McCormick: I talk to founders all the time who are 10 to 1,000 times smarter than I am, and they have these incredible ideas, and they don’t write them because writing is hard if you don’t do it all the time. I actually tried last year to write less frequently. I thought I’d give myself more space and I’d come up with these beautiful big pieces. It’s actually harder if you don’t just go. So this year I’m just going. But they have all these ideas. […] There’s just all these really interesting ideas that people have earned because of what they do, or that they are doing what they do because of this idea that they haven’t written down anywhere. Maybe they’ll write it down in a company blog post, but those are 500 words. And even the best ones are not the full thing. I think people really like the opportunity to go long and have a canon document where it says, this is how I look at the world and why I’m doing the thing that I’m doing. Or this is something really interesting that I’ve learned. I like reading. I listen to podcasts all the time, but I get most of the ideas from reading. And so trying to bring more of that to the world.

Rational Optimism

Packy McCormick: I think I’m naturally optimistic. And I think one of the things that made ‘22, ‘23 weird and made me write a piece called Optimism, then we started this Weekly Dose of Optimism, was that people seem so, at least in our part of the Internet, so down in the dumps. Meanwhile […] the people that we get to talk to every day are doing these unbelievable things that if 5% of them are right, the world is a much better place. And nobody else knows about this stuff. And so it’s kind of like, I’m naturally optimistic. I will look at, I think crypto is a great example. I’ll see that, and I’ll see the positives of what crypto can be way more than I can see what all of the downsides will be. And so it’s not a purely positive thing to be that kind of optimist. There’s rational… I’m not just a total dumb optimist. But that was a real dissonance for me. Getting to see what I saw every day and having people be like, the world is so bad […] Even just three years ago, there was, was it the Atlantic, that article, “How could you possibly have kids in a burning, drowning world?” Or something like that, that I wrote a long response piece to. When you talk to all these companies in nuclear, in solar, in batteries that are doing the actual work to fix the problem. And so I think my natural optimism just was met with this goldmine of all of these people who made me more and more optimistic. So I wanted to go fight the fight.”

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Packy, welcome.

Packy McCormick

Great to be here.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, I was looking back at the first time you were here, and you had the Not Boring newsletter, which I love. I’m also a subscriber to the paid version.

Packy McCormick

I saw that. Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Love your stuff. But you were about 70,000, I think this was in 2021. And, you know, one of my producers said you actually made the announcement of your first $8 million fund on that show. Is that true?

Packy McCormick

I think that might actually be true. I think it was a little leak before there was any official announcement.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s really cool. You’re like king of Substack. You’ve got 250,000. And so, first off, congratulations. But, you know, we just share so many ideas in common, and one of them is about writing. Talk to me about your passion about you got to write it down.

Packy McCormick

Yeah. So I recently just launched Paid. My whole thing with Not Boring in the beginning, I was going to go paid, and then I was having so much fun with it growing that I was like, I just don’t want to limit this in any way at all. I’m going to keep it free. And it’s been wonderful. It’s grown really well. But recently, I think because Substack has these leaderboards, and you’re not on them if you’re not paid, I was like, I need to do something paid, but I don’t want to put my stuff behind a paywall. So what is it? And I was thinking and thinking. I thought about a bunch of different ideas, and then I realized I was just sitting there thinking. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I couldn’t think of the first time or the last time that I heard a new idea that had been formed on a podcast or in video that really stuck. And then you think about writing. You think about all the Ben Thompson and aggregation theory, everything Chris Dixon’s written in tech. There’s all these canon pieces, and they’re all written things. I talk to founders.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

All you need is attention. Attention is all you need.

Packy McCormick

Attention is all you need. And so I talk to founders all the time who are 10 to 1,000 times smarter than I am, and they have these incredible ideas, and they don’t write them because writing is hard if you don’t do it all the time. I actually tried last year to write less frequently. I thought I’d give myself more space and I’d come up with these beautiful big pieces. It’s actually harder if you don’t just go. So this year I’m just going. But they have all these ideas. And so last year I was having a conversation with this guy, Anjan Katta, who makes the Daylight tablet, and he had this idea. We were just texting back and forth. I was like, we should write that. And he’s like, I don’t write. I’m scared of writing. I was like, you send me voice notes and I’ll write it for you. And it went really well. And so I decided to try to get people to write their very best ideas down. I’m trying to figure out what the right format is. So we just did one on robotics, and it was this company thesis that robotics should actually iterate in small steps instead of there’s not going to be a moment where robots just wake up and can do everything. You need to collect all of the data. And so that was one. I have another guy who’s going to be writing about how the cartels move money because he works in fraud. And so trying to figure out what.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I thought you were going to say because he works for the cartels.

Packy McCormick

Because he works for the cartels. He’s a good friend of mine. But there’s just all these really interesting ideas that people have earned because of what they do, or that they are doing what they do because of this idea that they haven’t written down anywhere. Maybe they’ll write it down in a company blog post, but those are 500 words. And even the best ones are not the full thing. I think people really like the opportunity to go long and have a canon document where it says, this is how I look at the world and why I’m doing the thing that I’m doing. Or this is something really interesting that I’ve learned. I like reading. I listen to podcasts all the time, but I get most of the ideas from reading. And so trying to bring more of that to the world.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Which I applaud. I kept journals all my life since I was a teenager. And literally, we have stacks and stacks of them. I think that writing is thinking.

Packy McCormick

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I got in the habit of doing it. And all of us have these ideas bumping around in our minds, and if you just leave it there, you don’t really know until you try to write it out. Writing things out has killed more stupid ideas that I have had. And believe me, man, I have had a plethora of stupid ideas. But it is only in the writing. And I’m a big believer in writing by hand. And there’s some neuroscience that suggests that engages a different part of the brain and whatnot. But as we were talking about, I’m writing my first fictional novel right now, and kind of a system like yours, you’re co-writing with people. I have a writer’s room and I have some of the best writers in the world in there. And at the last session we had, I was telling you, I told them all about the story that I was building and it’s a thriller and the ideas that they threw my way, I was like, that is brilliant. And so I just, you know, it’s the way they do TV shows, right? They always have a team of writers. So it’s really fun experimenting with it. But take us back to the beginning, because your origin story is really interesting. You were at a company that wasn’t doing so well, and it was the writing that got you on this kick.

Packy McCormick

Totally. So my backstory started my career in finance, did that for a little bit, and then went to a company called Breather, which did on-demand meeting and workspaces. And the product was great. Everybody that I tell that I worked at Breather, oh, we use Breather, we love the product. But the business model was take a five-year lease, do construction, and then rent it out for an hour at a time. And so if you think WeWork’s business model is bad, where you do it for months at a time, we did it for hours at a time. And when it works, it really works because you can charge a lot more for an hour than you could charging for a month hourly. But often it didn’t work. It was compounded by the fact that we had the same investors as Uber and they were like, the thing that you need to do is expand your supply as quickly as humanly possible. Because that’s what Uber did. And it worked for Uber. Uber didn’t sign five-year leases and do construction. We did. And so we ended up with this glut of supply on the map. I think we launched one of these little office spaces every day for an entire year, which is also managing to the metric. We would put a wall in the middle of a space that should have clearly been one space just to be able to get two spaces on the map. But we did it and we were deeply oversupplied. Some spaces, like right around here in Union Square, did really well, a bunch of other spaces didn’t. And so a coworker of mine, Ben Rollert, and I took Christmas break and we came up with a plan to fix the company. And then we wrote the whole thing down. We had read Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. We were high on business strategy. We wrote the thing down, we presented it to the rest of the exec team. They actually gave us, you know, we needed to do something because our margins were negative 25% and we had these fixed leases. Oops. So we did that and then we sold it to the rest of the company. And it meant for a lot of people, if you were somebody whose job it was to set up a space and it was supposed to be set up one way, we said, all of a sudden now, instead of just doing hourly and daily, one space could be hourly. But if it’s underperforming, we’re going to sell it monthly for as low as we can still make money. And then maybe somebody wants it hourly and we want to switch it all back when they’re done. People’s jobs got a lot harder. The sales team had to completely change what they did. And everyone read this thing and everyone got really into it. The idea made sense and it was clear and we put it down on paper. And so that was the first time that I was like, wow, writing actually can change the way that people even work inside of a company. If you can communicate an idea clearly. It worked for a while. Margins went up to positive 25%, which isn’t going to win a Nobel Prize for business, but certainly was better than it was. Did that for a while. Finally, we brought in a professional CEO. We tried to be mini WeWork with a thousandth of the resources. And then I left because I could see the writing on the wall. And then COVID hit and the company fell apart. But I had taken David Perell’s writing course during that whole process. And so when COVID hit and I couldn’t start the physical space-based thing that I wanted to do, I decided to just start writing online for three months. We had just gotten pregnant with our son Devin, and I begged my wife to let me write and she did. And it just started growing. I didn’t make a dollar for nine months, but I was doing the math and I was like, soon I’ll turn on paid subscriptions and if I get a 5% conversion, then at least I’ll maybe be able to pay for rent and food and hopefully insurance if things go really, really well. And then one thing led to another, and here we are.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m a friend of David’s. In fact, we gave scholarships to Write of Passage at O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Let’s talk about that a bit. Were you uncertain of how good a writer you were? What was the reason to take David’s course?

Packy McCormick

The reason to take David’s course was I wasn’t writing. I liked writing. I had maybe a couple of Medium posts, maybe published, maybe just in Google Docs somewhere. Word at the time. I had written… I was a philosophy minor in college, so I wrote a little bit for that and did well there. In high school, I liked being the class clown, but writing well enough that I could still get an A, even if it was a little bit of a satirical piece. And so there was something there, but I was never a writer. I took the course because I saw a tweet and I had said the word enumerate in one of our exec meetings, and I got looked at like I had seven heads and got laughed at. And I was like, well, if I don’t do something here, my brain’s going to fall out of my head. And so I took his course because I saw a tweet that next day, and I was like, yeah, that sounds great. I’ll do something just so I can keep my brain going. And I think what it was really good for was one, just confidence. The first day, there were 50 people in the class. The first day we had to write an essay on one of our favorite Internet writers. And so I wrote something on Ben Thompson’s work, and David called it out as the best piece in the class. And I was like, whoa, I might actually be a writer. This is really cool. And the other thing was just showing up every week and having to write something, but then having to get it edited by your small group. And if you were the asshole who showed up with nothing, then you couldn’t really contribute to the group. You’d break out in small groups on Zoom. And so that was really helpful. And then he had a few, I think, really helpful concepts, the most helpful of which was the idea of a personal monopoly, which sounds cheesier than it is, but it’s really just pick a bunch of your different interests and overlap them until you find something that you’re the only person in the world who’s going to be good at writing or you’ll be the best at writing about that thing. And so I went from being like, how am I going to write about tech when Ben Thompson exists? To going, well, if I combine tech and pop culture. And so I wrote stuff about the Mickey Mouse Club and Joseph Schumpeter and then maybe a little bit of Philly sports. There’s nobody at that overlap. I can win that overlap. And so I started from there and it was very on the nose in the beginning. Here’s this business and tech idea and here’s this pop culture idea and I’m just going to combine the two of them. And I would force myself for the first six months to write about both. That got to. I mean, it was picking two essays. But I’ve tried to keep the tone from that as I started writing a little bit more seriously.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

As you’ve gotten bigger, have you had to deal with audience capture?

Packy McCormick

I think a little bit. The whole thing is a rollercoaster. You know, talking about, I started writing about a topic that you’re bound to fail X percent of the time. I’m writing about startups, so you’re going to be wrong a large percentage of the time, just naturally. But you don’t have the upside that you would in a venture portfolio because you’re not going to get 1000x on your essay. And I was doing it as a new writer on the Internet very publicly because it started growing in the beginning. So I think I had a really fun first two years and wrote a lot of stuff that I’m proud of, but also was totally wrong. And so I think there was more than audience capture. There was just a period for a couple of years, actually where I was just way less confident. And so I’d try to write about things that I thought would do well. And something changed, I guess, the past year and really now, I do not care. Last year I was writing, I wrote 40,000 words on the electric tech stack. I wrote this piece Means and Meanings that we were talking about before, which is more philosophical. I’m a philosophy minor 16 years ago. I’m no philosopher. And then all manner 33,000 words on an Internet startup in Colombia, just whatever I find the most fascinating, I think that comes across on the page. If I find it fascinating, I’ll do a better job on it. And other people will too. So I think I’ve done largely a good job at avoiding audience capture. It was more of just a confidence thing, I would say, in the middle.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I remember. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you went through a period where everyone was being really mean to you.

Packy McCormick

It was a short period. So I am still fascinated by crypto. I think open, decentralized networks are this beautiful thing, but they also, I think I underestimated because I’m this optimistic, that if people see the opportunity to do bad things, they will. And there’s nothing more of an opportunity than an open, decentralized network full of money to attract the cryptos. And so stablecoins are doing really well. Bitcoin is doing, in turbulence, what it’s supposed to. I moved to that in my flight to safety during liberation. There’s a lot that I still really love about crypto, but I got fascinated by it. I was writing about it a bunch in 2021 and 2022, and when that tanked, I got beat over the head with that. There was one in particular where I had gotten on a podcast, Logan Bartlett’s show with Zach Weinberg, when he was. This was the first of a series where he just started ripping anybody who did anything related to crypto. And it was 8 at night, and my son had just thrown up on me and I wiped off my shirt and got on the podcast. And then Zach was like, what’s one real use case for crypto? And so I pulled something out of my ass. And I was like, you know, mortgages on the blockchain, something like that, just was not thinking. And he ripped me apart, which was fine, except this guy Loren took the clip and it went super viral that I was this complete idiot. And that all started happening while, you know, the throw up had turned into RSV. And we were in the hospital with my son. So I was sleeping on the floor of the hospital, looking at Twitter with the whole Internet dunking on me. And it was just the worst possible experience. And so that was actually, I think, a confidence turning point. And not just me, I think actually… and I don’t think I’m just feeling this… I think people lost confidence in anything that I said after that experience, which at the time was brutal. And now I think it was the greatest thing in the world. Because one, I think just going through that, you realize it actually doesn’t matter and people forget. But then two, because now, I don’t know, that’s the worst it’s going to get on the Internet. And it wasn’t that bad. And I think I probably was for being such a novice investor writer. I probably did have too much hubris and confidence in what I was writing. And I think that made the writing fun and fresh. But it is a weird experience to start as a novice on something with that much visibility because now I feel like I’m a 10 times better investor. I probably know what I’m talking about on the writing side and I’m a better writer, but needed to go through that you’re not that hot shit to get to this point.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I remember when I, because I did see that clip on Twitter and I thought at the time that might be the best thing that ever happened to him. Because I went through something similar. But we didn’t have an Internet during the dot-com boom. All of our stuff was large cap value or small cap growth, which were in nuclear winters back then. I got attacked by the Wall Street Journal, by Jason Zweig, who’s now a good friend. I got attacked in books. In books. You know, O’Shaughnessy should have called his book What Works on Wall Street Until I Wrote This Book. And it was fucking brutal. But in hindsight, it was absolutely liberating because, you know, you gotta get punched in the face.

Packy McCormick

Totally.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You learn to be much more humble.

Packy McCormick

I could not agree more. It was such a weird time. Just COVID in general on the Internet was weird and everything was moving so fast. And I just had this belief that, I remember I can’t name the company, but there was this company that was like, would you, instead of doing what you’re doing, would you take this absolute dream job? I couldn’t have made up if you told me, make up. I wouldn’t have because it would have been too cool of a job. And I was like, no way. Because next week someone’s going to offer me something even cooler. That was the way that it felt. I’m making myself probably sound like more of an asshole than I was, but it just on an upward slope, it really felt like things were just going to keep going and at some point they’d just be like, do you want to be the president or something? Which would be a terrible job also. And so really to get punched in the face and really think I have to go back and figure out what I care deeply about and want to write about and invest in and all of that. Greatest thing that could possibly happen.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And my thesis is that it’s required. If you don’t have scar tissue, you’re probably not going to make it. And you get scar tissue by just continuing to persevere and becoming a lot more humble. But one of the great fears is people are terrified to fail. And more importantly, they’re terrified to let other people see them fail 100%. And what I always try to get them to understand is that’s the only road to succeed, right? Because that’s the way it works. And so it just sometimes drives me really crazy when I talk to incredibly talented people and I’m like, you should write a book or you should start a company. Or they’re like, nah. People listening right now. What advice would you give for that kind of person? How can you be brave and actually do it? Because nobody will remember.

Packy McCormick

No. And we’re past that hopefully now. I wouldn’t even say it was from that. It was from the very beginning when I started writing. I’ve told the story before, but I legitimately thought if I start writing on the Internet, as a guy who didn’t, I mean, I worked at this startup that was failing at the time, and now I’m like, here’s what I think about startups. That at the very least, my friends were all going to have a group chat going where they’re like, what is Packy doing? Is he okay? He went from finance to a failing startup to now he’s writing a newsletter called Not Boring on the Internet where he talks about the Mickey Mouse Club. What is going on here? And the truth is that one, people are nicer than you. I went to the playground this weekend with my son. I wrote a little thing on it and he sold for the first time. He made these donut hats out of Play-Doh and put tape on them and went to sell them. Was going up to grownups after getting over his nerves. And he afterwards, I guess like father, like son, just started telling me to write down the lessons that he learned. One of which was, people are nicer than you expect. And so I think that is actually, that is one of them. The other is that people just don’t care. You have to fight for their attention. So if you’re not doing good work, people just don’t waste a second thinking about it. And if you are, it’s only upside. Of course, there’s the downside of getting punched in the face and all of that, but I think it is so asymmetric, the upside for the downside, because it is so hard to grab people’s attention, positive or negative, and even if it’s negative, to hold their attention for more than two hours.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And the other thing you were early on, which was one of the reasons why I was intrigued by you back in ‘21, was optimism. I am what I call a rational optimist, a Deutschian optimist, I guess. I had reread his. I read the book when it came out, The Beginning of Infinity, and I liked it and I enjoyed it and everything, but then I reread it and I got so much more out of it. The second time I read, I did a thread on Twitter. But back then, it was kind of hard to be an optimist. You were really going countercyclical. Are you naturally optimistic?

Packy McCormick

Yeah, I think I’m naturally optimistic. And I think one of the things that made ‘22, ‘23 weird and made me write a piece called Optimism, then we started this Weekly Dose of Optimism was that things like, people seem so, at least in our part of the Internet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Packy McCormick

So down in the dumps. Meanwhile, you know, we have mRNA vaccines, and then just everything that’s come out of that, we have now what is AI. We had tech companies that are actually going back into the physical. The people that we get to talk to every day are doing these unbelievable things that if 5% of them are right, the world is a much better place and nobody else knows about this stuff. And so it’s kind of like, I’m naturally optimistic. I will look at, I think crypto is a great example. I’ll see that, and I’ll see the positives of what crypto can be way more than I can see what all of the downsides will be. And so it’s not a purely positive thing to be that kind of optimist. There’s rational. I’m not just a total dumb optimist. But that was a real dissonance for me. Getting to see what I saw every day and having people be like, the world is so bad. We have all these problems. Climate change. This is. It’s crazy. It feels like people don’t think climate change is going to kill us all anymore. But even just three years ago, there was, was it the Atlantic, that article, how could you possibly have kids in a burning, drowning world? Or something like that I wrote a long response piece to. When you talk to all these companies in nuclear, in solar, in batteries that are doing the actual work to fix the problem. And so I think my natural optimism just was met with this goldmine of all of these people who made me more and more optimistic. So I wanted to go fight the fight. Now it feels like we’re just preaching to the choir, because I think everyone’s gotten more optimistic, or not everyone, kind of in our world, at least. But it was very weird for a little while there that people were so pessimistic.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I think one of the reasons for that is it’s so much easier to be a pessimist. You can naysay anything. I always look for things to root for as opposed to against, because, honestly, it’s fucking easy to root against whatever, and it’s lazy. And it bothers me, though, because I just see so much wasted potential. You know what I mean? And that time in particular, I was feeling like you. I was like, people, you know, honestly, it’s like that old Louis C.K. bit about having Wi-Fi on a plane.

Packy McCormick

Although it is frustrating now, but yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, but where he’s like, I can’t believe it. I’m 30,000 feet above the air and I can scroll on the Internet. And he goes, then it goes out and you go, what the fuck?

Packy McCormick

Yeah. Everything is amazing and nobody’s happy. I think it was his punchline on that one. And that’s exactly how it felt. And then you had everybody, people who were. I remember listening to one All-In podcast when Chamath was like, I can’t believe people got so irresponsible during. I was like, what are you… People? Come on. And so it was not just the pessimism, but it was the people who led the parade were like, what were you guys?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You are exhibit A, my friend.

Packy McCormick

You are exhibit A, my friend. And so it was just all of that combined. But I think now, hopefully, people are feeling more optimistic about things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I do sense that it’s kind of a regime change and the idea that everything’s going to shit is losing ground maybe for the first time in a long time. What do you think some of the reasons for that are?

Packy McCormick

I was just going to ask you that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m lucky that I’m on the host side of this conversation. Make you do all the hard thinking.

Packy McCormick

I think in our part of the world that’s probably true. I think there still is a lot of, if I say anything good about AI on the Internet still, you’re going to get a bunch of people like, are you kidding me? This is the worst thing in the world. It’s going to kill the planet. It’s going to, I can’t believe you would even use this. And so I think there are plenty of people who are still pessimistic, and rightly so. And you know, the job market can be tough for young people. So I think it’s our part of the world and that’s the part of the world that I know best. Tech and VC. But I think in our part of the world, you get punched in the mouth enough a few times in a row. There was COVID, everything was going to fall apart. And then it did really well. And then ‘22, ‘23 happened and then we’re saved by AI. And then you look around at just again, all the things that are happening right now. I saw Mario Gabriele did a podcast with the founder of Reflect Orbital today. So now we have satellites that are going to reflect the sun’s beams onto solar farms to keep solar farms operating 24/7. And all of this stuff is actually really happening. In the past week, the DOE and NASA said that we’re going to put nuclear reactors on the moon. And then a company said that we’re going to put hotels on the moon. And probably neither is going to happen on the expected timeline. But the fact that we’re actually talking about these things as plausible things is absolutely amazing. What’s happening in medicine is unbelievable. Ozempic and the like are miracle drugs. My friend who used to work with me, Elliot Hirschberg, wrote a piece on the GitLab founder yesterday and his attempt to cure cancer. He was diagnosed with cancer. He’s this great systems thinker, and he’d gotten to the end of the line and they’re like, sorry, bud, this is the end of the line. And he’s like, well, that stinks. That’s not how I want this to end. And so he just flew around the world and came up with all of these different ways to test himself and do different trials on himself. And because he had a ton of money, he was able to be this n of one character who could go figure it out and went into remission and actually beat this incurable cancer. And Elliot’s point was, the thing that this guy is doing is this very bespoke thing that only one rich person can do today. This is going to be accessible to all of us very soon, maybe 20 years. And medicine takes a while to change, but that is incredible if we’re getting to the spot where, one, early detection of cancer really helps. But then, two, we have a bunch of therapeutics that are coming to market that could help just beat it once and for all. It’s pretty hard to be too bummed right now if that’s the soup that you’re swimming in. Not to mention, it’s just, I think the amount of fun people are having impacts their pessimism or optimism. And it’s really fun to wake up every morning and be like, all right, assistant, go do exactly what I want you to do. And then I’m going to go focus on the thing that I want to focus on. The thing that even a couple of years ago we were all saying, which is the AI will do the stuff that you don’t want to do, and then you’ll do the stuff that you want it. Actually, for the first time right now, I kind of feel that where I just get to think about what I want to write about and write while I have this research assistant doing all this stuff for me. And it’s just a really fun time to be doing this. And so hopefully, I think the big important thing will be whether the benefits of all this diffuse and how quickly we can get all this tech that we’re excited about at the early stages benefiting actual people. But there’s just so much cool stuff coming down the pike that I think for at least for our world, it’s hard to be too pessimistic right now.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s also a time when, you know, context is really important and a lot of people don’t have it. You know, I was saying on Drivetime when I was 11 years old, literally, women couldn’t get credit cards without their husband’s signature. My oldest sister, who unfortunately died, was married to a black guy from Trinidad. Their marriage was illegal in half of the states of the United States. I mean, really, seriously fucked up. And people who lack that context really can’t see how much forward progress we as a society have made. And when you know all of that, right? And then you see in just 50 years, the changes that America, I mean I would be hard pressed to find other societies that changed, I think directionally, in a good way, as quickly as the United States. And so context, I think is super important. But I also think that, you know, you’re talking about the AI and so we have our own AI hardware, software installation and we have a genius who’s programming it. You’re going to see some pretty cool things come out commercially ultimately from our AI lab. So one of the things I had the AI lab do was go through every innovation and find out the reaction to it. And there’s a thing called an ur pattern, which is a primitive pattern, right, that if you can extrapolate from that pattern, you can see really cool things. The ur pattern for innovation is unchallenged, go all the way back to writing. Socrates said, no, that’s a bad idea. And it follows the same pattern, right? So what happens, and the reason it happens, in my opinion is let’s take photography. When photography came on the scene, painters of portraits were really unhappy, right? And so, but it happens for novels, it happened for photography. Music, when records came out, symphony orchestras took full page ads out in newspapers saying, that’s not real music. Real music you have to hear live, right? So what’s really happening is the prior regime that was really good at that particular skill gets nuked by an innovation and they’re unhappy about that and they start coming up with every kind of reason. One of the ones that’s really interesting is they shift from outcome. So how should you judge a book or a piece of writing or a movie or whatever? Well, what did you get out of it? Did you enjoy it? Was it a good story? Did you learn something? Did you change your mind about something? Right? The outcome was what was important. What happens, and it happened across all of these innovations, they change the playing field and they stop talking about outcomes and they start talking about process, right? And well, no, if you’re using AI, which by the way, we use in every aspect of O’Shaughnessy Ventures and which I’m using in concert with my human writers. I literally could not be writing this fiction book without AI because the research alone, it would take me. I would have to hire hundreds of people and let them loose on libraries all around the world, and it just wouldn’t get done.

Packy McCormick

You know, that just made me think of that. It does take away the thing I was saying about, it frees you up to do the. For a lot of people, I think that’s uncomfortable to be freed up to do the creative. That is the hard part of this whole thing. And it is really comfortable to say, I can’t get my book out because I have to go to this library. And you can sit in the library for hours and you’re working on your book, and so you feel like you’re doing this really amazing, productive thing. And it, I guess, prevents you from doing the hard work of actually sitting there and thinking about what you want to write about and the questions that you’d want to ask AI and the research that you wanted to do when you have to move faster yourself. And so I’m sure a lot of this is just. I mean, people are bad at change, right? And so they’re used to doing something one way. Their identity is tied to one thing, and we’re bad at change.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And, you know, of course, the paradox. Everyone wants things to improve, but they don’t want anything to change. But then what’s interesting about this pattern is it gets overcome. And, you know, like, movies, when VHS came out, Hollywood spent millions of dollars trying to kill it. They lobbied Congress. They did every. I think the guy’s name was Valenti. And you would see him everywhere on the news. This is piracy. This is not the way movies were meant to be watched. They’re meant to be watched at a theater. And it was a big, huge thing. Until they’re like, oh, we might actually be able to make a buck on this. And then, of course, you look at their revenue streams, they’re making so much more money because of the innovation. And it’s interesting because if you know about how things get innovated and found, I was just reading this great book, The Story of Money, and the piece on Gutenberg is amazing. So Gutenberg was basically a grifter. He was a jeweler. He was obsessed with striking it rich. And not only was he a jeweler, he grew up in wine country. And so wine presses, he was looking at those. The problem with printing before Gutenberg was people had come up with stuff, right. But they could never give uniform pressure when they published it, down to the ink, and so it smeared all over the place. And everyone thought, this is awful. This is horrible. And he figured, no, because he was a jeweler, he could do the fonts much better because that’s what he was trained to do. And then he figured out the way to make the pressure thing. But do you know why he did it? Because he wanted to get rich. And literally the only game in town was the Catholic Church. And so back then, it’s such a great story. Back then, the church was making bank on so-called letters of indulgence. Basically, they were selling you heaven tickets.

Packy McCormick

It’s amazing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But there were so many people who wanted them. There was a supply, demand, mismatch, because all of them were done by a scribe with a quill, with the fancy letters and calligraphy and everything, and then signed by the bishop. Right. So even though there was a demand for 100 of these letters, they could only produce 10. And so Gutenberg goes to the local bishop and shows him a printed letter of indulgence. And the bishop almost wets himself. Where do I sign up? They finance him. He gets all the financing from the Catholic Church, which, by the way, was also the lender of choice back then. And the bishop is thrilled, he loves it. But Gutenberg is like, no, I gotta do more. And his eyes set on Pope Pius II, by the way, anything but pious. He had kids in different countries. He wrote erotica.

Packy McCormick

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

He was also incredibly vain. And because he wrote so much, his eyes started to go. And the thought of having to wear glasses to read to a congregation really offended his vanity. So Gutenberg did a Bible just for Pope Pius. It was beautiful. Being a jeweler, the cover of the Bible was all encrusted with beautiful jewels. But when you opened it up, the fonts were this big so that he could read it without glasses on. And Pius was like, where do I sign? And so literally, they gave him all the financing. But they didn’t think, because they thought, this is amazing. We’re going to get 100x the revenue from the letters of indulgence. We’re going to get these beautiful Bibles. But he forgot that there were other people who might use the printing press too. Enter Martin Luther. But even that Luther came from mining country and they were in a huge bear market. His whole family was in it. And so he got triggered when the Pope sent the prelates and everything to his town to raise money for the beautification of the Vatican. And they’re all in these incredibly fine robes and everything. Meanwhile, Luther’s family is starving and he’s like, fuck that. And thus you got thesis nailed to the church wall, man.

Packy McCormick

They need to teach history differently because this is so cool. And I did not know any of this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I didn’t either until I read this book.

Packy McCormick

Did he get rich?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

He was profligate. So he was basically the old-fashioned term for him was he was a bounder. And what’s really fascinating about it is the real history is so much more interesting than what we’ve been taught. Before reading this, I always thought of Gutenberg as this very studious academic type guy. No!

Packy McCormick

I also picture everybody from history as old. Almost same with me. The last portrait they have is what you picture them as. And not a vital young farmer or whatever.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But the second order effects of publishing created everything. And it gave us the ability for the first time in history to time bind our ideas and send them forward into history and the profound changes of that. But then again, the book I’m reading is The History of Money, right? And The Story of Money. And what was another reason Lutheranism and Protestantism took hold? Well, all of the. Because Germany was a confederacy of duchies. It was not a unified country and they were all competing with each other. That’s why it took hold there. Because as the author of the book points out, the Chinese had already figured out printing, but because they were centralized under the God king of the emperor, they squashed it. They didn’t want ideas that were not supported by the emperor to get out there. In Germany it was like the Wild West. And so all of them could get out. Pamphlets got huge. The thing about Martin Luther, he was literally one of the bestselling authors of all time at that time, but it was all pamphlets. And the key thing was the priesthood spoke Latin. And I always joke that the priesthood says the incantations in Latin because they don’t want the laity to know what they’re on about. And Luther published in German, it was the first time ever. And so most people were illiterate, right? And so the pamphlets were meant to be read in the town square and they were. And then he published hundreds of thousands of these pamphlets. And they made their way all across all of the city states of Germany. And then the princes of those states were like, you know, if I convert to this new form of Christianity, I can seize all of the church’s lands. It’s a, you know, follow the money.

Packy McCormick

Wow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so they’re like, yes, please. I mean, Henry VIII. Yeah, he wanted to get married a couple of times, but the thought just had him salivating that I can seize all of the church’s lands if I convert and you know, Protestantism is born.

Packy McCormick

Humans are amazing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We are.

Packy McCormick

Humans are really amazing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We really are.

Packy McCormick

I mean, yeah. The fact that so much innovation comes from greed and war is a very weird feature of humanity.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. But I mean, it makes sense, right? Of course. And you know, also in this book, do you know what a florin is?

Packy McCormick

Yeah, the money.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, the money. Florence minted the florin and created the world’s first reserve currency because it was, you know, 25 karat gold, always uniform. They had the. It was done by merchants. Right. Church was very unhappy about that. But they literally became the world’s reserve currency because of liquidity. And that’s what created the Renaissance, was the ability to trade in your own currency. Because literally the US dollar gives us inordinate privileges and crazy privileges. When you can. When the world uses your currency to price all of the other goods, you have advantages that simply don’t exist for other things. And the same thing happened over in Florence. So one of the ideas that I think somebody like you should explore. There is so much alpha sitting in history books when you start seeing these connections. And this was new for me. I had heard about it earlier, but that’s why I picked up the book and reading it, I’m like, this is amazing. And you know, I learned that Fibonacci, his real name was Leonardo of Pisa. I think he wrote the first bestselling business book.

Packy McCormick

No way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And it was written for merchants and it was basically defined the time value of money. And it was the book that made lending take off, that made all of it. Took it away from the church and.

Packy McCormick

How do we not know this?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Same with me, dude. I’m a late night guy. And so I read every night and last night I’m just like, I can’t stop reading this book. This is amazing. But it’s almost kind of like a hidden history. Because it’s the real history.

Packy McCormick

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So the dynamism of eras, sometimes they’re really short lived. Back to Florence. Right. The Florence of the Renaissance was a marvel and it was done by merchants like the Medici. Do you know what that name derives from? Medici. It derives from medicine. They were doctors that I did not know and they were founders of the doctor’s guild and then they took the name Medici. But the church, talk about a network. The church had the most incredible network on earth. Still probably has pretty good network on Earth. But literally they were like, yeah, no this has to stop. And so they sent this crazy monk. And that’s where the term Bonfire of the Vanities comes from. He went and he convinced all these people, you’re going to hell. You are definitely going to hell because of your vanities, which was beautiful art, beautiful furniture, all that kind of stuff. And so they literally had bonfires. A beautiful thing, you know, Florence. One church catches up. But it’s a long winded way to get your opinion on. I think that there are certain elites who really don’t want things to change that much. And what do you think about that? I kind of think we’re entering a battle, but it’s a battle of elites, but it’s intra elite. And I kind of say one side is the Empire and the other side is the Rebel Alliance.

Packy McCormick

Who do you think is on each. Are there surprising people that you would put on each side? Are there surprising factions?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So World Economic Forum is the Empire. The guys at a16z are the Rebel Alliance. I count myself as a member of the Rebel Alliance.

Packy McCormick

I’m also in the Rebel Alliance and I think that’s completely right. And I think this is not an AI thing. This started with. I think social media probably was a huge driver of this, that anybody could go out there and say the thing that they believed and compete for attention. I think there’s been some bad things about social media and there’s been some very good things about social media, this being one of them. I think Davos is going on right now and I guess there’s a lot of people there that are important, but who cares? And you’re not waiting for Davos to tell you what’s going to be important this year. And it’s actually maybe a negative signal, whereas. I just wrote this piece on a16z.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I read it. Yeah, I thought it was really well done.

Packy McCormick

Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

My friend Alex Danco is going to tear that place. I mean, he’s so smart.

Packy McCormick

I’ve called this to people recently a divinely inspired hire. And I think it is. I think Alex Danco is amazing and I was shocked to see it. But it makes all the sense in the world when you think about what they’re trying to do. The impact that he can have by making all of. I mean, it’s kind of what I’m trying to do in a small way with just a16z scale resources and Alex Danco level talent is a pretty crazy thing to think about. But I think one of the things that does not come off about them is how humble they are almost in their philosophy, which is just if there are smart people out there doing a thing, even if we don’t really fully understand the thing yet, we’re going to go find the very smartest of the people who are doing that thing and we’re going to back them. And in that case, they built the best machine to be levered to things being different and better in the future, whereas the empire is levered to things staying exactly the same or they benefit from things staying exactly the same. So there’s just that natural tension there. And I think that’s happening in a very big way. I mean, my whole thesis, and this is another one that maybe seems less interesting now than it did a couple of years ago, like optimism, but just that I think people underestimate just how quickly the largest companies in every industry can change. I mean, and how much bigger those companies will become when they do. The fun example, I mean, like SpaceX obviously, but they were competing with a dead launch market Anduril I think is a really fun one because let’s say you get to even a quarter of the Prime’s revenue, but you’re doing it at 40% margins as opposed to, you know, contractually guaranteed 8% margins. And you’re growing faster. That just becomes a much bigger company. And the world keeps getting bigger. Obviously Internet businesses just have a much larger TAM. And so I think things change really fast, but then I think, you know, the established elites and incumbents more generally are just going to get flipped really quickly. And that is a scary prospect that you can only fight dirty essentially because you’re not going to win the technological battle, you’re not going to win the battle for talent. And probably as a Boeing, you’re not going to win the battle for hearts and minds. And so yeah, I think you’re absolutely spot on that that battle seems to be happening.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well and I also think that this is kind of a unique time where for example, the number of people who said to me, why the hell are you opening a publishing company? Well, because the inefficiencies of the. I love to say that. And look, I owe a tremendous amount of my success to the four books I wrote, right? Especially What Works on Wall Street. I was absolutely. My career was turbocharged by McGraw Hill and by other publishers that I published with and loved. Right. But by the same token, the innovation just isn’t there and we now have the tools, right, the means, as you would say, to make meaning for our human readers. And you know, some of it is just so simple. And the fact that they’re not adopting it’s not because they’re stupid. They’re not. There’s a lot of really smart people running legacy publishing companies. But they feel that they need to be backward compatible to the way they used to do things. Right. And so, and they’ve got tons of employees that, you know, who wants to be in the Wall Street Journal for mass layoffs and have those put at the foot of technology, technological improvements. Right. So we can build one from the ground up. And that’s what we’re doing.

Packy McCormick

Well, a lot of people, I think, experience publishing and then said, we’re definitely going to go build a better publisher. I think a lot of people have tried something like this. What do you think people get wrong and what are you doing differently there?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think that the traditional publishers are still very much based on status and prestige and they want to be a little mysterious. So, for example, if you’re an author, I still get statements from What Works on Wall Street, but I get them twice a year, royalty statements. I have no idea how they’re calculated. It’s literally a sheet of paper with a check. Which is nice. But they are, in my view, the author has become incredibly underserved by traditional publishing. We are looking at authors as stars and we are going to do everything in our power to make them stars. What does that practically mean? It means that you don’t have a two-week window to market a book. You have a window that never closes. We have AI workflows, we have team members who are constantly monitoring the books. And then we continue marketing it forever. Boys in the Boat. When it came out, nothing, just fun. And it was because they didn’t really think about the fact that, you know, we should probably send this to rowing crews or things like that. And so I don’t know, I’m sure I’m getting the timing wrong. But like six months later they give a two-week window usually to marketing a book and then move on because they have to.

Packy McCormick

Yep.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Six months later, I think the author himself, Jimmy Soni, my editor in chief, knows this better, but was like, you know what, I’m just gonna start giving this to rowing clubs and all that. And it absolutely exploded. It sold, I think, you know, hundreds of thousands.

Packy McCormick

I read it, yeah, I read it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Got made into a movie. The other great example is Slow Horses, which they have on Apple TV now. The story of that is crazy. His publisher there said, no, this type of writing isn’t your lane. And they’re real big on lanes. Right. We erase lanes. But the other thing that we’re doing is we’re faster. We are publishing a book that the author really wanted it published at a particular time. She went to the big publishing houses. They’re like, oh no, that’s going to take three years. We’re like, we’ll do it for you. Utter transparency to the author. They’re going to have dashboards that show where they’re selling, where they’re not. They’re going to be able to see that hopefully in real time. Ongoing marketing, much greater share of royalties. Basically the model is 50% until we recoup our expenses. 70% to the author, 30% to Infinite Books. How can we do that? Technology. That’s the only way you can do it. We look at the author and the reader. Those are our clients. If a book just fits our thesis as well, we can get it done for you really quickly. We market it much more extensively and you’re going to make a lot more money. Literally one of our goals internally. And Jimmy’s going to hate me for saying this in public, but we want to turn every author that works with us into a millionaire. And we can. Right? And that’s just a different way of thinking about it. And you know, simple things like A/B testing, cover art, why are they not doing that?

Packy McCormick

What I love about this answer is I think a lot of people see AI and technology and they’re like, we’re just gonna be faster and that’s half of it. But the counter positioning piece or understanding where legacy is stuck respecting them realizing they’re smart, but knowing that either because of tradition or probably because of business model, they’re stuck doing a particular thing. So if you can run fast at that weak spot, then that’s the holy grail there. That’s really cool.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Absolutely. And you know, kind of our internal mantra is we only do win-win things. We’re not going to do anything, any zero sum, we’re not going to do anything that disadvantages. And I’ve been like that for a long time. So, for example, we got a lot of opportunities back when the payday loan companies were coming online. And I was just like, no, I will not do that. Because that’s predatory lending on the people who can least afford it. No. And then after we sold OSAM, I’m like, you know what? I think I’m just going to make that the mantra of the new company. It’s just everything has to be win-win. And the way we look at it is the author is going to win huge. Right. Because they’re going to have a view into their books and writing that they’ve never had before. And authors are very clever people and they’re going to be, oh, I didn’t even think about that. Yeah, I should do that. That and this and that and they’re going to get a much greater share of the revenue again because the margins work for us because of technology. I just think that cultural evolution, company evolution takes a lot longer than a lot of people think. But it’s, you know you mentioned Schumpeter earlier, creative destruction. Yep, it happens and it will continue to happen. And so my view is always just embrace it. And you with the newsletter, which is brilliant, you’re putting out really good material. I love the co-written thing. I think that’s a really genius idea actually. But you’re also using it as top of funnel for your venture activities. What are you excited about now in venture?

Packy McCormick

Oh my gosh. I mean kind of everything that I was just talking about and again I think the hardware thing and even complex businesses is a thing that’s gotten a little bit more attention over the past couple of years. But I think it was 2022, it was in the midst of all this bear stuff I realized like we’d invested in Replit, we’d spent a bunch of time in crypto where there’s composability. And I was like, man, it seems like it’s gonna be really hard to build enduring software businesses de novo now. And obviously there are exceptions to that rule in very big ways and certainly AI put in a different category but started getting really excited and I think I’ve always been really excited about this idea of just hard things that are really, really hard to do. And the manifestation of that now is these just complex vertically integrated businesses that are trying to compete directly with incumbents and just win categories of Anduril and SpaceX for everything we did along with Patrick actually Basepower Company, which is this battery company starting down in Texas, but will go everywhere and I think because there are a million things that go into why a company like that would be exciting. But I’ve spent a lot of time studying energy. I think the stuff happening on the generation side, on the nuclear side and the solar side is really exciting. On the usage side, the demand side, electric vehicles and drones and smart everything, all of that AI, certainly a big user of energy. All really exciting. If both of those continue to grow, the thing that you need is batteries. And if you want batteries, the best place to put them actually to balance the grid is next to the home. And if you want to be next to the home with a battery, the best place to start for a million different reasons is in Texas. And so finding the company that has the battery next to the home in Texas with the great people is what I dream of. We invested in this company that I wrote about, Somos Internet, that I think is probably the most similar business in the world to what Basepower Company is doing. They’re down in Colombia, they’re building what looks like, you know, regular ISP. And so half the investors who look at it are like, why in the world would I ever want to do an ISP? In Colombia they’re fully vertically integrated on a new architecture, building all of their own hardware pretty much at this point. In China they are doing active Ethernet with now they’re going to have two fibers directly into the home. So it’s almost like your home is a node in a data center. 10 gigabit Internet, for practically no money compared to what you’d be getting today, are laying their own national backbone, just this fully vertically integrated thing. But because of all of that, you can give this better experience to the consumer than they’re used to having. And you own one of three utilities into the home. I don’t think there’s going to be a water or gas company. So it’s essentially your power and your Internet are the two things that there can be a startup. And so if you own that real estate next to the home, the things that you can do both integrating up and down are just tremendous. And so I’m looking for these businesses that are doing a lot of really hard stuff. It took Somos five years to get to the spot that they’re at now where they’re just humming and really growing fast. But I think if that doesn’t become the largest telco in Latin America, at the very least something has gone horribly wrong because they have a product that’s better, faster and cheaper in a way that no incumbent is going to be able to hire the team to go out and do that. They have all this fiber that they’ve already laid that they’re not going to go want to rip up. They’re buying all of their equipment from Huawei and they don’t know how to do it themselves. If you look at it even in American telco, the R&D line item is like $0. They don’t do any of their own R&D. And that’s exactly who you want to compete with. And what I love about the opportunities right now is that I think for the first time in a while, instead of just saying we’re going to build software to help industries, people are saying oh cool, we have all this software, we have all this technology, let’s just build a better thing and go compete. And people think that’s possible and it’s starting to happen in a real way. So those are the types of things I’m excited about.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

On the venture side, do you look outside the United States? Because you’re mentioning obviously this is outside of the U.S. One of the things that we experimented with was a dedicated fund that we don’t run. So it’s. We’re an LP, but it’s in Bangladesh. Right. And literally the valuations there for an idea here that would be pre-money 100 million, it’s like 5. And what’s really cool is all the young people there are like a nation of entrepreneurs. And do you primarily, what’s your geography look like?

Packy McCormick

I do it mostly US. And then if there is a version of this business model, this vertical integrator business model that is happening that I think is the best version of that in their industry somewhere in the world, great. We did a mining company in Australia called Earth AI that’s doing really, really well and we did that in Colombia. Just personally just put a small early check in a drone delivery company in India. And so if the best version of a thing is happening somewhere else in the world, great. I think a lot of it happens in the United States, but if the best version of it’s happening elsewhere, I’m happy to do that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And one of the things we’ve seen in Bangladesh is they just pore over ideas that start here, but they actually make them better because they’re doing the second iteration. The valuations are much lower. They can learn from the US startups’ mistakes. That’s a very interesting line for us. The other thing, what’s your view on all the startups? Because I have a pretty specific view that are wrappers of large language models.

Packy McCormick

I was very bearish. Back to the humility point. I think one of the things that continues to happen is you’re bearish. Then you get. There was one, it looked like a wrapper company. I’m not going to give specific valuations because we’ll give it away, but even 18 months I talked to the founder and I was like, what do you think about. I know this is, I’m a loser for asking this, but how do you think about over time building moats in this business? And he’s like, I build good products. And I was like, all right, well, it’s been good talking to you. 18 months later, it’s worth 33 times more than it was when I talked to him. So joke’s on me. And I don’t know if that’s a short term thing or a long term thing. I think each use case, I think each example, each situation ends up being probably a little bit different. I mean, Cursor. Now moving down into the models, I think is a really interesting company doing something really unique that people seem to love. Will they be worth 10x in 5 years? Potentially. Will they be worth 10 times less in 5 years? Potentially. I think the Anthropic OpenAI fight is even super interesting right now. As we were saying before, Claude has by far become my favorite model to use. I just think it’s moving so, so fast. I’ve largely, I have probably a fairly uninformed view because I’ve largely stayed away. I think there’s so many smart people fully focused on AI software and foundation models that I have no. I mean, I could write about companies and invest that way. And so there’s some edge. But there’s just so much to keep up with. And I’m so fascinated by this other part of the world that fewer people are fascinated by that. There’s some comparative advantage, at least that I have there. But I don’t know what’s your very specific view?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

My specific view is there’s an ur pattern there, a primitive there as well. And whenever a new technology really ignites the imagination of the society, hundreds of companies get started. So for example, at the turn of the 20th century, 1900, there was something like 200 car companies in America. One of them was actually an electric car company. And what happens is they try everything and then slowly the winner emerges. And the winner that emerges is not always the best product. Right. And so I think, you know the classic VHS beta.

Packy McCormick

Brian Arthur stuff, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. I mean, but so I think that most of them are going to get nuked. Because very difficult to establish a moat. One of the things that we are working on in terms of commercializing some of the AI workflows that we’re doing and the actual AI itself, just really good picks and shovels. I’m not going to name what it is, but there’s a very common thing that everybody uses. Everybody uses. And our CTO has made that 50x better. I was talking to another friend of another portfolio company of ours and he’s like, do you realize how if you just sell this, just this thing alone, you’re gonna do incredibly well. So I do think that there is lots of room there. Yep. But wrappers.

Packy McCormick

I know. And then the fun part about what we do though is, I’ll sit. I have been sitting at wrappers. I will continue to sit at wrappers. And one thing that I pass on inevitably will have made up for all of the things that I got wrong. Probably if you had invested. I’m going to get the numbers wrong on this, but you might actually know. If you’d invested in Amazon at the peak of the dot-com bubble, I think you would have made up all of your losses. You know, I think I forget exactly. I’ve run this before, but there’s something like it. It outreturned all of the losses of the dot-com crash.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, it’s actually true. I wrote a piece for which I was vilified in April of 1999 called The Internet Contrarian. And in it I said, the crash that is going to come is going to have 85% of these companies carried out feet first. DOA. But the example that I gave of a company that would probably survive was Amazon.

Packy McCormick

No way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Packy McCormick

And you bought too.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Hang on. Because I had a thesis. I said Amazon will probably go on to do extraordinarily well, but first it’s going to go down 90%. It went down 93%. And then one of our models picked it up because we’re quants.

Packy McCormick

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So. But you know, it’s really interesting because that was the first time I experienced information cascades and homophily leading to homogeneity of views. And back in April of 1999, you were a heretic that was going to get burned at the stake for saying anything negative about dot-com companies. And I was like, I was 39 and the comments that I got on because it was a blog post for my company. The comments I got were like, you’re an old fogey. You’re only 39. You sound like you’re 95 years old. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. And all that. In my journals, I wrote about it saying I have never experienced this uniformity of opinion. And it made me feel I’m right because literally when you have that kind of thing, and I made bad decisions because of that too. If you think that you’re not going to be affected by the just everyone thinking the same thing at the same time and the information cascades, you’re crazy.

Packy McCormick

How much of what’s happening now feels like that and how much is it different?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s pretty different this time around. I think that there is still a lot of skepticism around it. We haven’t seen. Now we have on the investment side, but we haven’t seen. What was fueling a lot of that was the public loving the Internet. Wait a minute, I can buy any book I want on this website? Are you kidding me? Right? And so the novelty of that was different. I mean, because we’re all been so used to being online now. Listen, I think, you know, Jobs said computers were bicycles for the mind. I think AI is rocket ships for the mind. And but like anything else, it’s only going to be as good as the user, right? And the same power laws are going to apply. Don’t use a free version of one of the big large language models and ask it a stupid question and get a stupid answer and then say, oh, that sucks. Right? You need to come up that learning curve. But what’s interesting is it’s capping that incredible excitement that the general public had. I do not think that this is nearly the same kind of situation.

Packy McCormick

Were there more public Internet stocks than there are public AI? That has to be a big piece of this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Huge piece of it. The minute public markets are available to the public’s imagination and like Globe.com, the valuations of these companies when they went public and then they would go public at a ludicrous valuation and then triple after it. And I remember getting a call during this time period because you got to remember, and let’s be really clear, a lot of my success was being born at the right time, right? I was born in 1960. I was one of the first Gen X users of computers. If Ben Graham had access to my computers and the database, he would have written What Works on Wall Street, right? But the other thing that was super nice for me was I got married at 22 in 1982, and we began the longest decline in interest rates in 100 years. If interest rates are going down, stocks are going this way. Talk about a tailwind, right? And so, I was just incredibly lucky to be fascinated, really obsessed by the stock market at that time. So super lucky around that. Starting to feel. Because I experienced the crash of 1987. I fucked that up. I had a bunch of puts, and I let my emotions. That’s how I became a quant. I was always quantitatively oriented, but I had all these puts because I had a model, right? A quant model, and it said, bearish. And so I had amassed in my young life the largest put position I had ever had. And I let my emotion. Because most people don’t know before the real crash, there was a mini crash the day before. I was getting called by all the brokers who I was using, right? Because you called everyone back then and they’re like, dude, close your position. You just got back to even. You close your position because these are going to expire. And I was totally emotional about it. The model said, don’t close your position. I close my position. The next day, the market crashed. I would have made a fortune in all of those puts. And that was the push that was like, you know what? Maybe I’m the enemy here. Maybe my human OS. I’m no different than anyone else, right? I’m emotional. I get. I let emotions get to me. But then going in, it also tempered me, right? Because it’s like, okay, you might be able to see some signs that things are getting a little frothy. So I was a year early on the Internet call. The crash dot-com bomb didn’t happen until early 2000. But I got a call from the president of my company, who was in Arkansas in a McDonald’s, and he’s like, Jim, you know, all this stuff you’ve been gotten. You’ve gotten pretty bearish on a lot of stuff. And I went, yeah. And he goes, I think this is going to increase your bearishness. And I went, what? And he goes, I’m in a McDonald’s in Arkansas. There’s a bunch of people with their shotguns and hunting gear on, and CNBC is on the TV. And I’m like, oh, fuck. That was kind of the version of, you know, the shoeshine boy telling Joe Kennedy. But so I don’t see that as much, but I definitely see the adoption cycle is speeding up. Are you finding that as well?

Packy McCormick

Yes. Even in my personal usage, I’ve been almost proud of myself for how removed I’ve been. And I’m not going to invest in the app layer and I’ll be fine sleeping at night if I miss out on things that I don’t believe in the business case for. I think just even talking about my personal adoption curve went from using it a lot to over the break, I think a lot of people and in the past few weeks since Claude has gotten better using it all the time. And even now I’m like, shit, did I miss this whole thing? Was I wrong here? And so I’m just trying to be, you know, trying to be more conscious of those thoughts and emotions because that’s probably, you know, either a sign that this time is different for the first time and this is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The big one, most dangerous words in the market. This time it’s different.

Packy McCormick

Exactly. Or I’m starting to lean into that. And so I’m just, I really try to, I meditate daily now. I really want to actually watch my thoughts and understand if I’m getting swept up because I very clearly can. But it does seem like on the Internet, so there’s that echo chamber. And so it feels like the adoption cycle is faster. But even talking to my friends who are not, you know, part of tech, Twitter, people are using it all of the time and people are amazed and they want to talk about it. And so that is starting to happen. But then there’s no. Unless you want to be like, there’s a lot of people now who just become online. You talk to a lot of Uber drivers who are just online stock pickers now. And so unless you’re that level where you want to, you’re doing second order stuff and you’re buying nuclear because of. Or starting to buy quantum because of something that might happen.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You’re right.

Packy McCormick

There’s not as easy an outlet for someone to get excited and be like, oh, there’s a fairly cheap thing that I can go buy and express my belief. And so that probably, yeah, it probably breaks that adoption total craziness.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. The challenge with that is time horizons, right? We really do not want to turn the younger generation into hopped up. I want to double my money in a day because that usually leads to tragedy and despair. But by the same token, I love the idea that we’ve really democratized the tools that make it available. But again, it’s all how you can end up using it. If you’re going to end up using it like a slot machine, that’s going to lead to bad things if you’re not. The world is your oyster as a young investor right now. And things like. Again, back to context. I wish more people knew that Isaac Newton lost his entire fortune in an Internet AI company of the day. But it was a South Sea trading company. The graphs are identical. You plot the South Sea, right? And you plot the NASDAQ. They’re identical. And that’s not because they’re completely different industry, completely different thing. It’s because of us.

Packy McCormick

My takeaway from that Jim Simons book was essentially that his machines were just really good at understanding when humans were being irrational and just trading against us when we’re irrational.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And that’s basically what my thesis was too. It was basically technology, innovation, industry change minute by minute. Markets change minute by minute. Human OS, millennia by millennia doesn’t budge a bit. So arbitraging human nature is the most sustainable edge. And it works for public markets super well. But it also works in private markets, right? What do you ever see? Because you must see huge deal flow now what are the ones? And don’t name any companies please. But just give me categories or pitches just you’re just like. Yep, nope. Goes right into the circular filing.

Packy McCormick

I have to confess something that if current or future LPs are listening. Sorry, I do a lot more subject line straight to the trash. I really am trying to be more, just more thoughtful about what I even take into the top of funnel. And I’ll be super happy if I invest in five companies this year and they’re things that I love. I don’t have a thesis because if the fusion company that I invested in when I thought fusion was a completely uninvestable category, if I had studied for the rest of my life, I never would have come up with the idea that he had come up with that makes it feel more investable. So I’m not thesis driven in that way. But there’s just I have a tighter box now and so there’s a lot of small ideas that go right into the trash. That’s obvious. Anything that’s not differentiated for me goes right into the trash. Differentiated, short term, structurally different, built in a way to maintain that differentiation over time. So there’s not a particular category. There’s nothing even for me to pick on in particular. I think people are trying a lot of really interesting things and we will see what works. I have not made a robotics investment yet, although I think there’s a lot of single use case stuff that’s really interesting. But really for me, it’s, is this thing something that not 12 other people are building and I just don’t have the time of day to pick the best of the 15 entrepreneurs going after the same thing when there’s so many other really big opportunities out there. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s a pretty boring answer, but it’s just my top of funnel used to be like this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Your entire brand is not boring.

Packy McCormick

I know. I used to take. It must have been 20 pitches a week in the beginning and now it’s four or five.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Packy McCormick

It just. I really want to tighten all of that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And let’s flip it around. What innovative business models are you seeing that you’re like, wow, okay, this is really, really intriguing?

Packy McCormick

Man. I’m going super off brand here and I’m going to come up with boring ones again.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know what? I think I’ve got now the title for the podcast Boring.

Packy McCormick

I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that’s going to happen. How do you pay for workers as opposed to, you know, for seats or all the different AI stuff I think is super interesting. I think the interesting business model to me is whatever works best for the industry that it’s in. A way that’s kind of, I’m bad at doing these answers because it’s so use case specific. I think I mentioned that company Earth AI and so to go back to them a little bit, they started out building, you know, back in 2018. So pre-AI started building AI models to do mineral discovery in Australia where a Y Combinator company they sold to explorers and they could actually make themselves because explorers will raise some cash and then they’ll be willing to spend it and then they disappear.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Packy McCormick

You’ll get a $50,000 contract selling them this thing. Either they go under or you just never hear from them again because they’ve either found something they haven’t. So you can’t train your model on that. You have no idea if your business is doing well. And so finally the guy was like, you know what? I’m going to go out, I’m going to build my own drilling rig. And I’m going to go out into the field, I’m going to actually see if this thing works. I’m just going to build one and I’m going to see if we’re actually coming close to anything. We’ll go with. We will tell our explorer customers that we will go with you and dig the hole for you, drill the hole for you, just to know if we’re actually finding something or not. And so he did that and then they decided to build their own rigs and now they’re just, you know what? And I think this is true in most of these categories and these vertically integrated things where you start out selling software, you sell to a customer that is a really bad customer. And if someone’s a bad customer, that they’re probably a pretty good competitor to have. And so they started just competing. Now they make their own drilling rigs. They’ve made three discoveries with potentially a fourth. And I bring all of this up because the business model here is essentially where in Australia, where they’re starting, if you can find something that’s not brownfield, which means not next to an existing site or something that people have done before, if you can actually find greenfield discoveries and no one’s been there but you plant your flag that is yours in perpetuity. So you find that you have a cheaper drilling rig, you go out to the spot, you drill it’s yours, and then you develop it a little bit. And if you can drill cheaper and faster, then you can develop it faster. Sell a stake in that business. The drilling rigs are not particularly expensive, but you sell a stake in that deposit to a miner, to somebody midstream, and then you take that cash and you buy more drilling rigs and you work down this 650 target list in Australia and that just spins in this unbelievably beautiful way. Literally the first time that you sell a stake in a deposit, you can just spin this machine that keeps going forever and ever as long as people need metals and minerals, which I think we will for a while. And so that’s not a trend that I’m seeing in the market. But that is something that in that particular use case, and I actually said no to it at first because I’m not going to invest in the Ukrainian guy who started up a mining company in Australia. But we’d been doing Elliot, who I mentioned earlier, and I were doing some biotech investing and I was like, this actually feels like what the biotech platform business model is where you use technology to develop an asset and then sell it off and then take that and invest in more. But it’s that with perpetual rights on the deposit that you’re finding. And so all of what I do is trying to find these one-off things and by building this top of funnel, that’s what I’m looking for. Are these really one-off things that specifically work for the industry that they’re trying to beat?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Our first really big client at my first company, O’Shaughnessy Capital Management, had done extraordinarily well in mining and gold mining. And he was a wonderful man and gave me my time horizon. I was sitting with him out west. There were pictures of all of his grandkids on the table next to where we were sitting. I had. Because he was elderly at the time, and so I had brought these really conservative portfolios, right? And he’s looking at him, he’s this, you know, cowboy to the boots, right? Weathered face, loved this man. Anyway. And he goes, what you bring me this shit for? And I’m like, well, I mean, given your age. And he looked at me and he goes, you don’t get it. You don’t get it. And he points at his grandkids, he goes, my time horizon is infinite. And I loved that. And it changed my own thinking because that’s the answer I give now. Because I have grandchildren, I hope to have great grandchildren, I have organizations that I would like to continue to support, et cetera. And what that does is almost like a magic spell. My time horizon is infinite, meaning you will make decisions in a completely different manner. But the reason I bring him up was he also, gold miners in general are the biggest risk junkies that I have ever met in my life. And he told me this really funny joke. He’s like, he also was a pilot and that’s how he actually found. He trained his eye to see certain impressions that meant there’s gold in them hills. Anyway, so we’re in the plane and we’re on the thing and he’s showing me all the stuff that he sold to this big company. And he goes, did you hear about the miner who died and went up to heaven? And I went, no, tell me about him. He goes, well, yeah, he got up there to heaven and St. Peter came out and said, I’m sorry, this is really unusual, but we’re full up with miners. You know, we got a quota, we normally don’t ever get many of them up here because you guys are so crazy. But all these are wonderful guys and they’re in heaven. And miner goes, so you’re telling me. He goes, you got to go to the other place. He goes, but I’ve led a great life. And he goes, listen, I’ll make you a deal. They’re all over there because they love hanging out together. You can go over there and say something to him and if anyone leaves, then we’ll open a slot for you. And the guy goes, okay. He goes over and shouts to the other miners, gold found in hell. And they all dash for the elevator to go down to hell and St. Peter goes, that’s brilliant. Welcome. And he goes, and then St. Peter goes, because he’s walking away. And he goes, what are you doing? And he goes, I’m joining those guys. There might be something to that rumor. So.

Packy McCormick

Yep.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I mean it is a super high risk, you know. And the other joke he told me was what do you call most gold mines? A dark hole with a liar at the other end. But if you can figure out a way to innovate like you’ve just described, potentially.

Packy McCormick

And what you want I think is none of the explorers have the resources to go out and do 12 of them, but if you have a portfolio, actually you’re in a pretty good spot. And so that’s the innovation on this one.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So. And let’s go back to writing. What are you most excited about? Do you plan out what you’re going to be presenting or does it just grab you and then you go with that?

Packy McCormick

Yeah. So now actually a little bit more now that I’m doing these co-written essays with people. So I have to have some sort of a content calendar just because I’m working with other people on it. The thing that is most exciting me about those is that I would not have predicted the ideas that particular people would have given their industry. You have to get through layer one and get through the pitch idea. And then you talk for a while and you’re like, nope, that is the thing that we should be writing about. And that just keeps happening over and over again. So I’m really excited for the, that this year, probably the category that I want to explore the most that I haven’t done yet and that I just need to take the time to go do I think bioelectricity, all the Michael Levin work is the most fascinating thing in the world and my very dumb take on it. I wrote that electric stack piece. And if we’re in this electric era, I bet just cosmically that the body is going to turn out to be more electric and more electrically controllable than previously thought. But the results that they’re getting.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Doesn’t the heart have its own generate its own electrical field? I think that it does.

Packy McCormick

That sounds right to me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But everyone listening, I will look that up after we’re done.

Packy McCormick

Yeah, but I mean the whole body is just more electrical.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I Sing the Body Electric.

Packy McCormick

I Sing the Body Electric. I went back and the book was terribly written, but really interesting.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Great title.

Packy McCormick

But you could regrow amphibian legs by applying. Just by putting a cuff around it and applying the right current to it. And I think there’s just a lot there.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, you know, Maxwell is a great example of a guy who I don’t think gets enough credit. His work spawned more innovation than almost any other one from that period. And right now a lot of people say Maxwell who? Right.

Packy McCormick

We have, we have a piece coming up that is Maxwell adjacent. A piece with a quantum magneticist. So I’m not the one who’s actually going to be writing that, but talking about why humans are so bad at grokking.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And is that the strategy going forward for the paid is are they all going to be co-written or are you going to sometimes do solos?

Packy McCormick

I think it’ll be a... I think free. I want to keep the big tentpole pieces just out there, but there might be ones like that piece that I was saying I wrote about my son selling stuff. That’s probably…

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s cool.

Packy McCormick

Yeah, that probably stays. I want to have a spot actually where I can feel free to write more short stuff that I don’t feel like I’m spamming 257,000 people with. I’m only spamming the people who’ve been nice enough to pay me. So thank you and sorry in advance, but that’s the spot where I want to just experiment a lot more.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And is that going forward? Is that going to be the twin engines going to be the paid, always keeping the free and using both as top of funnel for the venture. Any plans to raise another fund or. Yeah. Okay. And you can’t talk about it.

Packy McCormick

Incredibly excited about that opportunity set that we’re talking about right now. And I’ve been surprised. I think in the beginning, my thesis on the original fund was maybe if I have this newsletter, people will let me write about them and then they’ll let me invest. And that was. More people read it than I thought and were just like, oh, yeah, you write a small check and we read Not Boring. So come on in. I think now the way that I’m thinking about it is I want to be the best in the world at this one thing, which is telling stories about these companies and then everything that goes around that it can’t just all be company stories, but I want to be the best in the world at that one thing. And I think, particularly for the type of business that I’m interested in, but for companies generally, you see a lot of companies out there hiring chief storytellers or narrative officers or whatever. I think I can do that, but then apply, add distribution to it. Add just the fact that the audience likes to come to Not Boring to read these really deep, long things that we’ve been told that people don’t read anymore. So I think this combination of investing in this type of company and writing just is way more fun than I thought and way cooler than I thought. So either am or we’ll be raising against that thesis soon.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Cool. That kind of brings me full circle to the original. Your idea that I never got an actionable idea from a podcast. I think that you’re gonna see this type. And of course, obviously I’m reasoning based on my priors, let’s be very clear. But the kind where a conversation. It’s more of a freewheeling conversation, but then the people who are listening or watching can go to a piece of writing that you mentioned. Right. And that’s where the idea discovery comes. They get it by listening to it. But there needs to be a next step. And I think that type of podcast is going to continue to do really well.

Packy McCormick

Totally. I think I put it in the piece, but I think that podcasts are unbelievably good for getting to know people. This type of conversation where we’re just sitting here and talking about a bunch of different things. This would be the weirdest essay, you know, the weirdest written thing of all time. Nobody would sit through this whole. Maybe you said that you read transcripts sometimes. It’s not the kind of thing that you’d want to ever read because there’s this back and forth. There’s our faces, there’s all of that. But any idea that I’ve said on this, at least me personally, I would do a much better job expressing that idea in writing. And I think a lot of people, given the time and a week to work on something or a month to work on something, will do a much better job expressing that idea. And then to your point, once they have it, then you can go out and just repeat it over and over.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it’s the conversation that introduces them to the concept. And so I’m still very bullish on that and I think that will continue. But I’m also completely agree with your thesis that you got to get it in writing. Right. Because if you don’t have it in writing, you haven’t really thought about it because writing is thinking. And you know, these kinds of things can be great and lead you to all of those cool pieces. But you probably. Because again, imagine if we were going to talk the way we write, then you’d get really fucking boring.

Packy McCormick

Yes, 100%. That doesn’t work. Writing has just been so oversold and video is great and podcasts are great. And part of this is just, this could be me. I’m about to be 39, so maybe this is me being old. But writing doesn’t feel like something that’s going to go away. And so I think it’s really oversold. And I’m, you know, I think having just announced this to the world, the amount of people that are like, yeah, I actually do want to come on and write my thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Packy McCormick

Has really blown me away. So I think writing is coming back.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. As investors call it a deep value opportunity. Because I agree with you, it’s not going away. And in fact, I think quite the opposite. I think that the people, if I was giving advice to a young person today, I would say learn how to write really well. And because not only is it going to improve your ideas because writing is thinking, but everyone else is doing TikTok. Go the other way and you’re probably going to end up really well. Well, Packy, this has been, as I anticipated, super fun. I love talking to you because I love your optimism. I remember when I first saw you, I’m like, oh, finally. Finally we have a young person out there saying, not the sky is falling and oh, woe is me. But look at all these great things that are going on in the world. As you might remember, even though it was a long time ago. Our final question is, we’re going to make you the emperor of the world. You cannot kill anyone. You cannot put anyone in a re-education camp, but we are going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it. And the two things that you say into it are going to incept the entire population of the world. They’re going to wake up whenever their next morning is and they’re going to say, you know, unlike all the other times when I woke up with a great idea, I got two this time. And I’m actually going to start acting on them right now. What two things are you going to incept into the world?

Packy McCormick

Be you. I think that’s a big one. That’s my goal for the year, probably the rest of my life. And I don’t know. Be joyful and energetic. I’m giving advice to myself now, but these are the things that I’m telling myself, we’re so lucky to be in the situation that we’re in right now. And so I think one, there’s just differentiation and just being unique and interesting and authentic to who you are. I think you have to learn as you get older that is the most important thing. But I’m really also just trying to be as joyful and energetic as I can because the world just becomes more fun that way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, totally.

Packy McCormick

And you’re the prime example of this. But the world just becomes. As soon as you’re like, hey, I’m gonna experience whatever happens with joy, it just gets joyful. It’s wonderful. So those are the two things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love both of them. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s be yourself. Everyone else is taken. But I also like the idea of authenticity is just you. I see so much advice online, right? Be authentic. In other words, be a fake and ape this person over here.

Packy McCormick

Here’s how you talk authentically.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. This has been a blast. We’ll have all of your info on the show notes and can’t wait till next time.

Packy McCormick

This is so much fun. I can’t wait.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Thanks.

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We also explore how AI can remove meaningless cognitive load, protect deep work, and unlock creative leverage.

Jean-Marc and I have these kinds of conversations ALL the time and, as you’ll hear, we tend to go off on all kinds of tangents…

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights 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

• Jean-Marc’s OSVerse essay: The Future of Food.

Links

Highlights

The Last Human Chief of Staff

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The line that got me, that cinched it for you was, “I will be your last human chief of staff.” Elaborate on that a little bit.

Jean-Marc Daecius: Well, there’s a few parts of the job that, like any job, is a little annoying. Particularly with email. There’s so much that is just kind of like bullet holes through your attention during the day when you check five emails, and then all of a sudden, by the time you’re done with the fifth, you have like six more, and it’s like, all right, I’m not getting anything done. Email is a useful communicative tool, but there’s a huge trade off there because it’s essentially just nuking your ability to concentrate on one meaningful thing that actually has ROI for a given period of time where you can actually make progress on it.

I think AI can handle a lot of that shenanigans that happens in emails where it’s like, all right, I guess I needed to read this. I guess I needed to be updated on this. I would much prefer at the end of the day and at the beginning, or at the beginning of the day, I check a little app that I’ve built, and it’s like, here are a little ticker tape of things that I need to know that have been aggregated from emails that I haven’t actually gotten to since I last looked at it. And here’s like a short list of meetings and then my highest priority items. So integrate a to-do list into it.

And so then an AI that also has the context of all of my priorities, my personal priorities, my work priorities, and then the priorities of the company can crunch all of that and then give me a short list of things that I should work on. It’s like, all right, you have a lot of meetings today. You have a couple of emails that will require some time. So you don’t actually have much time for any deep work. So your to-do list has been reshuffled to reflect that. And so it’s like, all right, here’s a few little easy things that have been on the back burner that you can just knock out with a little bit of available time that you have. And then the next day it’s like, all right, I got one meeting in the morning. Emails are kind of light. Block off this huge thing and tackle this next big phase of a coding project that I’m working on. So an AI that can just take all of that sort of meaningless cognitive weight off of the human would be great, because there’s no point for me or anyone else to be doing that kind of thing.

Don’t Tolerate Bullshit

Jim O’Shaughnessy: A lot of people hate the book business and think that’s not a good business. And the way it currently exists, they’re probably right […] Do you think it’s this corporate culture that is just endemic to most big company legacy companies where it’s kind of like having to... Each upgrade needs to be compatible backward? […]

Jean-Marc Daecius: I think maybe two parts from a human psychological point of view is people have way too high of a tolerance for bullshit. You were saying meetings are masturbatory. I feel like that’s just waterboarding yourself with bullshit. And it’s like if you have such a high tolerance for that, I don’t think that’s a good sign. And then I think people also just lack imagination where if someone tells you, oh, this is the way that it’s been done, the iconoclast is like, well I don’t care about that, let’s find a different way. Most people don’t react that way. Most people are like, oh great, someone just told me what my job is and gave me a rubric for what I need to do. That’s great.

If this is the way it’s always been done, then it must be tried and true and I’m golden. I don’t have to think anymore. If you want to find a new way of doing something, it’s cognitively taxing. And so I think that goes hand in hand with people who can tolerate tons of bullshit are perhaps talented in the ways of not wanting to think too much.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Didn’t Bertrand Russell or maybe someone of his ilk say that what most people call thinking is simply rearranging their prejudices? And if you really want to do good work, it’s taxing, right? Because you got to think deeply and hard about things, but you also have to be willing to just say, oh well, I fucked that one up and what can I learn? I think there’s also that very strong in traditional corporate culture the cover your ass mentality. And it’s just not a good structure. It was designed for a completely different era for industrialization and Taylorism, which, you know how little I think of Taylorism. But to be fair, for the time that Taylor came up with all of these ideas, they made sense, right? Because you were supposed to do one thing. You pull that crank right on a big industrial assembly line. And yet it took over what we call corporate management or those types of things to an extent that people didn’t realize that it was just enshittification of everything.

🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let’s do your superhero backstory, because when we were chatting before we decided to record, we both agreed that your CV, unless you had a nutcase like me being able to not pay... I didn’t even look at your CV, to be honest. But when I learned a bit after hiring you, I’m like, huh, wow, that’s pretty cool that you got this job.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah, it’s kind of like hyperstition. But I never even would have gone for a job like this, to be totally honest. But the situation here is much different than what I think most chiefs of staff would be dealing with. So I think it dovetails well, nicely into the fact that I don’t have a traditional CV for this kind of position. Well, the position is also a bit different than what I think most chiefs of staff might be accustomed to.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And although we use the terms, we are essentially in real time trying to create a completely new sort of company. AI first in all of our verticals, everything that we’re doing. The line that got me, that cinched it for you was, “I will be your last human chief of staff.” Elaborate on that a little bit.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Well, there’s a few parts of the job that, like any job, is a little annoying. Particularly with email. There’s so much that is just kind of like bullet holes through your attention during the day when you check five emails, and then all of a sudden, by the time you’re done with the fifth, you have like six more, and it’s like, all right, I’m not getting anything done. Email is a useful communicative tool, but there’s a huge trade off there because it’s essentially just nuking your ability to concentrate on one meaningful thing that actually has ROI for a given period of time where you can actually make progress on it.

I think AI can handle a lot of that shenanigans that happens in emails where it’s like, all right, I guess I needed to read this. I guess I needed to be updated on this. I would much prefer at the end of the day and at the beginning, or at the beginning of the day, I check a little app that I’ve built, and it’s like, here are a little ticker tape of things that I need to know that have been aggregated from emails that I haven’t actually gotten to since I last looked at it. And here’s like a short list of meetings and then my highest priority items. So integrate a to-do list into it.

And so then an AI that also has the context of all of my priorities, my personal priorities, my work priorities, and then the priorities of the company can crunch all of that and then give me a short list of things that I should work on. It’s like, all right, you have a lot of meetings today. You have a couple of emails that will require some time. So you don’t actually have much time for any deep work. So your to-do list has been reshuffled to reflect that. And so it’s like, all right, here’s a few little easy things that have been on the back burner that you can just knock out with a little bit of available time that you have. And then the next day it’s like, all right, I got one meeting in the morning. Emails are kind of light. Block off this huge thing and tackle this next big phase of a coding project that I’m working on. So an AI that can just take all of that sort of meaningless cognitive weight off of the human would be great, because there’s no point for me or anyone else to be doing that kind of thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you definitely avoided my question about your superhero backstory. So we can truncate it. What, and you’ve done so many different things, which I find super cool, what one of those things that you did do you think was the most helpful for you in the role you occupy now?

Jean-Marc Daecius

Oh, man. Playing with Legos when I was a kid, maybe. Actually my first entrepreneurial endeavor was actually accidental and slightly illegal. I was living in Vancouver in a tiny studio apartment. And I remember I’d gotten a decent paying job and like two months in, I looked at my bank statement, I’m like, why do I have no money? And I look at my credit card statement, I was like, whoa, booze is really expensive in Vancouver. And my reaction to that was, well, how hard can it be to make whiskey? And so I spent the next nine months studying separation sciences and built a six foot fractionating column complete with a Graham condenser in my tiny studio apartment and distilled my own vodka, gin, rum and whiskey. Even barrel aged the whiskey myself.

And it wasn’t until I was doing my first run and I actually tasted this, got it up to 94% ethanol. I tasted it, I was like, this is good. And I had a friend over at the time and they were like, is this legal? And I was like, I didn’t think about that at all. But I’d also spent quite a bit of money building this copper still. And so I wanted to make my money back. So I may have traded a few boxes of booze for money with some friends.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So wait, so the headline is, Jim’s chief of staff at O’Shaughnessy Ventures, the best prior skill I got was from bootlegging.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Well, I mean, it was essentially a complete business that was founded on an experiment of curiosity that required a lot of tinkering and a lot of hands on building in order to get it to work. So it was this initial question of, well, how hard can this be? And of course Hofstadter’s law, it always takes much longer than you think it will, especially when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. But then unintended, it developed into this business experiment that, well, I’d had all of these costs and it’s like, well, now I want to recoup these costs a little bit. And so I was young at the time and I never really thought of starting a business at the time. Obviously it wasn’t a legitimate business, it was just really like a hobby.

But it was the first time that I made something that earned an unexpected dollar in that sense. And so I think the lessons involved in that entire little hobby experiment extrapolate really well to pretty much every product or service or business experiment that I’ve run since and have run since I’ve come on board here. So it’s like, all right, this is a cool idea, but what will the ROI on it be? Is this actually going to move the needle? Is this actually like a decent business experiment or is this really just fulfilling some curiosity? Fulfilling curiosity can be great.

It can be useful because it can lead into unexpected unknowns where you can find a little bit of gold and then it’s like, all right, kind of like the Bell Labs, where it’s like, all right, a whole bunch of scientists just do cool stuff and then they uncover all sorts of things that eventually do have higher ROI. But that all being said, I think it is good to have every sort of proposal or idea go through that litmus test of like, can we see a viable ROI here?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And basically what we believe is there is gold in them there tails. But a lot of people aren’t operating there because of a variety of reasons. Like for example, with AI Lab, we think that we’re going to be able to develop some very commercially successful software that people will use and love. But we have kind of an edge in that no VC would touch it because the market isn’t big enough.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think one of the troubles that traditional enterprises get into is they get captive of their own jargon. Right. And so what’s the TAM, the total addressable market? Oh no, that’s not big enough. And plus they’re constrained by the fact that every investment that a traditional VC makes, essentially they need it to return the fund. And we are not under any of those problems.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yes, it’s kind of like they have incentives that create scope paralysis. So they can’t zoom into something that it would actually be very much worth their while because of those incentives that you outlined. And then because of that kind of becomes a habit. So if they move into some other area, they might still have those, their zoom is basically stuck. Whereas here there’s just so much freedom in terms of like, well, how high could that go? How low can we address it and still have a meaningful ROI? Even if something’s just an internal tool, doesn’t have immediate ROI, but it has, once you compare it to an industry standard and then you scale that across time, it’s like, oh, actually this is going to save a ton of money over time. So yeah, I do think about scope paralysis quite a bit. And it’s often the very mistake that I’m making when I’m trying to work on something and I’m stuck. I often have to be like, all right, I gotta shake my head out of the grass and stand up and be like, all right, bird’s eye view. What’s going on?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I think also we’re a fairly interesting crew here in that, if you are not a highly agentic person, you’re not going to make it here. Right? I’m not running a kindergarten, and neither are you. And so there’s a lot of people who think that writing furiously about something and posting it on social media, that shows them, whereas the value of that is precisely zero for most endeavors. What’s it feel like? You’ve worked at a bunch of different places. One of the things that we try to do here is show me. You’re very good at that.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah. I had an idea that I bounced off you based on something that Jimmy said in one of the monthly meetings, and I bounced the idea off you, and your response was, sounds really cool. Write up a proposal for it. And so I went home that weekend. I thought, I’ve never written a proposal for anything. I guess I’ll take a shot at this. And I was like, oh, it’d be really cool if I could show what the UI of this thing would look like. And so I whipped out my iPad, I started drawing it, but then I was like, oh, actually, it might just be faster if I just code up the UI real quick. And so I did that.

And once I had it on the browser, I was like, well, I’ll take a shot at the back end. Just see how far I get. And so Monday morning rolled around. I don’t know if you remember. I was like, Jim, so you asked me to write a proposal, and I didn’t do it. You were like, okay. I was like, but I built a working MVP. Do you want to check it out? And you were thrilled. So that developed into a tool that we use almost every day now. It’s a meeting about a meeting in order to think about a proposal, and then another meeting for someone to decide who’s going to write the proposal. And it’s like, when are we eventually going to get to the interesting part, which is someone actually does the thing.

So I’ve always been a little bit, I guess you could say allergic to corporate culture, because it just seems like a lot of meetings and nothing gets done where I’m much more of the, okay, that’s great. Leave me alone. I would like to actually take a crack and get something working and see how useful it is and then we can get feedback on it and we can actually build something meaningful. That’s the number one thing that I think I love about being here. But perhaps maybe not having the traditional CV also, these go hand in hand because I just never wanted to go through all of these, jump through all these hoops in order to build a CV in order to get this kind of job. It’s like, no, I just want to actually do things that are interesting and give me real feedback as opposed to more gold stars.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, well, even when I was in a more traditional environment, I think 80% of internal corporate meetings are masturbatory and a total waste of time. And I think the challenge with that is that people think that they’re accomplishing something. You had 10 meetings today. Who the fuck cares? Did you do anything today? And as part of the series that we never really kind of got off the ground, the Great Reshuffle, I think all of that... And I started that, I don’t know, 2018, where I got the sense we are going to go through the biggest transformation in the way businesses are run. Who wins, who loses. The old playbooks were going to stop working and we’ve already seen that. And then aligned our verticals around things where I saw the greatest arbitrage ability.

For example, Infinite Books. A lot of people hate the book business and think that’s not a good business. And the way it currently exists, they’re probably right. But the way we are reinventing it, kind of... We toy with the word, not even calling it publishing, but an author’s operating system. And it amazes me. A simple thing. We A/B test all of our covers, right? And you and I just had an experience where the cover that both you and I were not happy with won. The whole team hated it. And yet again, maybe it’s my empirical quant background, but if the market says something and you’re saying something else, market is right. But I wonder, okay, that’s the easiest thing in the world for like a Simon & Schuster or one of the legacy publishers to do. Do you think it’s this corporate culture that is just endemic to most big company legacy companies where it’s kind of like having to... Each upgrade needs to be compatible backward. Right. We don’t suffer under that problem. But is it a mixture of things. Is it... What do you think it is?

Jean-Marc Daecius

I think maybe two parts from a human psychological point of view is people have way too high of a tolerance for bullshit. You were saying meetings are masturbatory. I feel like that’s just waterboarding yourself with bullshit. And it’s like if you have such a high tolerance for that, I don’t think that’s a good sign. And then I think people also just lack imagination where if someone tells you, oh, this is the way that it’s been done, the iconoclast is like, well I don’t care about that, let’s find a different way. Most people don’t react that way. Most people are like, oh great, someone just told me what my job is and gave me a rubric for what I need to do. That’s great.

If this is the way it’s always been done, then it must be tried and true and I’m golden. I don’t have to think anymore. If you want to find a new way of doing something, it’s cognitively taxing. And so I think that goes hand in hand with people who can tolerate tons of bullshit are perhaps talented in the ways of not wanting to think too much.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Didn’t Bertrand Russell or maybe someone of his ilk say that what most people call thinking is simply rearranging their prejudices? And if you really want to do good work, it’s taxing, right? Because you got to think deeply and hard about things, but you also have to be willing to just say, oh well, I fucked that one up and what can I learn? I think there’s also that very strong in traditional corporate culture the cover your ass mentality. And it’s just not a good structure. It was designed for a completely different era for industrialization and Taylorism, which, you know how little I think of Taylorism. But to be fair, for the time that Taylor came up with all of these ideas, they made sense, right? Because you were supposed to do one thing. You pull that crank right on a big industrial assembly line. And yet it took over what we call corporate management or those types of things to an extent that people didn’t realize that it was just enshittification of everything.

Jean-Marc Daecius

I guess constant meetings are like the doom scrolling of the corporate world.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I mean honestly. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I like LinkedIn. They feel fine over there. It’s like, oh, he got a promotion, wow. I guess I’ll now mimetically become envious of him and try to bring him down. I think that we are very fortunate in that this isn’t exactly a startup. Right, because we don’t have to worry about funding and all those kinds of things. And your average startup founder spends what, 60% of their time on raising money or keeping investors informed, monitoring the situation and... And so we don’t have to do any of that bullshit. And we also have a culture that bullshitting is not appreciated unless it’s like shitposting or having fun. I mean, how many people do you really think right now could thrive in an environment like this?

So, for example, we’ll talk about this right now. You just did a post for our Substack, which is fascinating. You told me about it months ago, and I rode you relentlessly to write it. But you’re a good writer too. And how many places are you chief of staff, but hey, I also want that Substack from you on AI and ag. Talk a little bit about that because I think it was a fascinating idea.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah. First, thanks for letting me do that. It’s a lot of fun to have it broadcasted on the OSVerse. Some really nice feedback on it too, so far, which is great. So the basic thesis is that the same argument that you’re making about Taylorism and how that’s infected the corporate world in this overly bureaucratic, bloated, meeting heavy way...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Vogons, Vogons. If you’re a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan, you’ll know the Vogons are the most bureaucratic race.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah, and they’re blowing up the world in order to build a superhighway straight through it because they don’t have the dexterity to question the order or just build around a planet. Solar system, like, come on, guys. So very similar to these... If you take that as analogy or a metaphor for the current way that we do agriculture, which is essentially just industrial monocrop farming, there’s something very similar there because we have these endless rows of the exact same crop, and they require like a Vogon-like contraption to harvest all of it. Because, for example, I think it’s the Calmer 1357 or something is like 32 rows of corn. It’s basically just this long hammerhead type device that you put on the front of a tractor and then you run it through 32 rows of corn and it can harvest all 32 rows simultaneously, which is amazing. And from the point of view of the Industrial Revolution, this is a triumph. But it has come with serious downsides.

One, for example, is that in order to have monocropping work, we have to dump loads of pesticides on these plants in order for them to make it to harvest. In the U.S., the U.S. applies over 1 billion pounds of pesticides to food every single year. That trickles down to about 3 pounds of pesticides per person per year, which trickles down to about 11 aspirin tablets of pesticides on your food per day. And even after you wash food, you still have 75% of the food still has pesticides on it. And many of the pesticides now aren’t even something that you can rub off. They’re called systemic pesticides. So they basically infuse into the fruit or the food so you can’t wash it off. It’s literally inside. And this has health consequences which I could get into that even relate to the GLP-1 craze and obesity and whatnot.

But back to what I think is probably going to happen with the future of agriculture is we’re going to get something that’s far more dynamic. Charles Mann is a writer, awesome writer, who published this book called 1491, which details what his best thesis, what North and South America probably looked like prior to the arrival of Europeans. And one thing that stuck with me from that book is an agriculture technology that we don’t use today. It’s called the Milpa and it’s a system of intercropping where you plant like a dozen different species together. And like, for example, corn lacks lysine and tryptophan, but beans have lysine and tryptophan. So if you plant them together, they basically complement one another. And what one plant takes from the soil, another plant provides. And so you essentially get this fully regenerative system in this little collection of species that can be harvested basically forever without depleting the land, which is kind of like an infinite food hack. And the Aztec empire, the Inca empire, all use these systems of intercropping. And then we basically bulldozed that system and we invented monocropping.

We had to because it had to cater to the machines that we had available as a result of the Industrial Revolution. We didn’t have a tractor that could plow through a milpa and catch 12 different varieties of plants that are all getting ripe or ready for harvest at all different times. We don’t have a machine that could do that, but we will. Once we have humanoid robots, we could transition huge monocrop fields to essentially food forests that have dozens, if not hundreds of different species of food. And these fields, these food forests would be attended to by essentially a small army of robotic gardeners. Because the human hand, once we have that in fully automated form, it can differentiate between a ripe tomato and a ripe avocado.

And all these other things that it’s going to interact with can also, using AI, basically run hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of concurrent experiments in order to find a little bit more arbitrage in these systems. Like, oh, this species does a little bit better for whatever reason, if it’s 2 meters away from this species, we don’t know yet, but it seems to work. And then like this species of insect next to this species of tree with this type of mushroom and dandelions here are necessary because dandelions hoover up zinc and selenium and all that sort of stuff. We’ll be able to run those experiments concurrently, but then also rebuild the topsoil. Because another thing that monocropping does is it depletes the topsoil. And topsoil, an inch of topsoil takes a thousand years to build.

And then in the Midwest we are losing, what was it? I think in an average field we lose 2.2 tons of topsoil per acre. And then in the Midwest we lose substantially more. It comes down to basically like in an average field, we lose 11 years of topsoil in one year. And then in the Midwest where it’s much more heavily farmed, we lose 69 years of topsoil growth in one year. And so with these numbers, you just project them forward. Things are going to look really bad in about 50 to 60 years. So if we don’t figure out a different way to pivot away from monocrop culture, we’re going to run into problems. The other thing about this Milpa style food forest is that you won’t need pesticides because you have all of this inter-species competition.

It alleviates basically all of the problems that you get with a huge field of corn which can be just destroyed overnight by one particular species of bug. You just don’t get that if you have this diverse ecosystem of plants and insects that are all interacting together. So then you can do away the pesticides, the topsoil comes back. That means that the ground can hold more water. There’s just so many benefits here. So I outlined all of that in this Future of Food.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know what I love about it too, is that it kind of speaks to our overall thesis brilliantly, right? Monocultures are bad just in humans, in any variety. When you slip into a monoculture, bad shit happens. Using food as the example. Yeah. For when that was the way it had to be done. That was the way it had to be done because we were limited and constrained by the technology and the hardware and rigs available to us. But that’s no longer the case. And part of our thesis is that everything’s going to become customizable and so can food, right? And then I guess with a tilt to my fierce anti-authoritarianism, you’ve got to look at a system that goes at things top down. And one thinks of course of Mao and the sparrows.

And for people who aren’t aware of this, Mao decided that he was going to collectivize all of the farms in China and he fucking hated those sparrows too. And so they literally killed all of the sparrows in China with disastrous effects because the sparrows were eating the bugs that were destroying the crops. Right? And it just to me makes me go crazy. People don’t think of second and tertiary effects of anything. And then take an ideology that thinks it has the answers to everything and one of them happens to be, yeah, the supreme leader doesn’t like those fucking sparrows, so we got to wipe them out. And millions of people starve to death. And so one of the reasons why I’m so incredibly bullish on this new era is it doesn’t have to be like that anymore.

And your article is a perfect example of how it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. And one of our themes is that we are an AI first company, meaning that anything that can be done by AI should be done by AI because why should I want you, who’s incredibly creative, incredibly productive... Why should I want you doing horribly boring and tedious jobs that AI can do much more brilliantly and quickly and all of that. And I sometimes think when I talk to people who are like normies, who aren’t looking at this stuff and why should they, right? I get that. Those inside kind of the AI bubble, we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and everything and so we think, oh man, they’re just promoting the hell out of this, and maybe they should tone it down a little. I think we’re not promoting it enough because there’s a huge class of people. This just isn’t their thing. Right. And that’s a shame because they themselves, like Steve Jobs very famously said, a computer was a bicycle for the mind. AI is a rocket ship for creativity, for leverage for all of these things. And that was one thing we aligned on immediately. Give our listeners and viewers some more of your... I don’t want to steal the credit for your ideas, so talk a bit about more of some of the workflows that are just unlocking time, talent, and the need for huge overhead.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Just to comment on the normies. I think there’s something that could be said about the school system which indoctrinates this high tolerance for bullshit. And this...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, it’s totally fucked. FUBAR. Fucked up beyond all recognition.

Jean-Marc Daecius

A good example is, I think traditional advertising is just... It’s very much like monocrop culture, where you’re just spraying and praying at thousands, millions of people with the idea that, oh, it’ll work for some of them, but for most of them, yeah, fingers crossed. But for most of them, you’re actually wasting time and attention, even if it’s just like a tiny little bit of a scroll.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it’s irritating.

Jean-Marc Daecius

It’s irritating. But you add all of that up over a lifetime and it’s like someone... People are wasting just ungodly amounts of just tiny little slices of cognitive attention that could be devoted to more fulfilling life. And so what’s the humanoid robot food forest gardener version of advertising? In that sense? It’s very much like a really great recommendation from a friend where Liberty comes to you and is like, all right, this movie, you gotta watch it. You’re gonna be like, he never misses, so I’m gonna watch this. Essentially, that was an advertisement. He just advertised this movie to you. But it doesn’t feel like that because it feels organic, it feels human. It’s customized to you because a human is behind it.

Whereas the majority of advertising is just like a bad billboard, which is like, why did I even just look at that? Oh, I had to, because it was on my screen and I had to click out of it in order to get the thing out. So I think in the age of AI, we can use AI to figure out if someone is a good fit for a recommendation for something where advertising doesn’t become this sort of waterboarding the population with something that we want to sell, but more of like, oh, here are the 385 people in this pool who’ve expressed interest in similar things. That would be a good fit for this. Let’s contact them. That just seems like a much better use of everyone’s attention and much less waste.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, and you’re being modest. We really drill down and we find not only the nearest neighbor audience, we also look at their work and they’re like, oh, wow, look, he just wrote an essay that he’s going to love this book. But then we bring up the essay, right? And a lot of that... The reason I feel so comfortable with that is I would welcome that email if somebody took the time to read What Works on Wall Street, right? And they found a book that was really similar, but different, with a lot of new information. And I got an email citing the findings from What Works. Wow. They actually read the book. Most people simply use it for personal protection or as a doorjam because it’s this thick. But I would welcome that, right? And the way we’re doing it is, I think, somewhat similar. You’re probably not going to get an email from Infinite Books, Infinite Films, Infinite Media, if we haven’t done our homework on who you are as a person. It’s all about really trust. And I would trust the company that I never got a bullshit spammy type email from. And I hate... I hate the ones, especially the ones who seem to do it intentionally. If you want to unsubscribe, hit unsubscribe, and then you’re fucked because it’s just like they keep coming in and there’s just so many of these annoyances from the previous industrial era that we don’t have to have anymore.

And the same is true with the app that we’re just crawling on it right now, but the recommendation app, because I do believe that like anything, AI is going to bring a tsunami of slop and it will also bring brilliance and masterpieces and everything else. But you need... People are going to need help, right? And so the recommendation thing that we’re going to be working on, it won’t be in the form that I want it in until maybe 2030, 2032, but it will be something that I want, right? How cool would it be to be able to open an app first thing in the day, here’s the books that you might like, here’s the movies you might like, here’s an essay, here’s a Substack that you haven’t discovered. Now, granted, this is the opposite of a mass market, right? We are using a very targeted market of people, but it’s still a big market. And I anticipate that a lot of our stuff will appeal to not a huge group of people, but that’s fine, right? That’s the other thing that people don’t seem to understand. It’s like you live under a system for so long. So, right, like American TV, you’re familiar with the standard bell curve. 68.5% are within one standard deviation of the median. And guess what? I Love Lucy has 79 million viewers because it fits right into that distribution of 68.5%. Now, we’ve already seen this, of course, but there’s going to be much more of it. There are shows, podcasts, Substacks, movies, books, et cetera, that can be enormously profitable, but with a much smaller audience. I mean, what was Game of Thrones? I can’t think, what, 18 million watched the final season. That seems... That’s a huge arbitrage point that people are just ignoring.

Jean-Marc Daecius

I’ve often thought of the human species as like a single entity. And what we’re doing with all of this scrolling, we’re kind of like liver cells that are processing these free radicals and whatnot. And all of the spam email is basically inflammation in the collective body. And it’s like, all right, we need to do something about this. Where is the immune response to all of this spam? And then you get the arms race between Google, Gmail filters and whatnot. And then the spammers level up their arsenal. And you essentially have this immune battle between these two things that are going on. And I think AI can become like an antibiotic for a lot of this nonsense in our culture.

And the way that we’ve set up our systems, it can just debloat a lot of this inflammation. Imagine if I could, very similar to your curation app, I would love to have an AI just curate Twitter for me so that every day I could just open it up and I could get the 10 posts that would take me 15 minutes to find and comment on, and I could just see those and be like, all right, that was actually great.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. The risk there, of course, is that confirmation bias. Right. And I don’t know that we want a society where everybody has their own personal bubble. So as part of the curation app, just to stick with that one for a minute, we’re intentionally going to add things... Well, not noise, but it might be noise, but it might be something. They’re like, oh, I never thought about that. Maybe I should check that out. What other areas do you think... I personally, you know my views on the leverage component of AI, but I take it much further, as I usually do most everything. I think you can learn a lot with the book I’m writing right now. As you know, it’s a thriller, it’s a novel, but a lot of it is based on real world things that really exist in the real world. And literally we never formally calculated it out, but I think that conservatively, it would have taken 10 years to do the amount of research that I did in nine months.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah, I mean, it depends how many people you were employing during that 10 years.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. I mean, you would literally need an army because they’d all have to go to libraries around the world. Right. Because it’s not all centralized and I wouldn’t have done it. And so I think that the research part, but I also think the writing part, I write everything longhand and then I put it on the thing, but then I put it into AI and say, tell me how bad this is. And then I’m like, okay, you think you can do better?

Jean-Marc Daecius

Show me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so I think that there’s always a moral panic when a new technology comes on which crushes the gate that the old talent used to have up, right? And so it’s nothing new. It’s like all the way back to the novel. Those manuscript monks were pissed off, man. And calculators I experienced when I was a kid, they were very expensive. Everyone thought they were the coolest thing in the world. And then they banned them from all the classrooms.

Jean-Marc Daecius

You’re not going to have a calculator in your pocket.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. Well, yeah.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Are you sure about that?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But so the pattern of it is the same. And I think we’re kind of in the moral panic period right now. The pearl clutching. Oh, was AI used? Well, come on, get used to it. Right? It shouldn’t be... And that’s the other thing they always do. The ones who were the kings and stars under the old system, when they see their gate being crushed, right? Gate gets nuked, then everything becomes about process, right. Whereas it should be about outcome, especially in a creative endeavor. Did this movie or book or podcast change your mind? Did it inspire you? Did it piss you off? Right. It should have some effect on you. And so I just think it’s really funny seeing everyone like the process. Can you imagine if we did that with everything.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We’d still be living in caves.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah. You don’t need to take organic chemistry in order to talk to ChatGPT about a particular health condition and then go to a doctor with a really informed opinion and then you get this smug sort of gaslighty rebuke from the doctor. It’s like, did you ChatGPT that? It’s like, well, yes, I did. But am I wrong? Is my premise here that I’m proposing to you incorrect? And it’s like, oh, but that’s not the thing that you’re focusing on. You’re focusing on how I got to this information.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yes, I did use ChatGPT and I want some actual answers because now I have a little bit of context around this, which previously most people didn’t. And then they were just at the behest of whether they had a good doctor or not and whether that doctor was well informed about whatever the issue was. That’s been one of my favorite and most eye opening examples. You were talking about using AI to educate. The amount that I’ve learned about health since ChatGPT dropped has been unbelievable. The things that I’ve been able to do personally, just taking blood tests and plopping those into various AIs and being like, all right, give me a read. It’s been incredible. It’s like, oh man, I wish I had this like a couple decades ago.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, as you know, you’ve seen the actual journal from 1983 or whatever in which I spend page after page talking... I didn’t call it AI, begging and pleading for it to come. Now, we’re enthusiasts, right? And so I doubt that a lot of people out there are going to be doing their own blood work and sending it to a lab and having it processed. But even in that old 68.5%, so many lives could be made materially better by just embracing the technology for simple things like learning. I mean, we talked about the school system, yet another relic of the industrial era. Right. It was like industrialists saying to the... Imagine industrialists had influence on governments. The shock. Basically, they’re saying to him, yeah, what we need you to do here is we need the kid to not be curious, not be controversial. We want them to have a correct answer machine installed in their head. And there is only one correct answer. And that’s the one we are supplying. Right. And there’s high tolerance for bullshit. Yeah, high tolerance for bullshit. There’s a reason why I liked Pink Floyd’s song about, “Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone.” But rather than just go on and rant about it, there are now alternatives. And I think it’s really easy to root against things. And so I always look for things to root for. And I think that in the field of AI and across disciplines, right, there is so much to root for. I mean, I look at my grandchildren and the way that they are using AI, and it’s really clever. And it’s one of those unknowns. Right. And this idea that... Did you ever see the movie Matilda?

Jean-Marc Daecius

Oh, yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, right. All my kids love Matilda, especially my girls. And I just remember that scene. Why? “Because I’m big and you’re little. I’m right and you’re wrong. I’m the adult, you’re the kid.” It’s like, that’s just so much... And we can unlock, I mean, really what we’ve done. And I get a little extreme here, but school and a lot of current curriculum is designed to crush creativity, crush that way of thinking. And it doesn’t have to be like that anymore. With AI, we’re investing. We’ve invested in several AI companies for education. What other areas do you think are non-intuitive for where AI could be an amazing unlock?

Jean-Marc Daecius

Well, before answering that, just to address something that you said about people criticizing it, they’re so quick to criticize. And when I hear a criticism of AI, the first thing I always ask is like, well, how much do you use it?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Because if Picasso was in the room and he had a criticism about a particular paintbrush, I would take that criticism very seriously.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

As would I.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Dude probably knows what he’s talking about. Whereas someone who spent, who’s only done like three or four queries on ChatGPT...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The free version.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah. And like, oh, this sucks.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s like, well, they’re right. The free version does suck.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Well, yeah, it’s like, all right. You’re clearly an authority on this. You’re kind of like anyone on Twitter who’s like, whatever the subject of the day is, you’re now an expert in when you actually haven’t gone deep on it at all. What’s going on here. We hear a lot about it, but it’s almost invisible, which I think might count as not intuitive. Just Tesla’s full self-driving AI.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Amazing.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Unbelievably good.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Sorry, I will interrupt. You were the guy who converted me. I still don’t drive a Tesla, but the firm has one and it’s fucking cool. And if you’re driving around midtown Manhattan or downtown here. The last time I was with you, I was blown away and you even turned to me and said, if I was driving, we would have gotten into an accident. Right. And so the proof’s in the pudding.

Jean-Marc Daecius

There’s been at least twice in the last 10 months where I’m like, oh my gosh, if FSD hadn’t been operating...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Would have been bad.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Things would suck right now.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It would be bad.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah. But the thing is, it’s invisible. You can’t... For example, when cars were first invented, it was super visible and obvious. 1901, a picture of a Manhattan street was like almost all horses and then like one car in the distance and 2.5 million pounds of horseshit. And then like 15 years later it was the complete reverse where you had like a sea of cars and one horse in the background. Whereas with AI taking over driving, it’s completely invisible because you can be in a regular gas powered car going down the highway and then someone right next to you is in a Tesla and the Tesla is driving itself.

But it’s really hard to tell unless you’re like, oh, they don’t have their hands on the wheel and they don’t have their foot on the pedal.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jean-Marc Daecius

So I think that’s going to be, I think that’s an example of something that’s non-intuitive but which is actually going to have this enormous effect. Tesla’s starting to ramp up their robotaxis in Austin and in San Francisco and I think those are just going to demolish. At that point it might become slightly more obvious because then you’ll see a car driving around with no one in it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Because if you do summon on a Tesla in a busy parking lot. I’ve done this a few times where the car is driving itself to me and it drives past a pedestrian, they’re like, there’s no one in that fucking car. But some other non-intuitive ways.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I just want to make a point about that because I think something people often miss is that my thesis is at least that for your everyday person they will be beneficiaries of AI because it is invisible. I think that 10, 15 years from now it will be like electricity. It’ll just be there. And it will be doing yeoman’s work. Right. It will be doing heavy lifting. The self-driving car being a great example. But people will just get so used to it that it won’t even be remarkable anymore.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Oh man. That’s kind of the sad thing about technology is that once it becomes a protocol, it ceases to be magical.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Even though if you went like a century before it was invented and introduced that now protocol thing to those people, they would be like, what kind of devil sorcery is this?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You’d probably be burned at the stake depending on how far back you went.

Jean-Marc Daecius

Yeah. Oh man. It’s just how... It’s just strange how humans have this immense capacity for becoming inured to wonder and something that’s truly magical while simultaneously having very crippled imagination. Huge tolerance for bullshit. We really are such a strange species.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But we’re actually quite pro-human here at... But the, and of course the classic is Louis C.K.’s thing about Wi-Fi in an airplane. He had this great bit where he’s like, do you remember the first time you went on an airplane and they had Wi-Fi? How you were like, oh my God, I can’t believe it. I’m 30,000 feet above the earth and I can waste my time scrolling Twitter. And then he goes, then the minute it goes out you go, what the fuck...

Jean-Marc Daecius

This is bullshit!