They cover her transition from law to writing Power Money Fame Sex, why she often ends up writing the book before the proposal, the art of editing until the final hour (even during pass pages), her 5:30 AM writing routine, and why "know thyself" remains the foundation of all her books - from 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill to Life in Five Senses.

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

Links

Apple Podcasts

Highlights

Are You an Opener or a Finisher?

Jimmy Soni: I have the challenge of sometimes you’re sort of, you know, you want to dance with the girl that you brought, but then you have this other project. Like there’s always the other projects that you’re like…

Gretchen Rubin: ... A hooky book. That’s what I have.

Jimmy Soni: That’s a great... that’s a great one.

Gretchen Rubin: I often have a hooky book. Yes. Now my... when I was writing Better Than Before, my book about habit formation, my hooky book was a book that turned into Outer Order, Inner Calm.

Jimmy Soni: Wow. So how do you prevent yourself from going to... and turning the hooky book into the daily driver?

Gretchen Rubin: Right, right. Yeah, that it is. You’ve got to remember it’s a hooky book. For me, it’s all about note taking. So note taking is a big thing for me. So I will let myself take notes on it. Like, and I’ll... I might read for it and take, put notes into it, but I would never allow myself to begin to structure it. Because once I’m structuring, then I’m like, “Okay, now I’m really tackling it as a book.” But because I always start with a bunch of notes, having a bunch of notes, then when I’m ready to start writing, then I have this huge head start. So it’s a good use of my time. But you’re right, you’ve got to make sure that it doesn’t swallow up what your main project is.

Jimmy Soni: Sometimes, by the way, hooky books can yield something amazing, as you put it. You can have... I find that it’s tempting because the beginning of these projects is some of the best. Yeah.

Gretchen Rubin: Okay, so there’s beginners... there’s openers and finishers. Okay, so openers are people who love to open a project. So they love the beginning stages. They love to start something new. Like, I talked to a professor, and he’s like, “I have seven half-finished, you know, new curricula for new classes,” because he loved to open. But then there... and then finishers are people who love to end. They love to finish. And both of them have pros and cons because openers sometimes don’t finish. And so they don’t get the benefits of their work. And they can get distracted because they’re pulled in so many directions. But finishers, sometimes they just want to be done so badly that they might rush at the end because they’re just like, “Okay, I just really want to get this crossed off the list.”

But a lot of times it’s that last work that’s really painstaking and difficult that can really make something go to the next level. And sometimes they are too cautious about what they start because they think, “Well, if I can’t finish it, maybe I shouldn’t start it.” But sometimes with creativity, you kind of have to say, “Well, maybe I’ll start it and maybe it won’t go anywhere, but I need to just kind of get it started to see.” And so I think it’s good to know which one you lean toward so that you kind of can try to offset that.

Jimmy Soni: Are you an opener or a finisher?

Gretchen Rubin: I’m a finisher for sure.

Jimmy Soni: Okay.

Gretchen Rubin: I’m a finisher. I love to cross things off the list. And it is... it’s like towards the end, I feel myself being... let’s just... let’s just say it...

Jimmy Soni: Done.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh, here’s an edit. But I’m just going to decide I don’t agree with that edit. It’s like, I actually do agree with that edit. I just want to be done.

Jimmy Soni: Want to finish.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, I want to finish.

Why Do People Throw Their Possessions Away?

Gretchen Rubin: I went through a serious period of being absolutely obsessed with the question of why people destroy their own possessions. And I wrote a law school paper about it, then I wrote a novel about it. And then I actually published a book called Profane Waste as a collaboration with an artist, which is all about this question of why people destroy their own possessions. So I tried it every which way, and then I just ended up with nonfiction.

Jimmy Soni: So this is why you will now... you are now and will forever be one of my favorite people. Because these are the kinds of rabbit holes that I go down. Right. I’ll just find myself lost in some question that possesses you.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes.

Jimmy Soni: And then you ask...

Gretchen Rubin: So delightful.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah, it’s the best. I think Wikipedia scratched that itch for people who are satisfied with, like, you know, 10 to 20%. But then there’s a whole other level. So if you... if you rewind the clock and it may... I don’t know if you can remember this question of why people destroy their own possessions. How did you even get to the question itself?

Gretchen Rubin: Oh, I know exactly. I was again, I was in D.C. I was walking on my lunch hour. This is why it’s important to go for walks because you have all these ideas. And I went to the... one of the... I forget the exact title of the museum, but you know how the Smithsonians, you can just... they’re free. You just walk right in. So I walked in and it was a display about potlatch. And potlatch is a tradition of kind of exorbitant gift giving. It’s like the big man will give extravagant gifts and kind of give away everything as a... and there’s a lot of research about why the custom of potlatch existed. And then when trading came in, these groups of people became... had so much wealth that they literally couldn’t give it away fast enough.

And they were throwing goods into the ocean too, because they just... anyway, but this idea that people would destroy something as a way to show their possession of it just messed with my mind. Okay, then there’s another thing that happened. So this is in my mind. Then something happened. Where? Okay, so I was in law school. I was first year law school, so in love with the guy who’s now my husband. He was a summer associate at a law firm. And because I was so in love, I’m like, I’ll go with you and just do my own thing while you’re doing your summer associate thing. And on our way there, we stopped at a corner store and he bought a couple snacks. I got a couple snacks.

And one of the things he got was a piece of cheesecake wrapped in plastic. Why? I don’t know. So we get there, he does his work, we’re getting ready to leave, and I look in his trash can and I see there’s the unopened piece of cheesecake. And I say, “Oh, I’ll fish this out. You never opened it, like, you know, it’s still good.” And he goes, “No, I don’t want it anymore. Just throw it away.” And this rocked me to my core. I’m like, what are you talking about? What just happened? Right? You just threw it away.

Jimmy Soni: Right.

Gretchen Rubin: And I can... I mean,

Jimmy Soni: Did you have an explanation or did…

Gretchen Rubin: He was just like “Well, I thought I wanted it, now I don’t want it.”

Jimmy Soni: Oh, wow. And there was some part of you that was disturbed by this.

Gretchen Rubin: Absolutely baffled by it. And so that... and then the potlatch, this guy... and then when I got to law school and we were talking about property rights and all the bundle of rights that are property, I wanted to write a paper about it and a lot... and one of my law professors said, “But people don’t want to do that. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would somebody want to destroy their own property?” And I was like, that’s exactly my point. Why do people do this? It doesn’t make any kind of economic sense anyway. So I would talk about a rabbit hole. I went deep down there.

Transcript

Jimmy Soni:

Well, I have an amazing privilege today, which is I’m here with not just one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite people in the world, Gretchen Rubin. And to set the scene for people, this is you and I get together semi-regularly for lunch and to talk shop, catch up. And the way I describe these lunches to other people is I always tell them that they are like a Gretchen Rubin vitamin B shot of energy and ideas and inspiration. And you push me to think more critically about the platforms I’m on or what I’m doing or talk about this or that. And so I’m hoping that our conversation today captures some of that energy, because I do think of you as one of these great pushers of ambition and creativity.

Gretchen Rubin:

Well, I’m so happy to hear you say that. I feel exactly the same way. I feel like I leave our conversations with homework because I have to go home and look something up and figure out how to do something.

Jimmy Soni:

See, that’s way less nice than the version I did.

Gretchen Rubin:

No, that’s the highest praise. Like, I’m actually going to do what you tell me to do.

Jimmy Soni:

Amazing. So I thought what we would do just to give people a sense of where your career started and where your writing career started. You were a recovering lawyer, you went to law school. So can you just walk us through kind of how you got from law school to the formal work of doing books, but just from your legal career to your authorial career?

Gretchen Rubin:

Okay, so I went to law school for all the classic wrong reasons. It was a great education. It’ll keep my options open. I can change my mind later. I’m good at research and writing, so I’d probably be good at this. My father’s a lawyer. So I went to law school. Did very well in law school. I was editor in chief of the law journal, and then I went on to clerk for Sandra Day O’Connor. But at that time, I was sort of starting to realize that I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. And simultaneously, I have this habit of asking myself theoretical questions, just, I don’t know, kind of conversation starters with myself. And I was out on my lunch break.

I was looking up at the Capitol dome, and I thought, what am I interested in that everyone else in the world is interested in? And I thought, well, power, money, fame, sex. And it was like, power, money, fame, sex. It was like this one big idea. I instantly got incredibly preoccupied with it and started just doing masses and masses of research and note taking, which is something that happens to me all the time and has happened to me since I was a child. So this was very familiar. So I was doing all this research, doing all this note taking, and then finally it occurred to me this is the kind of thing a person would do if they were going to write a book. Maybe I could write that book.

So I went to Kramerbooks and Afterwords in D.C. and got a book called something like How to Write and Sell Your Nonfiction Book Proposal.

Jimmy Soni:

Oh, wow.

Gretchen Rubin:

And then, you know, cut to, I followed the directions and that’s how I got my first agent. And that was my first book, Power, Money, Fame, Sex: A User’s Guide.

Jimmy Soni:

Got it. Okay.

Gretchen Rubin:

So that’s how I switched from law to writing.

Jimmy Soni:

Got it. So what I find interesting with that is theoretical question piece. How long has that been a habit? Because you’re one of the great studiers of habits. Have you always done that? Is that something that...

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, often it will be a question or it might be a word. Like I went through a period where apocalypse was a word that I was really preoccupied with. And I ended up writing this really bad novel that I have locked in a desk drawer. Or when I was very young, I was really interested in the Salem witch trials. And so I have this little notebook that’s just my nine-year-old handwriting of sort of facts about the Salem witch trials. Now for some reason I have this incredible antipathy to any plot having to do with unjust accusation. So probably as a result of that, I would never study the Salem witch trials now. But yeah, so I will...

And then I got really preoccupied with the subject of color, in a way that I really couldn’t explain. I was just... did enormous amounts of research and I even wrote a little book called My Color Pilgrimage. And I showed it to a couple editors and they were like, “Well, you really had fun with that, didn’t you?” It’s like, that’s not the answer I’m looking for. You know, like you’re a child. So I turned it into... this is, okay, Jimmy, you’ll appreciate this. Like this is very much a today’s solution. I was like, I’ll adapt like 30% of that material and I’ll make it into a bonus for paid subscribers on my Substack.

Jimmy Soni:

There we go.

Gretchen Rubin:

Because nobody seems... so far, nobody wants the entire My Color Pilgrimage. But there’s really good stuff in there. So it is something that’s happened to me. Or like I remember with Churchill when I just all of a sudden was just like, oh my gosh, all I wanted to do was think about Churchill morning, noon and night. And so when I get... that’s when I usually, when I start a book, that’s amazing.

Jimmy Soni:

You reminded me of something, which is there are all of these creative people I admire, yourself included, who have projects that they have taken, let’s say 40, 60, 80, or even 100% of the way, and then haven’t had them see the light of day. And I remember either reading or talking to you about novels that you had unfinished. So that is tantalizing. Like, what are those projects?

Gretchen Rubin:

Okay, so they’re all finished, they’re just bad. But one of the things I would warn anybody doing a creative project is that if you suddenly lose interest, like call it 80% of the way there, if you’re all of a sudden like, “Oh, I just, I’m not interested in this project anymore,” it’s often a failure because if you finish, then it becomes like, am I going to try to get an agent? Am I going to show this to my agent? Am I going to show it to anybody? Like, am I going to admit that this is the best that I can do? And sometimes I think people turn away from it out of self-protection. And so once you get to a certain point, I’m like, take it all the way and then let it succeed or fail.

And like My Color Pilgrimage, like, let’s just say it did not succeed in what I wanted for it.

Jimmy Soni:

But it got a second life now.

Gretchen Rubin:

I found a... as you say, you find a second life for things. You never know. What do they call it? Saving string where things can end up paying off. But any kind of... I think for people who are doing creative work, anything that you’re interested in doing, it’s like, if nothing else, it’s doing scales. If nothing else, it’s practice. If nothing else, it’s learning and not, you know, every... you know, the more failure, the more success means probably the more failures too, right?

Jimmy Soni:

Did the novels come before the nonfiction work or did you... like how, when, in what sequence were the novels? The unfinished, and I’m sure better than you think novels...

Gretchen Rubin:

No they’re finished, they’re just bad. You know what it is? Growing up, all I read was novels. I was an English major. I just read novels all the time. And I didn’t really... so they were novels of ideas, because I didn’t really understand that what I wanted to do was write nonfiction. So I was trying to channel ideas that I had through fiction. That’s very hard to do. Most good novels are really about character. And so once I switched to nonfiction, then I sort of stopped writing novels because I found the right vehicle for the ideas I wanted to express. Yeah, I wrote a novel in law school. I wrote a novel about... because I went through a serious period of being absolutely obsessed with the question of why people destroy their own possessions.

And I wrote a law school paper about it, then I wrote a novel about it. And then I actually published a book called Profane Waste as a collaboration with an artist, which is all about this question of why people destroy their own possessions. So I tried it every which way, and then I just ended up with nonfiction.

Jimmy Soni:

So this is why you will now... you are now and will forever be one of my favorite people. Because these are the kinds of rabbit holes that I go down. Right. I’ll just find myself lost in some question that possesses you.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yes.

Jimmy Soni:

And then you ask...

Gretchen Rubin:

So delightful.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, it’s the best and honest. I think. I think Wikipedia scratched that itch for people who are satisfied with, like, you know, 10 to 20%. But then there’s a whole other level. So if you... if you rewind the clock and it may... I don’t know if you can remember this question of why people destroy their own possessions. How did you even get to the question itself?

Gretchen Rubin:

Oh, I know exactly. I was again, I was in D.C. I was walking on my lunch hour. This is why it’s important to go for walks because you have all these ideas. And I went to the... one of the... I forget the exact title of the museum, but you know how the Smithsonians, you can just... they’re free. You just walk right in. So I walked in and it was a display about potlatch. And potlatch is a tradition of kind of exorbitant gift giving. It’s like the big man will give extravagant gifts and kind of give away everything as a... and there’s a lot of research about why the custom of potlatch existed. And then when trading came in, these groups of people became... had so much wealth that they literally couldn’t give it away fast enough.

And they were throwing goods into the ocean too, because they just... anyway, but this idea that people would destroy something as a way to show their possession of it just messed with my mind. Okay, then there’s another thing that happened. So this is in my mind. Then something happened. Where? Okay, so I was in law school. I was first year law school, so in love with the guy who’s now my husband. He was a summer associate at a law firm. And because I was so in love, I’m like, I’ll go with you and just do my own thing while you’re doing your summer associate thing. And on our way there, we stopped at a corner store and he bought a couple snacks. I got a couple snacks.

And one of the things he got was a piece of cheesecake wrapped in plastic. Why? I don’t know. So we get there, he does his work, we’re getting ready to leave, and I look in his trash can and I see there’s the unopened piece of cheesecake. And I say, “Oh, I’ll fish this out. You never opened it, like, you know, it’s still good.” And he goes, “No, I don’t want it anymore. Just throw it away.” And this rocked me to my core. I’m like, what are you talking about? What just happened? Right? You just threw it away.

Jimmy Soni:

Right.

Gretchen Rubin:

And I can... I mean,

Jimmy Soni:

Did you have an explanation or did…

Gretchen Rubin:

He was just like “Well, I thought I wanted it, now I don’t want it.”

Jimmy Soni:

Oh, wow. And there was some part of you that was disturbed by this.

Gretchen Rubin:

Absolutely baffled by it. And so that... and then the potlatch, this guy... and then when I got to law school and we were talking about property rights and all the bundle of rights that are property, I wanted to write a paper about it and a lot... and one of my law professors said, “But people don’t want to do that. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would somebody want to destroy their own property?” And I was like, that’s exactly my point. Why do people do this? It doesn’t make any kind of economic sense anyway. So I would talk about a rabbit hole. I went deep down there. Yeah, it’s such an interesting subject.

Jimmy Soni:

That is totally fascinating on a number of levels. And did you... at that point, you knew you had this curiosity and you knew you had this kind of... you had wanted to sort of take ideas and make them packaged in some way. Novels weren’t going to be it, because novels are based on character, so... but you also achieved the highest heights of like, legal... of what someone could do with a legal education, like clerking for Supreme Court. That is the... that is the NBA of law school graduation. Right. And so... so were you ever at any point in your career, like surely were torn to like, what might be considered more practical, like go down the law, like make partner or all of that. That track against this following every, you know, your curiosities. How did you, how did you deal with that? Sort of in the tail end of law school and then immediately after.

Gretchen Rubin:

Well, right after law school, I went to work for the Federal Communications Commission. So in there I was really acting as a lawyer. I just, I didn’t know what I wanted. I noticed that when I would look, you know how you read your alumni notes, you get that magazine or whatever. And I realized.

Jimmy Soni:

By the way, I don’t think most people read their alumni notes. I think people like you and I read...

Gretchen Rubin:

If one reads.

Jimmy Soni:

Do you know why I read it, though? Do you know the real reason is because I always read it for the... it’s a... it’s a reminder. It’s like the, you know, memento mori. Because it covers people who are gone.

Gretchen Rubin:

It does, right? Sure does.

Jimmy Soni:

And you have this connection to them. Like I look at my Duke.

Gretchen Rubin:

You know they’re your exact age.

Jimmy Soni:

Exactly. And you go back to the end. And I always look for the people who are the untimely deceased, the ones who are close to me in age, where we have the same experience, we lived the same four years at Duke. And you know, for some one reason or another, they’re here, they’re not here, and I am. Right. And it kind of invests your time and your life with a bit more significance. That’s the reason I do it.

Gretchen Rubin:

That’s a great... that’s a great... that’s a great reason. That’s a great... I’m going to start doing that too, because I know exactly what you mean. For me, it was just curiosity, but I noticed that when people had really interesting law jobs, I felt sort of like mild interest. But when they had really interesting writing jobs, I felt sick with envy. So that was one data point. But one of the things that really made it easy for me is I think a lot of times people know they want to leave, but they don’t know where they want to go. And for me, it was less about leaving law and it was more like wanting to write. And it wasn’t even that I just wanted to be a writer where I think some people are like, “I’d like to be a writer.” I’m like, I want to write a book called Power, Money, Fame, Sex. And I have done like a thousand hours of research and note taking about it. And I really want to do this project. And so it was very clear what it was I was aiming for. And I think that made it easier in my mind. So you know the scene in the original Star Wars where they’re in the Millennium Falcon, they’ve got the tractor beam on them, and Han Solo says, “We have to stop pulling back because we’ll rip the ship apart. We have to allow ourselves to be drawn to this destination.” And I’m like... I just felt like I was in the tractor beam, and I was just being drawn so forcibly toward it. I thought, I’d rather fail as a writer than succeed as a lawyer. I have a project in mind. I’m moving to New York City. This is my time to take a shot. And if I fail, then I’ll figure out what I want to do later. But if I take another law job now, it might be too hard to switch. I will have started to invest so much.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, because there’s already... I mean, you’d gone and gotten a degree, you’d run the gauntlet.

Gretchen Rubin:

No, I know, right? If I... any more investment in it starts to become something that you just can’t step away from.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah. I like this metaphor of the tractor beam as a way of thinking about creative influences and things that pull you in. Is that something you’d consciously thought of in the past, like the idea of what’s pulling you creatively in a certain direction or another?

Gretchen Rubin:

I mean, I don’t know about you, but for me, there is a compulsive element to it which is incredibly gratifying, but sometimes inconvenient for people, or it’s not what they want. I think sometimes people feel compelled to do things even though they kind of rationally know it’s not a good idea, but they just can’t resist it. I definitely know that feeling.

Jimmy Soni:

In your case, though, the writing of books happens to be a compulsion, but also a positive compulsion.

Gretchen Rubin:

It’s been very positive for me, but, like, let’s say I couldn’t afford to take a risk.

Jimmy Soni:

Right.

Gretchen Rubin:

Then maybe I would have had to make a different choice. And then it would have been extremely painful for me not to have been able to write the books that I wanted to write.

Jimmy Soni:

Right. So we’re going to bounce around a little bit chronologically. But, you know, one of the things that is true of the writers I know is at one point or another, their childhood was consumed by books. Right. Not everyone, but I would say there’s a pretty high overlap. Like, it’s like 90 plus percent. What was your childhood relationship to books like, how did you...

Gretchen Rubin:

I read all the time, but I... but I read nonfiction. I mean, not nonfiction. I read fiction all the time. No, I was a huge reader.

Jimmy Soni:

Did anybody spark that in you, or was that... how did that start for you?

Gretchen Rubin:

My whole family are readers, and so it’s like a very... like, we would go to the library every week, and it was a really big deal, but so I saw people reading for pleasure. We had a lot of books in our house, but... but it was... yeah, I remember, like, they had to tell me I had to go outside for a certain amount of time when I was little, because otherwise I would just stay indoors and read all the time. So they were like, no, you have to go out for, you know, 45 minutes every afternoon after school. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Did you have favorites growing up? Do you remember some of your favorite readings?

Gretchen Rubin:

A bazillion. And, you know, I still have a love of children’s literature and young adult literature. I’m in adult groups where we read young adult literature and children’s literature, so... but then... but I was also one of those kids who started reading adult books very early. Jane Eyre. You know, I remember Jane Eyre being the first sort of really adult book that I read, and then, you know, all of the trashy novels that you’re not supposed to read when you’re young. But... yeah, even, like... and not even really understanding books like, you know, David Copperfield, but wanting to read adult books.

Jimmy Soni:

And so for me, the books that changed or that engrossed me, I mean, I had a bunch, but it was the Mossflower and Mattimeo series by Brian Jacques was one that stood out for me. And I remember just being able to lose myself in them for hours. And, like, sometimes I’d look up, and all of a sudden, like, day had turned to night, and I didn’t even realize... what were the... do you have... if you have titles in mind from when you were a kid, what were those for you? Did you have anything that stood out?

Gretchen Rubin:

It’s such a basic answer, but I have to say Narnia.

Jimmy Soni:

Oh, really?

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

That’s not a basic answer.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I love...

Jimmy Soni:

That’s amazing.

Gretchen Rubin:

And the thing is, I still admire C.S. Lewis tremendously as an adult writer, too. So, I mean, one of the things I love about children’s literature is that a lot of them are masterpieces of literature on their own terms. And it’s, you know, great writers doing... you look at something like Charlotte’s Web, it absolutely will stand up to any adult novel. You know, and just like his adult work does, such as his children’s work. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

So fast forward. Actually, this is a bit of a tangent, but you’re... you, you know, you became a parent. How did you encourage this in your daughters? What’s their relationship with reading? Like, how do you think about the parenting... parent as reader trying to inculcate a love of reading into kids?

Gretchen Rubin:

That’s such a great question.

Jimmy Soni:

Asking for a friend.

Gretchen Rubin:

Asking for a friend. But your child is a big reader already.

Jimmy Soni:

She is already and she reads obsessively.

Gretchen Rubin:

You don’t have to fan those flames. I kind of think a little bit people have to find their way to it. But it’s interesting because my two daughters who now are in their 20s, I would say didn’t read a lot for pleasure, but now they are much more. And even my 21-year-old came home from... for college break and was like, “I want to read. I want to spend the summer reading classics. I feel like I haven’t read enough of the classics.” So maybe people come to it later.

Jimmy Soni:

But I feel like you didn’t do any... there weren’t active steps you took other than having books around and being an author and all of that and talking...

Gretchen Rubin:

About it and having people talk about... my husband’s a huge reader too. He reads a lot of policy. He reads a lot of very contemporary fiction. So it was always that people were always talking about it and, you know, but I think the more you sort of try to make people do, then you... I worry about igniting the spirit of resistance.

Jimmy Soni:

Right.

Gretchen Rubin:

Because it’s supposed to be fun. The reason you do it is because it’s fun. But one thing I will do is like, I will be like, “Have you read The Secret History?” You know, like, give them something that you know is going to be really high payoff. Like a really good book.

Jimmy Soni:

Did you write as a child? Did you write stories?

Gretchen Rubin:

No, I didn’t do that .

Jimmy Soni:

Write for the school paper.

Gretchen Rubin:

Well, I wrote for the school paper, but only just in a very perfunctory way. Not like, “Oh, I’m going to be a journalist” or anything. I’ve never had the desire to be a journalist.

Jimmy Soni:

Got it. So it was always ideas and just rabbit holes that you were going down.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

And then sort of how to work backwards from there.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Okay.

Gretchen Rubin:

Just on my own.

Jimmy Soni:

So let’s go through the first book in some detail, the process of the first book. Because I think... we’ll recommend your books and people should check them out and we’ll talk more about them toward the end of the interview. But the... the question I have is the first book is like the big threshold. You don’t really... these are like... so you sort of have these book objects, you know that theoretically somebody is behind them. Right, like somebody does something.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yes.

Jimmy Soni:

So you went and bought a book called How to Write Your First Nonfiction Book

Gretchen Rubin:

Book proposal. Because, as you know, like, one thing I think a lot of people don’t understand is writing a proposal is very different from writing a book. And getting an agent is probably harder than actually getting a book deal. So it’s very... the challenge of being a sort of traditionally published author is very front loaded.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, but you’re doing this in an era of... so I had the equivalent experience. So my story of the first book is I googled “how to write a nonfiction...”

Gretchen Rubin:

Right.

Jimmy Soni:

But you had to go to Kramers and buy…

Gretchen Rubin:

And buy a book.

Jimmy Soni:

Right. So what was that... what was that like? How did you know that the idea had merit? You know, now you can test ideas. You can put things on Substack, you can put things on Medium, you can put things on LinkedIn. Right. How did you even know to go down that road?

Gretchen Rubin:

Just the utter commitment. Like, I just... it just felt irresistible. But, you know, one thing that’s happened to me over and over in my career is I’ll have an idea and I’ll be like, “This is an amazing idea. This is so fascinating. Everybody’s going to love this idea.” And people will be like, “Yeah, I don’t really get it. I don’t really think so.” And so I often end up writing almost an entire book...

Jimmy Soni:

Oh, wow.

Gretchen Rubin:

Before I write a proposal, because I feel like I have to have it so well developed in my mind before I can describe it in a way that other people see its potential. Like The Happiness Project, my current project, Power, Money, Fame, Sex. I really had to do a huge amount of... it’s very hard to describe what you’re going to do, I think. So I often end up... which is... then I often end up throwing out just a gigantic amount of material because I may have completely changed my entire structure. You know that. That has happened to me many times. I have many versions, almost complete versions of things that then I was like, “No, this isn’t the right approach.” And I’ve had to recast it.

Jimmy Soni:

Have you ever taken a project that far and just abandoned it entirely? Like…

Gretchen Rubin:

No.

Jimmy Soni:

So something’s always netted out from the work you’ve done.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah. But I think sometimes... well, I wrote a book called Life in Five Senses, and it’s about life in five senses. And at first…

Jimmy Soni:

Beautiful book.

Gretchen Rubin:

Well, thank you. Thank you. I loved writing that book. But so first there were nine senses. And I wrote it for nine senses. I’m like, “No, actually there’s 11 senses.” And I wrote it for 11 senses. And I was having all this trouble and I was like, “Do I divide it into sub things? I’m like, what about this? What about that? Which ones are alike, which ones are different?” And then I was just sort of like, you know, sometimes you can intuit by extroverting. And you just... I was just talking it out with somebody and they said, “Maybe you just want to do five senses.”

And I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is the big insight of all time.” Like, went home, like, really just threw away everything that didn’t fit. Just did five senses. Which if I had gotten a board book for a three-year-old, it would have been seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, the five senses. And that was the structure I ended up with. But it took me so long.

Jimmy Soni:

It took you this…

Gretchen Rubin:

But you do have to write through that. Like, you have to understand, like, why is this? What, you know, why am I writing about this and not that? How does this all, you know, how does proprioception... what are my thoughts and feelings about proprioception? Turns out, yeah, I don’t have to go into that so much.

Jimmy Soni:

So when you open up this book, How to Write Your First Nonfiction Book Proposal, what was the process like between that and getting an agent? Just like, you know, brass tacks, because you’re not just, you know, now, if you and I were to work on a proposal, we’ve seen it done. We know what we’re doing. We can kind of approach certain... we know what the method is like, but you’re doing it for the first time.

Gretchen Rubin:

There is a strange variety. Like, I do feel like there are many different ways people do proposals. There’s like, do you do 40 pages or do you do four pages? Do you do, you know anyway? Yes, but we know that those questions exist.

Jimmy Soni:

Right, but you were... you’re dealing with unknowns then, or at least sort of semi-known unknowns.

Gretchen Rubin:

I knew nothing and I knew no writers. I remember when it was a huge thing for me. I’m like, it was like on my list of, you know, like, life goals. It was like, make friends with writers. Of course, like, now I know so many writers, I can’t count them.

Jimmy Soni:

Now you’re like, I need friends who are not writers because they annoy me and invite me to do podcasts like this.

Gretchen Rubin:

This is so exciting. No, but, yeah, I felt like... but I was lucky. I had a few friends from college who were just starting off in that world themselves, very early. But they were able to give me lists of names. And so I did have that. Like, I had... I had who would I send it to? Cold.

Jimmy Soni:

And then did you... was it sort of the first... you had already written a lot of material and then condensed it into a proposal and then sent it off?

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

And so what was the moment like when you had your first agent conversation or when the agent said yes?

Gretchen Rubin:

Oh, my gosh. It was the hugest moment of my life. I mean, I think it is probably the most important moment because it is the moment where you are... you’re not an amateur anymore. Because even before I got paid, I was like, time is money. And this person saying they’ll represent me means that they’re putting their time in me. This means that I am... I’m on the first rung of being a professional writer. So it was huge. I still have the same agent now.

Jimmy Soni:

Still the same agent all these years later.

Gretchen Rubin:

All these years. All these years. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Did they... do you remember any of the specifics of what they kind of told you after they read the proposal? Like, or did they make changes? Like, how much of a gap was there between what you pitched to the publisher and what you ultimately did with the book?

Gretchen Rubin:

I think it was pretty close. It was pretty close. In general, my agent is really good at saying something’s not good enough, which is a very useful thing. It’s not always the most welcome thing. I’m not always eager to open her emails, but she... you know, I remember with The Happiness Project, I remember her writing something and she was like, “I’m sorry to write this, but I just don’t think it’s there yet.”

Jimmy Soni:

Wow.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah. Wow.

Jimmy Soni:

And has her feedback generally as a tuning fork been pretty useful for you?

Gretchen Rubin:

Absolutely. Yeah. No. I think she’s got a really good sense of what’s missing, which I think is often hardest to see as the writer. You don’t see what you’ve left out because you’ve left it out. So it’s... for some reason, it’s just like, that’s something that’s in your vision or tone problems. Sometimes you get the tone wrong. Like you’re trying to be funny, but it’s not landing or you’re not seeing that you need to find a moment of lightness. So I think that’s where her... that’s... and then she’ll do line edits and stuff. But... but yeah, it’s more those big picture things.

Jimmy Soni:

Did you talk to multiple agents or did you kind of find one that really understood you?

Gretchen Rubin:

I did talk to multiple agents. I was just thinking... I was just telling somebody the other day. Do you remember Judith Regan?

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah. The Judith Regan.

Gretchen Rubin:

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, like, huge, big personality. And so my first book is called Power, Money, Fame, Sex: A User’s Guide. And it’s kind of like if you imagine The Preppy Handbook being combined with Machiavelli. Right. And it’s written like a how-to guide. It’s very much... and I’ve always been sort of enchanted by the how-to format. So it’s written and it’s kind of right on the line between, is it satire?

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah.

Gretchen Rubin:

Or is it...

Jimmy Soni:

Or is it real?

Gretchen Rubin:

Like, you know, and so anyway... but it’s very dense because it’s written in this how-to guidebook format. And Judith Regan said to me, she pointed to a page and she said, “Too many ideas.” And I remember thinking, that is the most preposterous thing. It’s like that scene in Amadeus where he’s like, “Too many notes.” I’m like, what do you mean, too many notes? You can’t have too many ideas. That’s what we all want. But now I realized that was actually a really profound insight. Like, I write too tight, I cut too much, I need to loosen. I need to open it. Ever since... that’s something that I’ve... so, no. So I talked to nine agents, I think, at that time.

Jimmy Soni:

What made you want to pick the one you went with? Just to get very tactical, if you can think back.

Gretchen Rubin:

I think she just felt like she understood what I was trying to do. Like, she got why it was funny, she got why it was interesting. She wasn’t trying to fundamentally change it. You know, sometimes my sister writes for Hollywood, and there are these moments where they’re like, “We love it. It’s wizard school, but let’s set it on Wall Street.” You know? And you’re like, “Okay, I don’t really see...” So sometimes you do get... or just their taste. Like, sometimes people have a taste where you’re thinking, I don’t want to be fighting their taste. So I just felt like we were the most in sync in terms of her response and everything.

Jimmy Soni:

So, and so you send a proposal to the agent and I remember this process. And they then, you know, at the time especially, it was much more of a black box. Like, you just don’t know. You don’t know what they do.You don’t know what cocktail parties they’re going to.

Gretchen Rubin:

I think it’s still… It takes forever.

Jimmy Soni:

It takes forever. What was it like? Did you... how did you land on the publisher you found? Like, what was that process like? Like, did they... did you have multiple offers? Like, how did you... do you remember back to what happened?

Gretchen Rubin:

Gosh, isn’t that crazy? I don’t even remember if I had multiple offers. I’m still really good friends with my first editor, Greer Hendricks, who now herself is like a very, like, you know, like a number one bestselling author of psychological thrillers. So she’s still in my life as well. I might have only gotten one offer for that. And I remember, like, you know, somebody said, “Well, how much did you get?” I’m like, I would have done it for free. I would have done it if they had said, “We’re paying you $0, but we will publish it.” I’ll take that deal. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

I always tell authors to just write the proposal. Like, it’s not... you don’t really lose that much. If you’re trying to put a nonfiction book project together and you know, you could go one of two ways. Your way is far... it requires far more... it’s actually much more admirable in some ways. You sort of write the book fully through.

Gretchen Rubin:

But I will say, like, I’m not in... I don’t have to do things like traveling to do interviews. Like a lot of nonfiction authors, there’s a huge financial thing, whereas I’m really writing more of an essayistic thing where it’s my time and it’s like money that I don’t have in my pocket now. But I’m not paying, you know...

Jimmy Soni:

Paying to do the proposal because a lot...

Gretchen Rubin:

Of people, they have enormous expenses associated with actually writing the book.

Jimmy Soni:

But I tell authors too, that the proposal does help you clarify. Like, even if you’re going to self-publish, even if you’re going to do anything.

Gretchen Rubin:

100%. Right. No, you, everybody wants to skip that stage because you’re like, “Why should I waste my time on a proposal? Let me just skip to the book.” But you’re right, it can save you. A lot of times, I think people write a proposal and they realize it just doesn’t... just doesn’t hold up. And then you’ve saved yourself tons of grief.

Jimmy Soni:

You actually are forced to get the structure down. I mean, you’re forced to do much of the book.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yes.

Jimmy Soni:

You know, even getting style and tone.

Gretchen Rubin:

Such good advice. Pacing. Like, you can look and say, “Oh, this book is really out of pace. Like too much of it is in two chapters. But I’m saying there’s 10 chapters. Like, I have to...” That’s... you can’t have a book like that.

Jimmy Soni:

And I would say even the comp titles then force you to make the argument about why your book is different. And I was going to ask you about that project in particular, because it’s not like you’re the first person to write about those four themes. Right. What, in your head back then, what were you trying... how were you trying to position it to make it different?

Gretchen Rubin:

Well, part of it, that it was this really how to....

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah.

Gretchen Rubin:

And it’s written and it is... it’s written in a particular tone. It is very distinctive whether or not you like it. It’s a distinctive book. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

When you go back, what was the... so you get the deal? Do you remember any of those moments, like when you find out that you’re going to do it and then... because there is a moment where you figure out you have the deal and you’re like, “Oh, I’m like the dog that caught the car.”

Gretchen Rubin:

Right, right, right.

Jimmy Soni:

Did you have that feeling at all?

Gretchen Rubin:

Oh, no, just so happy to be... just... yeah, but, you know, I mean, to your point about the kind of the confusion around the process, one of the things I, and I often will say this to people who are on the publishing side. I’m like, people know how to be a writer, but they don’t know how to be an author. Like, they don’t know what trim size is. They don’t know what trade publishing is. They don’t know what a pub date is. They don’t know what first run is or first serial or promo copy. You know, there’s all these things that you don’t understand. And I think a lot of times they don’t know what you don’t know.

And I do remember a lot of it just feeling like, “Oh, I’m supposed to know so much more about this process” and feeling like I shouldn’t just say, “Oh, I don’t... I really don’t know what that word is, or I don’t know...” You’re asking me a question, but I don’t know that I don’t know the implications of my answer.

Jimmy Soni:

Right.

Gretchen Rubin:

Like, I remember somebody who was... who self-published and they changed the number of pages and then when she got the book, the quality of the paper was lower than they had agreed to, and they said, “But you raised the page count and that meant the quality of the paper had to change.” And she’s like, “But I didn’t know the implications of that decision.” So you don’t know again, you don’t know what you don’t know. So now I try to really just admit, like, “I don’t know what you’re asking. I don’t know what that means.” Even now.

Jimmy Soni:

It’s an interesting... you know, I had a similar experience, because I don’t know if you felt this way. I certainly felt this way. You get the first deal and you do feel a bit like you’re like, “I got away with something.” Right. Like, I sold this thing to you. You’re about to give me money and you don’t know...

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

That I have no idea what I’m doing.

Gretchen Rubin:

Right.

Jimmy Soni:

Right.

Gretchen Rubin:

Here I go.

Jimmy Soni:

So then, so then you start doing it and they will ping you with things or send you terms of art within the publishing world and you don’t want to reveal to them...

Gretchen Rubin:

Yes.

Jimmy Soni:

You have no idea what you’re doing.

Gretchen Rubin:

You just try to fake your way through.

Jimmy Soni:

Just like, “No, good.” And then you’re furiously trying to look up what the answer to the question is.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

I think this actually drives a lot of authors to drink like...

Gretchen Rubin:

It’s a pub day for a reason.

Jimmy Soni:

Well, it’s a good thing you... you do find yourself having to fake it, especially if you’re getting started. You don’t know what you don’t know. And then worse is you don’t know... you always have this persistent fear, at least I did with my first book, of if I say the wrong thing, they will wake up to me being an imposter, take the deal away and say, “What business do you have doing this kind of work?” Right. Yeah, did you... was any of that part of your experience of writing the book? So once you go through the deal, you’re done with the deal. We’ve gotten past the deal, now you’re in the writing. What was that process like? Like, how did you... because this is your first time out.

Gretchen Rubin:

It was my first time out, yeah. Like, I remember not understanding something like first pass. I don’t... I still am like, “Remind me, what about first pass?” For me, a huge thing. And I didn’t know this until I was on my third book. So this is... this is the kind of thing you learn the hard way is there is... there’s a point at which you can make lots of changes. You can change anything you want. You could add an entire huge chapter. You could change the ending. You can do anything you want. Then there comes a point where your window is starting to close. Then there comes a point where you’re looking at it, but they’re only going to fix a mistake, a typo, a factual error, and they might charge you even for that.

And then there’s a point where they’re like, if you do, it is the hugest, biggest deal. And what... and I also learned is every time you go into a draft and make a change, you introduce an opportunity for error because something goes wrong, there’s a stray punctuation piece that doesn’t get caught. Or you use the same word two sentences above, but you forgot to check because you just added this one thing and you didn’t realize you just used the word “pageant” or whatever. So one thing I’ve learned is you need to watch... I need to watch that very carefully. Like, what... what stage of editing am I in? Because I will edit every single thing up into the last minute. I would never just say, “Oh, it’s done, pencils down.” Oh, here’s a question for you.

Somebody just asked me this question. Let’s say you submit a draft to your editor, okay? So it’s with your editor. Are you like, “Okay, now I’m going to take a break from the book while it’s in their hands”? Are you like, “I will continue to edit myself and then I’ll just incorporate their edits into whatever I’ve done”? It never even occurred to me to stop editing my own work. I’m like, of course I’m going to edit every single day. I’m not going to wait for them, right? Somebody was like, “That’s... why would you do that? That’s bonkers.” I’m like, “Okay, what’s your thought?”

Jimmy Soni:

So this is the thing, is that you and I are wired very similarly in this way, but it is also an editor’s nightmare to have this happen, right? Like in the sense where the diverging... where the diverging... well, because I’m like you. As soon as I turn it into them, you’re immediately thinking, “Okay, let’s go back and revise every chapter and blow things up and twist...”

Gretchen Rubin:

Things around because you got this time. You can’t wait.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, you can’t wait. And the thing so I would say one is I know you probably feel this way as well. No one is going to invest the time into my book that I will, full stop. My name’s on the front. I live and die by the words in it.

Gretchen Rubin:

You’re thinking about it morning, noon and night.

Jimmy Soni:

I can’t tell you. I mean for most of the books I love, I probably couldn’t tell you who published them with a couple exceptions. I know sometimes, like just because of the way we’re in the industry, I know some of the editors that are putting out the work I like. But for the most part, most listeners aren’t going to know who published the last great... unless they looked at the spine of the book. I know I’m going to live and die by the words and I know that I’m going to obsess over them like nobody’s business. And here’s the thing. I think there’s... there’s the way publishers tell you that the editing ought to go, which has a rhyme and reason, by the way. Like there’s a reason why they do things the way they do.

And I have found that process is actually first rate. Everything kind of post-copy editing production with traditional publishing is actually phenomenal. Right. But I have found that we’re ultimately dealing with a PDF and in 2026, making those changes is not that big of a deal. Like there’s ways to work around it. I edit right up until the goal line. I edit until I can edit no more. If it were possible to edit in the hour before it was sent to China to get printed...

Gretchen Rubin:

I would too. Because you’re constantly... like that verb is kind of, you know, vague. I can strengthen that. Or like, “Oh, I thought of a...” Or like for me I use a lot of examples. So if I... that I get from real life. And sometimes I’ll just get a much better example from life. So I’m like, “Well, I want to swap this example for that example because it’s just a stronger, more interesting version of the point that I’m trying to make.” Or you just have an original idea and you’re like, “Oh, I want to layer that in” and...

Jimmy Soni:

I would frame it differently. And this is true of all creative work for me. It’s just a touch different. The specifics matter what you just said about word choice and about... but I actually think what happens is if you have a deadline where you’re supposed to send something into an editor, you pour an enormous amount of energy into everything leading up to that moment, right? And you sort of give it your all. It can be this whole body experience of editing. Your friends can’t talk to you. You sort of can’t communicate with the rest of the species. Your family starts to resent you a little bit. You drive and drive and drive. And let’s say it’s like a Monday at 5 o’clock and you press send Monday at 5 and you send them the draft.

You’re so fried, at least for me, I’m so fried at the end of that process that if I take a day or two, the editing I do after that is better often than the editing I did at the tail end of that crazy marathon. So I take a day or two break, but then I get right back at it because I’m bringing better energy to it than I was before. So I actually think of it as super important to go back and dive into the draft as opposed to walking away from it. Because in that state, I don’t know what I was doing in the 72 hours leading up to the deadline. Maybe it was good, maybe it was bad. I frequently find it wasn’t that good. And so I think it’s an energy management thing.

My energy goes all the way to empty right up until the deadline. And then it sort of fills up in the day or two after and I’m ready to look at the project with fresh eyes. And ultimately... the line I always use... everybody wins. Like, we’re gonna sell books.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah. No, no, no. It’s better to have a better book, always. Well, one thing I want to do too is read the book aloud. And that takes a lot of time. And so that’s the kind of thing that’s good. Nobody’s gonna do that other than you. And so that’s the kind of thing also that you can do when you’re sort of in that downtime. Because it takes a lot of time to do it and a lot of focus, but you can kind of do it in that period.

Jimmy Soni:

So you go right back into editing as soon as you turn it in and start to dive right back in.

Gretchen Rubin:

Well. And I don’t even really have a deadline. So what I’ll say to my editor is, “I will edit right up until the time I’m ready now. What I have now is a complete draft, but I will continue to edit it. So when you’re ready to read it, tell me and I will give you the most up-to-date draft.” Because if you’re not going to read it for a week, it’s already going to be changed by the time... so for me, the deadline is always, “Okay, I’m ready to read it now. Send it to me.” And then, so they’ll have the most up-to-date one. And then... and then... so I... so for me, the deadline is just

Jimmy Soni:

A suggestion.

Gretchen Rubin:

It’s... it’s like now I’m... by when do you need to have it be ready for you? And a lot of times I find editors really aren’t ready. Like they might say, “I’ll be ready early this month,” but then they have something that came in that needed a lot more work than they expected. And so they’re not really ready right then. So I always feel like it’s good to say... and I think, when are you ready for me?

Jimmy Soni:

Well, and I think the publishing industry is pretty accustomed to delays, right? Like it’s... it’s like you can always move it back. You can’t move it forward. I followed that rule sometimes in a reckless way. Like I... I actually got charged for additional editing. I was one of those people because I edited during my first and second and third pass pages.

Gretchen Rubin:

Oh, okay...

Jimmy Soni:

But then, but then here’s the thing. Don’t do it at home. Really don’t.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, there’s a point where they get very, very cranky.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, I would say that being on the other side of it, I understand why they get cranky. And at the same time, there’s a writer I really admire, Erik Larson, who talks about how he edits his first and second and third... and I was like, you know, if it’s good enough for Erik, it’s good enough for me. Like, because there is something... what I would say is the reason that authors edit the first and second and third pass pages, sometimes more aggressively than a Word document or Google Doc or something else, is because we’re finally seeing it laid out on page.

Gretchen Rubin:

It makes a huge difference.

Jimmy Soni:

I don’t know if you’ve had that experience. You have.

Gretchen Rubin:

No, I... funnily enough, I think anything that you do that changes the way it looks... if you print it out, you’ll pick up completely different things. If you read it out loud, you’ll pick up different things. You can put it in a different font. Because I feel like my font kind of looks like my handwriting and if I even... but there is something hugely psychological when it’s laid out and it looks like a Xerox of a page of a book. No, in fact, that’s a really good point. I mean, I’m sure now we could easily do that ourselves.

Jimmy Soni:

Oh yeah. It’s much easier.

Gretchen Rubin:

That’s a really good idea. I want to do that.

Jimmy Soni:

It’s much easier. And I actually...

Gretchen Rubin:

Just because as you say, you pick up a completely... you have a completely different sense of your book.

Jimmy Soni:

Well, you do. And also, by the way, the simplest example, and it happens all the time, is you write a paragraph and you think it’s short, but it turns out to be really long. The only time you realize it’s really long is when you see it in your first pass pages. You look at it and you’re like, “This is a giant block of impenetrable text that nobody is going to want to go through in 2026.” Right. Like this is... we don’t... we don’t have these kinds of attention spans. I need to take this, create an indent. And I’m only going to know that when the first pass pages come around.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah. Where your line edits fall. I mean your line breaks fall. Whether your headers are working. I think a lot of things do become... you... just a lot of stuff sort of... that’s a really good idea. I’m going to do that. Like figure out how can I make it look like... maybe they can do it just... well, we’ll just do it to you as a favor.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah.

Gretchen Rubin:

Like just to kind of fake it.

Jimmy Soni:

A fake first pass.

Gretchen Rubin:

Half pass pages. That would be real. That’s a really good stage.

Jimmy Soni:

It’s a great stage. And it’s also... it’ll save them time. It’ll save them time later. It’s also an important stage. Like it really is. Like you look at it differently, you feel differently about it. I’ve... I’ve actually cut chapters in half.

Gretchen Rubin:

You’ve got to publish... you’ve got to introduce the half pass pages.

Jimmy Soni:

We’ve got to introduce. Yeah this will be our... among our many innovations, another one. The... the thing about it though, if people don’t realize that when you’re... when you are... have stared at something as often as your own words on the page, the change in form matters a great deal. It is the only way to see them afresh. You don’t... otherwise you’re just looking at the same document the same way. And so for me, I do this thing, I have a tracker for every chapter of a book and it has “read aloud, question mark,” “printed, question mark,” “printed edit, question mark” and like what was it? Oh, mobile. So I read on my phone. So I also...

Gretchen Rubin:

I’ve never done that.

Jimmy Soni:

So let’s nerd out for a second.

Gretchen Rubin:

Wow.

Jimmy Soni:

So here’s why there’s two or three reasons why. The first is people are reading on smaller form factor devices.

Gretchen Rubin:

They are, that’s 100% true.

Jimmy Soni:

So you have people who will download the book to Kindle, they’ll have their Kindle synced to their phone.

Gretchen Rubin:

But even a Kindle is a smaller format than reading a book. So you are... they’re multiple sizes.

Jimmy Soni:

So that’s one reason is people... my readers are reading that way. The second reason is an interesting one. If you’re working in Google Docs like I am, but I’m sure this is true of any software you’re editing on. You can find a mobile version. When you’re in your phone. You actually... because of the way we text and because our thumbs are doing a lot of thinking, I find that I write differently. And so when you’re reading something on a phone in Google Docs, you’re kind of having this experience of, what if this was being... what if this passage is being texted to a friend? Does it work?

And so it’s actually... it’s a way to sort of look at it and be like, you know, this could be tighter, this could be shorter, this could be more succinct. It pushes you in the direction of being succinct. That’s reason two.

Gretchen Rubin:

That’s really... because a lot of times I might... this is the training as a lawyer that I always have to push back is a lot of times my first is really kind of long and wordy and it’s like pull it back. Be more succinct, speak more clearly. That’s a really good point.

Jimmy Soni:

The reason is if you turn off your notifications, which you should anyway, you realize that on a computer it’s much easier to be distracted because you have to make an affirmative choice to open up a new tab or change software to... it’s a real choice for some reason to me on a computer to go and be distracted. I’m sorry, it’s not... it’s a much easier choice on a computer to be distracted than it is on a phone. Because with a phone, I find that if I’ve got the notifications off and I’m looking at that document on my phone, there’s something about it that’s much more... it compels me to focus on it as opposed to, “Oh, I could just drift off and do this, or drift off and do email or anything.” The final reason is simple.

I have my phone with me all the time, so I can always be editing. Like, you’re on the subway, you can edit. You’re waiting for a friend at a restaurant, you can edit. You can edit in all these little confetti minutes, right, that you just sort of track during the day. And I find that for me, editing on the phone has actually become a big part of getting books to just be snappier, be more succinct. It’s a totally different way of looking at it.

Gretchen Rubin:

That is such a good idea. I’m gonna... I’m gonna instantly do that. I never thought of that because I know I always read books on paper, right?

Jimmy Soni:

Same, and I’m old school in that way, I love my paper books.

Gretchen Rubin:

I love my papers. So it just... it didn’t occur to me, but 100% I know you’re exactly right. And it’s just any... anything that switches it up reveals new problems, basically.

Jimmy Soni:

One question I have. Not about just your first book, but about projects in general. There are lows in projects, right? So you and I have talked about the highs, right? We covered the highs. Did you have with your first book or with subsequent books? Do you have a method or a way of dealing with the moments when you feel stuck or when you’re like, “I don’t know if this is going to work” or that kind of thing, or do you just breeze through?

Gretchen Rubin:

No, if I feel stuck, I... I will just get up and walk around. So I won’t persist in something that I’m stuck. And I’m a big believer of the unconscious mind will be working on something. So like, let’s say... let’s say I’m in a late stage of editing. And so I have five problems left to solve. And these are the hardest problems because I did all the easy ones first. So I might just look at them and think about them and then walk away or, you know, let a day go by and try them again. And then if I still can’t solve them, sort of repeat. So I’m in the problem and trying to... and trying to... and really pushing myself to try to solve it.

But if I haven’t solved it, then I’ll get up, walk around. I’m also really a morning person. So I get up at 5:30 and from 5:30 to 9 is the best time for my thinking. So anything that’s hard, I do then. So if I have a hard problem, I’ll sort of skip it and save it to do it first so I can do it first thing in the morning. Because that’s my, by far, my best time. But yeah, I think there’s always problems. There’s always things when you’re like, “I don’t...” This is something I should incorporate, but I don’t see how or where it should go or how you would even broach it or it’s a complicated idea that’s hard to succinctly convey.

Jimmy Soni:

You know, when you’re in the middle...

Gretchen Rubin:

Some kind of pervasive issue you gotta tackle when you’re in the...

Jimmy Soni:

Middle of a project. I have the challenge of sometimes you’re sort of, you know, you want to dance with the girl that you brought, but then you have this other project. Like there’s always the other projects that you’re like…

Gretchen Rubin:

... A hooky book. That’s what I have.

Jimmy Soni:

That’s a great... that’s a great one.

Gretchen Rubin:

I often have a hooky book. Yes. Now my... when I was writing Better Than Before, my book about habit formation, my hooky book was a book that turned into Outer Order, Inner Calm. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Wow. So how do you prevent yourself from going to... and turning the hooky book into the daily driver?

Gretchen Rubin:

Right, right. Yeah, that it is. You’ve got to remember it’s a hooky book. For me, it’s all about note taking. So note taking is a big thing for me. So I will let myself take notes on it. Like, and I’ll... I might read for it and take, put notes into it, but I would never allow myself to begin to structure it. Because once I’m structuring, then I’m like, “Okay, now I’m really tackling it as a book.” But because I always start with a bunch of notes, having a bunch of notes, then when I’m ready to start writing, then I have this huge head start. So it’s a good use of my time. But you’re right, you’ve got to make sure that it doesn’t swallow up what your main project is.

Jimmy Soni:

Sometimes, by the way, hooky books can yield something amazing, as you put it. You can have... I find that it’s tempting because the beginning of these projects is some of the best. Yeah.

Gretchen Rubin:

Okay, so there’s beginners... there’s openers and finishers. Okay, so openers are people who love to open a project. So they love the beginning stages. They love to start something new. Like, I talked to a professor, and he’s like, “I have seven half-finished, you know, new curricula for new classes,” because he loved to open. But then there... and then finishers are people who love to end. They love to finish. And both of them have pros and cons because openers sometimes don’t finish. And so they don’t get the benefits of their work. And they can get distracted because they’re pulled in so many directions. But finishers, sometimes they just want to be done so badly that they might rush at the end because they’re just like, “Okay, I just really want to get this crossed off the list.”

But a lot of times it’s that last work that’s really painstaking and difficult that can really make something go to the next level. And sometimes they are too cautious about what they start because they think, “Well, if I can’t finish it, maybe I shouldn’t start it.” But sometimes with creativity, you kind of have to say, “Well, maybe I’ll start it and maybe it won’t go anywhere, but I need to just kind of get it started to see.” And so I think it’s good to know which one you lean toward so that you kind of can try to offset that.

Jimmy Soni:

Are you an opener or a finisher?

Gretchen Rubin:

I’m a finisher for sure.

Jimmy Soni:

Okay.

Gretchen Rubin:

I’m a finisher. I love to cross things off the list. And it is... it’s like towards the end, I feel myself being... let’s just... let’s just say it...

Jimmy Soni:

Done.

Gretchen Rubin:

Oh, here’s an edit. But I’m just going to decide I don’t agree with that edit. It’s like, I actually do agree with that edit. I just want to be done.

Jimmy Soni:

Want to finish.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, I want to finish.

Jimmy Soni:

There’s a... there’s that expression, once you’re lucky, twice you’re good. Right. And the first time I did a book, I really did feel like I was... I mean, I knew the book was good, but I felt like I got lucky. It was the second time where I was like, “Okay, I can actually... this is a real thing. I know how to do this.” Did you have a similar experience? Like, how was it... what was the process like from the first to the second project? Because you also changed.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, I changed style. My second book was a short, unusual biography of Winston Churchill.

Jimmy Soni:

Which is... it’s a fantastic book. It’s really great.

Gretchen Rubin:

No, I love that book for me, and this still is a thing which is, are you going to be able to write your next book? If you’re a traditionally published person, that’s a concern, which is, are you going to get published again? Are you going to get a deal again? You know, is somebody going to want to publish you again? So I do feel like that. And I’ve never done a two-book deal, so I’ve always faced that, which is, I’m going out there again.

Jimmy Soni:

Right. And so how did you go from power... from the power book to... to Churchill? Like, what was that process like?

Gretchen Rubin:

Well, when I was studying power, I kept coming across these references to Churchill. So then I became very preoccupied with Churchill. And then a lot of my books have sort of an origin moment. And so I was standing at the corner of 69th and 3rd Avenue and I said to my husband, “You know, you could write a book about Winston Churchill that would just be the most adulatory thing of all time. And you could write a book about Winston Churchill that is so critical of him. And both of them could be completely factually accurate.” And he said, “You could write that book.” And I was like, “Oh my goodness, I am 100% going to write that book.” And I had been reading all these biographies, so I had all these thoughts about the nature of biography.

That’s another unwritten book that I have. I have this enormous collection of quotations about the nature of biography which I could work into something which I actually... I forgot until this minute I had. I should go back and look at that because it’s very cool. But anyway, so 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is both about Winston Churchill and it’s also about the nature of biography. But how this connected with Power, Money, Fame, Sex... like in my mind, they’re very closely associated. From a book publishing standpoint, they’re not closely associated with it, but I was just able to pull that off.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah. And how did... did you have to convince, coax, cajole, like, you know, because you’re one of the rare people and this is a true gift that you’ve managed to jump from idea to idea. But they’re very... they can be very disparate. Right. Like it... they’re... to quote the… the pudding has no theme. I know it has a theme, and I kind of know that you’re following your intuitions and your curiosities, but it’s not as though you’re a sort of...

Gretchen Rubin:

They’re all about human nature. To me, that’s the thing is they’re all about how do you... and one of the ways you understand human nature is you look at someone like Winston Churchill or JFK, and they’re just so huge and there’s such a vast quantity of information about them that you can study them in a way that you can’t study somebody who’s just more... a more modest player on the world stage. So to me, they feel very connected. But you’re right, but from a publishing standpoint, they’re incredibly disparate.

Jimmy Soni:

But I’m surprised that nobody pushed back to say, “Could you do another book on, you know, power? Or, hey, could we take one of the verticals and really go deep?”

Gretchen Rubin:

I know, I know. It’s... yeah. Now to me... yeah. Because once I started writing about happiness, I have... they’ve all been sort of connected with how do you have a happier life?

Jimmy Soni:

Right.

Gretchen Rubin:

And it is nice to sort of be building around a core subject now with 40... so when I wrote... so I wrote 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, it did pretty well. I wrote 40 Ways to Look at JFK. And you know, when a book flops, they tell you. Or at least my team tells me. “Your book didn’t find its audience.” My book didn’t find its audience. I wanted to write 40 Ways to Look at Richard Nixon. Oh, and that wasn’t going to... just like, this just wasn’t a form. I probably would have kept going. I wanted to do Ben Franklin. I wanted to do Leonardo da Vinci. I wanted to do Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. It just wasn’t supported by the market.

Jimmy Soni:

Why do you think Churchill worked but JFK didn’t?

Gretchen Rubin:

Okay. So I think I have a theory about that. Let me tell you what I think. So I think the people that... that are interested in JFK are... they are either they adore Kennedy and admire him tremendously and everything that he stands for in their minds, or they think... they really... this... you know, they think Kennedy was such a fake and he was doing all this stuff and it’s like this dark underside and what was he getting up to? And so a book that talks about…

Jimmy Soni:

Either camelot or conspiracy.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah. Exactly. That’s perfectly... well, that would be great cover copy. Yeah, you’re thinking like a publisher.

Jimmy Soni:

People are getting a window to basically what we do at lunch.

Gretchen Rubin:

So they don’t want to see the other side. They want one or the other, they don’t want to see both. And so people would look at this and they’re like, “I don’t want that.” Whereas I think the people who come to Churchill... so when I wrote the Churchill... and this is a good example of the fact that when you write a book, you never know who the true audience for the book is. You don’t know who it’s really going to appeal to. So when I wrote the Churchill book, I was thinking, there are all these people in the world who have no idea that Winston Churchill is the most fascinating character in history and I will be the gateway drug. They will read my short book and then they will go on to the eight-volume biographies, which I think is absolutely fascinating.

But they don’t yet know that they want to read. Yeah, but that wasn’t who the audience for the book was. The audience for the book was the people who had already read every single Winston Churchill biography. They knew tons about him. So they were interested in my take, because my take was, look, 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. So it was looking at him through all these different lenses, often which were very much in opposition or very surprising. And they’re meant for paradoxical. They were meant to sort of show you what you could... the limits of biography. So people who knew a lot about Churchill were the people who were attracted to that and who... and with whom it resonated. So it was not at all the audience that I thought I was writing to. It was like the opposite.

But I think that audience didn’t exist for JFK because the Churchill people, I think that was an audience that understood the triumphs and tragedies. You know, I think that’s even the title of one of the big... yeah, they got it that his flaws were his weaknesses and his weaknesses were his strengths. And you know, so part of it, I think had to do with the nature of the audience for that figure.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah.

Gretchen Rubin:

But somebody told me, they said to me, “Gretchen, when most people read a biography, they want an authoritative account with some new information. And that’s not what you’re writing.” And it’s like, it’s not what I’m writing. It’s like I was writing a book that people weren’t that interested in.

Jimmy Soni:

It was more of an impressionist painting almost. Right.

Gretchen Rubin:

40 Ways. Right. So it’s like a Monet... the haystack painting.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah. And then, you know, I have a million questions that could get into about the Churchill book. But the... one of the... I imagine a criticism or I imagine pushback that you could get is “Gretchen, I mean, the shelves groan under the weight of Churchill’s stuff...”

Gretchen Rubin:

Yes. No, Churchill himself said...

Jimmy Soni:

Exactly.

Gretchen Rubin:

That’s... that field has been plowed. I mean, even when he was still alive.

Jimmy Soni:

And he himself was prolific and...

Gretchen Rubin:

Oh my gosh.

Jimmy Soni:

So you’re competing against your subject and people who have written about your subject ad nauseam.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

For 50 years, 60 years. So how did you... did you have to deal with that, any of that?

Gretchen Rubin:

I mean, I... I dealt with it in the introduction. I just said, “Yeah, I get it, but...”

Jimmy Soni:

But your publisher still went for it.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah. And it’s just like... but there’s always a new way to understand him and his own account of himself. The biggest problem with the Churchill book was that Churchill himself is such an outstanding writer that I felt like whatever he wrote just jumped off the page. And then my stuff was like, “Eh, this is... yeah, meh.” So... but I learned so much as a writer from Churchill. Like, that was a thing I didn’t expect. It’s just like, because I would type out all these, you know, these... my favorite speeches and things that he would write, my favorite passages. And there was so much as a writer that would be a really fun book which is writing lessons from Winston Churchill because he was a master.

Jimmy Soni:

I think there is a book like Churchill as Writer.

Gretchen Rubin:

I’m sure there is. Right?

Jimmy Soni:

Churchill as Painter.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah. The wit and wisdom. No, I’m sure I probably have that. Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

You made a really important point and it’s an interesting one for anybody who’s listening, who is a creative. And there are many that you... I... the way I’ve heard it described is you have to leave a reader-sized hole in your work. Right. So you never know... to what you said. You never know who is going to find your book and use it or treat it or think about it in a way that you’ve never anticipated. Right. So for you it was, “Oh, this is the gateway drug.” And it turned out to be actually... this is the... this is the finishing course for this particular meal.

Jimmy Soni:

I had a similar experience with my first book, which was about an ancient Roman senator named Cato. It was called Rome’s Last Citizen. And I remember thinking, “Well, I’m writing this for people who are super nerdy like me, really enjoy Roman history. They probably read about Caesar. They might have read about Cicero. This fits that spot on the bookshelf. Great. That’s the audience.” And it turned out that Cato was one of the patron saints of Stoicism. And Stoicism had a renaissance among different people. And people like Tim Ferriss read my book, loved it, let me blog on his site way back in the day and it took off among the sort of contemporary Stoicism set. Right. I heard a story about Michael Lewis when he did Liar’s Poker.

He said he thought he was writing kind of a message in a bottle for people to stay away from... to stay away from Wall Street. And what he got were hundreds of letters like, “I read your how-to guide for how to succeed on Wall Street. Like, is there other things you left out?” I do think you have to leave a reader-sized hole. Like it’s one of the challenging things actually about doing this work is when you see it misinterpreted or you see it kind of... and it’s not always a bad thing because if people are reading it, you’re happy. Right. But I do find that there’s a little bit of, “What about that little thing that I put in there that everybody missed that I was so happy about?” Have you had moments like that?

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, you have to let go of that. You have to let go of that. Well, it’s funny because in writing about happiness, a lot of times people will say to me, “Well, I know you wrote in your book, blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, “I never wrote that at all,” you know, but I’m just like, if you brought that to it that’s fine.

Jimmy Soni:

That’s fine.

Gretchen Rubin:

You know, it’s because I think once people start thinking... one of the nicest things that anybody said to me about my work was somebody, it was either Better Than Before or The Happiness Project. They said, “I’ve never read a book about somebody else that made me think about myself more.” And I’m like, that’s exactly what I’m going for. But when people are reading a book and they’re trying to understand it for themselves, of course they’re going to start seeing things in the book that you never put there.

Jimmy Soni:

Never intended. And it’s actually also one of the... books are great randomness machines in this way.

Gretchen Rubin:

That’s a great... that’s a great way. It’s just throw a bunch of ideas. You know, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. But the question is, how do you put yourself in the place where the teacher can appear?

Jimmy Soni:

Right, right.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

And it’s... but it’s also one of the most gratifying. Like, I’ll... you get random notes from people about some little ingredient you included you didn’t think was a big deal or a footnote you threw... a stray footnote that ends up being a thing.

Gretchen Rubin:

Wait, can I tell you an example from our podcast? Okay, so I have the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast, which is my sister. So sometimes people would send in... and this is to the point of you never know what ideas are going to land deep with people. So somebody had written in and said, “I lost my engagement ring. It was really important to me. We can’t afford to replace it. I am just sick about it. I don’t know. I looked everywhere. I just can’t find it. I just can’t find it. And my question is, how do I make my peace with this? How do I find happiness when I have just so much... and I’m just so upset about this?” So the question isn’t how to deal with a ring.

The question is, how do I deal with the negative emotions that I have around the ring? So we had our own answer. Whatever. Then a listener wrote in and her answer... people to this day are like, “What was the episode where the woman talked about this answer?” We’ve returned to it several times because people just... it struck a chord. She said, “In Japan, we have the belief that a precious object might sacrifice itself for you, that to save you from a bad fate, it might lose itself.” And she said, “It’s totally a myth. But it might be help... comforting for her to think that this precious possession had lost itself to save her.” And to us, this was so strange because it’s just a reframing, right? Nothing in the... none of the facts have changed. It’s just the reframing in your mind.

And people to this day are like, “What episode was it where that woman talked about the ring losing itself?” There’s just something about it to just... and then I was in Japan and I was having some... I was with a guide and I mentioned this and she looked at me and she said, “It’s very Japanese.”

Jimmy Soni:

That does sound… you told me this story without cultural context, but that sounds Japanese.

Gretchen Rubin:

It sounds Japanese. And because the reader herself is in Japan. This is... we have this thought, but... so that was an interesting example where to us this was just like, “Oh, interesting insight from a listener in response.” And we... we have these all the time. And then it was just... it just reverberated for years. And sometimes you just don’t know. And I think for creative people, this is why sometimes it’s good to just throw a lot of ideas out there, because you don’t always know that you’ve hit a deep seam, because, like you said, there’s so many rabbit holes that you’re going down all the time. You know, sometimes it’s really... it’s really illuminating to think, “Oh, this is an idea that people are really... that somehow is really striking a chord.”

Jimmy Soni:

It’s also one of the reasons why I tell people, whether they are authors or just readers, to write in. Like, to tell the person who created the thing what specific things stood with you. Like, I just have that as a default habit now. If I walk around the world...

Gretchen Rubin:

Do you really do that with books you read?

Jimmy Soni:

With books I read, with statues I walk by.

Gretchen Rubin:

That’s so nice.

Jimmy Soni:

I remember I walked by Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn, and I was so... my daughter was riding it a lot. And I remember thinking, “This is a really nice carousel, and it’s nicer...” and I could get in trouble for this. “It’s nicer than the Bryant Park, the SeaGlass, the Central Park one.” It’s the nicest carousel in New York. It’s very beautifully maintained. And so I started going down the rabbit hole. And I remember thinking... I was like, my habit is, I’ll find it, find the creator, write them some kind of note so that they know.

Gretchen Rubin:

This is such a lovely practice.

Jimmy Soni:

And it just became a default thing. But what’s great is I know how I feel when I get those notes. And so I wrote to Jane of Jane’s Carousel. One thing led to another, we became friends. And then I ended up doing the coffee table book with her about Jane’s Carousel. Because of that note. All because of that note. So I always tell people, if something strikes you, if it enters your life’s conversation in some way...

Gretchen Rubin:

Yes.

Jimmy Soni:

Let the person know.

Gretchen Rubin:

That is really...

Jimmy Soni:

Because then you and I don’t have any sense of what’s working or what’s not.

Gretchen Rubin:

We don’t. We don’t.

Jimmy Soni:

We have a vague sense, but not really a concrete sense.

Gretchen Rubin:

Okay. And here’s what I would add.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah.

Gretchen Rubin:

There’s so much AI slop of all these AI agents saying all of these flattering things that it’s like, can I tell the difference between somebody who’s faking it and somebody who’s actually resonating?

Jimmy Soni:

100%?

Gretchen Rubin:

100%. Or even people are like, “I loved your recent podcast episode where you talked about...” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s fake.” Because I can tell when somebody’s really, you know, says, “Oh, I was thinking, you know, we have this...” But you can just sort of tell the difference in terms of how people are, you know. For 2026, one of the items that I wanted to do was to rate and review podcasts and books more, because as somebody who’s a creator, I know how much it matters. It just matters for the... for all these things, it really matters to people, and it’s gratifying, and... and I haven’t even really been keeping up with that as much. And you’re going way beyond that, which is to actually track down the contact information. But that’s so much more meaningful.

Jimmy Soni:

It is. It’s also... it’s not that hard to do. So here’s the way I think about it is...

Gretchen Rubin:

Also to sharpen your gaze.

Jimmy Soni:

Oh, absolutely. And the other thing is you know, you... everybody lives a life where you try, I think, on balance, to leave the world... hopefully you live your life this way... a little bit better. A little... just a wee bit better. Right. And you can do that in a lot of ways. You can raise your kids well. You can do creative work. You can just be a human. You can volunteer. And I do think that this is my way of the karmic scales.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Like, I need to keep them in balance. And, you know, my work requires a lot of borrowing on karma from other people, whether it’s editors investing in you or time away from certain friends or... I kind of think of this as my way of restoring the karma scales. But then the other part of it is it’s not a long exercise. You know, I finished a book a couple weeks ago, and it took me, what, a minute or two of Googling to find the person’s contact info. I had two sentences that I wanted to say to them because there was one chapter that really stood out to me. Drop a note. Send it off. It’s not like I’m not laboring over this for years and years. This is just very quick.

Gretchen Rubin:

So keep it easy.

Jimmy Soni:

But keep it easy. And also, it then sort of puts you in the position of, I may never have contact with that person again. Ever again. But they know that something that they spent years on had some kind of effect in the world. I think that’s one of the things that, you know, it’s... you do spend years of your life on these projects. And I’m sure, especially when your first few books came out, anytime anybody wrote you, it was the greatest. It was the greatest moment ever.

Gretchen Rubin:

No, it really was.

Jimmy Soni:

I think you can be world famous and these things still affect you. Right? Like, you can have fans galore, but it’s somebody identifying something specific in your work that still makes a massive difference. A massive difference.

Gretchen Rubin:

No, I think that’s really true. And I think there is something about putting out those... the appreciation for people’s efforts..

Jimmy Soni:

And I would say that it extends as well... as I said to physical things or a product you really love or... it doesn’t have to be a book. It doesn’t have to be some... some work of art, it can be something very simple. I also find the other effect of this. It gets you to find the origin story of the thing itself. So you... because you look at something and you’re like, “I really like that.” You have to then go dig and figure out how did this thing come into being. Right. And for people who love rabbit holes, that’s catnip, you know, there’s nothing like that feeling. How did you... just... because I want to be conscious of your time. How did you go from JFK and Churchill to The Happiness Project? What is the origin story? The kind of, you know, pre-story on The Happiness Project?

Gretchen Rubin:

Again I have been... I know exactly when and where it happened. So I was finishing up... it was probably just after first pass with my JFK book. So I had this... and at that time, because writers didn’t have all this other stuff that we were doing, there is kind of a period of inactivity because you can no longer actively edit, as we were saying, and they’ve ripped it out of your cold hands. And the book hasn’t been published yet. So there’s kind of this... and for me, it was... so I just sort of had this open time in my head. So it was during that period and I was stuck on the crosstown bus on 79th in the pouring rain. It was going really slowly and I didn’t have anything to read or distract myself with. And I just...

I looked out the window and I thought, “What do I want from life anyway?” And I thought, “I want to be happy.” But I... and I thought, “Well, but I don’t spend any time thinking about whether I am happy or if I could be happier or what is happiness anyway?” And I thought, “Well, I should do a happiness project and figure all this out.” So... and I instantly became super interested in the idea of happiness. So I ran to the bookstore and the library and got a giant stack of books. Stoics, you know, novels, nonfiction, research. This was right at the time when sort of the positive psychology movement was just getting going. So there was a lot of interesting research that had just kind of emerged at that time. And at first it was just...

For me, it was just like, what do I... what could I do to be happier in my own life? And... but as I got into it, I just... my note taking, my research got deeper and deeper, and there were so many things that I wanted to learn and so many things I wanted to try in my own life. Yeah. That I thought, “Oh, maybe this could be my next book project.”

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah.

Gretchen Rubin:

And then I’ve sort of been writing about happiness one way or another ever since. And it’s funny because I don’t know about you for titles, but for me, titles either come right away or extremely slowly. And people, many people, said, “You shouldn’t call it The Happiness Project because that sounds like homework. Nobody likes to do it.” And I was like, “But I love homework. I love...” No, I love a project. Homework for long periods of time. Seriously, give me a course. I’ll sit down. I love a curriculum. But... but I was like, but that’s... that’s... it was... I was like, it... just from the very first minute, I had this idea it was The Happiness Project. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

That’s great.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Did you have trouble selling it at all, or was it a pretty easy sell after... because you said JFK didn’t do well.

Gretchen Rubin:

No, it was not an easy sell. First of all, I was talking to people about it, and they didn’t get it. Like, somebody’s like... because I was like, “Oh, yeah.” I kind of mentioned Benjamin Franklin. Because if you’re talking about, you know, he’s, you know, OG in this... in this space.

Jimmy Soni:

No, he is. He’s the Godfather.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, he’s the Godfather. And they would be like, “Well, maybe you should do a thing where you follow all of Benjamin Franklin’s rules.” And I’m like, “No...” This was a time when doing sort of what... what you could dismissively call stunt nonfiction was... was more and more. And so kind of the...

Jimmy Soni:

The more august name. Right. Was the gonzo journalism a long time ago.

Gretchen Rubin:

Exactly, exactly right. And so, yeah, everything just keeps being reinvented. Auto-fiction, it’s like, yeah, they’ve been doing that for a long time. No, so first people didn’t really get it. And that’s part of why I thought, I think I just have to really write a lot of it because people aren’t understanding and this wasn’t me officially pitching it, but just more me casually talking to smart people to sort of pick their brain and they just... they just weren’t responding the way I thought that they should in my vanity. So I basically wrote a huge thing and then my agent was just like, “Yeah, it’s not good.” And then I wrote it again and my agent was like, “Yeah, I’m sorry, it’s just still not good enough.”

And then... and then I kind of figured out how to break it. And then... and then that’s when I went out. And then there was a reasonable amount of interest. But not like wild enthusiasm.

Jimmy Soni:

Not enthusiasm commensurate to what the book eventually became.

Gretchen Rubin:

No, not at all.

Jimmy Soni:

Because now that’s your best known...

Gretchen Rubin:

For sure. Yeah, I mean it was, yeah, it was number one. It was on the list for two years. Yeah, no, it was... no, nobody... but the one thing that I had done so I had a blog that I had been doing for years, a daily blog. And I did it because when I was writing the book, one of the arguments that I was testing, because it was all a test on me, all self-experiment was novelty and challenge make people happier. And I had thought, “Well, I’m not that kind of person. Maybe that’s true for most people, but I like familiarity and mastery.” But I had to test it for the purposes of the book. So I decided I would start a blog because I’m like, “This is novel, this is challenging. I don’t know tech, I don’t write for deadlines.”

I’ve never been a journalist. This is going to be really hard and, but I’ll do it and just sort of report. And I thought, “Oh, I’ll do it for a month.” But then it really worked. And so I was fortunate in that at that time, not that many people had done something like that, which is to create an audience for a book before the book was published. And use it as a way to try to get people interested in a book. Now of course, preorder campaigns are a huge thing. And people are constantly talking about this thing. But at that time it wasn’t as common and I didn’t do it strategically and cleverly. I did it accidentally and for my own reasons. It just sort of ended up that way. But I think that was something that made... that really helped.

Jimmy Soni:

I want to bring things kind of... wind things to a close, but I, you know, we talk a little bit about your writing habits. You write in the mornings.

Gretchen Rubin:

Well, I write all day, but I write hard things in the morning.

Jimmy Soni:

And so how do you, yeah, how do you structure your creative life now? Like what’s... what is a typical week, a day and then a week kind of in your life look like.

Gretchen Rubin:

So in my dreams, I’m a Benedictine monk and every day is exactly the same and I know exactly what I’m doing at 10am every single day. But it’s not like that because now I have a podcast... I have podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, I have a newsletter, I have a newsletter in Klaviyo, I have a newsletter on LinkedIn, and I have a newsletter on Substack, all of which are different. I do social media, I have products, I do speaking. So I... so the one thing that I… I go to the Met every day...

Jimmy Soni:

Right yeah, which is probably one of my favorite things in Life in Five Senses.

Gretchen Rubin:

Part of my creative practice. So as much as I would love to have a very routinized life, I can’t because it’s just... it’s just, it’s constantly, I have to constantly shift things around. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I like to do my hardest reading first thing in the morning is from 5:30 to 9. Rarely changes. I... except for walking my dogs. That is very much... I can count on that. And then everything else, it’s like, I may or may not be able to do it. I might not be able to do it until 4pm by which time I’m not at my best. I might only have an hour. Instead of having a big block. One thing I have learned to do is not to have a big block. I think when you’re starting out in writing, you’re kind of like, “I have to have a whole day or I have to have half a day.” And now I’m like, I have all kinds of writing tasks and some of them I can do if I... I’m just sitting down for a few minutes.

Jimmy Soni:

So does the morning time always go to the biggest, most important project? Is that what you try to do?

Gretchen Rubin:

Yes, that’s what I always try to do.

Jimmy Soni:

And do you miss that? Like, do you... do you miss it when you’re on the road? Do you sort of give yourself breaks, or is it seven days a week?

Gretchen Rubin:

I try to do it seven days a week.

Jimmy Soni:

Wow okay. Yeah. That’s great.

Gretchen Rubin:

Because it is just so precious to me. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Look, I’m...

Gretchen Rubin:

But I’m rigid. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

You know, I’m rigid in the same way. And honestly, I feel off on the days I don’t have that.

Gretchen Rubin:

It doesn’t feel like... it doesn’t feel like a treat.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah. It feels like the way I described it to friends. It’s like, if I don’t have that time in the morning where I’m doing a... whatever the creative or editorial or writing task is, that’s the most important. It feels like I didn’t brush my teeth.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, no, that’s... it’s such a good analogy. Exactly.

Jimmy Soni:

Something is off…

Gretchen Rubin:

It’s not that it’s really a big deal or that it matters in any kind of way or that anybody else cares, but you just feel...

Jimmy Soni:

Just feel off.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

And then those grooves, they get... they get to be the place I’m happiest. Right. Is when I’m in that... that particular groove.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Do you... have you ever tried to change up the schedule or has this been the schedule for time immemorial?

Gretchen Rubin:

I haven’t always been able to get up this early. And when I had little kids, of course, I had much less control over my mornings. So then I... but at that time, I had fewer other commitments. You know, I didn’t always have the podcast. I didn’t always have the newsletters. I didn’t have... it just... I feel like as a writer, the kinds of work that you might do just as part of your ordinary writing life have really expanded. So I feel like I was fortunate that when my kids were younger and they were taking up a lot of my sort of unpredictable time and predictable time. I was just more focused.

Jimmy Soni:

When do you read? If you read?

Gretchen Rubin:

I love to read. This is a huge question in my life, it is a huge mystery because I read books, at the end of the month, I have the stack and I post a picture of it. And these are the books that I read. And I see that I read books. I’m always like, I feel like I’m never reading. I’m constantly fighting to find more time to read. My favorite thing is the same day book where I start and finish a book in the same day.

Jimmy Soni:

That’s where my...

Gretchen Rubin:

So delicious. I love that feeling. I have to do a lot of work for reading. If I’m doing work reading, I’ll do that during a work day. Kind of at the end of the day when I’m tired. If I’m just reading for pleasure, then I feel like I have to read it in sort of my leisure time. But... and I... I feel like I’m not reading nearly enough. For the podcast, we always have a challenge tied to the year. So 25 for 25 was read 25 in 25. So you had to read 25 minutes a day?

Jimmy Soni:

Oh, 25 minutes a day.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Okay.

Gretchen Rubin:

That... and that was... yeah, I... I just, I don’t know. How do you get enough reading done?

Jimmy Soni:

It’s hard.

Gretchen Rubin:

It’s... it’s something that’s very easy to find... push to the bottom. You have to fight for it.

Jimmy Soni:

You have to fight for... what I do, you know, part of it, I think... and this is sort of occupational hazard. I read... I am reading always, somewhat opportunistically. If I’m in the middle of a book project, I’m reading things that are tied to the thing I’m writing. So I feel like it’s real work. Right. So then I always have a reason.

Gretchen Rubin:

But does that feel different. Oh, yeah. That’s... that’s a different category.

Jimmy Soni:

There were years when I actually... I talked to a friend about this the other day, that I, at one point, I lost the ability to read for pleasure. I was... I... because you write books and you’re obsessed with books and you’re working on books all the time, and all of a sudden I wake up and I’m like, “I don’t actually enjoy reading anymore.” So I had to go back and start with fiction again and revive my childhood love of reading and wonder. The wonder of discovery. I lost all of it because it was all so utilitarian now.

Gretchen Rubin:

Exactly.

Jimmy Soni:

And then I would say, I... I try to do... if I... if I’m going on vacation, I try to take only novels and I’ll read stuff that has nothing to do with work. Right. But it’s actually hard. It’s actually hard to carve out. There was a period where I was trying to do 15 to 20 minutes every morning before anything else. That lasted for several months, and I finished a bunch of great books in that process. But I... it’s a challenge. Like, I... I will find that... actually, one thing that’s helped is my daughter has 30 minutes of required reading time every day for school. I just read side by side.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah, that’s a great...

Jimmy Soni:

So it’s like...

Gretchen Rubin:

That’s a great...

Jimmy Soni:

That makes it actually very easy.

Gretchen Rubin:

Because you have that accountability. One thing a friend of mine told me, and I’ve completely followed this, is that when she’s traveling for work, she reads for pleasure. So she never tries to work on a plane or review a document or something. It’s like, if you’re traveling for work, you just read for fun. And she’s like, that way, you know that you have that time and it’s just the most delicious. I love reading on airplanes because you’re just so focused.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah, no, I finished... I finished a number of books on airplanes that I wouldn’t have finished in any other form or because you always feel like you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Gretchen Rubin:

Right.

Jimmy Soni:

It’s like, do you work on the Substack or do you read? Do you work on X or do you read? Right. And I find that the other... the other bit, for me, it’s much more around choosing books. If it’s in project mode, I’m choosing books that I have to read anyway. Hopefully they’re enjoyable. But if I am, I try to portion out vacation time and choose my books there so that it’s pure pleasure.

Gretchen Rubin:

Pure pleasure, yeah. I think people don’t sometimes expect enough. Put down a book that’s not good, find something that’s really... then what I often do is I’ll pick a book. I’ll pick something to read for the summer to give my summer a theme. So I had a summer of Proust, because I had never read all of Proust. I had a summer of rereading, because I love to reread. And there were a bunch of sort of difficult books that I wanted to reread, like The Varieties of Religious Experience. I’m like... I’m like, when am I going to reread that? So I’m like, “Okay, I’ll have a summer when I just reread these books.” And then my summer this year, which will start June 1, is the summer of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Because I love Virginia Woolf. She’s my favorite author.

But I have never read her diaries, which are extensive. And I’m like, when am I going to get around to that? Like, I had to turn it into sort of a project. So... so that’s what I’m gonna... so that’s... so I will often do that with the summer if there’s something that I kind of want to tackle. Yeah, that’s how you’ll tackle it. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

So one of the ways all Infinite Loops episodes end with this question, which is, you’re made emperor for a day. Which, by the way, I actually think you’d make a great emperor.

Gretchen Rubin:

Thank you.

Jimmy Soni:

Like, if you ever... you ever decide to campaign for that office, let me know, because you’ll have my vote. And you... you have a magical microphone. You’re allowed to share two ideas that everybody in the world will wake up, and those two ideas will be implanted in their minds, and they will... they will believe that they are their own. Right. They’re not coming from Emperor Gretchen. They’re coming from their own psyche. And they... people live by and adhere to them. What... what are those two... you’re... you’re somebody that’s thought about this question extensively across...

Gretchen Rubin:

I’ve never thought of it in this iteration.

Jimmy Soni:

What are the couple of... Couple of ideas?

Gretchen Rubin:

I would say, know thyself and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think that could go pretty far.

Jimmy Soni:

Yeah. So on the know thyself, that’s been your life’s work, right?

Gretchen Rubin:

It’s on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Yes. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Is that... is it fair to say that your work is kind of an extension of that question?

Gretchen Rubin:

Yes, I think that’s a... I think that’s... yes.

Jimmy Soni:

I think that’s why it has resonance. Like, it’s... it’s why even...

Gretchen Rubin:

It’s a great challenge of our lives. Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

And in the intro to Life in Five Senses, you write about how this is... these books are very personal for you.

Gretchen Rubin:

Right.

Jimmy Soni:

That one seems to be the most personal. You have this kind of moment. And I won’t spoil it, because I think people should go check out that book. But you have a moment that leads you down these rabbit holes. It’s about knowing yourself.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

And the other one is do unto others…

Gretchen Rubin:

As you would have them do unto you. And you can quibble and you can say, “Well, but sometimes they don’t want you to do unto them. They want you to do unto them the way they want it to be done unto you.” I was like, start from there. Start from there.

Jimmy Soni:

Amazing. Well, Gretchen Rubin, you are... you remain... and you are one of my favorite authors. I love your work. I want everybody to check it out. Where can people find you? And just give us... give us the list so that we have...

Gretchen Rubin:

GretchenRubin.com. It’s all... everything’s there. Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Soni:

Okay.

Gretchen Rubin:

Yeah. Oh, this is... this is such a pleasure.

Jimmy Soni:

Thank you for coming on. Thank you for taking the time to do this wonderful work and until next time.

Gretchen Rubin:

Until next time.

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Highlights

Finding Peanut Butter and Jelly Stories

Ben Cohen: And so that’s something else that I learned covering sports at the Journal is that I think there are two ways to tell stories. One is taking small ideas and making them really big, and one is taking big ideas and making them really small. In some ways, they’re connected. But, for example, we always used to look for funny, interesting, peculiar, clever ideas at the Wall Street Journal. So one story that I wrote was, in 2016, the Golden State Warriors started the year 24-0. They were 41-4 at one point. There was nothing that was going wrong.

And as a journalist, you’re always looking for tension. Tension is what makes a story. And when there’s no tension, it’s like, well, what do you do with that? And I remember listening to a bunch of radio interviews the Warriors were doing at the time. You know, probably the only person outside the Bay Area who was actually listening to interviews on local radio. And in one of them, the interim coach at the time, Steve Kerr was on medical leave. And the interim coach at the time was Luke Walton. And he was doing this interview as he was walking off a plane, and they were saying, “Luke, what’s going on? How are you doing?” He was like, “I’m terrible. The team trainer before the season got rid of our peanut butter and jellies on the team plane because he thought they weren’t healthy. And everyone is completely miserable about it because all NBA players famously eat, they just subsist on peanut butter and jelly. It’s just around at all hours.”

And I heard this, and I was like, “Okay, well, the story to do is that the greatest source of tension in the locker room in Golden State right now is they’re fighting to get their peanut butter and jellies back.” And so that’s a funny idea for a story. And then you take it to the extreme. And they happened to be coming through the East Coast a couple of days later. I remember I went to Philadelphia and stalked their locker room and went quietly to every player in the locker room and asked, “What do you make of the war over peanut butter and jelly in the locker room?” having sotto voce conversations with Steph Curry in the side of the room. Then the next day, they were in New York, and I went to the Garden, did the same thing. And over time, you’re reporting, that’s hours and hours of reporting to ask players off to the side to get an exclusive about peanut butter and jelly. And so you could tell sort of the story of the Golden State Warriors’ magical season through the only thing that has gone wrong for this team is peanut butter and jelly.

And so I’m always kind of looking for peanut butter and jelly stories in all sorts of industries. And one other thing I’ve learned through the course of writing this column is that if I find something interesting, the chances are that I can convey that interest and enthusiasm to readers. And if I don’t know something that it feels like everybody else knows or should know, then the chances are that they don’t know it either. And, you know, I find myself thinking a lot, “Well, does everyone know this? Or am I just an idiot and just found out for the first time?” And I think a lot of people don’t know a lot of things. And so things that you would think that everybody knows, they don’t know, and I didn’t know them.

And so I’ve learned to kind of trust my judgment and gut about that a little bit. If I think something is interesting, I can convey that interest and I can make other people interested in it as well.

Sam Walker: Evil Genius

Jimmy Soni: Can you talk a little more about Sam Walker and the effect that he’s had on your career and your life and the way you write and all of that?

Ben Cohen: Yeah. Sam Walker. There are a lot of people who came up through the Wall Street Journal sports section then, and I think they would all credit Sam for sort of being the evil genius voice in our head. And Sam is a brilliant writer himself. One of the reasons why it was okay that Sam was rewriting you was because he was just such a better writer than any of us were, that you would read it and be like, “Well, I would never say this…”

Jimmy Soni: But it’s said way better.

Ben Cohen: The fact that my name is on these words is actually great.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah.

Ben Cohen: And just a diabolical genius. He had just such smart and clever and inventive ideas and ways of reporting and writing and just making sentences sing. And his voice is constantly in my head. And so one of his rules for writing and especially finding stories was that the lead quote in any story that we wrote, which meant that the idea had to be so clever and so novel that the lead quote could have been, not that it should have been, but could have been, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And that was what we aspired to every single time. And so we were always looking for ideas that could be, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And the highest form of praise is when Sam would just write back in an email, “Yes,” with eight exclamation points and weird bolds and yellow highlights and that praise and affirmation is still, I should just print out those emails because they still mean so much to me.

Transcript

Jimmy Soni: Ben Cohen, thank you for coming on Infinite Loops.

Ben Cohen: Thanks for having me.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah, I’m really excited about this. This has been something I’ve been looking forward to for a while because I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time. I think you cover the widest range of things that somebody I know writes about. It is everything from the pants at Costco to sports to why the fuel indicator on your car goes a certain way. I have yet to meet somebody that covers a range of things that you write about.

Ben Cohen: All the important things in the world.

Jimmy Soni: Exactly. I’m excited to have you here and we can just dive right in and see where this all takes us. One of the reasons we’re having you on is you’re an author and you have this side hustle at the Wall Street Journal. But I’m curious, take us back to how did you get your start in writing? Thinking about it as a vocation or even as an avocation.

Ben Cohen: Some kids grow up wanting to be astronauts. And for some reason I just always wanted to be a sports journalist. I have no idea why, but I very vividly remember reading the sports section of my local newspaper every morning growing up and going through the box scores and then eventually knowing who the columnists were and reading every piece and having it dawn on me that people actually do this for a living and that I could do it too, if I wanted to. And so even when I was in middle school, I wanted to write about sports for a living. I didn’t know anyone who did it. I was randomly emailing people who wrote for the Star-Ledger in New Jersey and was starting to write into the newspaper letter section.

So every day in the Star-Ledger, they would ask a question about something happening in sports at the time. And I would just write in and I would have my name and my writing in the local newspaper. So no one knew that Ben Cohen: from Livingston, New Jersey was 10 years old weighing in with hot takes about the Yankees.

Jimmy Soni: How often did you get published in the Star-Ledger as a 10-year-old?

Ben Cohen: Frighteningly often. Yeah. Which I think may have something to do with the fact that I may have been the only person writing in. But they would ask a question and they would print between 8 and 15 responses and they would run them throughout the course of the week. There’s probably a different question every week. So I feel like if you went through the archives of the Star-Ledger, you would find my name in there dozens of times.

Jimmy Soni: Wow. And that was your first byline?

Ben Cohen: I think it was my first byline, yeah.

Jimmy Soni: Awesome.

Ben Cohen: And so I was always obsessed with it. And I was writing for my high school newspaper, and I would watch games and then go up to the computer room in our house, remember computer rooms in a house, and would try to bang out columns on deadline and they’re horrible. And then I really started writing for a newspaper for the first time when I got to college. And at that point, we had gone from growing up and wanting to be astronauts or doctors and lawyers to consultants and I-bankers. And that just never interested me. From the second I stepped on campus at college, I knew I wanted to be a journalist.

And probably that wasn’t the greatest idea financially or for my mental health or anything, but it was all that I wanted to do and kind of all that I can do. And so I feel very lucky that I’m actually able to do it now.

Jimmy Soni: That’s amazing. I didn’t know that part of your story.

Ben Cohen: You weren’t familiar with the sports archives in the 1990s?

Jimmy Soni: Yeah exactly, I should have done more homework. When you think back on that time if you can, I mean, it might be impossible, so much time has passed. But do you remember the first thing you got published? Was it a thrill from the job?

Ben Cohen: Yeah, always. I mean, at that point, getting published was not looking at my phone or something in pixels. It was literally going outside on the doorstep where the Star-Ledger was in a yellow newspaper bag, opening it up, having no idea if my response was going to be in the paper that day. It wasn’t like they emailed you and said, “Oh yeah, you’re going to be in the paper tomorrow.” So every time I wrote in, I would frantically open the newspaper and go to the second page and say, “Oh, is this a day that I’m in the newspaper?” And I sort of felt that way throughout.

I remember I played sports in high school and I would always be curious, our baseball game yesterday, who are they going to pull out and put in the paper? So that thrill of being in the paper was familiar to me from a young age. And I still feel that way. I don’t have that. I know when I’m going to be in the newspaper now, so it’s not as thrilling, but it’s still very cool to be able to open a print newspaper, a thing that still exists, and say, “Oh, my God, there’s my name.”

Jimmy Soni: Did your parents think you were a savant or did they see a child prodigy in you because you’re getting these published?

Ben Cohen: I don’t know. I think they thought it was cool. I think they saw that I was passionate about it and they pushed me towards it and did not deter me from trying to be a newspaper journalist when maybe they should have. So I don’t know what they imagined for me. I don’t know if it was astronaut or investment banker, but I landed somewhere in another galaxy.

Jimmy Soni: How did you choose? You and I share the august fact that we’re both Duke alumni.

Ben Cohen: Not supposed to tell people.

Jimmy Soni: Not supposed to tell people. All right, first rule of Fight Club. What made you choose Duke? Out of curiosity? Because it’s not the natural place for somebody who’s going to. It’s a more natural place for somebody who’s going to go become a banker or a consultant, not a journalist.

Ben Cohen: I would argue that it’s quite a natural place for a boy from New Jersey who likes basketball to end up, maybe the most natural place in the world. But no, I mean, it is a fantastic school, as we both know. And I was obsessed with the basketball team forever. I mean, I can say that I was also obsessed with the UNC basketball team from a young age. But I remember, I think like most kids who end up touring that school, I sort of went through the tour and braved the whole thing and was just sort of counting down the seconds until we could cross Tower View Road and get to Cameron. Because that was the place that I wanted to check out.

And so the idea of going to Duke and going to basketball games, much less being able to sit at center court and write about those basketball games, would have been just a total dream to 10-year-old me writing into the Star-Ledger.

Jimmy Soni: Did your work there, you were already bitten by the bug and this just made it go viral, right?

Ben Cohen: Yeah, it was full infestation when I was at Duke. So I wrote as a freshman and a sophomore. As a junior, I was the sports editor of the Chronicle, which is Duke’s newspaper. And that was my full-time job and major. I technically majored in English at Duke, but I majored in the Chronicle. The Chronicle had a program where the top editors took a reduced course load. So I think my junior fall, which was the big time when I was spending 80 hours a week in the office of the Chronicle, I took two courses and an independent study. I think I was in class for two hours a week and I was just putting the paper to bed at 3 a.m. every night, every day, a daily print newspaper. And this was at a time that you remember.

You would kill time before class by opening up the newspaper in print and reading it in the classroom. And by reading it, I mean you would do the Sudoku and crossword in the back with a pen. But we didn’t have iPhones then. We had sort of had flip phones and then Blackberries. The iPhone came in the middle of my college experience. But it wasn’t ubiquitous at the time. It was a real thrill in the same way that it was gratifying and thrilling and super exciting for me as a 10-year-old to be able to see my name in the print newspaper.

It was so cool to be in a lecture hall and see people reading the thing that I had written in a delirious state the night before that morning in class. It is the closest thing that there is to community newspaper where you are surrounded by your readers of that community. So I knew that my fellow students were reading it. I knew that professors were reading it. I knew that Coach K was reading it. It’s an awesome power and responsibility for a 19-year-old who has no idea what he’s doing to be read by everyone who is with you on campus. Which I just found super cool.

Jimmy Soni: That’s, I couldn’t have put it better myself. I did a column when I was a senior and I remember spending so much more time on that column than I ever did on actual schoolwork. I was trying to make it into something memorable. Meanwhile, these papers actually count for something.

Ben Cohen: Yeah, but when you write a paper, one person reads it.

Jimmy Soni: That’s true.

Ben Cohen: And when you write a column, you have no idea who’s going to read it or why or when or what effects will come from you having written that column. And so there’s much more pressure and responsibility, I feel, in being able to say something novel and interesting and engaging. And that’s still what I’m doing today, which is fun, but there will never be a feedback loop, I feel, the way that I had.

Jimmy Soni: Do you have standout moments from that time in your writing life? A piece or a particular thing you did that you’ll never forget?

Ben Cohen: I mean, a lot. Yeah. Covering basketball games. One of the great privileges of being the sports editor of the Chronicle is that my junior year, I covered the Duke-Carolina game. So a game that, as you know, kids will literally camp out in tents for months for attendance. I sort of waltzed in two hours before, and I feel like I made a point of getting there really early that day, before the arena opened to the public and just sort of sitting in this hallowed ground, silent. I vividly remember John Scheyer was warming up. He was the first person out there. And John was my class at school and is now the head coach of the basketball team, which is a very weird thing for me.

But just thinking about it now, I sort of have goosebumps because I’m like, when else am I going to be in Cameron Indoor Stadium before the biggest game of the year?

Jimmy Soni: That’s right.

Ben Cohen: But there are all sorts of moments like that. I remember when I was sports editor, Duke hired a new football coach named David Cutcliffe, and nobody knew anything about him. And I sort of made it my mission to profile him in a lot of interesting ways and dig up interesting moments from his past and got lots of time with him over the course of that year in a way that I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to be spending time with a student reporter over the course of that year, but these little vignettes from his past.

And it kind of reminded me, my first introduction in looking for new angles into stories that everybody else is covering, which is what I’m still doing today, and that if you put in the work, then people will respect it, even if you happen to be a student reporter and the person you’re trying to get the respect of is the head coach of a college football team.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah. You know, this is a specific question that it’s not anything I would ask any other guest, but did you ever have attention in writing objectively while also being a fan? Because you are a student and you’re there. Are you allowed to cheer? What are the rules?

Ben Cohen: Definitely not when you’re on press row.

Jimmy Soni: Right, of course.

Ben Cohen: But it’s a very, it’s one of the stranger parts of that particular job, and it’s something that I really don’t have to deal with now. I did write about Duke a little bit for the Wall Street Journal, but even then, you’re not a student at Duke. But I think that there is, I think some of the rules of objectivity in that sense have kind of loosened a little bit. And they were loosening at the time. There’s no pretending that I’m not a Duke student. And sometimes you would go all the way the other way and be more critical because you cared more deeply. I would imagine that I had much more nuanced and complex views about Mike Krzyzewski when I was a student at Duke than I would as an alumnus, because you’re just around it all the time.

You have such high standards, and you’re crazy, and you’re sleep deprived, and you think you know everything and you’re on top of the world. But I was a senior when they won the national championship, and I wanted them to win the national championship. I wasn’t objective about this fact.

Jimmy Soni: No studied objectivity in the chase for the championship.

Ben Cohen: There was not. In fact, I did not cover the national championship, and I did not go, partly because it wasn’t my turn to cover the team when they went. But I faced this choice when I was a senior of do I want to go to Indianapolis to watch them win the national championship or play for the national championship, or do I want to stay on campus? And I thought, hopefully there will be another chance to see a Duke team win a national championship or play in the Final Four. But I’ll never have an opportunity again to be on campus as a senior with my friends when they’re playing in the Final Four. And so I stayed on campus, which I still insist was the right decision.

Jimmy Soni: So fast forward. You finish up at Duke, how do you wind up doing journalism as a profession?

Ben Cohen: Blackmail. Yeah. No. I applied for an internship at the Wall Street Journal, and I didn’t get it at first, which is one of those sliding door moments, because I’m not quite sure what would have happened otherwise. So I applied.

Jimmy Soni: Are you a senior at this point?

Ben Cohen: Senior, yeah. And I had this really great conversation with the sports editor of the Journal at the time, and it turns out he had already offered the internship to somebody else. And he had seen my application at the bottom of a packet and thought it looked interesting for a whole bunch of reasons and called. We had this great conversation. He was like, “You know, this is all great, except I’ve basically offered this internship already to someone.” And I was like, “Well, that’s too bad.” And then the first week of May in my senior year of college, I got a call from the sports editor of the Wall Street Journal, who said, “The person I offered the internship to, who had taken it, just took a job at the Washington Post. So this internship is opened. Are you doing anything this summer?”

And I was like, “I’m not. I have nothing else.” I literally had nothing else lined up. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was going to stay in Durham and just sort of bum around and try to pick up clips. And he was like, “Can you start in two weeks?” And I was like, “Okay, sure.” So I moved up and got an internship at the Wall Street Journal. That was 10 weeks, and I sort of kept my foot in the door. And I’ve been there ever since.

Jimmy Soni: Wow, okay. So you’ve had one employer after graduation. What was that first? Was it a baptism by fire, or was the Chronicle harder than the internship for the Wall Street Journal?

Ben Cohen: The Chronicle is very difficult in its own way. No, the working for the Wall Street Journal for the first time, trial by fire is one way to put it. I remember the first time I filed a story to the sports editor, who is this completely brilliant editor, and really was so formative in so many ways for me. I filed this piece to the editor and a couple other people underneath him, because that’s how we filed stories back then. I remember I filed the story and a couple other editors walked over to my desk and they were like, “This looks great.” And I was like, “Oh, great.” And they were like, “Whatever happens next, don’t take it personally. It’s going to be okay.”

And I was like, “Okay.” And then two hours later, I got back a rewritten version of the piece that had, I think, my byline on top of it and no other words that I had written. And it was just a complete top-to-bottom rewrite. And I was like, “Okay, I guess this is how it’s going to be.” And that really drilled into me what the standards and quality of a Wall Street Journal piece had to be at that time.

Jimmy Soni: Interesting. And did that keep happening? Or did the rewrites get a little less substantive as you went along?

Ben Cohen: They definitely got less. But the first editor I worked for at the Journal had just insanely high standards. And at the time, we only ran one story a day in the sports section. And there were probably between eight and 12 reporters. And so everyone was battling for that print space. And so the bar to get a story into the paper was, you had to be like Mondo Duplantis to clear it. It was so high, and the reporting had to be so deep, and the idea had to be so novel and inventive. And at that time, the nice thing about really the super fortuitous thing about writing for the Wall Street Journal sports section back then, I joined it in 2010. The Journal didn’t have a sports section until 2009, which is kind of remarkable if you think about it.

If you would think, what topic would Wall Street Journal readers be interested in? You would think sports would be at the top of the list. But we launched a page for the first time in print in 2009, and what that meant was that there was no legacy or baggage of, we’ve covered sports this way for 150 years. And so there’s going to be box scores and there’s going to be game stories. And this is how we’ve always done it. And so this is how we will continue to do it. We had to invent that on the fly and think, how should we cover sports today?

And the formula or the model that the founding editor, Sam Walker, came up with, was that a story that runs in the Wall Street Journal sports section not only can’t run in any other section, but hasn’t run in any other section. So if you think about the way that a lot of journalism works now, it’s like finding, everyone sort of writes the same story over and over again. And if one person writes a story and it does well, then lots of other outlets will write that story. We were always looking for clever angles into news, and we were looking to break news. So there are lots of ways to get exclusive stories that nobody else is writing. You can have some incredible investigative piece and turn up news that nobody else has.

You can write a piece in a completely different way that makes it stand out from everything else. You can collect data, you can analyze data in a different way. You can create the data yourself. You can be funny in an industry where nobody attempts to be humorous. You could just call a million more people than anyone else is going to call. You can look for ideas in different places. And so whenever we had space in the page, which is every day, we had to fill it with something that couldn’t have run anywhere else and hasn’t run anywhere else. And that was the challenge on a daily basis.

And so when I learned what journalism is, I learned it first from the Chronicle, which was its own form of journalism, and then from the Wall Street Journal, and specifically this pirate ship off of the Titanic of the Wall Street Journal that was just trying to be creative and inventive and interesting and give people something that they didn’t know that they wanted, but that they did want every single day.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah, do you remember your first piece that ran in the Journal? The first piece where you felt you met the bar?

Ben Cohen: Well, the first piece and the first piece where I felt I met the bar, probably different. One of the pieces that ran, I started in the summer of 2010, and it was a World Cup summer. And so we had a bunch of people in South Africa, and then we had a bunch of people in the office just reporting their own things. And I remember at the time, the Journal had a feature of the sports page every day called the Count, which was a short statistical piece every single day. Sometimes it was gathering data that was out there and saying, how many times do the Dallas Mavericks high-five each other during a game?

And sometimes it was like, what if we just took an idea and pushed it to the max and gathered all this data that was available and just presented it. And so one of them, in fact, it might have been the piece that I filed. And every editor swarmed my desk and said, “This is fine, it’s going to get rewritten, but don’t worry.” Was my editor, who is insane and brilliant, came over one day and he said, “What if the World Cup was a war? Who would win? How would we go about quantifying this? Military size and GDP and just come up with all these different metrics and let’s rank them and see where we are.” And presumably that meant the U.S. was not going to win.

We needed to come up with, actually the Netherlands would win if there was… or the the round of 16. And so that was, you know, before Claude could just go out and do this for you. It was like, well, how are we going to think about this and what data are we going to get. And how are we going to confirm that it’s accurate and it’s not just something that we pulled off of Wikipedia? And is there a way that we can present this that is not completely offensive, but is actually interesting and thought-provoking and kind of funny and people will get it? So that was one that stands out from that first summer of, oh, yeah, what if the World Cup were war?

Jimmy Soni: Can you talk a little more about Sam Walker and the effect that he’s had on your career and your life and the way you write and all of that?

Ben Cohen: Yeah. Sam Walker. There are a lot of people who came up through the Wall Street Journal sports section then, and I think they would all credit Sam for sort of being the evil genius voice in our head. And Sam is a brilliant writer himself. One of the reasons why it was okay that Sam was rewriting you was because he was just such a better writer than any of us were, that you would read it and be like, “Well, I would never say this…”

Jimmy Soni: But it’s said way better.

Ben Cohen: The fact that my name is on these words is actually great.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah.

Ben Cohen: And just a diabolical genius. He had just such smart and clever and inventive ideas and ways of reporting and writing and just making sentences sing. And his voice is constantly in my head. And so one of his rules for writing and especially finding stories was that the lead quote in any story that we wrote, which meant that the idea had to be so clever and so novel that the lead quote could have been, not that it should have been, but could have been, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And that was what we aspired to every single time. And so we were always looking for ideas that could be, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And the highest form of praise is when Sam would just write back in an email, “Yes,” with eight exclamation points and weird bolds and yellow highlights and that praise and affirmation is still, I should just print out those emails because they still mean so much to me.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah. So fast forward a little bit. But I’m curious how you got the book writing bug at some point and you did these, you know, we’ll talk about your book, The Hot Hand and what you’re working on now, but you did a couple of e-books, short books that you did on your own with a publisher. Tell me the story about those. Because, you know, they’re close to my heart. One’s obviously about Coach K. So there’s a Duke connection. But I’m curious what prompted those projects.

Ben Cohen: So there was, I lied a little bit. There’s a slight gap in which I was freelancing for the Wall Street Journal and I was editing and writing a lot of stories but was not on staff. And so I had the freedom to do a little bit of freelance experimentation. And in 2011 it must have been, Mike Krzyzewski was going to break the all-time college basketball wins record. And I thought, you know, I’ve probably thought more about Mike Krzyzewski than most people on this planet and I’ve had some privileged access to him and feel like I could get a little bit more. There had sort of been a change in his career that coincided with the time that I was at Duke and writing about him and thinking about him a lot.

And I thought maybe there might be something interesting here. What is it like when a 23, 24-year-old writer tries to write a long magazine-ish profile of Coach K that is not written by 40 and 50-year-olds who remember what he was like when he was hired at Duke, but who was on campus as he was evolving and turning into this version of Coach K that kind of the world knows and maybe doesn’t love but or loves to hate or but it’s just familiar with. And his career had evolved in a really interesting way.

And so I wrote this e-book which is kind of like sort of a long magazine piece about how he got to this point in his career, which allowed me to flex my muscles a little bit and go beyond my comfort zone. I don’t think I’ve read it in 15 years. I have no idea if it’s any good or not. And I would probably be mortified to read it today. But it was an interesting experiment both with the form of actually writing it and in the medium in which it was presented. It was not a newspaper piece, it was not a magazine piece. It was asking people to pay 99 cents for a piece of journalism, which is still kind of a novel concept, but was very strange and interesting back then.

Jimmy Soni: Did it do what you wanted it to do? Did you get feedback? Did you, I don’t know what metrics you might have had for success, but I’m curious, other than feeling like you did something, did you measure the success of it in any other way?

Ben Cohen: You know, I don’t really remember. I remember just thinking, “Oh, this thing exists. My name is on Amazon.com now.” And which hadn’t been before. And I accomplished this thing. And I had always known that I wanted to write books, too. And this seemed like an interesting stepping stone along the way. You know, at the time, writing for a newspaper meant writing stories that were between 800 and 1,200 words. And no matter how many calls you made or how much reporting you had, the stories were between 800 and 1,200 words every time. And so this was, okay. Well, I’ve been thinking about this guy for five, six years at this point. I can call a bunch of people. I have pretty good institutional knowledge about this guy.

What would it mean to write 8,000 to 12,000 words? And, you know, when you get to a book, it’s, what would it mean to write 80,000 words? And how to keep people’s attention. But it was an interesting experiment in that form, I think.

Jimmy Soni: You said that you’d always had designs on writing books. Was that just a natural extension of kind of being around writers and word people and being in newsrooms and stuff? Or were you, is this a big part of your life? Books in general?

Ben Cohen: I think when I was a kid, I just loved being in the bookstore, and I loved seeing what was on the bookshelf and imagining, who are these writers? And where do they get these ideas and how do they go about reporting? I mean, I’m a big journalism nerd. And I still am. I’m very curious about where people get their ideas from and how they actually go about structuring their day to write books. And so I just, and it just seemed like the natural next step. You’re a journalist. And you get to write books. That is, I said get to, not have to or, you know, whatever. But it seemed like a great privilege and something that would be really fun to do.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah, when I was growing up, there were books that really stayed with me. Series that I would just devour. And I look back and I’m like, a lot can be explained by those choices. I’ll give you an example just to riff on it. But there was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. And I think I would have, the right psychiatrist would have diagnosed me as sufficiently neurotic if they had seen that at every critical juncture in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I would dog-ear the page so I could go back and make a different decision.

Ben Cohen: You choose a different adventure.

Jimmy Soni: Choose a different adventure. And so, but at every decision point I would be racked with, well, what if it doesn’t work out? And then I would dog-ear the page, come back and play out the alternative. I’m curious if there were series or series of books that when you were a kid really stayed with you.

Ben Cohen: I remember reading the Matt Christopher young adult sports books. I don’t remember, I definitely dog-eared the pages, but I don’t remember going back and choosing different endings for them. But I feel like that got me from a young age and Goosebumps. Obsessed with Goosebumps. And I think maybe it’s just because there were new books all the time. And the same way that you had to wait four years for a new Harry Potter book or whatever. But these, there was a series and you could just sort of keep banging through them. So I was a voracious reader when I was young. And I still am, not so much books. I just read the Internet all day long now.

And every newspaper and I start my day, I read the Journal and the Times on my phone. I just try to read as much as possible in part because that’s where I get my ideas now. There are reporters who are very good at calling their sources and calling 50 people a day and schmoozing and sweet-talking them and I’m surrounded by these people at the Wall Street Journal and they are on their phones and just chatting with people all day long. And I’m not good at that. And that’s not how I get ideas. I get ideas by reading everything I can and trying to find nuggets or ideas or stories that connect and haven’t been connected before.

And I feel like my competitive advantage in journalism is having a good eye for a story and seeing what is out there and being able to connect dots. But I remember the first, the book that probably made the most impact on me was Moneyball, which came out when I was in high school and I was obsessed with baseball and I love statistics and I love journalism and that book is just so brilliant in so many ways. It is, and this was before, I mean I was in ninth grade. I didn’t know that all of business was going to become Moneyball for this. But I just remember reading that story and thinking, “Oh, my God, someone wrote this.” How did this person find this story?

How is it written so compellingly and hilariously and insightfully? That story is just so brilliant from start to finish. And the fact that it was just sitting there under his nose for someone to write and to write it the way that he did, and then for that story to become the story of everything in America.

Jimmy Soni: A cultural touchstone in a kind of perverse way.

Ben Cohen: For sure. For sure. And it’s still, you’re still seeing the ripple effects of it now in every industry, including sports. It is still playing out in sports to this day. And it would completely revolutionize sports during the time when I started writing about sports myself. The statistical revolution and how players were valued is kind of what I spent 10 years writing about as a sports writer at the Journal. That idea of a bunch of numbers on a page changing the way that an entire league could value a player. And, you know, Michael Lewis has talked about this a lot, but one of the really just incredible things about that story is that, and the reason why it resonated the way that it did was that sports is probably the most quantified part of society.

We can watch all the games. We know exactly how much players are paid, we know why they’re paid that, we can put a number on every single thing that someone does on the court or on the field. And yet, despite all of that information and all of those statistical metrics, players were still being misvalued all the time. And we didn’t know what made them good or what made them bad. And if that could happen in that industry, then of course, that could happen in every industry. And so that idea of shifting value, and I wrote about it in basketball, guys who were the eighth or ninth guys on the bench, statistical metrics showing that they were insanely valuable and they would get contracts worth $200 million.

That’s just such a juicy and rich story every time, because you can tell a really human story through those numbers, which is what Moneyball did. The reason why people remember that is because they remember the characters and how they were brought to life and the numbers identified those people. But the story that it tells is an incredibly human story.

Jimmy Soni: Did you read that when it came out?

Ben Cohen: Yeah.

Jimmy Soni: You were in high school when you read that.

Ben Cohen: Yeah.

Jimmy Soni: Because that is not a book that I imagine every high schooler has in their backpack.

Ben Cohen: No, but I read it as a baseball book. And I remember because I was a Yankees fan growing up, and those, the Yankees beat those A’s teams, but I just remember. I don’t think I ever thought, I don’t know what their salary cap was or that they had the lowest payroll in baseball and they were still winning all these games. But when I read the book, I was like, who is Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon? And how are all these guys from this part of the country that I’ve never been hanging with the Big Bad Evil Empire every year, you know? And so I came away from that book not only thinking, “Oh, this changes the way I think about baseball and statistics,” but journalism. This is a story that can be told.

Jimmy Soni: Oh, that’s. There’s a great moment, I think. Michael Lewis didn’t interview. He’s done a bunch of interviews about that book, but I remember seeing one where he’s actually a little nervous to release the book, I guess. He goes to Billy Beane, and it’s like, “I’m, you know, I’m kind of giving away state secrets here” This is a methodology you have refined.”

Ben Cohen: And Billy Beane says, “You don’t think anyone’s going to read this book.”

Jimmy Soni: And part of the reason was, you don’t think anybody in baseball reads books, do you? So you had The Art of Winning, which was the Coach K book, but you had this other one that I was, An Illustrated History of Duke Basketball. Is that even, tell me the origin story of that one? How did you...

Ben Cohen: I think I wrote the epilogue to that.

Jimmy Soni: Okay.

Ben Cohen: That book existed, and I think it was 100 Years of Duke Basketball. It was written by this guy, Bill Brill, who was this legendary sports journalist in the Research Triangle in North Carolina. And the book had been written, and Duke’s basketball team was turning 100 years old, and they needed someone to write a chapter about the last few years. And those last few years were the years that I was on campus. And it ended with Duke winning a national championship in 2010. And so I think I knew Bill a little bit from when I was in school, and he very kindly and generously said, “Would you like to write this final chapter, since you lived through it?” I was like, “Oh, my God. Amazing. Yes.”

Jimmy Soni: That’s awesome.

Ben Cohen: I have a lot of thoughts about Duke basketball between 2006 and 2010. Thank you for asking.

Jimmy Soni: That’s amazing. How did you start working on The Hot Hand? And we’re going to, we’ll get to your column now, the Science of Success. But I’m curious about, you know, you’ve been doing it. You’ve been writing for the Journal how many years before you started this and kind of what was some of the stuff that was in the stew while you were working on this?

Ben Cohen: So I think I sold this book in 2017. So I’d been at the Journal for about seven years then, writing for the Journal for seven years, on staff for five years. And this book was born out of two stories that I wrote for the Journal at the time, I was vaguely familiar with the idea of the hot hand and this idea that in basketball, if you make a few shots in a row, you feel more likely to make your next shot. And I think I may have been aware of this fierce generational academic debate about whether or not the hot hand exists. I first became aware of the concept because I felt it myself as a terrible basketball player in high school.

The one time when I made three shots in a row, I still had this vivid memory of that afternoon. I could tell you where it was. It was at a Catholic school in New Jersey that no longer exists. It is defunct. And I just remember everything about that day. I have no idea why it happened. It never happened to me again. But I felt something that day that just stayed with me forever, and I had no idea. There was this long debate about whether or not that feeling exists that has looped in some of the smartest people who ever lived and applies to so many industries.

So I remember the first time I came across this concept in academic literature, because one of the things about writing for the Journal is that when you’re looking for stories that nobody else has written, you go looking in a bunch of funny places for them. And I remember seeing a couple papers about the hot hand, and I started reading them, and there was this new paper that came out that was presented at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which is kind of like, it’s called Dork-a-palooza. It is the industry convention for sports analytics. It was really born out of Moneyball. So in some ways, this book was born out of Moneyball in a very strange, roundabout way. This paper was presented at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT, had been written by a couple of Harvard undergrads.

And it used all of this data that had not existed until then, with data that came from shot-tracking cameras in every NBA arena that was able to collect attributes about shots that had never been tracked before. And these undergrads had this really clever and counterintuitive idea to take that data and say, “Well, the hot hand is this idea that has been studied by Nobel Prize winners and economists and psychologists for decades. What if we actually apply this data and search for whether there is a hot hand effect?” And they found that when you adjust for the quality of a shot and the difficulty of that shot, then there is actually something of a hot hand effect.

And the reason why the hot hand had been such a contentious topic in the academic literature for so long was because there was this seminal paper that came out in 1985, written by Amos Tversky of Kahneman and Tversky fame, that said, “Actually, the hot hand doesn’t exist. It’s just a figment of your imagination. It is this canonical example of seeing patterns in randomness.” And that bias, the hot hand bias, reflects so many other forces in society, and that is why it’s so interesting. And what these Harvard undergrads were coming along saying, that was a really, the broad takeaway of that paper was accurate, but this specific takeaway actually may not have been accurate. And you might not be crazy to think that there is such a thing as a hot hand.

So I wrote a story about that paper for the Wall Street Journal. There’s this big response to it. And then the next year, there was another paper that came out about the hot hand that was interesting in an entirely different way. I wrote a story about that paper, too.

I thought, you know, these really smart people have been thinking about this idea for a really long time, and I wonder if there is a way to take this idea and tell a whole bunch of stories through it and use this idea to explore the world of basketball and beyond basketball and take it to markets and decision-making and use the quest to figure out and solve the mystery of the hot hand as the narrative spine for this book and then go in all sorts of interesting and unexpected directions and just kind of surprise and delight the reader. So that is the challenge that I assigned myself while writing this book and thinking that I was possibly capable of pulling it off.

Jimmy Soni: What a description. And I will say this is, it’s actually made me think this morning because I was reflecting on your body of work, and I thought to myself, the thing you bring is delight. And part of delight is surprise. Why is Christmas morning interesting? Part of the reason Christmas morning is interesting is because you don’t know. If you’re a kid, you don’t know what you’re gonna get. Things are wrapped up. That’s what I love about your work, is that I actually never know what I’m gonna get with, particularly with your Science of Success on a given day.

Ben Cohen: I don’t either.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah, right. You’re like, I’m making it up as I go. But the book covers art. It covers investing. You have a thing on sugar beets in there.

Ben Cohen: I take a trip to a sugar beet farm in North Dakota. Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Soni: Tell the story of that. That’s an interesting part of this whole...

Ben Cohen: Part of the story of the book is, should you believe in the hot hand? And more important, should you behave as if you believe in the hot hand? So if you are on a basketball team, the simple version of this question is, if someone has made a couple shots in a row, is it smart to feed the hot hand and get that person the ball? Or is that person going to miss and you’re going to think that your brain has played a trick on you? But that question is so much more interesting and important in parts of the world that are beyond a 94 by 50 piece of hardwood. So in markets, should you give your money to an investor who has beat the market a couple of years in a row? Does that make him more likely to do it? There’s a story in the book about Rob Reiner and his directing career.

And when you’re hot as a director or an actor, the world kind of opens up to you a little bit. You are able to take bigger swings and take advantage of your hotness and do stuff that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. So Rob Reiner starts his career by making This Is Spinal Tap and then Stand by Me and The Sure Thing. And he’s made three hit movies in a row, all movies that nobody else wanted him to make, oddly, which you wouldn’t think of today. You would think, “Oh, someone should have been throwing money at him to make This Is Spinal Tap.” And after he makes these three movies, he is hot in Hollywood. He is a director who can kind of get anything made that he wants to get made.

And he has this conversation with a studio executive around that time. She comes to him and says, “You’re Rob Reiner. You’re making these movies that everybody loves. What do you want to do next? We’ll do whatever you want.” And he says, “You’re not going to want to make the movie that I want to make.” And she says, “No, trust me, we’ll do whatever you want. What do you want to make?” And he says, “No, trust me. You’re not going to want to make the movie.” And she said, “Just name the movie.” And he said, “The movie I want to make is The Princess Bride.” And she says, “Well, anything but The Princess Bride.” And I was shocked to find out that The Princess Bride was this movie that the biggest names in Hollywood had tried to make for years.

Robert Redford and Norman Jewison, François Truffaut, they had all tried to make The Princess Bride. And it had been this riddle haunted by a curse that was wrapped in an enigma. Nobody could figure it out. Nobody could think out, who was this movie for? And why would anyone want to see it? Makes no sense today. It was written by William Goldman, coming off of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. It’s just a beloved movie that has just endured for generations. But Rob Reiner used all of his capital as a director, and I remember we traded emails and he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That movie was still impossible for me to get made, even with this hot hand.”

So anyway, the reason we go from Rob Reiner to a sugar beet farm on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota is because if you’re a farmer, do you bet the farm on patterns? How are you thinking about patterns and randomness and data from year to year? And so I met this really fascinating fifth-generation sugar beet farmer named Nick Hagen, who has to think about all of these lessons that his ancestors have taught him over centuries about how to think about data. And if one patch of his farmland has yielded a whole bunch of sugar beets the year before, does that mean he should invest more in that patch of land going forward or not? And what does it mean to be in an industry that is as random as the weather?

And can you believe in the hot hand? And if you do believe in the hot hand, even in life, can you invest in the hot hand in your business? And so there are all sorts of interesting ways of looking at the world where I might feel that the hot hand is real in basketball. Yeah. But I might still also invest in index funds because I don’t believe that someone’s going to beat the market year after year.

Jimmy Soni: Right. If you go back to the kind of pre-selling the book process, you know, you’re somebody that’s worked at the Journal but you’re still pretty young in your career. What was it like to think about the book? How did you do the mechanics of what came after the decision, like, “Hey, this should be a book-length thing.”

Ben Cohen: I remember we sold the book and I was so happy and went through the whole process of sending out the proposal and getting an offer and signing it and I woke up the next day and thought, “Oh God, what am I going to do now? How do I, I don’t know how to write a book,” and especially a book as open-ended as this one. And it’s a challenge that I actually sort of deal with on a week-to-week basis now because when you can write about anything, the bar has to be super high and you have to think, “Oh well, what I write about has to be something worth writing about.” It can’t just be like, “Oh, I happen to find this story interesting. I’m going to spend 10,000 words and three months of my life and get you to read it.” It has to be important and interesting and keep my attention, much less the reader’s attention. Then I just sort of went looking for stories and casting about for characters and they had to be stories and characters who, when I told my friends about them, I could see their faces light up. And I was eager to tell people about them because I wanted to sort of stress test and pressure test the arguments and the characters and the stories. You’ve written books, you know, when someone asks you what are you working on? You’re like, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And I still don’t want to talk about it.

But all the times that I did talk about it, I could get excited talking about it. I will say I wrote this book before I had kids and I wrote the book on mornings and weekends, which are things that now that I do have kids I no longer have. I remember waking up early in the morning, was waking up at 7:30 and banging out a thousand words before work. So it is, in some ways I was insanely green and eager and ambitious and didn’t know what I didn’t know, and was very happy and sort of inexperienced, but also had a lot of time and no responsibilities, which is a great thing.

And it’s just much harder to write a book with a full-time job and kids and life responsibilities.

Jimmy Soni: How did you go about? You have a very particular thing you do at the Journal and the pace is a certain kind of pace. Did you just stick to a word count every day to get the book done? Was that how you basically approached it?

Ben Cohen: I tried to, yeah. I feel like the advice out there to write between 500, 1,000 words a day and just get them on the page is very good advice. And it works for a reason because you don’t think you’re doing all that much. And all that work compounds over time. And after a few months you have 85,000 words and then you can start chiseling and shaping it and getting it into a place where you want. I’m, even now I’m in the process of writing a book and so I’m thinking about it and the hardest part is just getting the words on the page.

The reporting is done, I have all the material and it’s just vomiting the words onto the page and getting it into a place where I can print it out and start redlining and thinking about what comes next. But for me, that routine of just writing a thousand words and then going to work was very helpful.

Jimmy Soni: Right. Did you…

Ben Cohen: What about you, how do you think about it?

Jimmy Soni: Yeah, it’s the same thing. I mean it’s, and it’s funny because it’s a bit of a rinse and repeat process. There’s not, once I have the subject, once I have the actual thing I’m writing about, and I’ve done all the research and I’ve done all the interviewing and everything else. I mean, you just set a manageable word count number every day. I tell people it’s kind of like enough that it’s substantive but not so much that I’m going to be burned out of my own project. And I just have a little, on Scrivener, they give you this little indicator. Scrivener’s the software I choose to use when I’m doing the raw material for the book.

And it’s really funny, there’s a little indicator and it gets green when you hit to that point in your, when you hit the words. And I just try to get it to green every day and just keep going. And then, as you said, over time, you collect everything. I think the real work is in then the revising, the shaping, the trimming. But honestly, I just, I woke, I woke up, same as you. You just wake up obscenely early. You knock out the words you need to knock out, and you get back at it the next day. And then some days you kind of double or triple. And those are great days. You’re like, “Oh, I’m ahead,” but I still go back every day and just keep going.

Ben Cohen: I also found the most productive writing time for me was early in the morning. Or what I considered early in the morning back then, without checking my phone. I would check my phone to make sure the world was still spinning and nothing terrible had happened overnight. But I hadn’t checked email. I didn’t look at Twitter. I didn’t do any of the stuff that I would normally do that turns my brain into mush. And I could get more done in that first hour than I would over 12 hours over the course of the day. It was just getting the stuff out on the page was so valuable and helpful and useful to me. And now I have two young kids. That means waking up at ungodly...

Jimmy Soni: Yes. But you do get used to it. And then the other thing is, I always felt like if I did the book work, even because I’ve done now two of my books after my daughter was born, and actually three of them, and I find that if I can get something done before she’s awake, then I’m not robbing Peter to pay Paul. I don’t feel that way. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve gotten that stuff done now. Now time with her is not a tax on book time.” Right. And so for me, that’s worked really well. I would also say that the part about it that people don’t appreciate is it sounds fun and it looks fun, but as you said, it’s a real struggle to go from interviews and raw material to finished words on the page. There is still something in that that is really hard, especially if you’re doing it twice. You’re doing it once in the morning and then going to the Wall Street Journal, doing it all day. How did you manage that? Or was it just different kinds of writing? So it was okay.

Ben Cohen: I think it is different kinds of writing. So I think there is some element of cross-training to it where I think both made me better at the other one. The book writing allows me to push my limits a little bit more and stretch muscles that I don’t get when I’m writing a weekly column. And it allows you to think and make connections and just let stuff sort of marinate in your brain that you don’t get in an 800-word column when you’re on a specific cadence. And even now, I’m in the process of putting a bunch of chapters together and I’m seeing patterns and connections between the chapters that I didn’t think of when I was writing them. And clearly, they were always there and they just were waiting to be mined.

And the only way I was going to do that was with time and some distance from the material and being able to come back to it with fresher eyes. And I also find the reporting of these chapters is so fun. And you come back from a reporting trip, you’re so eager and, for this book, I’ve made the mistake of not just writing right away. And then months pass and I have to relive the interviews and go back and listen to the tape and I’m like, “What was that about again? What were those images that were floating around my head?”

And so I wish that I had just come back from a bunch of reporting trips and just written 10,000 words as soon as I got back that I would be in a much better shape now today if I had done that.

Jimmy Soni: When you think back on this particular book, the moment that, you know, it can always be an interest is either when, for me, when you get the first finished copies of the book, that box shows up. They don’t warn you. They don’t. Nobody tells you they’re on. Sometimes they’ll tell you they’re on their way. But most of the time a box just shows up and you’ve got the finished copies. And then when you start to see it out in the wild, what were those moments like for you with this particular project?

Ben Cohen: My book came out March 10, 2020.

Jimmy Soni: Oh, perfect timing.

Ben Cohen: Great timing. Yes. So the book party was on a Tuesday and the world shut down on Wednesday. And so I have very strange memories. I walked into Three Lives bookstore in the West Village, probably the day before it closed for a very long time. And I saw the book in the new nonfiction part. And I got that joy and then didn’t see other people for a very long time afterwards. So it was a peculiar experience of releasing a book into the teeth of the pandemic. Yeah.

It just means what people warned me from the beginning, even before it was clear that it was going to be a very strange time to release a book, is that books have a long tail in a way that newspaper articles do not, and that people would be reading this book and coming to it in different ways for a very long time. And I found that totally to be true because you get an email from someone who picked up the book five years later, and I wake up in the morning and I see an email about that, and I’m like, “Well, I haven’t thought about this book in seven years, but it’s living in your brain right now.” It has lived on in this really rewarding, gratifying way.

So that is something that is totally different than writing a newspaper column that appears in print and then you will get 99% of the traffic and attention the day it comes out. And then never again.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah. I’m going to ask a couple more book questions, and I want to shift to the Science of Success and your current project. When, how did you settle on the title and the cover art and that kind of stuff? I mean, I imagine some of it was intuition, but did you sell it as The Hot Hand?

Ben Cohen: We did. That was the title the whole time. Yeah. I felt that was intuitive and sticky and a little bit seductive. That if you knew what the hot hand was, you would be curious why it was the title of a book. And if you didn’t know what it was, you would also kind of want to know a little bit more about why it was the title of the book. And I liked the rhythm of it. And I actually hate alliteration in writing. If I write a piece, you will almost never see two words with the same first letter back to back, because it’s just an eyesore to me. But there was no other way of. Yeah. And I think it was a neat way of doing it.

And I didn’t have control of the cover but I do remember we were talking about potential art for the cover. And I think I did suggest, what about a fireball emoji as the O in The Hot Hand? And they sort of ran with that from there.

Jimmy Soni: That’s great. How did you transition from the work you were doing as a sports reporter at the Wall Street Journal to what I think is one of the great sections of any contemporary newspaper. It’s a thing, again, that I look forward to reading so much. How did you start and build and grow the Science of Success?

Ben Cohen: So in 2022, I had been at the Journal for 12 years. I’d been covering the NBA for almost 10 years. And it was an incredible decade to be covering basketball specifically. So the first, really, the first major season that I was covering basketball was 2014, 2015, which was the first year that Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors won a title by playing basketball in a completely new and interesting and exciting way and really revolutionizing the sport. And that idea of the three-point revolution taking over basketball was such a Wall Street Journal way of covering basketball. This idea that there is a shot on the court that is worth 50% more than a shot that is one inch closer to the basket. And it’s this incredible market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.

And it had taken teams decades to figure out that three was worth more than two. And now you have this team with the most charismatic and compelling player of his generation, who had been overlooked his entire life, taking advantage of it to incredible effect. I mean, that team in 2016 was a cultural phenomenon, the most exciting team since Michael Jordan’s Bulls, with this really iconic player taking on LeBron James, this behemoth who had conquered the sport in a completely different way. And this rivalry was taking shape, this incredibly unlikely rivalry. Nobody saw this coming. And so my first four years covering basketball, the NBA Finals every year was the Golden State Warriors versus the Cleveland Cavaliers. So I spent a lot of time in Oakland and Cleveland and felt like it was Groundhog Day.

I was like, “Yeah, it’s June. I’m going back and forth between Oakland and Cleveland.” There are all sorts of fascinating stories about ways that teams were trying to build themselves to take on the Warriors. So the Houston Rockets was a team that I wrote about ad nauseam. So I probably wrote the most about Steph and LeBron and James Harden and Daryl Morey and Mike D’Antoni and the Houston Rockets, because they were trying to dethrone the Golden State Warriors by building a team and pursuing this counterintuitive strategy to beat them. And they would talk to me about it and I would get to explain, here is why this team thinks that they can beat the unbeatable Golden State Warriors. And they came really close, and it was just really fun. Teams were taking control of data and statistics.

And you could just see all of these stories unfolding that we would have never been able to write about at any other point in basketball history. And so, but over time, I sort of felt that I had just written the same story over and over again. I think one of the great strengths of a journalist, and it’s really important to have fresh eyes and to not be jaded and to be surprised and delighted by stories when you find them and not think, “Oh, I wrote that story six years ago,” or a different version of the same story. And so I’d been looking, especially after writing The Hot Hand, I’d been looking to expand a little bit beyond basketball.

And when I was pitching this column that became the Science of Success, the whole idea was, can I take this playbook that I’ve been able to come up with and learn from writing sports at the Wall Street Journal and take that idea and apply it to the rest of the world and all sorts of industries and the rest of business? Can I find interesting people doing interesting things in important industries and other important industries and just try to write about them the way that we write about sports at the Wall Street Journal? And so also in the same way that I have found that writing a book is different with children. And covering basketball means working a lot of nights and weekends, and nights and weekends are what you kind of don’t have when you have young children.

And so I thought this was the right time to kind of look around and take the stuff that I’ve learned covering sports and basketball at the Wall Street Journal and explore the rest of the world with it.

Jimmy Soni: How do you, I mean, I have a million questions, but how did you sell it internally? I mean, to the extent you’re allowed to talk about it. It seems like a very specific thing. I’m going to cover everything, success and failure in all human endeavors.

Ben Cohen: It happened to be at a time when the Exchange section of the Wall Street Journal was looking for a couple new columns. And I had said, I’ve done this for a long time, and this is what I want to do. And I wrote a memo explaining the type of work that I wanted to do, the lens through which I saw the world and wanted to explore the business world, and came up with a bunch of sample ideas and stuff. I will, we want to be on the news. We want to be timely. We want to be a little bit timeless. We’ll see what happens every week. And can we write about people the way that we write about athletes? And maybe I was just very lucky again, that people inside the paper sort of trusted the vision that we had and said, “Let’s try it and see what happens.”

Jimmy Soni: Yeah, I have to believe that there’s some part of you and maybe you’ve just gotten so good at it. How do you wrestle with the challenge of meeting that bar every week? Because it is, it’s one of the, your consistency in your quality of subjects and topics and approaches. Do you just have a folder? Is there a big Ben Manila folder somewhere? Like, “All right, time to dust this one off.”

Ben Cohen: Yeah. It’s a Google Doc. It’s called Just Ideas. I do have, when I come across interesting people or companies or ideas, I will dump them into a Google Doc with just very basic information. Maybe copy-paste paragraphs of stories that were interesting and think, is whenever the time is right for this, or maybe something else will happen and there will be a time to pick up on this. But a lot of times it’s also just following the news very carefully and thinking, “Okay, well, there’s this one interesting nugget in this story that wasn’t fully explored, and I’m really curious about that.” And having the freedom and the luxury of following my curiosity to wherever it may lead.

Doing the full reporting, going deep into a subject, reading everything that’s been written about it, listening to every podcast that this person has been on, and trying to tell the story through that very small thing. And so that’s something else that I learned covering sports at the Journal is that I think there are two ways to tell stories. One is taking small ideas and making them really big, and one is taking big ideas and making them really small. In some ways, they’re connected. But, for example, we always used to look for funny, interesting, peculiar, clever ideas at the Wall Street Journal. So one story that I wrote was, in 2016, the Golden State Warriors started the year 24-0. They were 41-4 at one point. There was nothing that was going wrong.

And as a journalist, you’re always looking for tension. Tension is what makes a story. And when there’s no tension, it’s like, well, what do you do with that? And I remember listening to a bunch of radio interviews the Warriors were doing at the time. You know, probably the only person outside the Bay Area who was actually listening to interviews on local radio. And in one of them, the interim coach at the time, Steve Kerr was on medical leave. And the interim coach at the time was Luke Walton. And he was doing this interview as he was walking off a plane, and they were saying, “Luke, what’s going on? How are you doing?” He was like, “I’m terrible. The team trainer before the season got rid of our peanut butter and jellies on the team plane because he thought they weren’t healthy. And everyone is completely miserable about it because all NBA players famously eat, they just subsist on peanut butter and jelly. It’s just around at all hours.”

And I heard this, and I was like, “Okay, well, the story to do is that the greatest source of tension in the locker room in Golden State right now is they’re fighting to get their peanut butter and jellies back.” And so that’s a funny idea for a story. And then you take it to the extreme. And they happened to be coming through the East Coast a couple of days later. I remember I went to Philadelphia and stalked their locker room and went quietly to every player in the locker room and asked, “What do you make of the war over peanut butter and jelly in the locker room?” having sotto voce conversations with Steph Curry in the side of the room. Then the next day, they were in New York, and I went to the Garden, did the same thing. And over time, you’re reporting, that’s hours and hours of reporting to ask players off to the side to get an exclusive about peanut butter and jelly. And so you could tell sort of the story of the Golden State Warriors’ magical season through the only thing that has gone wrong for this team is peanut butter and jelly.

And so I’m always kind of looking for peanut butter and jelly stories in all sorts of industries. And one other thing I’ve learned through the course of writing this column is that if I find something interesting, the chances are that I can convey that interest and enthusiasm to readers. And if I don’t know something that it feels like everybody else knows or should know, then the chances are that they don’t know it either. And, you know, I find myself thinking a lot, “Well, does everyone know this? Or am I just an idiot and just found out for the first time?” And I think a lot of people don’t know a lot of things. And so things that you would think that everybody knows, they don’t know, and I didn’t know them.

And so I’ve learned to kind of trust my judgment and gut about that a little bit. If I think something is interesting, I can convey that interest and I can make other people interested in it as well.

Jimmy Soni: Yeah. Do you have, I mean, it’s probably like picking a favorite child or something. But let’s say from the last couple of years. Is there a story that stands out to you as a favorite of yours?

Ben Cohen: One of my favorite stories I ever did was two years ago I went to Boise, Idaho to visit the campus of Micron because Micron Technologies. Micron Technologies, yeah. In one of their chip factories in Boise, Idaho was a machine made by a company called ASML. And ASML is the most important, valuable, invaluable company that most people have ever heard of. And in the world of chips and semiconductors, which is the most important industry in the world, there are a bunch of really interesting companies. There’s Nvidia, which, you know, nobody outside of gamers had heard about five years ago. And then it became a trillion-dollar company. And I remember writing a column about it when it became a trillion-dollar company that was basically like, “What is the story of this company?

It looks like someone fell asleep on their keyboard typing it out. I’ve never heard it. This company is worth more than Berkshire Hathaway. Now, how did this happen?” There’s TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which is the most valuable, geographically important company that makes all the chips. But in every TSMC fab, and in every Micron and Samsung chip factory, there is an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine. An EUV machine is made by ASML. This is the most important machine on the planet. It is the bottleneck in the chip-making process. And only one company in the world makes these machines. This obscure Dutch company called ASML, which is one of the 20 most valuable companies in the world. And if you say ASML, most people will think you said ASMR.

And I remember thinking, “Okay, I found out about ASML. And I said, I can’t just write a story about ASML because while most people have never heard of it, even people reading the Wall Street Journal have never heard of it. I can’t just be, ‘You guys hear about this company, it’s this amazing company.’” But I remember I was reporting around ASML and someone told me that there was a job in ASML called customer support engineer. When I hear customer support, I think someone in a call center dealing with problems. Customer support engineer is a person whose job it is to make sure that machine never breaks and when it does break that they can fix it right away.

And I thought, “Okay, well this is the most important job at the most important company that nobody’s ever heard of and I can put a human face to it.” And so I talked to the company, we cast about for a few characters. We eventually settled on this woman named Brianna Hall who worked at the Micron chip fab as an ASML employee, as a customer support engineer. And I was able to tell the whole story of ASML and its importance to the global economy and everything we do all day long through this one person.

And I thought, “Oh, this is what I’m trying to do is to take this really big story about the global economy and the most invaluable company that most people have never heard of and boil it down to this one person doing this one crucial job on this one machine that is responsible for all of our lives.”

Jimmy Soni: A series of your pieces from that are becoming a book or you’re working on kind of structuring a book. How have you been thinking about this current, we’re in media res on that project so there’s only probably so much you can share. But this is your next book coming up. How are you approaching it? How are you thinking about it?

Ben Cohen: The book was really born from the column and one of the, there was a type of column that I kept running into that I really liked writing and I found that readers really liked reading. I kept talking to people who had come up with interesting startups or products or just things that I had encountered in my day-to-day life, which I find is how I find a lot of stories these days. Stuff that is just in the air or I keep running into and I think, “Oh, what’s the story here? Why am I just noticing that everybody is drinking Athletic non-alcoholic beer now? How did this happen?” And the more and more I talked to these people and they all had a lot in common. They were unlikely entrepreneurs.

They did not set out to disrupt an industry or create something new. They just thought to themselves there has to be a better way. This thing exists and I’m going to make a better version of it. And I thought, “Oh well that’s really interesting. It’s sort of this new theory of innovation. It’s not invention. It’s taking something that already exists and making it better.” And I think there are lots of different ways that companies and people do that. You could do that by recognizing unmet demand or finding a new source of supply, or redesigning a product, or failing over and over or coming up with different mechanisms of finding ideas. So the book is, it’s a bunch of chapters about people and companies over time that have figured out new and interesting and hopefully universal ways of seeking and achieving better. And so a bunch of them will be expanded versions of columns that I’ve written, and a bunch of them will be stuff that hasn’t appeared in a column yet. So I wrote a column about Athletic non-alcoholic beer during Dry January two years ago. And so that’s an example of a guy working at a hedge fund in Connecticut sort of understanding that there was a demand for a non-alcoholic beer that didn’t taste like swamp water and thinking, “Well, maybe, I had this data,” he ran all these polls and surveys that he commissioned himself that found that 55% of Americans said that they would drink non-alcoholic beer.

And at the time, non-alcoholic beer accounted for 0.3% of the market. And he thought, “Well, there’s an inefficiency here. If I can get that 0.3% to even 1%, that’s a huge business.” And of course, it’s much bigger than 1% now. But that was recognizing the demand for a better product in data. That wasn’t like, “Oh, I think they’re,” you know, he recognized it in his own life and that he went out and found this demand and he created a product to meet that demand. Another column that I wrote for the Journal that will be in the book that I found in my own life is as the father of young children, my children go through just an enormous amount of berries every week. I spend all of my money on berries.

And a couple years ago, I noticed that there was this new type of berry from Driscoll’s, which, there are different types of labels on every Driscoll’s clamshell. There’s the yellow label, which is regular. There’s the green label, which is organic. And then there were two words that were appearing on some of these blueberries and raspberries called Sweetest Batch. And I remember tasting them and thinking, “What are these berries?” Because I can’t stop eating them. And they taste so much better than the other berries. I remember reaching out to Driscoll’s and saying, “What is the story of these berries? How did they happen?”

It turns out Driscoll’s, for years and years, for as long as the company has existed, have been throwing out its best berries because its most flavorful, best-tasting berries were not reliable and resilient enough to make it through the manufacturing process. So in berry manufacturing, this is, I didn’t know anything about berries before writing this column, and this is kind of what I do on a weekly basis. Go really deep into a rabbit hole and then come back out and try to describe it. In berry-making, all of berry production is a genetic trade-off. So if something is really flavorful, that means the yield might be lower. Or the bush might be less bushy or more bushy and so you can’t actually pick them or more brittle. So they won’t make their way across the country.

And because of that, they couldn’t make enough of these berries to make the economics work. And finally a few years ago, they said, “Well, why don’t we just keep these berries in the genetic pool for longer and then charge a slight premium for them and see if people are willing to buy them and we can make the economics work like that.” And they started doing that. They were just this massive hit because you taste one next to the other, it’s just a different experience. And now because Driscoll’s is keeping those better-tasting berries in the genetic pool for longer, the flavor of their ordinary berries is getting better because it’s moving the scatter chart up into the right.

And so there’s this curious economic effect just by someone saying, “Why are we throwing out our best-tasting berries? We should try to keep these in for longer.” So there are all sorts of stories like that. So it’s going to be Athletic and Driscoll’s and the story of Birkenstock and Dyson and Waymo and Ferrari and Hermès. And so all of these companies and products that I think people are fascinated by and that kernel of better is embedded in all of them in all sorts of different ways.

Jimmy Soni: Well, we will look forward to that and have you back on to talk all about it once it’s and when you’re done writing it. Sometime in the hopefully not so distant future, every Infinite Loops episode somewhat ends the same way. We declare you emperor for a day and you have a magical microphone. You’re allowed to incept two ideas into human minds. They won’t know that it came from you, but everybody will adhere to and follow your precepts. So what are your off-the-cuff, what are your two ideas that you would, based on everything you’ve done, based on all the successes you’ve studied, based on the book, based on looking at athletes and entrepreneurs and CEOs and other visionaries, what would you want people to have as their two ideas?

Ben Cohen: I couldn’t get any heads-up about this?

Jimmy Soni: That’s the whole point.

Ben Cohen: When I sent the email. Is there anything I should be thinking about?

Jimmy Soni: That’s the whole point.

Ben Cohen: I think that idea that has been floating around my head and rattling around my brain for a while now is this idea that better is always out there for people who can find it. And I think that there are all sorts of ways of achieving better. And a lot of it just comes down to feeling. A lot of it just comes down to being willing to play around with that idea of better is out there and that I can do this better and nothing is stopping me from doing it. So I think nurturing that sentiment and that mentality I think is really important. And in some ways, I don’t think about it like this, but I have to kind of do that every week when I’m writing a column. I think about it in two ways.

One is it can be finding new angles into stories and topics that the Wall Street Journal is already writing about, which is really intimidating because I think, “Well, we’re already writing about this. The people who are writing about this know this topic better than anyone in this building and quite possibly better than anyone in the world.” If they haven’t thought of this idea, why not? Is that because they did think about it and they dismissed it? Is it because they didn’t have time to think about it? Is it because they just happened to not run into it? There are all sorts of reasons why a piece might not exist. And I have to have the confidence every time to think, “I saw this idea. I think it’s interesting. Should I write it?

Is it just I’m a rube and I’m naive and that’s why I think it’s interesting? Or is it interesting because it’s interesting?” And the second type of story that I write is charging towards open space and cracks in our coverage. So industries and people and topics and companies that we don’t write about as a newsroom and sort of having the courage of my own conviction and following my curiosity and thinking, “Well, if I think Driscoll’s berries are interesting, then I bet a lot of other people will think Driscoll’s berries are interesting too.” And Driscoll’s might not be, you know, Nvidia or Apple or Microsoft, but the Wall Street Journal should still be writing about it. And Athletic might not be Anheuser-Busch, but I bet there is a market for people who want to read these stories.

And so I have had to think every time I’m staring at the blank document and the blinking cursor, I have to convince myself, if you think this is interesting, somebody else will too. And in some ways that’s, “Oh, there’s a better way of covering this story. And this is the way.” And that doesn’t mean that our other coverage is bad. It’s amazing. And whenever I, because I’m always giving a heads-up to the beat reporter. “Hey, I’m writing about this. If you have anything...”

Jimmy Soni: Here comes Ben to steal my thunder.

Ben Cohen: It’s a nice way of putting it. And I think, “If you’re working on anything, let me know. Maybe we could do it together.” But, and if there’s any reason why this is wrong or I shouldn’t be doing this, please let me know and save me from looking like an idiot and wasting all this time. And every time I do that, my colleagues and our reporters at the Wall Street Journal are such fonts of knowledge. They just know everything there is. And every time I work with them, I’m like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe you know all this stuff.” And I’m just sort of pulling stuff out of their brains.

And I love writing, collaborating with people who are on certain beats at the Journal because I can just tap into their brain and I can look smarter. So I did a piece a couple weeks ago with our airlines reporter about the new strategy of United Airlines and why it is that I seem to see a tweet every other day, “United is the best airline in America right now” after years and years of Delta holding the title. And she interviewed Scott Kirby, the CEO of United. And we just sort of went back and forth all week long about what happened here. And it would have taken me hours and hours of research to figure out all of the crucial points in that story.

And I could just call Alison Sider, who was the reporter, and she had written all the story. She knew all of it already, and she knew so much more in her brain that I would have never been able to get out of any archival coverage or podcast. And so being able to take those ideas and team up with people and take one plus one and make it equal three is so much fun for me. I love writing with other people at the Journal for that reason. So I’m always looking for better ways to do something. And I think if I were emperor of the world and could take this microphone and turn it into a magic wand, it would be to kind of nurture that idea in other people.

Jimmy Soni: It was brilliantly said. And I feel like that hits both, you know, because there’s better, and then there’s also, you talked about the cracks, looking at the cracks, and I feel like that’s another useful lesson from your work, finding these places that people forgot, time forgot. Just the watchful eyes of an entire newsroom might have forgotten.

Ben Cohen: Right.

Jimmy Soni: And that’s why I love your work, and that’s why hopefully many others will love the book to come. And I can’t recommend The Hot Hand strongly enough, but thank you, Ben, for taking time to do this and for coming out and talking with us.

Ben Cohen: Thank you for having me. Thanks for such nice words.

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Highlights

440 Million Mr Beasts

Revan Lazarus: I think in 20 years it looks super interesting in the fact that I think things are going to have to be a lot more personalized. I think that we might start seeing versions of creators or podcasters that are hyper-specific to the individual. One thing I’ve been saying for a long time is, MrBeast has 440 million subscribers, and I think there will be 440 million different MrBeast versions for each person based on the data. And so I think this has to be a platform overhaul for the platforms to be really looking and measuring the data.

And I think the platforms potentially have the ability to now work together in a cross-platform manner of, without getting too Big Brother, but how to track people from one platform to another to figure out what content they’re actually interested in, what are they watching, and then to make sure they have the most personalized experience to them. And I think really there’s sort of this hockey stick curve moment that I think is coming with personalization. And so whether that starts out with there being four different MrBeasts for every 100 million people, I think could be an interesting play.

And I think that you’ll probably start to see that in the next five to 10 years, and then hopefully 20 years, you’re only watching the content that is most applicable to you and that you love every moment of it, and looking at the retention data to make sure every moment that you could be watching content, you’re watching the best content for you. I think it’s a little scary, but I think it’s sort of the way the world’s moving of just personalized everything.

On Bad Bunny

Nick Tawil: So in terms of Super Bowl halftime shows, this year’s Bad Bunny, the hedges around his performance, and people were literally in the stands saying, “I can’t even see the show.” But the show is epic in so many ways across social media.

Revan Lazarus: I was one of those people.

Nick Tawil: Okay, there you go. But you’ve probably seen a million clips on social media about it, and that’s the point.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I think actually the Super Bowl was super interesting. So I was there, and yeah, I couldn’t see anything on the halftime show. And so I’m watching the big screen, but I think there’s so many. Those hedges. Funny story, we’re sitting, we’re in the end zone, and we’re watching these people run out in hedges, in grass costumes.

Nick Tawil: Yeah, yeah.

Revan Lazarus: And we’re like, “Oh, my God, the hedges are going to start dancing or something.” And we just figured out...

Nick Tawil: I thought the same exact thing.

Revan Lazarus: Right.

Nick Tawil: And I was waiting for it to happen.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, totally.

Nick Tawil: It never happened.

Revan Lazarus: Me too. Never happened. And I started thinking about it, and I was like, Wow, it’s just so much more efficient than rolling out these giant, you know, fake hedges on wheels. Just dress people up in them and just have them run and it’ll be much more efficient.

Nick Tawil: Is that why they did it?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, 100%.

Nick Tawil: Oh, my God.

Revan Lazarus: It just, think about it. You could have all these people just run and move and make this stage without actually having to build the stage, which I think was really interesting and also created some great social media content for them. But yeah, I think everything is becoming hyper-tailored to the growth sort of economy in the sense of, I think old Super Bowl halftime shows were probably great. You watch Michael Jackson or Rihanna, whenever that was five years ago. It’s like, that is probably a great experience for the people at the stadium. It was a horrible experience for basically everybody at the stadium this year. I mean, the music was phenomenal, but impossible to see anything that was going on.

And so I think it’s really saying, “Hey, we’re gearing this,” and I actually thought this was a great stance, but because it was so controversial and so many people didn’t like it, it was like, “We’re going to make sure everybody sees it, and so we’re going to tailor it for the perfect TV, social media content, and we’re going to blow this out, because who cares about the 80,000 people that are here? We care about the 800 million people that are going to see this,” which I thought was awesome. And so big Bad Bunny fan. First Bad Bunny concert 2017. So I’m an OG. Yeah.

Transcript

Nick Tawil: Hey Revan, how’s it going?

Revan Lazarus: Good, how are you?

Nick Tawil: Good, good. So why don’t you walk me through exactly what you’re up to and what you’ve built at Jamie AI?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah. Well, first, thanks for having me. Super stoked to be here. So at Jamie, we are an AI platform for podcast networks and digital sales teams. We essentially allow sellers and the whole content organization to understand their content and their portfolio at a deeper level and then use that content and that data to help make sales and production materials like custom decks, run of shows, stuff like that, and then be able to query across the entire content suite to figure out what’s exactly working, what’s not working, and then what’s going to work for brands.

Nick Tawil: So with that description, help me think about it in terms of actual show production, pre-production, production, post-production, and marketing and social media, the whole gamut, the whole suite.

Revan Lazarus: So we mostly focus on the pre-production side. Typically what happens is we’ll ingest your entire portfolio, but specifically on a show basis. We’ll analyze what has actually worked based on retention. So figuring out this giant retention graph, which is an L-shaped graph that has all these peaks and valleys, which will be on this video as well, and then figuring out at scale, based on those retention spikes, what is actually working for your audience, what’s not working, how can you improve your hook, your transitions, your editing. And so when you are prepping for an interview, you know exactly what questions are going to create those spikes, or at least more so of that, and then additionally put together a full interview map from your guests.

So for instance, if you’re researching me or somebody, typically our guests are a little bit more famous than myself, you can look at their past interviews, can figure out what’s actually worked well on social for them, and then do the full research. So watching up to 500 hours of content to figure out exactly what they’ve talked about before, what they haven’t talked about, what actually did well, but maybe they’ve only spoken about it once. And then what you should really touch on based on what your audience typically likes, based on your past videos.

Nick Tawil: You’re already so famous to me. So when you’re communicating all this, are you working directly with talent? How big is that team? Maybe some examples.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, so typically we don’t work with talent. We work with the producers or the networks that work with the talent. And so we usually are with the producers that are making those run of shows, those interview maps. And some of our customers are Wave Sports and Entertainment, which started New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce. They also do Carmelo Anthony’s show, Andrew Santino’s show. We also have Dear Media, which has the Skinny Confidential and podcasts like Khloé Kardashian’s podcast. And then we work with a bunch of other great shows like Amon-Ra St. Brown’s show, who’s a big NFL player, and a suite of those guys.

Nick Tawil: So sports, pop culture, it doesn’t even matter the content that you’re covering. All that matters is that you have a system for this.

Revan Lazarus: Exactly, yeah. So an example is, we work with a few different shows at Amazon’s Wondery network. So that’s like Baby, This is Keke Palmer, which is a more pop culture show. We also work with a show that is Zach Sang’s show, which talks to music artists and producers and songwriters, and now they have other sports shows as well. So we work on those shows across the board.

Nick Tawil: When did you start?

Revan Lazarus: We started officially March 1st of building this product. However, I’d been producing a podcast for six months before that and doing all the editing and pre-production and doing all the ad sales. And so I feel like I’ve been in podcasting probably two years. But yeah, just building this probably a year and a half ago.

Nick Tawil: What’s the biggest change that you’ve experienced from beginning to now in terms of where you thought you’d be providing media services or production services to what you’re actually doing today? And how has AI affected that?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I think when we first started, there wasn’t a lot of buy-in from production teams with AI. I think that probably you and I are trapped in this bubble of tech and SF or even New York and LA. AI is a big deal and a lot of companies a year and a half ago just weren’t in that state of mind of, “Oh, AI is going to change the way we do everything.” And I think that’s starting to happen. But I think even at the grand scale, it’s not the way the world operates right now. So that has slowly started to be like, “Oh, we need to work on AI initiatives.”

And I think more companies have had budget now allocated for that and are open to experimenting, and especially top down, really saying, “Hey, this is going to change our business. This is an 18-wheeler headed straight for us, and if we don’t get out of the way or figure out how to stop it, we’re going to get crushed.” And so I think a lot of those teams have been more willing to be interested in what we’re doing.

Nick Tawil: The difference in attitude, because I’ve come across this a lot in some of the media projects we do at O’Shaughnessy Ventures, is what’s the biggest difference in narrative? When 18 months ago you’re saying, “Hey, are you thinking about this?” and they say no to AI, why? Versus why are they saying yes to AI today?

Revan Lazarus: I think a big portion of it is AI 18 months ago was pretty crap for what they do, especially on the creative side. Ask AI to write you a story or a book, it’s pretty horrible. And so I think it was people testing it out, ChatGPT-4 or 3, and doing it once and saying, “Oh, this isn’t good enough for what I want to do,” and sort of writing it off. Versus now, I think if you can show, “Hey, we’re trying to actually write line by line or give you very specific insights,” I think showcasing it like that versus saying, “Oh, here’s the whole story of how you should do an interview,” which is even how we started, has really grown.

And then I think additionally, especially with us, I always had thought we would be a sort of pre-production content tool because I actually originally, when I was producing a podcast, that was the thing I was worse at. Great at selling ads, but I was bad at doing pre-production. And so shout out to the guys here for doing all the production. But so I originally thought maybe a lot of other people have this issue or it’s a huge cost driver in a lot of other production companies. They’re spending a ton on producers. And I was like, maybe that shouldn’t be the case, or they should spend less, or producers should be working on more shows rather than just like three producers, one show, which is typically sort of how it was going. You’d have an executive producer, a regular producer, and an associate producer.

And now I’ve realized that attaching yourself from a business perspective to cost versus revenue is huge. And so we’ve been really focused on how do we make companies more money instead of how do we save them more money. I don’t really think anybody’s interested in saving money when they can just make more.

Nick Tawil: So that’s fantastic. Well, something I heard you say is they were just using it wrong, or the AI capability wasn’t there, or it’s just not something they were able to spend enough time on before they realized the value. Now it’s just much more apparent, but also you’re bringing that to the forefront for these people who may not be spending 24/7 thinking about it.

Revan Lazarus: Definitely, yeah. I think that, I would never say our users are using the product wrong because they’re using it how they think they should use it, right? So they’re always using it in the right way. We just have to adjust. And so I think that a great deal of it was the insights that we were pulling were just sort of lackluster on what a really good producer could do. And I think as AI has evolved, and especially we’ve evolved with our customers to figure out what do they actually want, because obviously me running a podcast, that’s one podcast versus a producer who’s done this for 10 years and works on five podcasts, is a little bit different in terms of the output they’re looking for.

And then also, just doing everything through a data lens can be really challenging with creatives because creatives obviously are like, “This is an art form to me and I know exactly how my audience thinks and how they work.” And so really convincing them to take a look at the data, which I think has happened a lot more recently. When you look at shows like Diary of a CEO or even Call Her Daddy, huge data-centered focus. I think a lot of it, yeah, you can tell. So when you look at the comments, sometimes you’ll see even on Diary of a CEO, Steven doesn’t ask enough follow-up questions or feels sort of heartless. And it’s because he’s optimizing for retention. So he’s not asking the follow-up question that’s a weak transition. He’s just cutting straight to the next question. So when you feel like, “Oh, I’m sort of done with this answer,” you’re already onto the next question. And I think it isn’t the natural flow of a conversation. So when you watch it, you’re like, “This guy’s mom died and Steven wasn’t that heartfelt about it.” And it’s because he’s like, “How do we keep the viewer staying for longer?” And so there’s a give and take to everything. But when you’re really optimizing for retention and for views, I think it does work. His channel has grown dramatically in the past year and a half. And I think a lot of it is because of their optimization on the data side.

Nick Tawil: So the willingness for a show to take on a data analytics approach and really focus on that, does it matter how big the show is, or is it literally any side show, any podcast? This is alternative media, right? So it doesn’t cost a lot of money just to produce one episode of a podcast if you want to do it on the lower end. Does it matter, or does the size of the show matter?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I mean, I think always the size of the show is going to show more impact on the changes that you do. I think a lot of the time that on a smaller channel, you’re really looking for that human connection, so you’re really hoping that somebody falls in love with the content that you’re making. And I think the optimizations can actually happen later on. So for instance, if you’re starting a podcast, what you’re really going to want to do is just define who your audience is and make sure that they love your content, regardless of the optimizations. I think the optimizations come a little bit later when you’ve grown your audience and now you can say, “Okay, how do we grow to a bigger audience? Or how do we expand our pool?”

One thing I love about MrBeast is you’ll look at his old videos. There’s no optimization, retention, anything, right? He’s saying Logan Paul a million times in a row, right? Or something like that. It takes him 48 hours, something crazy. It’s like, there’s no retention there. Nobody cares about if you’re going to watch the next second. And especially a lot of the early stuff is like, how do you just build that audience? But now that he has the audience, he’s like, “Okay, how do we optimize this to keep people watching for longer, to attract more people?” He’s got this purple cow theory. He wants to do stuff that nobody’s ever done before so that you click on his. “I trapped two pilots in a plane for 100 days. The winner gets the plane.” It’s like, all right, there’s not a video like that that exists on the internet. And so then it’s like, “Okay, how do we optimize?” But initially you just have to have an audience that truly loves what you’re making. And I think a lot of that just comes from being authentic and being yourself and then figuring out the optimizations later.

Nick Tawil: It’s no secret that people want to know everything about their audience and demo matters. What are the most non-obvious characteristics of demo that you think have an outsized impact on a show? Well, let’s walk through some. Let’s walk through some of the obvious ones. It’s like geography, age, gender, what else?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I don’t know if you have any control over your demo and really, obviously you can do paid media to a certain demo and market towards that demo, but I’m not sure if that actually gives you an advantage. I think there’s unique advantages to every demo and it’s just about how you position, right? So older demo’s going to have more money to spend, right? So you can say that to advertisers. Younger demo’s going to be more interactive with your content. They’re going to watch more of it. So I think there’s pros and cons to each of that. What I would say is you just want a demo that is obsessed with you in any realm. The same way the older generation is obsessed with the news, Anderson Cooper and whoever, right? They’ll watch anything that he does. Versus you have younger audiences that will…

One I say is a great one is this guy Jake Shane. Jake Shane is probably, I don’t know how many followers on Instagram that he has now, maybe 2 million. But his audience is so deeply connected to him, will watch whatever he does and performs at such a high level where it actually doesn’t matter that he has 20 million followers. His 2 million are real 2 million that all love him as their favorite. And so you’ll look at Forbes puts this out on creators who made the most money. Jake Shane is continuously at the top because his audience really cares about everything he does.

So whether that’s a brand promo or an event, his audience shows up. Versus you’ll have other creators that have 10 times as many followers, but it’s sort of loosely following to where they don’t really care. A lot of examples I give is men or women that are very attractive but don’t necessarily have that connection with the audience. And so they have a lot of followers because people care to see what they’re up to, but they don’t really interact with their content. Versus somebody that just really cares about their audience, their audience really cares about them and then has that massive pull. So I don’t really think it’s a demo that necessarily matters. It’s just how strong can you get people to connect with you? How many people can you get to show up for you if you need? And so I think that is the main thing I would look for when building an audience is how deeply are people connected to your authentic self.

Nick Tawil: Do you put a lot of thought into literally people showing up for that content creator or for that person, in terms of real-life events or physical events? And does that even, is that within scope of what you’re thinking about?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I mean, on the sales side, a lot of the stuff that people are starting to sell is personal appearances, social media creators or comedians and anybody doing podcasts. And I think that, obviously having that backing of like, “Hey, we can get 20,000 people to show up for a venue,” is huge versus, “I think we’re going to struggle to get people to come to this thing.” And I think you’ll see that at big tentpole events, whether it’s the All-Star Game or the Super Bowl or Grammy parties or whatever it might be, that saying to a brand like, “Hey, we can get real pull here,” is actually the difference of millions of dollars versus not having that in your back pocket.

And I think there’s plenty of creators that can’t offer that because they just can’t get people to show up. But there’s also plenty of creators that probably can get people to show up and should. And I think that’s a big lever that’s not being pulled right now.

Nick Tawil: When these creators are pulling on these real-life events, how often do you recommend, or how often do they want to have some sort of third-party sponsor as a part of that event? Always? Or are they just saying, “You know what, this is going to be somewhat closed off” always?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, always. I think there’s not a lot of opportunities for creators to make money outside of third parties or starting their own company, which is super challenging. And I think it’s great that creators are now full-scale businesses. They are the marketing, operations, they are the product, and they can create separate products. But I would always say, if you can get people to show up for you, I think doing personal appearances with a brand is super underrated. I know obviously you have things that are maybe a closed-off thing, but I think that’s because the creator just wants to have some authentic time with their fans. But I would say when it comes to tentpole events, it’s Coachella and stuff like that. Make your money. So I’m all for that.

Nick Tawil: Tell me a little bit about that because we were talking about that the other day, how the use of social media hasn’t really changed one generation to another. And it’s like the first time in history where you’ve got one older generation kind of doing the same thing that a younger generation is.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I think just in general with technology, you don’t really see generations shift that quickly to new tech, whether it was software or the iPhone or social media with Facebook. I think a lot of it has been sort of slow growth and slow adoption. And now I think with short-form content, I think it’s allowed plenty of the generations to sort of come together in the sense of 8-year-olds are watching TikTok and Instagram and 80-year-olds are watching TikTok and Instagram. And I don’t think that’s ever really happened in a technology shift.

I mean, even if we think about AI, we have this group of, call it 12 to 30-year-olds that are all in on AI, and then maybe a small section of tech executives that are really big on it, or just company executives, but that’s really it. This middle section doesn’t really exist. And then the upper section, the 60-plus, it’s not really interested in using AI, or if they are, it’s a very slow adoption rate. And I think one of the things that’s super interesting is how simple and easy short-form content has been and also how addicting it’s been, for good or for bad. But I will say, whether it’s my parents or my friends’ parents, plenty of people are constantly on the use of short-form content.

And I think that’s why the digital market in terms of the advertising world has grown so dramatically. I think it’s something like $700 billion on digital ad spend in the past year, which is insane.

Nick Tawil: It’s so large you can’t even really...

Revan Lazarus: You can’t even measure it.

Nick Tawil: Can’t even really appreciate how big that number is.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah. And so I think it’s just, it’s a really interesting time both with AI, but even just in general on social media that you have basically everybody in the world on one technology, which is a new technology. I mean, short-form content really started to pick up 2019 is my guess, 2020. And so within six years you have probably 100% of the demographic using a piece of technology. I think it’s pretty insane.

Nick Tawil: How are sales teams differentiating themselves then in this market?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, good question. I think a big thing with sales is trying to prove that your audience has a unique fit with this brand. And I think a lot of it has been typically like, “Hey, X company, you have budget and we have a great product,” and there’s not much overlap. And I think that we’re starting to see this world of advertising with short-form content, long-form content in general, really see a dip in perceived ROI. I think for a long time it was like, “Oh, we’ll have creators or we’ll have podcasters promote the product and everybody will know about us and we’ll do more sales because everybody knows about us.” So brand awareness. And I think now, I think brands are starting to realize, one, we have the power of social media too in our own right. We don’t need massive creators. We can use micro-influencers or hire our own marketing team to do influencer where we don’t have to pay them more than their base salary.

And so I think you’re starting to move to a world in which everything is turning ROI-based. So those are direct response brands. But even for the brands that aren’t direct response or don’t need to see a huge ROI, like Pepsi or Coca-Cola, what they need is real proof that there’s an audience overlap. And I think that’s what a lot of people are struggling to do. I mean, if you’re a sales team and you’re managing 25 shows, good luck watching all of the content, good luck looking at all of the personality social media pages to see who’s actually using X products, who’s actually talking about certain things. It’s just at the scale, even with the AI models, it’s impossible to figure out all of this.

And so that’s something we’re really focused on, is providing proof behind the pitch. So figuring out across people’s socials, like, “Hey, maybe you’re an agency and you rep a thousand creators and you want to look who’s drinking Pepsi, right?” And so you’ll look and you’ll say, “Oh, wow, we have 50 creators that in 40% of their vlogs drink Pepsi. Great. We can clip that, send that to the brand and really have a differentiating factor,” rather than just like, “Hey, this makes sense because we have all these creators and you should do a deal with us.”

And then I think additionally, there’s a world in which sales teams need to get creative about the pitch. So that is appearances, that is doing short-form personal, which is just starting to, I think, ramp up. I think some companies, like our customer Wave, has been doing that for a long time, and now I think sort of the general market has realized, “Oh, we need to both be selling personal and podcast.” So both on the company level, but also on their individual. And that’s how we’re going to get the most bang for our buck. And figuring out deals to which we can get some sort of portion of that to really incentivize this full holistic integration.

Nick Tawil: I see how brands may struggle to one, identify ROI, or if the budgets are so big, whether that’s even a priority. It’s more about, like you say, audience overlap and real interest, where their brand awareness actually makes an impact. But for podcasters, for creators, the ROI is the brand sometimes, isn’t it? Right, it’s their sponsorship dollars. So how do creators think about ROI? Is it only ad sales and sponsorships?

Revan Lazarus: There’s starting to be this boom, at least with the bigger creators, of figuring out how can I be a part of the marketing engine in a deeper way? Or how can I be part of the company in a deeper way? And I think that’s allowing creators to ask for way better terms. So for instance, like, “Hey, I’m going to promote this, but I also want equity in this company, or I also want backend on my promotion. So yeah, you’re going to pay me a million dollars for this promotion, but then I want two and a half percent of everything I sell.” And so I think it’s starting to get to a point where creators are recognizing their value if they have it, right?

There’s still a lot of proof to be had, but if you are recognizing that this is working, how do we get some sort of percentage of the upside? And then additionally, I think with creators, a lot of it is working with brands that you see a future with. One thing that I’d say to a lot of the creators that we work with is there’s no point to work with a brand for three months and then never work with them again, because you’re essentially branding yourself alongside them. And what you want to look for is brands that are on the up and up that you can grow with. And as they grow, maybe there’s more opportunities for you to grow alongside them.

And so I would really encourage creators to sort of define what type of creator they are and work with companies that they truly love rather than just for a check, which I think a lot of people fall into because they need to. And it’s like if you built a social media following and you want to do it as your full-time job, you’re going to have to make money somehow. And the platforms aren’t going to pay you enough. And so really figuring out what brands do you see a future with is, I think, super important.

Nick Tawil: While podcasting is alternative media, it’s also been around now, I’d say for a good hot minute. What does this look like in 20 years?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, on that note, shout out to my dad. My dad had a podcast in the ‘90s. He would do interviews with Broadway producers and put it on a website. Find the link. But yeah, shout out to my dad. I think in 20 years it looks super interesting in the fact that I think things are going to have to be a lot more personalized. I think that we might start seeing versions of creators or podcasters that are hyper-specific to the individual. One thing I’ve been saying for a long time is, MrBeast has 440 million subscribers, and I think there will be 440 million different MrBeast versions for each person based on the data. And so I think this has to be a platform overhaul for the platforms to be really looking and measuring the data.

And I think the platforms potentially have the ability to now work together in a cross-platform manner of, without getting too Big Brother, but how to track people from one platform to another to figure out what content they’re actually interested in, what are they watching, and then to make sure they have the most personalized experience to them. And I think really there’s sort of this hockey stick curve moment that I think is coming with personalization. And so whether that starts out with there being four different MrBeasts for every 100 million people, I think could be an interesting play.

And I think that you’ll probably start to see that in the next five to 10 years, and then hopefully 20 years, you’re only watching the content that is most applicable to you and that you love every moment of it, and looking at the retention data to make sure every moment that you could be watching content, you’re watching the best content for you. I think it’s a little scary, but I think it’s sort of the way the world’s moving of just personalized everything. I mean, you have AI agents working on everything to make your life as personalized and perfect for you. So I don’t think content would be any different.

Nick Tawil: Mass personalization, mass customization, fascinating. But doesn’t that go counter against one of the things that’s most important between the creator and the audience, which is keeping an authenticity or a trust factor? And if they think they’re just watching some AI-tweaked version of MrBeast, does that make it less compelling?

Revan Lazarus: Probably. I don’t know if people will care is the thing. I think content, short-form content, it’s like a drug. I think if you’re just watching the perfect thing for you, I don’t know if you actually care about the authenticity and that you feel this connection. And I think there will be creators that will be on their own and just have that authentic connection, but I think there will also be people that don’t exist and that are creators. So AI creators that are making the perfect content for you. And so whether that’s actually MrBeast or that’s MrBeast-style videos or whatever it might be, I think you’ll have this duality of AI creators and regular creators and just let the best win.

And I think that you probably will see, just because of the bulk content that these AI creators can make that is much better content and perfect for you, you’ll probably start to see a shift in adoption there.

Nick Tawil: So I want to say it here. Just because the creator doesn’t exist, i.e., it’s an AI creator, doesn’t mean there can’t be in-real-life events.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, totally.

Nick Tawil: I mean, because there’s holograms, there’s, I mean, the robots. I mean, there’s a lot of ways to bring an AI creator into the physical world in some sort of location.

Revan Lazarus: Totally. And I think a lot of these events that are based around creators, whether it’s tentpole moments, so Coachella and the Super Bowl, don’t actually have a lot to do with the creator themselves. I think it’s people that like the creator all being around each other. And I think the creator as the center point is super interesting, but and maybe there’s a meet and greet and stuff like that, but it’s actually not the driving factor. It’s like, “Oh, so-and-so is throwing an event. And great, I’ll go and I’ll support them, but also get to be around everybody that’s sort of like me that we all have this shared interest.” So I don’t see why it wouldn’t be different. And yeah, you could do holograms and all that stuff. And maybe 20 years we’ll have robots, who knows?

Nick Tawil: Yeah. I would argue in terms of Super Bowl halftime shows, the one that we just had this past but what’s his name?

Revan Lazarus: Bad Bunny.

Nick Tawil: Bad Bunny. So in terms of Super Bowl halftime shows, this year’s Bad Bunny, the hedges around his performance, and people were literally in the stands saying, “I can’t even see the show.” But the show is epic in so many ways across social media.

Revan Lazarus: I was one of those people.

Nick Tawil: Okay, there you go. But you’ve probably seen a million clips on social media about it, and that’s the point.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I think actually the Super Bowl was super interesting. So I was there, and yeah, I couldn’t see anything on the halftime show. And so I’m watching the big screen, but I think there’s so many. Those hedges. Funny story, we’re sitting, we’re in the end zone, and we’re watching these people run out in hedges, in grass costumes.

Nick Tawil: Yeah, yeah.

Revan Lazarus: And we’re like, “Oh, my God, the hedges are going to start dancing or something.” And we just figured out...

Nick Tawil: I thought the same exact thing.

Revan Lazarus: Right.

Nick Tawil: And I was waiting for it to happen.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, totally.

Nick Tawil: It never happened.

Revan Lazarus: Me too. Never happened. And I started thinking about it, and I was like, “Wow, it’s just so much more efficient than rolling out these giant, you know, hedge, fake hedges on wheels.” Just dress people up in them and just have them run and it’ll be much more efficient.

Nick Tawil: Is that why they did it?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, 100%.

Nick Tawil: Oh, my God.

Revan Lazarus: It just, think about it. You could have all these people just run and move and make this stage without actually having to build the stage, which I think was really interesting and also created some great social media content for them. But yeah, I think everything is becoming hyper-tailored to the growth sort of economy in the sense of, I think old Super Bowl halftime shows were probably great. You watch Michael Jackson or Rihanna, whenever that was five years ago. It’s like, that is probably a great experience for the people at the stadium. It was a horrible experience for basically everybody at the stadium this year. I mean, the music was phenomenal, but impossible to see anything that was going on.

And so I think it’s really saying, “Hey, we’re gearing this,” and I actually thought this was a great stance, but because it was so controversial and so many people didn’t like it, it was like, “We’re going to make sure everybody sees it, and so we’re going to tailor it for the perfect TV, social media content, and we’re going to blow this out, because who cares about the 80,000 people that are here? We care about the 800 million people that are going to see this,” which I thought was awesome. And so big Bad Bunny fan. First Bad Bunny concert 2017. So I’m an OG. Yeah.

Nick Tawil: And human stages.

Revan Lazarus: And human stages, yeah. It was really great. Yeah. What a show.

Nick Tawil: Let’s talk about the AI creator system overseas. What’s happening here? China, generative AI generally. I know, I mean we talk about it all the time already just within our teams. How are you seeing that use in your own workflow? But also what are some competing forces there that kind of raise your eyebrows?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I mean, I think short-form AI content in general is super interesting. I think you’re starting to see more and more of it on Instagram, TikTok. But yeah, especially these Chinese TikTok competitors, I think a ton of the content, maybe the majority, is AI-driven content. And I actually think there’s a huge growing force there in terms of we don’t really care again if this is a human or not. We just want the best content. And I think that you’re starting to see a lot of that. I will say sometimes I’ll watch a piece of content on Instagram Reels or something and I won’t realize it’s AI until halfway in. And I think the models are just getting that good.

And I think even TikTok’s competitor in China actually has a video model that they are building.

Nick Tawil: Talking about Kuaishou?

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, so Kuaishou I think has an AI video model within their app. And so I think it’s just starting to become more and more. And so I wouldn’t be surprised if TikTok then allows you to make AI videos and has their own model and stuff like that just to encourage the bulk of content. Because these platforms are in the business of showing you the most content and keeping you on longer so they can show you more ads. And so it’s to their benefit to just have more content on there because if you can service more people and they’ll watch for longer, it benefits them.

And so I know Meta has AI content flags and stuff like that, and I think they’re doing that to make sure people are safe and there’s a difference of misinformation and stuff like that, but I don’t know at scale if that’s going to keep up because I think people will just want to watch.

Nick Tawil: Or if it’s even defensible.

Revan Lazarus: Exactly.

Nick Tawil: It’s like you can’t stem the tide.

Revan Lazarus: Exactly. And so I think that’s super interesting. And again, if you’re giving me the best content for me, I don’t really care if it’s AI, if it’s informational and I’m getting my latest news that’s perfectly curated to exactly what I want. I don’t care if an AI is telling me, “Here’s the news and this is everything that happened,” versus some talk show host or some news anchor.

Nick Tawil: How are brands thinking about it though?

Revan Lazarus: I just have no idea. I don’t really have a good answer for that. Yeah. I don’t know. If I was a brand I could probably have a better analysis. But I mean, I think in terms of how I see brands using AI is there is so much marketing material that is now being pushed out. Whether it’s Nike or Porsche, they’re all using AI B-roll. And so they’re taking photos of the car, of the shoes and saying with AI, “Let’s make this look in certain ways.” And so I think they’re doing a lot of marketing around AI video and AI photos and stuff like that.

But I’m not necessarily sure how they’re thinking about it with creators and podcasts, but I know the assets they’ve been able to make and how quickly they’ve been able to make them is unparalleled.

Nick Tawil: Yeah, the commercial industry has been one of the earliest adopters of generative AI and infusing that in the commercials, and brands don’t seem to have a problem with it at all. The economics are just really compelling. And so it’s interesting how generative AI, one, the quality of it, but also where it takes hold in certain parts of entertainment and media. It’s not necessarily a completely linear adoption or an all-in-one adoption. It’s happening in some places faster and sooner than others. That’s just a result and I think a factor of the quality of what you’re dealing with. And as that stuff gets better, I think one of the holy grails is going to be actual long-form film.

And once you start talking about that, I don’t think it necessarily replaces Pixar tech or other types of film formats, but it’s just another type of film that people become used to and start enjoying consuming.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I mean they put Paul Walker in one of those Fast and Furious movies after he was dead. So it’s like, that was CGI.

Nick Tawil: It was CGI.

Revan Lazarus: It’s all the same thing, right.

Nick Tawil: It’s a different version, different tool.

Revan Lazarus: And I think there’s a lot of, AI is catching a lot of flack for the name and what it is, but people have been doing some version of making things that didn’t exist for a long time within content. Whether that’s making something look like New York, but it was filmed in Canada, right? It happens all the time. And so I think just because it’s tech doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong or it’s different tech. And so, yeah, it’s been happening forever, and I think it’s just part of the process. And I think even for these animators that their job’s getting taken, it used to take them four years to make a movie. Now it takes them, in terms of the animation, a couple weeks. That’s pretty awesome.

Now they get to work on a bunch of projects. I know Pixar in general, they had to pitch three movies. Each writer or each animator had to pitch three different movies and they would choose the best one. And so now if you have a team of 10, instead of pitching three, why not pitch 30? You have all the tools to do so. And so I think it actually just makes content better, and I think it makes the level of content you can create that much more interesting. And so I think it just benefits the whole industry and benefits the audience. And I think that, I think if it had a different name or if it was associated with something more positive, I don’t think anybody would have an issue.

And I think one thing I’ve been seeing is these commencement speeches and how the graduating class is booing anytime AI or artificial intelligence is mentioned. Have you seen those?

Nick Tawil: No, I haven’t.

Revan Lazarus: Okay, so it’s like somebody speaking at UCF or at really any school, and I saw this whole compilation. It’s like, they’ll mention, “Oh, the growth of AI or artificial intelligence,” and the whole graduating class booing. And it’s like, I think it’s insane. And I think we are also trapped in this tech world and venture world. And so we see all the positives, but I think a lot of people are just seeing this as a negative. And I would hate for that to actually be the case because I remember watching that and I was like, “AI did your homework. Why are you booing it? This helped you get through college.” So I think that’s my take.

Nick Tawil: That’s great. No, to go back to, even go back to movies, even how I think certain types of formats of movies will come back into fashion. Like the original When Harry Met Sally rom-com doesn’t really get made anymore, or if it does, not for the big screen. If it does, it gets made as an episodic or a miniseries format or it’s on Netflix and it’s just a different format. But something like that comes back into play when AI can generate the setting in every single scene and it’s a specific spot in New York or in Paris or wherever, and suddenly the production value, the production costs of that film just go way down.

And yes, you can make it faster, but also you can make a different type of movie that people probably haven’t seen in 10 years or 20 years.

Revan Lazarus: Oh yeah, you can make a movie you want to make without the budget of the studios needing to give you $300 million to make this movie.

Nick Tawil: Yeah, there might be a way, there might be a renaissance in the pull away from Marvel Cinematic, huge big-budget movies where that becomes 90% of what you see in theaters and maybe goes back down to a lower percentage. But because other types of films come out.

Revan Lazarus: I think something that’s super interesting is probably, it’s not content-related but just the, I think the overall job creation that will probably happen with AI.

Nick Tawil: Tell me more about that. Because everyone talks about AI and the scarcity mindset, it’s going to replace jobs, but I actually think it’s going to, anytime we talk about innovation, I think there’s a net positive that happens.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, I mean I was talking about this last night at dinner, but even if you just think about the HVAC industry, how many jobs are going to be created to cool all these data centers? Hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US in HVAC that will probably pay pretty damn well. Or I heard a bunch of actually different people give this analogy, but about radiologists and it’s like, “Oh, AI can now analyze X-rays so all radiologists won’t have jobs.” It’s like, no, people are just going to get more X-rays or people are going to need to understand every little thing a tiny bit better. So there’s just going to be more jobs or there’s going to be more software engineers, not less.

I think this is a huge one that everybody’s like, “Oh, rest in peace to all the software engineers,” which I don’t necessarily believe is true at all. I think there are so many things in our daily life that we could use software for that we don’t because it’s too expensive to build for a marginal benefit or this technical barrier of knowledge. Exactly. Or it’s like, “Hey, that doesn’t really matter to have software because I’ll just get by.” And plenty of things in my life that could be improved by software that I’m just like, I put up with or I do the process because it is what it is and it’s not worth building a piece of software for it.

But now, because you can build software for anything, I think there’s just going to be 100x the amount of software needed to be built and software engineers will need to build that because in order to make it production-grade, it can’t be vibe-coded. It just won’t happen. I think what you’ll see is a revolution of everything just getting software. And so I’m very excited about the industry in general. And one thing I heard, did Jeff Bezos say yesterday, was, “This is like digging out your basement with a shovel and somebody comes along with a bulldozer and it’s like, ‘Let me help you.’ And it’s like, why wouldn’t you say yes? It’s just going to help.”

Or even the fact that right now most households are dual-income, but it might not need to be, it might need to be single-income because you can just be that much more productive. I think there is this, I think there’s this mindset that AI is going to hurt. And I think that it probably will hurt if you think that or if you don’t adopt it, right. And I think it’s all a mindset. I just turned 25 and I was probably going to work a regular job and I was not a programmer. I was going to be working in podcasting and selling podcast ads, which is a great business, make great money. But I think the level of impact that I’ve been able to have because of AI and just adopting AI, I get to work with phenomenal people, hundreds of people that are impacted by our product and by what we do is the most rewarding thing ever. Money aside.

And I think so many people don’t realize you can change thousands of people’s lives by saying, “Wow, I have this pain point. If I solve this for myself, I can probably solve this for a lot of people.” And I think it’s never been easy to start a company. I think it’s never been easier to build a product and get it out to millions of people with short-form content. And so I would say all of these new grads that are booing AI, you have the opportunity to one, make a shit ton of money right now because you are the right generation for it. But also you can just benefit your own life. If you’re going to go work a corporate job, build AI agents to automate the stuff you hate about your corporate job. There’s a million things to do.

And so I think you just have to dive in because I think this is the biggest revolution in history. And I’ve been going to AI conferences for four years before...

Nick Tawil: I’m sure the nature of those conferences has changed even.

Revan Lazarus: Oh my God, it used to be like, “AI is the biggest thing that’s going to happen,” and now it’s like, “Okay, it’s here and we thought it would be a quarter of the size.” And I think this is in my opinion 10 times as big as the internet. I think this is going to be every company. I think you’re actually going to start to see a breakup of these semi-large companies. I think there’s going to be these huge companies which are these model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, et cetera. And then you’re going to see all of these small niche companies in AI and in software that are much smaller market cap.

And I don’t think there’s going to be any $500 billion software companies that exist because they’re just going to get crushed by the models or they’re going to get crushed by the really small company that’s just doing it better. And this is, I think this is a big thing. Everything that can be hypervertical is going to exist and then everything that isn’t is just going to be these large language models. So insurance, large language models. But maybe specific type of unique insurance that’s a super one-off, like very much these small companies or even in podcasting.

Nick Tawil: Classic cars insurance.

Revan Lazarus: Exactly. And so I think you’re going to have these model companies, these five model companies that are going to be worth tens of trillions of dollars. I mean Anthropic is going to be worth a trillion dollars this year. They’re going to do a trillion dollars in revenue in a few years. And then you’re going to have all these smaller companies that are super hypervertical and have the ability to just service their customer better than large language models. But the companies in the middle that are just doing regular software that are now worth a couple hundred billion, I don’t think stand a chance. And I think it’s a very concerning time for those companies. But I think everybody else that’s fresh, it’s like how can you pick something that’s a smaller industry?

And I think the investing world too from your side as a VC is there are companies that are going to be worth trillions of dollars and there’s probably companies that can just be worth billions of dollars and that’s probably it. There’s not going to be $100 billion companies in software. I think it’s just going to be the models and everybody else on the smaller side. And so it’s really interesting time to be a semi-large company. And I wonder how Salesforce and all these other companies feel. And I think they obviously have a great integrated product that’s very sticky. And so I think the short term is probably pretty bright. I mean the revenue keeps going up and up. But I wonder, 20, 50 years from now, what does that look like?

Because obviously this breakup of the small companies and the massive companies isn’t going to happen in the next five years. People are still stuck in their workflows and stuff like that, but slowly can have Anthropic make you a CRM. You can have it do all your automated emails, you can have it build your entire Salesforce pipeline. You can have it do data enrichment, you can have it do everything. So it’s an interesting time or Figma, stuff like that. Figma is great and it helps companies ship software. And I actually, I’m sort of bullish on Figma. I think nobody is, but because of the software boom, I think you all need some version of Figma because cloud design is great but you still need it to be productized. And I think Figma has a lot of room to grow.

But even stuff like that, it’s not a $100 billion company, I mean the market just showed that. And so I think you’re just going to have these companies that are super niche and these companies that are extremely general and nothing in the middle.

Nick Tawil: I think if you have nothing in the middle, what you have is really a larger SMB economy. So small-medium-sized businesses that oscillate between making a run at growing but also are lifestyle businesses run by what we would have considered mom and pop maybe 10 years ago, but being run by mom and pop at that level and they become lifestyle companies that are actually profitable. And it’s just a different type of middle class to anywhere from lower to middle to upper-middle class that comes into existence. And if that’s the case, I think you have to think about how that eventually gets consolidated because there’s just always going to be a recycling. There’s a cyclical play.

When you have a decentralized set of companies and they’re all maybe hyper-specialized, I think you always have another person that comes in and says, “How can we combine, how can we aggregate and how can we optimize even this?” And so I don’t know if that happens when you have the tens of trillions of dollars type companies that are in the background. Because especially in advertising and advertising technology a decade ago, one of the most common refrains when an ad tech company was pitching an investor is, “What if Apple decides to cut you off, cut you out? What if Google decides to cut you off or cut you out?” And that’s the same exact narrative that’s going to begin happening where like, “Great, you’re this type of hyper-specialized, verticalized company. But what if you lose access or what if Anthropic or OpenAI decide to do what you’re doing tomorrow?” And so there’s always a risk there. But what I think people realize if you kind of maybe go a level deeper is that Apple and Google never really kicked a lot of people out. And so it actually ended up being a huge net positive and an additional part of the economy that was able to just live.

Revan Lazarus: Totally. Yeah. I think obviously the model companies need the small businesses to pay their APIs and to keep them alive. That’s where the majority of the revenue is coming from, is from businesses. And so I think I’d be less worried on the niche stuff of what if they cut you out, but what if they do what you start doing? Or what if the models become so good that your niche company doesn’t matter? I think is super interesting. I do think though that the big company is never going to be able to service the specific exact customer and make them feel like this product was extremely built just for them, which I think is the difference. And I think customers will be willing to pay for, “This product was made just for me.”

Which is why I think these companies will be smaller because you can’t make that many “just for me” companies. And so Anthropic is not going to come and take your, even my business, the market’s not big enough, right. But are they going to do insurance? Are they going to do health care? Absolutely. Are they going to do finance? Absolutely. There’s a million of these other verticals that are trillion-dollar industries, which is why I’m sort of bullish on this take is you need to pick a niche, you need to monopolize the niche and figure out growth later. But you need to be really good at doing something that, yeah, maybe isn’t the biggest market in the world, but that you can make the “for me” product.

And that’s sort of what I say is I want the customer experience to be like, “Wow, they made this in-house for us.” That’s how I want it to feel. Then there’s only so much you can grow with that before you have to change up the way you think about your company and doing products. But it’s also why companies like Palantir and all these forward-deployed companies do really well because they go in, they look at your business, they spend a couple months doing it and they say, “Okay, great, we know how everything works, we’re going to make you custom software for you.” And so they’re actually, Palantir is a consulting company. They’re a software consulting company.

There is, as much as Deloitte or McKinsey that come into your business and, “Okay, yep, we know what’s wrong, we know how to fix things and we’ll make you software.” Yet they’re also getting the ARR multiples like SaaS companies, which is kind of crazy, but I think that’s sort of where you’re going. It’s just like, how can you make custom solutions for specific companies and specific niche industries? And then I think sort of what you were saying on that growth side is I think that these companies are going to be huge and I think that they’re going to be more nation-states than they are companies.

And I think that we’re playing a very dangerous game where you’re giving the power to five people and it’s just like you get into a point where they don’t want to be public companies because being a public company now sucks and their valuations.

Nick Tawil: Don’t say that to SpaceX.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, exactly. But I think SpaceX would be a private company if they thought they could raise money at $1.75 trillion in the private markets. They just can’t. But you have Anthropic that’s going to raise $900 billion, where in the public market it probably can’t get $900 billion, but in private markets definitely can, no problem. And so I think they’re going to try to stay in the private markets for as long as possible, which leads them to just have less customer favorability when it comes to feeling a part of this company. I think that you’ll get to a point where if Anthropic or OpenAI was a public company and people could invest and they’d be happy for the growth, they’d want to see more.

You wouldn’t have, I think, so much booing at graduations because people could feel like they could take part in the upside. But I think they’re going to try to stay private companies for as long as possible and potentially not even when they go to fundraise in the public markets, not raise that much. I think SpaceX is only raising $75 billion of $1.75 trillion. And so they’re not giving up really any percentage of the company. And so I think it’s going to be really interesting to look at how these model companies operate and then also how they give back in a way to the people or else there’s going to be riots.

One thing I heard this week was, when Hershey’s was making their factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania, they made a theme park, amusement park, right? They have roller coasters. It’s like, “Yeah, sorry for creating all this traffic, noise and pollution in your town. So here’s an amusement park.” It’s like what is the equivalent to that for the model companies? Like, “Hey, sorry for putting a data center in your backyard and sorry for creating all this havoc. What can we do to give back?”

Nick Tawil: Universal basic income.

Revan Lazarus: Exactly, exactly. But exactly.

Nick Tawil: Well, as these companies get huge, back in 2022, 2023, there is actually a lot of discussion around how actual nation-states would have their own nation-state models, their own AI models. I think that conversation’s gone a little bit by the wayside just with the growth around the privates like Anthropic and OpenAI. But that could very well just come back into the dialogue, into the fold. These companies are getting so big that maybe they’re just partially owned or they’re heavily regulated to the point where it becomes like a phone company.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah. I used to think there was a scenario in which OpenAI could no longer raise enough money to continue to grow. They wanted to grow with their burn and so they were going to have to rely on the government. I no longer think that. I mean, I used to think six months ago that, “Yeah, I think they’re just going to grow so fast and I don’t think they’re going to be able to raise enough money and they’re going to be the most powerful company potentially in the world.” This is before Anthropic obviously went on a tear. But who’s going to fund them? The government. And then the government’s going to have an AI and then you’re going to be asking all your personal questions, right. And so all of this stuff in the same way of...

I think there was a couple of years ago there was this fear that quantum computing would basically break everything. And so that it would break all your communication systems. And so there was this scenario I had thought of in my head which was like, if it happens, and for instance, you can’t send any encrypted messages, everything is just out in public. The government has to create some anti-quantum computing phone, right. So now you’re on a government phone, right. And now they’re listening to everything you say. And there’s a world in which we’re...

Nick Tawil: Back to where we started.

Revan Lazarus: Exactly. There’s just this world in which it’s an infinite loop of just corruption of privacy. And I think there’s a world in which there’s stuff that’s scary. And I think these AI companies are verging on the scary side for most people. I’m obviously super bullish on these companies. I think these companies are great for the world, but I don’t think if they don’t start giving back to the public in some sense, I think there will be riots in the streets for real. So it’s going to be interesting.

Nick Tawil: I mean, short-term disruption would lead to higher rates of unemployment across younger populations, which is always a recipe for volatility and also a recipe for more socialist mindset I would argue.

Revan Lazarus: It’s been a pretty fun conversation.

Nick Tawil: I know, I mean you speak at a thousand words a minute.

Revan Lazarus: Yeah, this is actually me.

Nick Tawil: We got a lot here. Well, it helps when you’re an expert in something and you’ve devoted your life to something to be really good at it. I think you speak very quickly. Anybody would speak very quickly because there’s just a high degree of confidence and knowledge around it. So I think that comes through. So thanks for the time, thanks for coming out, and maybe we’re going to do another one of these.

Revan Lazarus: I’m in. Cheers.

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In this episode of Infinite Loops, hosted by OSV’s Nick Tawil, we sit down for a roundtable on the hidden global economy of secondhand textiles with Brian London, Marisa Adler, and Eric Stubin, all experts in the field. We discuss how the industry works, why fast fashion has made the problem harder, why 70% of the world uses secondhand clothing, what AI can and can’t solve, and why turning an old shirt into a new shirt is still much harder than it sounds.

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

Links

Apple Podcasts

Highlights

70% of the Planet Wears Your Hand-Me-Downs

Brian London: When we say reuse, it’s useful I think just to kind of conceptualize what that really means. And I mean the stats I’ve seen, something like 70% of the world uses secondhand clothing. Something that probably includes US consumers that buy from thrift. But dozens of countries, it’s the main item that they buy. When people are living on a few dollars a day, it’s really the only affordable option. So that’s something in the profile of that in the book. The different benefits of our industry, again that no one really notices or sees much, is the environmental benefit which we can get into that. All the water and greenhouse gases it takes to create new garments. The charitable benefit. So you don’t even know how many billions of dollars go to Goodwill, Salvation Army, powering huge amounts of workforce training and other services like that.

Marisa Adler: And even the for-profit sector often has a charitable aspect to it.

Brian London: Sure, yeah.

Marisa Adler: Just wanted to mention that.

Brian London: Yeah, we’ll get back to that in a second because the collection part is a huge question too. But yeah, the third big benefit is that it provides affordable clothing to folks that otherwise really would have no option. So you see that every time. And we can get into this too about some of the barriers to trade a lot of times. But you’ll see every time they try to impose a ban or a restriction on used clothing in these countries, the people get up in arms because it’s such a hotly desired product. And sometimes there’s different forces at play, but it’s all around the world, it’s a hotly desired—

Eric Stubin: I’ve always looked at it in the following way in that demand always told the overwhelming story. I mean, demand for these secondhand products is global. And like you alluded to, Brian, two-thirds, I believe, of Africa lives on less than $2 a day. So you could really see, especially when you travel there and not for safari, but when you really travel and you walk in where people live and you see just how ubiquitous secondhand really is, it really gives you a distinct impression and you see the demand. And it’s not only Africa, I mean, it’s across the Americas, it’s throughout the world.

The World Wants America’s Old Jerseys

Brian London: But largely it’s a story of American soft power influence throughout the world. So in a lot of countries, I mean, I think in most markets a lot of times though, because of our, because of Hollywood, our sports stars, just like a lot of people here, they’ll be looking to have a LeBron James jersey or Jalen Brunson, go Knicks, jersey. Because American culture is kind of what they’re buying also.

Nick Tawil: And at the time of this taping, the Knicks are in game two.

Brian London: Okay, yeah, good luck tonight. And so, yeah, I guess traditionally over the decades, and as America’s role in the world changes or doesn’t change, I mean, that’s been sort of a constant because obviously we’ve been a major force around the world, definitely culturally still, and I think that plays a lot into it. But each country and each region has their own, whether it’s religious, cultural, weather, climate issues, they all have their specific items that they want.

What Does Vintage Even Mean Now?

Nick Tawil: For thrift and vintage, has there been a change? So it’s as hot as ever, but has there also been a change in where it’s happening? When you think of high-end vintage, you think of metropolitan areas like New York or Paris or London or LA. And I know Japan has a big Americana vintage market, but is this happening in other places as it continues to be a steadfast thing that consumers want or grow?

Eric Stubin: My sense is that there is large global demand for American vintage. I mean, Americana, American fashion is a big part of global fashion today. And it continues to be a lot of demand throughout the world for American vintage. Vintage, the term vintage has changed a lot over the last decade. Vintage typically sometimes means, what does vintage mean? Yeah, vintage. I mean, I think in the past, well, when I first started in this industry in the ‘90s, it meant ‘40s and ‘50s and sometimes even ‘60s as a decade in terms of what you were looking for. But obviously as time advances, that changes. Now ‘90s is popular and different fashion styles and what the vintage crowd is looking for, whether it’s flare leg, skinny leg jeans, that changes of course annually.

Nick Tawil: So as you’re sorting the stuff, you kind of have to be up on this.

Eric Stubin: Yeah, I mean for the companies that sell it and deal in those markets, they have to be very aware of what they’re selling and what they’re collecting or they’re not going to find it. But yeah, the world is always looking for American vintage and there seems to be continual demand for this, although that changes what constitutes it.

Transcript

Nick Tawil

All right, so I’d love for you guys to tell me exactly how this secondhand global economy works. And for a lot of people that don’t know about it, maybe the best way to go about it is to walk me through what happens after you drop off a bag of donated clothing to a Goodwill or a Salvation Army.

Brian London

So in addition to my day job in my industry position, another role I have is baseball coach for Little League. And so I bring that because last week I was looking in our bag and I realized there’s a bunch of T-shirts in there. We have extra uniforms and also T-shirts and a fleece in there too, and no one claimed them. And that’s a moment. There’s a lot of moments like this where it comes up in daily life where it starts to seem like clothing really is almost started to be seen as disposable, almost like a Kleenex or something. And then another moment I think about it is we were at the beach for Easter, and you see these silly shirts, crazy shirts. And it’s almost just like any message you have just becomes a T-shirt. It’s almost like it really is just like printing T-shirts.

So I bring that up because we were talking before about hidden economies. And on the way here, I was looking as I walked. I started walking, I took Uber, but driving down or up, whatever I was doing, first of all the clothing stores, and then I started looking at each person wearing clothing, started to think how long are they going to wear that shirt? Where is it going to go? Just because I knew we were coming here. And it really is a fascinating story because you see them all the time. Everyone you look at is wearing something.

But the story before and after is a fascinating story that really never gets told. So I mean, a little bit more, I think the public is starting to look at it a little more. But yeah, I bring that up because we’re going to get into that story. So when you look at the shirt, what happens before? And I’m not an expert on this side, but that book Travels of a T-Shirt, shout out Pietra Rivoli, great book, tracks the globalized production of a T-shirt. So you got cotton growing in Texas, it goes to another country where it gets spun and then made into the cloth and then dyed and all this. So there’s all that goes into it, huge amount of resources that go into it and the volume of it. So that whole machine has just grown enormously.

And Marisa has all kinds of interesting statistics. She can say, she really normally paints that picture well, but it’s a staggering amount and the story of what happens after someone’s done with it. So people don’t really think too much about it. People tend to give it to Goodwill or another local charity, and then they think it’s just kind of, most people think that store sells it to people in need, which is a fair—

Nick Tawil

That’s what I always thought.

Brian London

Yeah, fair assumption. But long ago, even before this recent influx of huge volumes of fashion, they got way more than they could ever serve the public with, and monetizing it through thrift stores and then downstream, which we’ll talk about, became the best method to monetize all their programs, their job training programs, and a host of other charities. So anyway, to get back to the question, because they can only use a certain amount, and I’m not even sure what the current numbers are, but traditionally we would say maybe a quarter of it, 20% might sell to folks here domestically. Then the rest goes down a path that I think is equally, probably more interesting than the journey that it took to become a shirt.

So at that point, it’ll get consolidated into bales of used clothing. So we call it salvage, mixed rags, or different names for it. And it’ll end up getting sorted somewhere. And we can get to the history of that as much as you want, but it used to get sorted here in the United States. And as the cost of doing—that’s why I say sorting. And Eric will give a much more detailed picture of that. But essentially the job then is all this stuff has, over the years, the same entrepreneurial spirit that created that huge fashion boom, which became a fast fashion problem, also has over the years created much of the solution. And so that solution involves finding a home for all those pieces.

And so we get all the numbers, but between being reusable here or somewhere else around the world, being repurposed, being recycled, and increasingly we’re looking at this world of what else? How can you really turn that into new material? So it goes all over the world. Some of it goes all over the world and then comes back to the US. Some of it goes across the world to get sorted most efficiently and then to another home, and then sometimes it crosses borders again, and then it’ll get repurposed. So there’s infinite stories, infinite loops that these items go through. It happens every day. And the volumes really are staggering.

Nick Tawil

In terms of volume, just coming from the United States, any range of time is good. But you think about this in tonnage, right?

Eric Stubin

I think the stat that I’ve heard is about 2.8 billion pounds annually. That was the last EPA stat that I recall. Is that about right?

Marisa Adler

Yeah. When you, I think of this in terms of tonnage because of the scale. There’s sort of a little bit of a difference. When you’re in the industry, you think in terms of pounds because that’s how things are traded often. But when you’re looking at this from a systems view, looking at it from the tons perspective is more meaningful to a waste management professional. But 17 million tons were generated as waste back in 2018, and we don’t really have more official numbers as of then. But it’s a lot.

Eric Stubin

What’s the EPA stat that they’ve always quoted? Is it 3.8 or 2.8 billion? I’m having a hard time recalling that. I don’t know if we can look in the background. But there’s a stat that the EPA is always talking about and they typically use the number. I think they say that 3.8 billion pounds of textile waste are donated, recycled, that’s captured by large charities like Goodwill, blue chip charities, private sector collectors that go through the reverse supply chain, including US recyclers of waste.

Nick Tawil

So for people listening, the reverse supply chain, talk about what is that. What do you mean by that? And is that the recycling that happens with these donated textiles?

Eric Stubin

Yeah, I mean, just picking up on Brian’s example. So somebody gives away a sweatshirt because they didn’t, it wasn’t quite the right fit, or it could be that they used to wash the car and the dog with it and it’s reached its real end of life. So they go and donate that to a charity. Charity will look at that and decide whether it ends up in their thrift environment or not. And then often if it doesn’t end up in the thrift environment, it will make its way to a US or an international textile recycler. Like Brian said, they bale that material and then it’s sold on a spot market basis to recyclers around the world that then sort that material for highest use values.

And that’s traditionally how our industry has functioned for decades, sorting material for highest use values, extracting everything from at the top end, reusable quality clothing down to wiping rags and recycled fibers that are used in many household products like carpet batting and insulation for the hood of your automobile.

Marisa Adler

So if you look at it from a very simplistic perspective, the average consumer will drop off their unwanted clothing or textile items to a thrift store or into a clothing bin. That material, some of it gets sold domestically back to consumers here through thrift markets. The rest of it gets baled, it gets exported to some—there are some concentrated hubs across the world where there’s a lot of sorting and grading that happens and then it gets sent into reuse, reclaimed wiping cloth, and fiber recycling.

Nick Tawil

So there’s three main buckets.

Marisa Adler

Yeah,so about, the stats are about 45% of all the post-consumer textiles that are collected are funneled into a reuse channel. Just looking at this top down holistically, wherever in the world that reuse happens, 30% goes into reclaimed wiping cloth, which is basically you take a T-shirt, you cut it up, you take out all the metal parts and you resell it into an industry that uses it for cleaning or wiping.

Nick Tawil

What are some of the typical industries?

Marisa Adler

Automotive, you have the petroleum industry, the agricultural industry, the hospitality industry. It’s actually one of the secret underpinnings of the used textile trade in my opinion, because people just don’t realize that industry even exists. And there’s a lot of benefits that offsets the need for new wiping cloth material, new production or paper products and things like that.

Eric Stubin

I think reclaimed wipers are roughly about half of all wiping rags sold. And there’s a little fun fact, but there’s actually more than a half a dozen different grades of wiping rags. So depending on absorbencies and the absorbency rates and things of that nature, if it has to pick up a heavy viscous oil material or you’re cleaning up paint, there’s different preferences for different industries.

Marisa Adler

Yeah, it’s highly technical. They’re tools.

Brian London

That’s a whole sector of industry. So yeah, I don’t know if we’ve done an intro, but so I have my private company, Woodhouse and Shapiro, but I also currently serve as president of SMART, that’s Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. Eric was a past president on the board with me.

Nick Tawil

And so this is the trade association.

Brian London

Yes, we represent the whole spectrum of folks that handle this material one way or another, if you’re collecting it, sorting it, exporting it, importing it, repurposing it. Yeah. So the wiper division is a whole chapter of our industry that I’m not an expert in. We’ll move the material. Eric has been sorting that material for a long time. But yeah, it’s a whole world of its own and interfaces with a lot of big industries too, which I’m sure they probably don’t know the whole background of it either. But just to be clear because among us, we use certain terminology and I’m thinking when we say post-consumer textile, that’s a fancy word. It just means the shirt once I give it—

Nick Tawil

Right, old clothes.

Brian London

Post consumer. Yeah, old clothes. So and that terminology, we have different words for what we mean there, but a post-consumer textile.

Eric Stubin

And it also includes anything that we wear. I like to describe it as anything we wear, meaning footwear, handbags, belts, accessories. It really covers the full gamut of everything wear.

Marisa Adler

Yeah, there’s post—and when you’re thinking in terms of how waste management professionals classify waste, there’s post-industrial, which is off the factory, it’s cutting scraps or things like that. Pre-consumer. So all the things that the brands overproduce or don’t end up selling through in their retail stores, all that’s considered pre-consumer, which is a subsegment of post-industrial. And then the vast majority of the waste comes from post-consumer. That’s everything that’s been sold, worn, used and no longer wanted by the consumer.

Brian London

Yeah, but so we’re looking at these billions of pounds of post-consumer textiles. When we say reuse, it’s useful I think just to kind of conceptualize what that really means. And I mean the stats I’ve seen, something like 70% of the world uses secondhand clothing. Something that probably includes US consumers that buy from thrift. But dozens of countries, it’s the main item that they buy. When people are living on a few dollars a day, it’s really the only affordable option. So that’s something in the profile of that in the book. The different benefits of our industry, again that no one really notices or sees much, is the environmental benefit which we can get into that. All the water and greenhouse gases it takes to create new garments. The charitable benefit. So you don’t even know how many billions of dollars go to Goodwill, Salvation Army, powering huge amounts of workforce training and other services like that.

Marisa Adler

And even the for-profit sector often has a charitable aspect to it.

Brian London

Sure, yeah.

Marisa Adler

Just wanted to mention that.

Brian London

Yeah, we’ll get back to that in a second because the collection part is a huge question too. But yeah, the third big benefit is that it provides affordable clothing to folks that otherwise really would have no option. So you see that every time. And we can get into this too about some of the barriers to trade a lot of times. But you’ll see every time they try to impose a ban or a restriction on used clothing in these countries, the people get up in arms because it’s such a hotly desired product. And sometimes there’s different forces at play, but it’s all around the world, it’s a hotly desired—

Eric Stubin

I’ve always looked at it in the following way in that demand always told the overwhelming story. I mean, demand for these secondhand products is global. And like you alluded to, Brian, two-thirds, I believe, of Africa lives on less than $2 a day. So you could really see, especially when you travel there and not for safari, but when you really travel and you walk in where people live and you see just how ubiquitous secondhand really is, it really gives you a distinct impression and you see the demand. And it’s not only Africa, I mean, it’s across the Americas, it’s throughout the world. And it’s also interesting to point out that today in the United States, this is the moment for secondhand really since COVID. But thrift and vintage almost have never been hotter.

So I feel like there’s a lot—yeah, demand is just global and as well as in the United States today, I mean it’s really all-time fever pitch for secondhand clothing.

Brian London

It’s been a funny thing too in that between COVID and all the different changes, societal changes, secondhand has really maintained its physical presence. It’s like a lot of businesses will get pushed out by an Amazon where you can easily order something. And there are efforts online to have thrift online. We have ThredUp and companies like Fleek, SMART members, thank you, that are working to make it more online. But it really is largely still an in-person experience. So a lot of the in-person shopping is thrift because there’s something unique about those items. So there’s something nice about that whole process. So yeah, for that reason and probably a lot of other reasons of authenticity and getting unique items in a world where fast fashion blows through.

Nick Tawil

For thrift and vintage, has there been a change? So it’s as hot as ever, but has there also been a change in where it’s happening? When you think of high-end vintage, you think of metropolitan areas like New York or Paris or London or LA. And I know Japan has a big Americana vintage market, but is this happening in other places as it continues to be a steadfast thing that consumers want or grow?

Eric Stubin

My sense is that there is large global demand for American vintage. I mean, Americana, American fashion is a big part of global fashion today. And it continues to be a lot of demand throughout the world for American vintage. Vintage, the term vintage has changed a lot over the last decade. Vintage typically sometimes means, what does vintage mean? Yeah, vintage. I mean, I think in the past, well, when I first started in this industry in the ‘90s, it meant ‘40s and ‘50s and sometimes even ‘60s as a decade in terms of what you were looking for. But obviously as time advances, that changes. Now ‘90s is popular and different fashion styles and what the vintage crowd is looking for, whether it’s flare leg, skinny leg jeans, that changes of course annually.

Nick Tawil

So as you’re sorting the stuff, you kind of have to be up on this.

Eric Stubin

Yeah, I mean for the companies that sell it and deal in those markets, they have to be very aware of what they’re selling and what they’re collecting or they’re not going to find it. But yeah, the world is always looking for American vintage and there seems to be continual demand for this, although that changes what constitutes it.

Nick Tawil

What are the—I want to stay on this a little longer. What are the taste preferences for secondhand clothing that’s being sold in vintage thrift shops maybe in the United States versus what Latin America or Africans prefer or Eastern European countries prefer if the secondhand donations make it that way. Are there taste preferences across geographies?

Eric Stubin

I mean my sense is there’s a difference in the post-consumer or the old clothes that you’ll find in Europe are slightly different from that found in the United States. It has a little bit to do with the styling of each market. I’ve heard people in our industry say that the market for T-shirts or what we call the industry jargon is polo. The market for polos or T-shirts is a bit different from Europe compared to the United States. Northern Europe, the climate’s a bit cooler, so there’s more heavies or heavyweight winter, fall type clothing sold in those markets. So you get a little bit more of that in the post-consumer textile waste.

Of course, if you’re shopping for vintage clothing and you happen to live in the north of Europe, you might look for warmer clothes, you’re looking for sweaters, things of that nature. So it really has a lot to do with the markets that these shoppers are in. But yeah, there’s definitely differences between the major markets that supply secondhand clothing because fashion is slightly different all over the world.

Marisa Adler

That’s why sorting gets really complicated sometimes. But it’s also why there’s a home for almost everything that is in a bale, basically. But there’s cultural preferences in different end markets. There’s climatic differences, there’s trends that the industry always has to be on top of for when they’re sorting and grading. I think all of those things come into play. And so how a bale gets sorted and who it’s sent to is highly tailored.

Brian London

Yeah, so Eric could go through all the different items. But largely it’s a story of American soft power influence throughout the world. So in a lot of countries, I mean, I think in most markets a lot of times though, because of our, because of Hollywood, our sports stars, just like a lot of people here, they’ll be looking to have a LeBron James jersey or Jalen Brunson, go Knicks, jersey. Because American culture is kind of what they’re buying also.

Nick Tawil

And at the time of this taping, the Knicks are in game two.

Brian London

Okay, yeah, good luck tonight. And so, yeah, I guess traditionally over the decades, and as America’s role in the world changes or doesn’t change, I mean, that’s been sort of a constant because obviously we’ve been a major force around the world, definitely culturally still, and I think that plays a lot into it. But each country and each region has their own, whether it’s religious, cultural, weather, climate issues, they all have their specific items that they want. And so Eric is, and he can tell more about his company that he already gave the intro. But they were the, have been the longest running sorter here in North America. So they have real expertise in terms of when you get all this stuff from anywhere.

So in our company, we have been a supplier of his for a long time. We’ll send him items from anywhere, from Virginia or Connecticut or wherever. And then whatever it is, he’ll figure out how to get the most value out of it. So his team there will identify, because to make this work with the margins that are so small in our industry, it’s really, it’s a penny business, really. To make it, it’s a huge volume as we talked about. But if you’re not really on top of it and not finding each item its correct home, you’re not going to last. So that’s really the trick and the art of it. And it takes a lot of expertise and I don’t know, maybe Eric, you could speak more.

Nick Tawil

Let me visualize the sorting process. Who’s doing it? Where are they doing it?

Eric Stubin

So the sorting process and probably the best way to explain it is it’s not that different than most recycling businesses. It’s high volume, thin margin as a business. And we as a textile recycler are a little bit different than most conventional recycling because in conventional recycling they might make eight or nine different products. For example, if you’re collecting metals, there’s probably roughly half a dozen to a dozen different metals. Same with paper. But in the textile recycling business, we make 300 SKUs or 300 different products. So we used to like to say that this is not just a MRF, material recycling facility, but a super MRF facility because we’re making 300 of these different products.

And yeah, we outlined earlier the different percentages of secondhand clothing that we might sell to developing countries, wiping and fiber. So within each of those categories, we’re making hundreds of products for export or for consumption. And we’re not physically changing the form of those garments, but we’re wholesaling it to those that do. For example, we’ll wholesale it to a wiper company that might specialize in cutting wipers. And whether that company, previously a lot of those companies were in the US, today they’re more often overseas. Same in the fiber industry as well.

Nick Tawil

You receive these by the truckload or by container?

Eric Stubin

Yes.

Nick Tawil

And how fast can you sort a container?

Eric Stubin

Everything is about scale in our world. Our company was recycling about a trailer load a day up until 2019 and prior to that closer to two trailers a day. So yeah, I mean everything’s down. We were a mid-sized player in this industry. There are companies globally that do many times that volume and really scale is the key there.

Nick Tawil

How many people?

Eric Stubin

In the states we’re 45 people. And internationally labor is a very key component. Labor drives the whole industry. It’s very labor intensive and there’s usually a stat that one employee can handle about a ton or half a ton rather of post-consumer textiles a day or about half a ton can be sorted per employee per day. And that’s generally a pretty good metric in which you can judge the efficiency of a recycler.

Brian London

Yeah it is a fascinating thing to see a trained sorting employee. They’re making dozens of decisions a minute. That’s the only way to make it work. And it is an interesting—and maybe Marisa can talk a little bit more about the technology piece, but it’s really because of all these industries. You look around at any industry between now and 50 years ago and most are totally different. Ours, a lot of it still, because it’s a human touch. I don’t quite even really understand why it hasn’t been more mechanized. I mean, there’s different equipment that could move goods in different ways.

And with all the talk about how does AI affect this or AI affect that, to date, as far as I know from everything I see, most of the sorting of this stuff, whether it’s here or in Karachi or Dubai or Honduras, it’s all kind of the same process. And I bring up Marisa because she’s been an invaluable addition to SMART. So she came on our board, I don’t know, five or six years ago, not from this traditional background. So Eric and my families have been in this for many decades. And Marisa, I guess you’ll go through her history and background, but comes from a different perspective and came to this through a different path. And she really has her thumb on the pulse of all the, a lot of new stuff in the industry that’s looking at whether it’s—well, maybe you could talk more about it.

But anyway, that’s why she’s been a really important addition to SMART because there’s this whole new world which we can talk more about at length if we want, but that looks at the technology side in different areas. And so that’s kind of the question. It’s like, what role does that play? Does it add on and enhance our existing infrastructure that works quite well for what it does, but for the new challenges of today. So I don’t know if you want to talk about a little bit about your background.

Nick Tawil

Yeah. Because when I hear there are identical systems across different geographies around the world, and it’s been being done the same way for a very long time, and there’s volume involved, I think, well, there’s probably room to have so many types of improvements. Just like people often say AI, but computer vision specifically, it feels like it can be a boon for this type of work and not necessarily to replace a sorter, but maybe you said one sorter does about half a ton.

Eric Stubin

Half a ton, yeah.

Nick Tawil

Half a ton, what if they can now with the assistance of some sort of computer vision, they can scale that to 2 tons or 5 tons.

Marisa Adler

And there are technologies that are in developmental stages to support with that. There’s different levels of technology and automated scanning. One that’s the furthest along is to identify fiber composition. And the intent of that is to speed up the sorting of textiles into different bales. Like is it 100% polyester, is it 100% cotton, is it a 50-50 blend? And then those bales of, and let me be clear, non-rewearable textiles. Because we always want to follow the waste hierarchy. My background is in municipal solid waste management. So that’s sort of the lens that I come to this area from. You want to follow the waste hierarchy, do reduction, reuse, repurposing, and then recycling.

So the technology used, the most developed furthest along technology now is near-infrared sensing. That has been used in traditional material recovery facilities and plastics and paper and packaging for many years. It’s being honed for textiles. So you could sort polyester bale, cotton bale, and then those would theoretically go off to a recycler who would recycle each of those fiber bales into whatever products they create. And that hasn’t really developed yet because we’ve gotten a bit of a chicken or egg situation here because those recyclers are very new chemical recycling technologies and they haven’t really commercialized yet. So there’s a bit of a mismatch on supply and demand there and sort of the collaborative market build.

And then on the sorting for reuse side, you have some of the new computer vision and hyperspectral cameras that are being used paired with algorithms and AI learning systems that can start to identify, this is a shirt or this is a pair of pants or something. And on top of that say, oh, there’s a flaw here, there’s a stain here, there’s a rip here, but it still has to be paired with the mechanical movement of the item because you kind of need a 360-degree view and even more than that, maybe even an inside-out view of each garment one by one. And so at that point you need a person anyway to do that. And until robotics are advanced enough where they can do that, and we’re nowhere near that.

So even if the AI algorithms and the hyperspectral cameras are ready and they’re being developed, you still need to pair it with the mechanical functioning of a facility. And so I think that’s the stage that we’re at now. There’s a lot of pilots going on, there’s a lot of development, there’s a lot of investment in that area. And I do think that’s the future. We’re just not quite there yet.

Brian London

It really is a pivotal moment from our industry standpoint, from an industry association, because traditionally, something unique about our industry is that we move an enormous amount of volume all over the world. All these numbers that we’re talking about. But traditionally we’ve always been a group of small family businesses, like Eric’s family, my family, and hundreds of others. And what we found recently because of, I guess because of increased attention for whatever reason, now all of a sudden we have huge brands coming in and getting involved, and they’re throwing huge amounts of investment in things. And then you have policymakers. And we can talk about the legislation that passed in California. They’re looking at, in New York and Washington state, essentially legislating how textiles are collected and handled, post-consumer textiles.

So all of a sudden you have these small companies that as a force we do, I mean, as a group of companies, as a trade association, we do a pretty good job of, I think, punching above our weight in terms of advocating for our members and open trade for our product. But all of a sudden there’s these enormous players involved. And a fear we have sometimes is, number one, how do we incorporate that without destroying part of what’s already working? And how do we get our voice heard? When you have these, a lot of times I’ll hear a policy coming in some country somewhere or a big effort made by a huge investment in a certain recycling technology. And it seems like they hadn’t even really consulted this group of companies that’s processing all this material.

So that’s kind of a big question right now is how do we work all together?

Eric Stubin

How does private sector work together? How do all the pieces come together? How does private sector work with all the other stakeholders, including charities, including innovative partners, to really grow the pie for everyone? And just to put another, underline Brian’s point, my back of the envelope calculation, there’s about 10 billion pounds that the traditional reuse markets have handled globally for decades. We get that number, if you look at the US, that number that I believe is correct, if we had the EPA website here, I think it says about 3.8. There’s about somewhat of an equal number in the EU. And then I pencil in Asia, including Japan, Australia, and then China has its own industry.

And I haven’t seen too many stats at what China’s generating in terms of post-consumer textiles. But it’s a tremendous number that the industry has efficiently found a second life for decades. So I think there’s a lot of innovation coming and we’ve got to find new ways to do it. And the innovation will always be there and markets are willing and able to, we as an industry will be there to support them. But yeah, this is the challenge that we face.

Marisa Adler

I think building on what Eric said, the United States has the highest per capita textile waste generation rate in the world. I think China is bigger on just a mass absolute value amount. And what’s important to recognize though is that we’re still only recovering 15% in the United States of what gets generated as textile waste every year. The 85% we’re not collecting is going straight to landfill and incineration. And so there’s a huge opportunity to recover those materials and find new homes for them, whether that’s in reuse or through repurposing or recycling. And that’s what a lot of the new policy that Brian was talking about is getting at. It’s mostly sort of this, it comes from the waste management perspective, extended producer responsibility. How do we get to zero waste and how do we incentivize that the right way?

And the idea of extended producer responsibility is putting the financial onus back on the original producer. Because then as theory goes, they would design products to be better reused or better recycled at end of life, or maybe they’ll reduce how much they produce in the first place.

Eric Stubin

Yeah. To underline Marisa’s point, one really interesting fact is that, and this fact, this stat is very universal. I think you’ve heard this. When municipalities look at the percentage of, when they analyze their waste streams and they look at the percentages of municipal solid waste, they almost universally find or have found that it’s about 5% composed of old clothes or secondhand clothing. That’s why states like Massachusetts, I think, went into, they technically, they put a ban of secondhand in their legislation, and you’re not allowed to throw away clothing in the state of Massachusetts. But yeah, I mean, that’s a great segue to EPR in California and why they’ve done this.

Brian London

Yeah, do you want to explain more about what happened in California?

Marisa Adler

And so California was the first state in the United States to pass extended producer responsibility legislation for textiles governing the textile waste stream. The way I just described, the producers have to pay usually a per unit fee into a centralized organization called a producer responsibility organization.

Nick Tawil

Who’s that owned by?

Marisa Adler

It’s usually stipulated as a nonprofit. And the whole purpose of that nonprofit is to fiscally manage the recovery system and issue the contract. And usually the board of directors is brands who are producers of the textiles and apparel, the covered products. And they have to answer to the state agency. So there’s always an oversight agency. In California, it’s CalRecycle, which is a part of the Cal EPA organization. And so once the law is passed, then CalRecycle will develop regulations which just additional clarity onto the law, maybe put in some performance standards on how the program needs to operate or what metrics it needs to hit.

But then other than that, the PRO is the one sort of looking at the system, figuring out how it’s going to develop a program to comply with what’s in statute or what’s in the regs, and then a board of directors that kind of oversees that, and then they get the funding from the brands. And so the brands are paying either per piece or per kilogram. It’s different in different places. So California was the first state in the US to pass that law, I think, in the very end of 2024. End of ‘24.

Eric Stubin

Yeah, that’s what I remember.

Marisa Adler

It’s a very long time frame. So it actually won’t be implemented fully. The residents of California won’t see the effects of this until about 2030. And producers won’t pay into it because there’s a lot of—

Eric Stubin

They’re still designing the regulations around it.

Marisa Adler

Yes. The regulatory development process is a couple of years. The program plan is a couple of years, fee setting, all of that. But this is a model that’s been around for many years.

Nick Tawil

Where else in the world has this been around?

Marisa Adler

Europe. The EU has mandated their member states to all adopt EPR and they actually do have a disposal ban across all member states that started January 1st of 2025. And the way that the EU is instructing its member states to comply with that ban is by adopting EPR regulations. Because the last thing you want to do is implement a ban without a plan because then you have a lot of textiles that are no longer going to landfill but have no infrastructure or funding or system to support it. So the point of EPR is to create that.

Eric Stubin

And Marisa, France had the longest running program. And I think the website that you mentioned earlier was Eco TLC dot fr but I think it’s taken on a new…

Marisa Adler

Refashion.

Eric Stubin

Refashion. Yeah. So that program was very innovative as Marisa pointed out, because it was one of the first essentially to tack on a fee for the recycling of every garment is my understanding of it. It’s a few euro cents. I think it’s more than, between, I want to say off the top of my head, between 5 and 10 euro cents per garment that’s charged to the consumer. The PRO or that group, the name of the group again was…

Marisa Adler

Refashion.

Refashion collects that money and distributes it to French or companies that recycle French post-consumer textile waste.

Eric Stubin

So California, Washington, states that are looking at EPR have a model in which to look at. And it’s also interesting to me that all of the stakeholders are part of that model or part of the solution. Because if you think about these are huge macro issues and how could one stakeholder tackle any or just all of it. You really need all the stakeholders working together in concert to help alleviate or move the needle on the issue of post-consumer textile waste.

Brian London

So with all those years of that program, it’s been like 10 years, I guess France has been doing it or more.

Eric Stubin

I think so, yeah.

Nick Tawil

Have there been any definable outcomes from it?

Marisa Adler

The French EPR system is, it hasn’t been modeled as a true EPR system in the sense that traditional kind of purists of EPR think of EPR. So it hasn’t done a lot to change the upstream design and production of textiles. A lot of factors that go behind that, including how much the fees are and incentive and is this just the cost of doing business or what are the penalties? Things like that. But if you look at EPR across different product categories over, I don’t know, the last 20 years in the United States, if it’s well-designed EPR, it has a very clear beneficial impact on the recovery rates of those items and on the design of the products going into the system. Because there’s a very direct financial link right back to the producer.

It gets really complicated in terms of how you structure that mechanism. And it gets really complicated because there’s a ton of stakeholders with varying—I mean this is policy. This is how policy is developed. You’re always going to, you’re never going to have the perfect bill, you’re never going to have the perfect worded law. But it’s really important to have well-designed policy. And EPR is not a magic bullet, but it has an opportunity to really infuse some capital, infuse some funding and think holistically about a system.

Nick Tawil

And can you just differentiate the difference between EPR and maybe we can start talking about something else which is closed loop.

Eric Stubin

But just before we go into that, I mean it’s also interesting to note that Europe diverts about 2x the volume of post-consumer textile waste than we do. They divert it at a higher rate. I think that’s what most of the EU studies show. So they divert a similar amount and it’s more per capita of textiles. So their diversion rate’s higher.

Brian London

Yeah. Which means they’re capturing more.

Eric Stubin

They’re capturing—

Brian London

So less is being thrown out. A lot less.

Nick Tawil

Oh, got it.

Eric Stubin

It goes to the old, everyone knows, I mean Europe politically and from a cultural perspective has always been ahead of the curve in terms of recycling. So they’ve done a much better job at keeping old clothes out of their landfills in general. And the EPR is sort of building on that.

Brian London

Yeah, but so you’re asking about.

Nick Tawil

Does it make sense to talk about closed loop now? Or, I kind of want to, going back to the thrift and the secondhand use. So highest use value concept. We can tie this into maybe earlier in the conversation. But any insights that you guys have taken away from the habits of American consumerism. Seeing all this stuff, seeing so much of it come over the transom over so many years and just be like, what are your thoughts on that? Either what do you think about American consumers specifically? I mean the trend is, I mean the habit is huge. But yeah, you kind of sigh.

Marisa Adler

Pass… No, I’m kidding.

Nick Tawil

Yeah, I don’t know. Or maybe not. Maybe you just, you see these truckloads of clothes come through and you’re like, yeah, just—

Marisa Adler

Well, it’s a river. I mean, I’ve always heard Goodwill describe it that way. It’s a river. They cannot block the river. Any blockage will just create overflows and chaos. I want to say that, but I also want to say we’re still only capturing 15% so don’t hear that and not, you know, divert your textiles and meaning, you know, donate or recycle. But we today are consuming massively more textiles per capita per time period than we ever have in the past. I mean if you look at the consumption graph, it’s almost like an exponential graph. And that’s because of the advancements in just-in-time production and fast fashion and drop shipping, which basically means door-to-door shipping and taking advantage of direct shipments from the manufacturer piece by piece, straight to someone’s doorstep.

And of course all the online e-commerce platforms that we all have access to. And then because it’s so readily available, they can make trends and the trends have just gotten more and more intense and quicker and quicker. We used to have seasonal trends like four a year. Right now it’s like one a week. And so people, especially with social media, can’t be seen wearing the same thing twice on their TikTok or Instagram or anything. And so there is definitely a hyper-consumption mindset of American consumers and the price has dropped because of fast fashion and a lot of other factors. And so it’s more accessible but people are keeping things like half as long, wearing things half as long. And so it’s just way more volume, way more turnover, but way less quality.

And so it has a much lower value and—

Eric Stubin

We’ll get more rags and material for fiber than we will usable clothing. But that was well said. I think that fast fashion is a major contributor, mass market apparel, and that’s the way the industry goes. And as the industry drifts towards that and there’s more consumption of this, of course, the quality of America’s secondhand clothing generally goes down and it’s harder to find durable, longer lasting garments in the post-consumer textile waste stream. But yeah, you can never turn it off. You can’t turn it off. It’s going to consistently flow and that’s why all the stakeholders are constantly trying to look at these issues together.

Marisa Adler

Yeah, yeah. And one of the concerns is with textile EPR legislation and potential disposal bans that come with it. You’re going to start seeing the stream that people have been throwing away. And there’s more, there’s concern that some of that is reusable, high quality because some people just don’t ever donate. But the concern is that we’ll see even more of the lower quality items if we’re forcing people to not throw things away and instead donate them. And so how is that going to affect the overall economics of the system and ability to divert for reuse? It might just kind of bring down the value of the average ton.

Eric Stubin

What’s the theory? I’m sorry, Marisa, can you give it to us again one more time? The idea is that they’re going to—why one more time, I’m sorry.

Marisa Adler

Because we’re going to get all the dirty socks and old underwear and things that people shouldn’t really, that, you know, maybe there’s a recycling market for it.

Nick Tawil

We should start with that. What’s appropriate to donate and what’s not appropriate to donate?

Brian London

Well, that’s been—

Eric Stubin

Yeah, that’s an interesting—

Brian London

Remember, don’t—what was the campaign?

Eric Stubin

I always would say don’t judge your clothes. Someone at SMART once said that in front of a group we were educating, I think the Northeast Recycling Coalition. And they had the term “don’t judge your clothes.” But building on that point, Marisa, I think that every statistic that I’ve seen is that there is a universe of post-consumer textile waste. And as you increase diversion, so do you increase all segments of—I don’t know that if today we are actually recycling 15% of all post-consumer, that means the remainder of post-consumer that’s going into landfill is necessarily all materials suited for landfill. People still make the mistake of throwing out—people, the average American doesn’t think of clothing as something that should be donated or recycled.

Often it’s tossed into the landfill. And there’s a lot of examples from pop culture. I keep a running tab in my mind. But it’s funny, there’s a lot of examples of that. You see it in movies, you’ll see it in books and TV shows. It’s out there. And not everyone thinks of clothing as something that you should donate or recycle.

Marisa Adler

And this is a tricky point though, because different places have different rules about what you can donate. Kind of like why it’s so complicated to just standardize recycling like your curbside recycling. Every place you go has different rules. It’s kind of like the same thing with your textiles and your clothing. Goodwill may have one set of rules. And also, mind you, not every Goodwill has the same set of rules because they’re all independently operated. But a consignment shop obviously has different rules than a donation bin. And so some places, it’s hard to put out the message, just donate it. Because some places don’t want the things that they can’t resell.

And until you have solutions like closed-loop recycling and a higher market demand for some of the fiber recycling, open-loop recycling, it does create a little bit of a drain on the system because then, folks like Brian and Eric could be inundated with a lot of really low value things. I mean, I don’t want to speak for you guys, but just thinking sort of conceptually, what would happen if you turned on that spigot?

Brian London

Yeah. Well, that also brings up the question of just this great unknown and the role, or maybe I would say the lack of data pretty much to date for most of our history of our industry. Every company’s doing their thing, they’re getting stuff in and there haven’t really been great numbers. Number one on, so how much is coming in from where, how much is being generated? If you actually dig into—so we quote this, only 15% of all clothing that’s discarded enters our stream. And that’s an EPA stat. And so I know Marisa and I have talked about this before, I still don’t quite understand. You go and you’re like, well, okay, how’d you figure that out? What are the methods behind it? And it’s kind of opaque.

Maybe you’ve done more research since we last spoke about it, but it’s like we don’t really know. So we don’t know how much and we don’t really know what’s out there in this world. So that calculation came from somewhere. And even if it’s half true, it’s still an enormous amount. But we don’t know that. And there’s a lot of things we just don’t know. But we’re starting to look at and Marisa lives in this world a lot in terms of data because you can’t really do much if you don’t really know the volumes coming in, what they’re, how much it’s going, what are the compositions in end markets. And so we’ve started trying to do a little more data. There’s different groups out there looking at some and we’re starting to get into that world.

Nick Tawil

Is it easier to do that here domestically or overseas?

Eric Stubin

There’s data that’s out there that the government, the US government has measured. I mean, they have the USITC. I have that acronym, United States Trade—I forgot. I hope I have that right. USITC trade data. And that measures the volume of containers that are being exported out of the United States. I mean, I think that was one of the key variables that they used in some of that, in some of the EPA’s construction of that, those data points.

Marisa Adler

I think it depends on which data you’re looking for. If you’re looking at understanding textile waste generation rates and the composition of the textile waste stream, then doing it in the United States makes sense. If you’re looking at traceability and understanding what fraction goes where, that gets really hard really fast because you can put an RFID tag on a bale that’s getting exported, but that bale will land at the first port, maybe in a Karachi export processing zone, for example, in Pakistan, which is one of the world hubs for sorting and grading. And then that bale gets opened and torn apart. That RFID tracker is no longer useful. Each piece in that bale then gets sorted and graded and mixed with materials from the UK or other places in the EU or any other place they’ve imported from.

And then it’ll go off to the first importing market, maybe it’s Kenya. And then the importer imports that bale. Then it gets opened up, resorted, redistributed through sort of a whole chain of market players all the way down to a stall owner in a secondhand market and whatever—

Brian London

Even in neighboring countries.

Marisa Adler

And then if it doesn’t sell there, then it might get rebaled, like aggregated and rebaled and then redistributed or even just directly exported to neighboring countries. It gets really hard to start tracking where everything’s going. Yeah, and so the data and the transparency piece is a really big underpinning of the new, all the new legislation we’re seeing. Even it’s fueling, I think, a lot of conversations at the international trade level. When you’re looking at the UN and the Basel Convention on how do you track and manage, again, I’m going to use a loaded word, textile waste. It’s a commodity. We don’t like to think of it as waste because people affiliate waste with garbage. But understanding where all that data sits and who holds all that, it’s a very decentralized system of who knows what.

And there’s no mandatory or very little mandatory reporting. There’s really not anyone aggregating this on a systems level to be able to understand.

Eric Stubin

There is some data that’s collected or aggregated from, as you mentioned, from a trade perspective and from the volume perspective that could be in orders of magnitude. Give us a sense, from a value standpoint, it might be different, but from orders of magnitude, are there hundreds of millions or how many tons are being exported to various processing centers from the United States? That information could be fairly accurate. And then the other interesting point Marisa brings up is, well, when you look at the term textile waste, it’s hard as someone that processed probably a billion pounds in their career of textiles, when you look at it, the demand tells a story because it’s finished product. So a lot of what’s being called waste—and there is someone prominent in our industry that just wrote a piece on this and says, what’s being called waste could be, they could be terming it waste because of the nature that X percent sold in a market and then X percent had to be wholesaled.

But I can assure you that the industry wouldn’t be able to sell and wholesale billions of pounds annually if this material wasn’t graded in a suitable way that then resulted in markets demanding it. And that’s really, I think, tells volumes about the products that we ship as an industry. Because it has to be right. It has to be graded to a certain extent for the quality. People are often surprised that secondhand clothing is not tattered or torn in most countries, that it’s good, usable clothing that has a second life. A garment that may have been sold for anywhere from $40 to $80 retail will find its way to a developing country and in that market be sold for maybe a dollar. So something affordable. And it gives the consumer in that country a lot of dignity and choice in being able to shop for secondhand products or for products that are unique.

Brian London

Yeah. And for us, the economics really tell the tale, largely because I’m going to say in a free market. But it’s actually even more than that because we’re overcoming enormous tariffs and taxes on—

Nick Tawil

Yeah I was going to go there. There because you mentioned demand, but the demand, the countries with the demand don’t necessarily get the secondhand use donations, right, so what are the forces that are going against that?

Brian London

So, yeah, I mean, traditionally there’s been some elements of protectionism which probably come from a good place. But I think miss some of the economic realities that again in most of Africa where people are living on less than $2 a day, I forget the statistics, but it’s like a used item is maybe 95% cheaper than a new item that could be created in that market. And let’s say in Kenya, in my mind it’s a bit misguided policy and at our trade organization we’re always working to open markets and lower trade barriers to our product. But it’s desired everywhere and so much so that even with, for example, we’re just working in Costa Rica because the duty there is about 50%. Effectively they have, they tack on all these other taxes with it.

But it’s still, even beyond free trade. So the economics of it really tell the tale. But when you’re actually looking at definitions and textile waste and what does this mean, and you start having these different organizations and policymakers and governmental organizations looking at it that don’t really live the day-to-day, they could from a very good-natured place make decisions that if you miscalculate it a little bit, you could stop an entire flow of goods which again in one place are waste and another place are vibrant markets of people. You go to these places, everyone’s looking for, it’s a huge vibrant economy at these places. You go to markets in Kenya and you see enormous demand for the product.

Nick Tawil

So how big are these markets?

Brian London

Oh, I mean tens—

Nick Tawil

Like outdoor mall size markets or bigger or smaller?

Marisa Adler

I mean if you go to the Kantamanto market in Ghana, it’s huge. I mean you can walk and walk all day through all the different aisles of the stalls. That’s probably one of the biggest that exists.

Nick Tawil

All secondhand?

Marisa Adler

All secondhand. All secondhand.

Brian London

Tens of thousands of people there. Wow. But then even downstream there’s—we just did a trip to Costa Rica where, along with some folks from Goodwill, we were tracking items that we sent there. And then the second and third degrees away all have fascinating stories. It’ll go to another trader. Then it’ll go to, in Costa Rica we profiled this one charity that she funds for young women who are victims of incest. The whole charity is funded by items that she finds good deals with. And so you follow all these items even second, third degree away from that, there’s economies that are also hard to track.

Eric Stubin

A lot of ancillary business activity generated from secondhand that some studies I think have tried to measure. There was a UN study a long time ago that tried to measure the ancillary industries that were generated by secondhand trade. Everything from moving secondhand products to tailoring them in these markets. And then, I think more and more you’re seeing that there’s some vertical in the, within these countries that import the materials and maybe they’re even cutting rags or they’re trying to incorporate other aspects of secondhand clothing. But yeah, it’s a tremendous industry. Rivoli’s book says that it’s one of the most competitive industries that she had ever studied. It was secondhand industries just with sheer volume of competition and truly competitive industry.

I think at the end of the day you really wonder, if you support free and open markets, it’s something that’s important. And secondhand clothing certainly fits in, it fits into that description. Most of the times where we’ve, the industry has seen problems, a lot of the bans seem to be, like Brian pointed out, a lot to do with protectionism. And it’s not that different here. There’s different industries that are affected by protectionist viewpoints here in the United States. But that seems to be a major factor across the world as secondhand competes with cheap manufactured apparel from other countries that are manufacturing.

Brian London

Yeah, I just want to circle back to the question about closed loop. So this whole world, and this has been a pretty new world for us. Again, this is kind of more the world that Marisa lives in day-to-day. So we’re talking before about closed loop. There’s—I mentioned there’s enormous amount of investments from brands, from other investment companies. And I was thinking to myself, why did all this money get into this closed loop? So by closed loop, we mean actually taking a shirt, not just reusing it, extending its life or repurposing it, but the actual process of turning an old shirt into a new shirt, which is way more complicated than you think for a lot of reasons. We could probably spend a whole hour or a whole semester talking about.

But so yeah, this whole world of closed-loop fiber-to-fiber technologies has become a big, I mean you go to whole huge conferences of it. And I couldn’t even put a price tag on the amount that’s invested in it. But to date, Eric had a good visual he did with the Venn diagram before about it’s really moving very little in terms of the practical economy so far. So there’s this huge amount of potential that we see. But I’m trying to think of myself too, what prompted all that? Is it that we feel like we’re not capturing stuff in that 85% we assume is all low-end, unusable stuff, that if it entered, because it is true, let’s assume 85% were low-end stuff and we all loaded it to our graders, we would have an issue.

Eric Stubin

I don’t think that’s ever been the case because we have increased—and if you look at, there is a model that’s out there. If you look at the EU versus the United States, the EU diverts 2x the amount of post-consumer that we do here in the States. But their post-consumer does not veer towards only unusable clothing or material that would only be destined for the fiber industry. So I think there’s, as you increase the pie, you get all segments of textiles. All segments of textiles increase along with it.

Marisa Adler

I think the push towards this closed-loop recycling comes from a sustainable materials management perspective of our Earth’s natural finite resources. And at true end of life, like once reuse is no longer an option and everything will eventually get there, how do we keep those materials in circulation? How do we maintain the value and how do we use those to displace the production of new materials? I think that’s sort of the age of where we’re at right now in the textile waste management industry is looking at how do you create those infinite loops and keep materials in circulation forever? And the answer cannot be found in reuse. Eventually it’ll reach end of life.

It can’t be found in mechanical recycling because of the technological limitations of mechanical recycling and the degradation of the natural fibers and what those fibers can be used for. So new emerging recycling processes are what we’re turning to, including things like solvolysis and depolymerization and some of the categories of recycling that are deemed chemical recycling, which is a kind of unfortunate umbrella term because it creates a lot of confusion over what they actually are. And there’s sort of a lot of stigma around, oh, chemicals, hazardous, bad. But I think that’s where this new age approach is coming from.

Eric Stubin

It’s a worthwhile goal. I mean it represents innovation and where the industry and all the stakeholders hopefully will come together to work in it. I think that’s some of what’s happened in various states that are trying to introduce EPR legislation. It almost feels like the legislation was written with a futurist world in mind. And then when the real world markets and innovation catches up to some of this regulations then I think it can all potentially work in harmony. But it might be a little ways till we’re there.

Brian London

But when you look at the economics of it and you see kind of what, prices would be for a material here. So let’s say you got a bunch of low-end stuff you can’t reuse, you can’t repurpose. You can talk a little bit about what we see or hearing about the cost of what’s—there’s interesting technologies that can sort these into the specific fiber types that could in theory and practice on some level turn them into feedstock. But the economics of it, from your perspective, someone handling the material, how do you view that? And what would make that fit into your worldview?

Eric Stubin

I mean it’s hard and I don’t, I think most of the professionals inside the industry, when they talk about it, we all sort of scratch our head and we wonder about the economics and how they might come into play. It’s hard to see today but markets change and so does technology. And when, I’ve always said when markets are willing and able to, the industry will likely find a way to support them. But at the moment it’s tough to find that. Even from, I’ve heard things by, from closed-loop recyclers, they said there’s X percentage of 100% cotton waste or X percentage of poly waste and some of that material is hard to find.

And it certainly seems when you hear apparel talk about, they need design to marry up with the overall strategic plan to recycle more waste. And there’s a little bit of a dichotomy there between design sometimes and recycling. So we need, there’s got to be a holistic move to make the, to make all of the variables come together and get everything moving in the same direction.

Marisa Adler

Yeah, I’ve done some financial modeling on this new textile recycling system and everything has to be exactly perfect for the model not to break and even then, it’s kind of shaky.

Nick Tawil

Well, I knew there’d be way more to talk about than the time we had allotted. Eric, Marisa, Brian, thank you. As is the tradition on the Infinite Loops episodes, there’s a final question. And so it’s a bit of a curveball, but here we go. If we’re going to make you the king or queen of the world for the day, and you can’t kill anyone, and you can’t put anyone in a re-education camp, we’re going to hand you a magical microphone. And you’re going to say two things into that microphone that will incept all 8 billion plus humans on the Earth. And when they wake up the next morning, they’re going to be like, oh, here’s just something I thought of. What would those two things be?

Brian London

Wait, so I’m giving a message to everyone in the world?

Nick Tawil

Yeah. And when you incept them with these two ideas, they will actually go out and do it.

Marisa Adler

Right. So you’re brainwashing.

Eric Stubin

All right, I’m going to go first. Mine is donate, recycle, don’t throw away. Does that count as—that’s three words. Is that one?

Nick Tawil

I’ll allow it. I’ll allow it.

Eric Stubin

Is that what you’re allowing for? You’re looking for two thoughts or two—

Nick Tawil

Two ideas.

Eric Stubin

Two ideas. Donate, recycle, don’t throw away, and don’t judge your clothing. That would be—

Nick Tawil

But also, don’t donate dirty socks.

Eric Stubin

You can donate dirty socks. We’ll find a home for—

Nick Tawil

Ah okay!

Eric Stubin

You can donate dirty socks.

Nick Tawil

Marisa.

Marisa Adler

It probably wouldn’t even be related to textiles.

Nick Tawil

It doesn’t have to be! It doesn’t have to be related to textiles.

Marisa Adler

All right, cool.

Nick Tawil

It can be love thy neighbor. It can be anything you like.

Marisa Adler

I think that’s what it would be. Recognize the reality that life is fleeting, life is short, and so just approach every day like it could be your last. And the second one, I think, would probably be something around love thy neighbor. Treat others as you’d like to be treated. How are you feeling about yours now?

Eric Stubin

About the dirty socks?

Marisa Adler

Exactly.

Nick Tawil

That’s great. That’s great.

Marisa Adler

Go ahead Brian.

Nick Tawil

We need variety. So this is good.

Brian London

Tune in, Infinite Loops podcast.

Nick Tawil

Wow.

Brian London

I guess, kind of like what I was thinking about earlier with shirts, like, whether it’s this industry or anything. Take a look at things sometimes and just kind of ask yourself, what’s the story behind that? How did that get to where it is, where’s it going to go? Dig into kind of what’s the story behind things? Because a lot of times there’s something interesting, and we tend to just kind of, when you see something every day it kind of just becomes like white noise. But there’s a lot of interesting stories around, and I hope we’re one of them. But you guys decide. Maybe we’ll see you chapter two in a few months.

Marisa Adler

Actually yeah. Think critically and act with intention, I think.

Nick Tawil

There you go. Okay.

Brian London

I’ll take that, too.

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This was such a fun conversation. I’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

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Highlights

What would you do if you knew you would fail?

Jason Buck: And with insatiable curiosity, and I know this is what we were kind of getting at earlier about portfolios, it’s extremely personal to us. It’s praxis, right? This is my entire life philosophy that I’m putting into this business and this portfolio for you. So it’s deeply personal. And so to me, it was more of that alignment where maybe in my younger years and maybe living under what’s important to others or some sort of Girardian mimesis, where it got to the point of, this aligns with my values and who I am at this point, and this is deep practice for me. So this is all I want to do. If it works, if it doesn’t. But this is what I want to do.

I always, I joke with our mutual friend Senra about there’s that quote was like, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? And I’m like, fuck that quote. It’s like to me it’s, what would you do if you knew you would fail? That’s what we’re compelled to do.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That’s a much better question.

Jason Buck: Just run headfirst into walls every single day knowing failure is probably imminent.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yes.

Jason Buck: And if we do get lucky, great. But otherwise, that’s what it’s—not anybody would do anything. Yeah. What would you do if you couldn’t fail? Anything. I’d fly out this window.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right, exactly.

Jason Buck: But no, we’re compelled to do things. And this gets back to where you and I disagree about free will. It’s like I’m compelled to do this thing where it’s high likelihood of failure, but I don’t know anything else better to do because it’s just everything of who I am and this amalgamation of detritus I’ve collected from others throughout these years because I don’t even have any thoughts I can call my own. They’re really other people. I guess they’ve been uniquely put together into this body and brain. But that’s all I’m doing, is using those to the fullest extent of my abilities. I’m just giving my all into this. And if it works, if it doesn’t. Because we can’t help ourselves.

Crossing the bridge of nihilism

Jason Buck: Yeah, well, as you know, he’s a mutual friend of ours and he’s 100% right. Because part of it too is a lot of people in our position want everybody else to be entrepreneurs or think the way we do. I don’t want anybody to think the way I do. And I actually think entrepreneur is a bug, not a feature. I think it’s terrible brain chemistry. Right. The way society’s set up for bimonthly paychecks, a salary, and then you get a mortgage and it all makes sense. Right. It’s bond-like income. Why do we want this equity VC-like income? There’s something wrong with us. And just I know to you and me, Hypomanic Edge was a really important book to me in my 20s.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yes.

Jason Buck: It made me understand myself if I have this mild bipolar. Right. Because part of that bipolar is that you get all the positive effects of really being able to lock in and focus on things and build businesses where you’re creating an entire world that you’re the fuel for that. But it also comes with a commensurate downside as well. Right. The darkness.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, well, everything does.

Jason Buck: Right, right. It’s just not a free lunch.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: No. And when I was in my 20s, I was just staring way too long into the abyss. And as you—you know the quote, it stared right back into me. And I was like—for a while, I was just like, why bother? Nothing matters. There is no truth with a capital T. There is no such thing as enlightenment. And the way I came to kind of figure that out because that leads to nihilism. And my thought was, well, okay, let’s assume that this is mostly right, even though I think it might be mostly wrong. Let’s just assume it’s mostly right. Well, what can I do about it? And I call it walking across the bridge of nihilism.

And when you get to the other side, you’re like, okay, well if life has no meaning and there is no such thing as enlightenment and there is no truth with a capital T, that means that I get to determine meaning. That means that I get to say what matters in my life. And so once I really embraced looking at the world that way, that’s when all of the dark abyss staring stuff didn’t end, but it was just like, oh, there’s the abyss again.

Jason Buck: Okay, this is why I love talking to you. Because it gives us time to talk about, pull on strings of nuance. And so you say you’re saying nihilism and everything. And I’ve always—everybody thinks nihilism is a pejorative.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

Jason Buck: But I think what got to the point, what you said is the true, I guess, definition for nihilism is there’s no grand meaning to life. Right. But like you just said, that means we get to make up our own quotidian meanings to life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.

Jason Buck: So our family, our friends, whatever we’re into, drinking or eating or whatever and just sitting in the park, having an espresso, that’s the meaning of life. Having conversations like this, that’s my favorite part of life. And so that’s what I mean. So it’s like, don’t you think that’s fair? It’s like, so you can be a nihilist on a grander meaning, but that’s totally different from making individual meaning on a daily minute-to-minute basis.

Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So, Jason, welcome to Infinite Loops. I love you for a variety of reasons, but when I look at your CV, it’s like, you’re a young guy and yet your CV, I would peg you at 87.

Jason Buck

Well, one, I appreciate you saying young guy because I’m 47, so I don’t quite feel as young anymore.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

From 65, that looks young.

Jason Buck

I know it does. But you always talk about being old, right? If we ask any of these guys in their 20s, I’m a boomer too, or whatever, I’m almost dead. So I appreciate that. But I do have a chaotic or circuitous CV in the sense that maybe what I didn’t realize is maybe I was always applying to work for OSV, right? I knew only it was for an audience of one. This has been in planning for 20 plus years.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I admire your patience and your ability to succeed at all of these various things.

Jason Buck

Well, success may be, that may be overshot. Right. I think it’s probably a lot of failure and just stumbling from one failure to the next.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So I guess the first question that I wanted to ask was how did all of the former things that you did—I mean, you were a great athlete, you did real estate, you did religious studies. I want to talk about that because I think there’s a lot of correlation between people’s investment beliefs take on an almost liturgical ring to them.

Jason Buck

100%.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But what did you learn from the earlier stuff that helped you with the Mutiny Fund and the Cockroach Portfolio?

Jason Buck

So I think it’s really easy to connect those dots in hindsight. Right? That’s what’s always hard for us with that foresight. The way I think about it is you and I suffer from a similar affliction of insatiable curiosity. So ever since I was a teenager, I was fascinated by religion and just why people act the way they do. And obviously religion’s a huge part of that. And my mother came from an Irish Catholic family, and my father was a Zen Buddhist. But this was in rural Michigan in the ‘80s, so that was very rare. So we started meditating at a young age due to my dad and everything. He was also a triathlete and endurance racer, so maybe that was part of it as well.

So my parents said, we’re never going to give you a religion. We’ll let you kind of choose your own. So starting at 12, 13, I started going with friends to churches, synagogues. I just wanted to explore, what is this? Why are they all so enamored or obsessed by this? And part is, with religion, it incorporates everything. So when I ended up going to university, I actually originally started international business. That was really easy because I came from a family of entrepreneurs. So I just always had the gift for business, I guess. I always go, people say they’re entrepreneurs. I’m like, what were you selling in middle school? I was selling bracelets my sister and I made. I would make mixtapes and sell them at school. You have that in you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Hall passes for me.

Jason Buck

Hall passes, you could sell. You found a pad you stole from the teacher.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Of course.

Jason Buck

So perfect. It reminds me I was the worst kid in the sense that I would skip school, but I would leave during first period and I’d go to the library and I’d spend all day in the library.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s not a good truancy effect.

Jason Buck

No, I should have gone to smoke cigarettes behind the local convenience store. But no, I went to the library. What I found through eventually switching to comparative religions, it incorporated everything. Because I was fascinated by history, philosophy, art, sociology. And really, that is the foundation of all of those things that come out of that is the way I thought about it. So it was a never-ending quest for that insatiable curiosity.

I also found interesting while I was studying comparative religions and I played D1 soccer at College of Charleston. Eventually I also had to get a job and I got jobs in restaurants. And eventually I leaned towards the sommelier wine side because once again, it was insatiable curiosity. So you could learn about every varietal of wine in the world. But every year a new vintage comes out and you basically have to reset that knowledge base. So once again, it was insatiable. It was the never-ending rabbit hole that I knew I could never quite satisfy.

So then after coming out of school and studying comparative religions and everything, I spent time living with a Buddhist Rinpoche. One of my mentors was a Hopi Indian shaman. I moved to Istanbul, Turkey. And everybody’s maybe heard the story where I sold Turkish rugs on the streets of Istanbul. “Hello, my friend. Would you like a cup of tea?” That was me. And this is in the late ‘90s, the first time I went there twice. And it was always interesting to me because all these Americans coming off of cruise ships or whatever, if they saw a blonde Midwestern white kid, they immediately trusted me versus a local, which they shouldn’t have. I mean, I always took care of them. But you’d sell them a Turkish rug and they’d be like, I want a leather jacket. It’s like, great. I know a Russian guy that makes leather jackets. I need a good restaurant. I go, great, take them to a restaurant. You circle around the block, you come back, and the restaurant owner gives you [inaudible]. I like the way that economy worked, I’ll put it that way.

But I was really doing, when I was in Istanbul, I was actually also living with the Mevlevis. So the Mevlevis are a sect of Islam that comes out of the—colloquially known as the whirling dervishes. So they trace their lineage back to Rumi, but once again, it’s the esoteric version of Islam. And so I was studying with some of the sheikhs there, and that’s why I was living in Istanbul.

And eventually, we talked about this before when I was at your house, eventually you get to the point where no matter if it’s Buddhism, whether it’s the Mevlevis, whether it’s any sort of shamanic tradition, they think they have secret knowledge. And so it got to the point always where I was like, show and tell time. Put it on the table, what do you have? And of course, they never had anything, right? It was always in the future. It was always pushing those goalposts away, always. And so eventually, I just kind of gave up on that part of my life. And I was in my mid-20s. I gotta make some money and those sorts of things.

So then I got into—my family has a past in kind of a little bit of real estate development on the residential side. So I fell in love with commercial real estate development. And so I did a lot of development projects in Charleston, South Carolina. So I stayed there, developed a lot of that King Street corridor. But then 2007, 2008 came as we were just talking about this beautiful apartment, and that crash was so painful that it changed my life pretty dramatically. Like every young man, I thought I was a genius, right? You become a multimillionaire in your mid-20s. You could do no wrong. This is just a dot plot on the radar. On my way to a billion by 32, right? Who’s gonna stop me? I’m clearly smarter than everybody else.

And you found out a rising tide lifts all boats and it shut it all down. And so the pain of that was so acute that I spent the next few years just trying to figure out, how do you hedge global macro risk? So that way as an entrepreneur, you can go as hard as you possibly can into your idiosyncratic business. So that’s kind of what led me into this whole investing space and long volatility, tail risk, options and thinking about defensive strategies for entrepreneurs.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And it’s a similar story with a different path for me. I just, from a teenage—I was 17 or 16 and my uncle and dad would be arguing about stocks and I just got the bug. It’s like neither one of these guys know what the fuck they’re talking about because they’re talking about this CEO and this, and it was all surface stuff. And I’m kind of like, don’t you think you should look at how much you’re paying for every dollar of earnings or all that? And so, but what I loved about it was it is the perfect spot for somebody who is insatiably curious and loves to go down rabbit holes.

We were talking about religion, you were just recounting all of your various experiences. I think that religion and religious attitudes inform far more than religion. Right. I think that, you know, you think of Bogleheads, you think of the various, no, I’m a die-hard fill in the blank. And what’s interesting about religion compared to the scientific method is that you can be consistently wrong with all of your predictions in religion and gain adherents.

Jason Buck

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think of the Seventh-day Adventists—not to pick on them because I’m sure that they’re lovely people. But that was a guy back in the 1800s who started, mathematically proven through the Bible, the world is going to end. I can’t remember, 1846. Right. And so literally he got a hundred thousand people to sell everything, wear white robes waiting for the rapture, and nothing happened. He was like, oh, I got something wrong. And he went back and he ran the numbers again and he came up with a new date. Of course, wrong. And yet there are now 18 million members of this particular sect that descends from him. And it’s not just him. Right. It’s like every major religion makes all of these—it’s coming soon. I always joke the world’s oldest profession is not prostitution. It is predicting the end of the world.

Jason Buck

That’s very fair. What’s the—I’m always terrible at pronouncing this word—millenarianism. Yes, yes. The end of the world. That’s what most religions are at the end of the day. But what you hinted at that I find so fascinating that I’m working on is I do take my background in comparative religions and now I’m applying it to investing and portfolio construction. Because like you said, I always like to mess around with my value-based brethren. I mean, inherently you got to love value-based in general, sure. But now they worship the Buddha, like Buffett, right? And whatever he says from on high, that’s gospel and you can’t tell them. But as any faith-based religion, it’s the pain in the interim, right? Going the past decade without value. No, if we just hold the course, if we just stay strong, right, we’re all going to be lifted together in this rapturous moment. And value, everybody’s going to get their comeuppance in the afterlife, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you know, that’s another big part of it, right? You see it in market behavior all the time. The people—we had value strategies, we had momentum strategies, we had a variety of strategies because the evidence suggests that on balance they work more often and with better predictability, if you want to call it that, than other strategies. So I in the beginning, like everyone else, read all of Graham’s books and found it compelling. But I also was like, wow, this Mandelbrot fellow is a very interesting guy because I’m sure you’ve read of course that chapter in which he just dissects and just—it doesn’t leave anything living from efficient market theory. Right? But isn’t that an edge? Isn’t it an edge for an investor who’s very happy to fade those consensuses and go their own way?

Jason Buck

Yes and no. We’re getting into a different topic that I find fascinating, like edge or alpha. I’m not sure any of it really exists. There are edges or alpha in arbitrage hunting, right? But you have to persistently arbitrage hunt because they appear and disappear so quickly and it’ll be in a different marketplace. That’s a true edge. But those are extremely rare. And so you go back to kind of efficient markets. But like you’re saying, what mine came from too is people, I find when they’re young, they either start with Buffett and then that just locks in from a young age. Right. That’s part of it. Or like I did, they start with Market Wizards. I kind of started both the same time.

But I loved Market Wizards because you find from reading the Market Wizards books there’s a million ways to make money in the markets. You got to find one that works with your personality so you’ll stick with it, which is really Buffett’s secret. Who else has done the same thing for 80 years? And compounded as we know it, all the wealth came later in life. Right. So that’s the unique part of it. But what I found even reading Market Wizards is a lot of times you had these CTAs or trend followers and it was like trend following plus nothing. They just thought that was the cat’s pajamas. Right. There’s nothing better than that.

But then you run the numbers and you’re like, well, if I pair that with long-only equity beta, I end up with a better portfolio due to the uncorrelated nature. And because they were faith-based in trend following, then they wouldn’t apply that. But now you’re starting to see that last few years, you’re seeing a lot of mutual funds and ETFs come online. They’re pairing those two together. So it comes down like you’re saying, this portfolio construction of all these different strategies that work at different times and all these asset classes that work at different times, whether inflation, deflation, growth or recession, if you pair them together, they all kind of muddle along in a symbiotic relationship. And your timing mechanism can just be rebalancing.

And so to your point, that’s maybe where you’re harnessing a bit of edge or alpha from the behavioral aspects of people. Because you kind of just watch money chase all of these asset classes around the world. What’s the hottest these days? Right. But then the hard part is if you have true portfolio diversification, there’s always a part of your portfolio that you hate. The news media is telling you to hate it. You’re an idiot for owning it. It makes you want to throw up. But if everything’s going up together, you’re not diversified. So that’s the hard part. I think it’s like Brian Portnoy is like always having to say you’re sorry.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I’ve said often that the less sustainable edge, if there is edge at all, is to arbitrage human behavior. Because literally human behavior has moved very little, at least over the recorded history I’ve been able to study, whereas markets—people confuse the climate with the weather. I think weather is obviously very changeable. It’s a beautiful day here now. It was raining yesterday. Climate is very different. It’s a lot more sticky and sticks around. And I too looked at the world in much the same way you’re describing right now. It’s kind of like you’d never know when you’re going to be right and how much pain it’s going to cause. I actually use that as kind of an indicator. If everyone was telling me, you’ve got to drop this strategy, it’s awful. We’re getting fired in this strategy. Everyone hates us, they’re yelling at us. I would put money into it just because it just seemed like a sensible thing to do.

Jason Buck

Tomorrow I’m going to—I’m going to London tomorrow and I’ll see Jerry Haworth from 36South out there. And he’s one of the OGs of kind of the long volatility tail risk space. And he told me once that the only way he can predict when the next market crash is coming is when he has the highest amount of redemptions. He just knows it’s around the corner, right? So once again, arbitraging human behavior. And then the event happens and then everybody rushes to invest because they want a time machine, right? When did Noah build the ark? Before the flood. Before the flood. But everybody comes in after the flood. So that’s what you’re saying. The arbitraging of human behavior is odd to me.

And our mutual friend Meb Faber always says too, when people call him up to talk about one of his ETFs, he’s like, oh, the one that’s down the most. And no, it’s never. It’s the one that’s up the most, right? It is just inevitable. Over and over. But I am sympathetic or empathetic to the idea that human behavior is hard. I think you’ve talked about it before. This is why I also love our business. The P&L every day is black and white. We have a connection with reality that you may not get in a narrative religion where the end times are down there tomorrow, always tomorrow.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What did you do today?

Jason Buck

Right? What did you do today? And your P&L could tell you you suck every day, right? Or even worse, what kind of job can you go to and lose money for months on end? Right. It’s only a job like this. Obviously, being an ER doctor, ER nurse is much more important than what we do. But it’s an interesting feedback mechanism that we get about reality. And therefore, yeah, you have to think very carefully about what your portfolio looks like over time. But the fairness for the human condition is—it’s one thing to have theoretical inputs and the philosophy and the back test and know through time I’m going to be fine over decades.

But the lived experience, day to day, it just plays on your emotions much harder than people could ever imagine. I always—because we work with a lot of younger investors that had their first liquidity event and they sold their business. And one of the things that’s interesting to me, they always tell me, if the market’s down 50%, I’m a buyer. And I just laugh hysterically every time because it’s just like, you have no idea. But understandably, they don’t have the experience for it. And I think Jason Zweig said it best, I can draw you a picture of a snake, but if I throw a snake in your lap, you’re going to act very differently.

And so what they don’t know is if the market’s down 50%, you’re in the fetal position on the floor, you’re going to ATMs to try to get your cash out. You think it’s the end of the world. The idea that you’d want to buy stocks at that point, you and I have been through this, it’s anathema. Hopefully over time we get enough experience. And then we’re like Howard Marks, and we’re like, well, I have to be buying now or else I’m in an existential crisis either way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I wrote while I was still in asset management, very few pieces that predicted anything, because I’m kind of in your camp that predictions—make them early and often and then cherry-pick the ones that work. But I do write them when I just feel the data shouting at me like, Jim, you got to share this. And so I wrote one in February of ‘09 saying a generational buying opportunity. And the hate of the emails that I got after I published that was very much like when I wrote The Internet Contrarian in April of 1999. That was worse because, man, living through that period, it was just surreal. Literally everyone had drunk the Kool-Aid. All of the priors were correlated.

And when that happens, you go from heterogeneity of opinion to homogeneity of opinion that causes information cascades and it’s like a tsunami. You’re watching, right? And you’re like, I don’t agree.

Jason Buck

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And then you get swept up. And just as proof of that point, what did I do? I started an Internet company. So if you think you’re impervious to the water in which we swim with our fellow humans, you are wrong. And it’s very difficult. I got very inspired by John Templeton, who put orders in way below where the shares were trading. And when asked, he was like, oh, I wouldn’t have the courage to do it if they ever got to those prices. And so I did kind of train myself with that instinct, like Meb. Right. You take the one—if you think the strategy is still sound and you think it’s going to work, that’s not a bad move.

But also you mentioned earlier rebalancing, Jason. Trying to convince a prospective client that your rebalancing discipline is what is responsible for much of your success. It’s like I’m pretty good at coming up with ways to persuade people. I just never came up—I mean, they would just literally stare at me like what? Just rebalancing.

Jason Buck

It’s a form of timing mechanism too, in a way. Non-predictive in a way. So we could also argue if it’s implicitly mean-reverting, is it a short vol trade or not. But maybe you have long vol components to your portfolio, but it’s affecting the hubris effect, as we both know all too well. And my good buddy Corey Hoffstein wrote a book about rebalancing timing luck. A lot of times when we look at the great returns of investors, there’s a lot of timing luck to it, whether we get into ergodicity or sequencing risk. And so you and I are trying to mitigate that as much as possible.

And that’s what I look at. If I hold all these offense and defense and all these world’s asset classes and I’m rebalancing between them, not only is it helping me scale trade kind of those equity curves as they go, so I’m forcing myself into the best behavior possible, I’m buying into a drawdown and I’m selling into the upswing and I’m rebalancing to other asset classes that may be doing similar things or countercyclically or negatively correlated. And so to me, it just inherently breeds that discipline that you would get from a quant effect by having a timing tranche for the rebalancing effect. It allows me to not override or oversee those things in a way. And then ironically, you do actually, if you have truly uncorrelated, negatively correlated, and some volatile assets in there, you actually get a rebalancing premium. You can make an extra 2 to 3% a year just on that rebalancing effect.

But I always think about how hard it is, like you’re saying, to sell it to clients and everything. I think about my own father who’s in our funds, right? And I’ve been talking to him about these ideas for 20 years. And in 2020, he made a bunch of money off long vol. Now you have to rebalance into stocks at that lower NAV point because that’s how you compound. Well, and then as you know, through the end of 2020, stocks rip. And he’s like—and I’m like, at the end of 2020, it’s rebalancing time again or whatever. And he’s like, but my stocks are up so much and this long vol is down so much. And I’m like, what have we been talking about for 20 years? It’s just like, no man’s a hero in his own family either. That’s also a lesson we all learned as well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s quite true. Something I live with every day. Let’s go back though. Let’s talk about the experience which was obviously painful for you, and then why it sparked, what it sparked that led to the way you manage money. I love the name of your portfolio, the Cockroach Portfolio. It just, every time I see it, I chuckle. And it’s the best kind of form of anti-memetic behavior because you’re just immediately excluding all the people that were like, yes, cockroach.

Jason Buck

So in fairness, everybody told me not to call it that, and I understand it, but I was like, wait, what do cockroaches do? Right? And I don’t have to say anymore. You know the philosophy of what we do immediately.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Totally.

Jason Buck

And then it’s visceral. So you also remember it because if there’s 10,000 hedge funds out there, how do I cut through the noise? Ironically though, we just did have an investor redeem because he said his wife was getting tired of the disgusting cockroach emails. So this is what you deal with. So the experience in that after the 2007, 2008, right, for lack of a better term, probably existential crisis, figuring out what I want to do with my life, everything I thought I knew and the genius I thought I was crumbles beneath you and you realize your mortality and probably more the opposite, you think you’re a complete moron, right?

Because it’s one thing as you know, to lose your own money, but if you lose friends and family money and everything, it’s absolutely devastating because these people believed in you and all that stuff. And so it’s almost like a double layer of existential crisis in a way. So in fairness, it probably took me years to even come to terms with that and kind of understand what happened and take full responsibility for all that. Because even though it’s a global liquidity event, you want to tell yourself you should have seen it forthcoming, there’s things you would have hopefully done and thinking about in hindsight, which helped lead me to create things now.

But part of that process was I was very—I’ve been very lucky in my life. Let me start from the ovarian lottery, right? I was born a white male in America, in the upper Midwest. Doesn’t get any better than that. And then was lucky enough, a family of athletes. I was a good athlete. My brain works great. I have a decent memory. So my whole life I wanted to be a D1 athlete. So I found, I did that. I found that to be hollow right then. I was like, everybody, I wanted to be a millionaire. And a net worth millionaire on paper, we’ve talked about this before, doesn’t buy you a cup of coffee, kids. But I found out what it’s like to be a millionaire and how banks and everybody treat you then. And I found that to be hollow as well.

I found what I thought was the love of my life, found that to be hollow. Just all these real life events, I found them to be hollow. And by 30 years old, I’m like, well, I’ve conquered everything I wanted to do. Kind of what do I want to do now? One of the things we talked about before is then I had the hubris still at that time somehow where I was like, well, all these individuals have been enlightened before. I’m like, if anybody can do it, then that means I could do it too, right? And so pursued that path to only find out enlightenment doesn’t exist, which I’m sure you’d love to talk about later. But so all of that, it ends up though that insatiable curiosity has never left me.

And one of the things I’ve always been obsessed with is generational wealth or investing or what do you do with your money, right? You have money comes in, you consume whatever you need to consume. If you have anything left over, that savings, what do you do with that savings to make sure you’re okay? So that’s what obsessed me, because I came from a family, went from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in the job shop manufacturing community. So I saw it happen from my great-grandfather started something that my grandfather ran, then my dad, and then it was completely out of our family. And so this always obsessed me. And so thinking about how do you survive in these environments and then always be an entrepreneur and think about other entrepreneurs. I got obsessed with defensive asset classes, right?

Nassim Taleb, tail risk hedging. Another offshoot of that is the long volatility programs. And then you can think about the commodity trend followers. They protect against inflation or kind of differentiated markets or we have breakouts that are uncorrelated. So it’s like, how do you combine correlated, uncorrelated, negatively correlated assets together to build this robust portfolio that can kind of muddle along in any of the four economic quadrants? Like we talked about, inflation, deflation, growth, recession. So it was just that obsession over time that led me down this path of I taught myself how to trade volatility, especially the basis trade. I traded options and then eventually figured out I was probably a better entrepreneur than a trader. And a member of my family read Nassim Taleb’s books like Black Swan. They’re like, hey, how do I—tail risk hedging looks interesting to me. And I’m like, well, Taleb’s connected with Universa and they want 100 million plus. This is an institutional hedge fund and there’s nothing for the little guy.

So I thought there had to be a way to construct that portfolio. And it took me years to figure out what that path would be. And as you know, the wrapper and everything that goes into building a business in finance with all of our oversight, but eventually figured out how to do it for my friends and family and aggregate them together to get those access to QP funds and those sorts of things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And do you find that your client base, and this is a horrible way to phrase it, do you think that when they give you money, they really, truly understand what you do?

Jason Buck

Man, like a samurai, you went right at the heart of it. Right? So the way I think about it, we’ll get down to that part, I try to fire as many potential clients as possible. So we’re out here, we do podcasts, whatever. We bring people into that funnel, and as they come down the funnel, they eventually get to me. I want to make sure they truly understand what we do and they need it like water in a desert. And ironically, most of our clients have been engineers that have tried to build what we built and knew the difficulty of it. And they’re like, oh, thank God you built this. Please take my money. Right. And so they fully understand. We go through that process and they completely understand what we do. Right.

As you know, the harder you have to sell, the hotter that money is. Right. And so it’s a weird thing. It’s like you have to sell what you’re doing to get people in the door, but if you’re pitching harder and harder, you get the money initially, but it’s gone quickly. So you want to make sure you have the best clients. That’s why I say, I’m trying to fire all the clients and try to say, go here, there’s better options for you. But eventually we get down to that client. Now, the heart of what you’re saying is something that I think about way too often is that I know everything that’s gone into this portfolio, every decision we’ve ever made as the thousands of decisions that have gone into that portfolio.

And knowing every time we try to make the best decision outcome as possible and a lot of time at our own detriment. Right. But you don’t know that unless you’ve been in that room and been part of those decisions. Right. And so I have that full faith-based system in what we do because I’ve been there since the beginning and my team’s been there since the beginning. So we’re all easy investors in the fund. Like you said, people can understand, they think they understand theoretically and philosophically with what we do. But as soon as times get tough, that’s where you really find out if they believe in it or not. And unfortunately, it comes right back to faith-based dynamics and basically religion.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I love the way you avoided my question, by the way.

Jason Buck

Did I avoid it? I probably did. I’m going to try to be evasive about all your questions, but nail me down.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I asked that question because of the many decades I spent with clients.

Jason Buck

Very difficult.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I found that, like you, when I started out, I tried to sort for clients I did not want. And so, as you know, we’re empirically based algorithmic quants. And so rather than bring in here’s the best results of this strategy, I would always bring in the 10 worst drawdowns and just watch them, watch their reaction. And that seemed very effective until it got overrode. You know why they were sitting opposite me, right, Jason? They were sitting opposite me because the fund was on fire. And me showing them all of the—and some of these drawdowns were horrific, right? Like 55% drawdown. And it didn’t touch them. And I learned to my detriment that when the fund started doing poorly, guess who were the first people to fire me?

And so it was something that I always really struggled with because I’m a big believer in level playing fields. Right. I did everything wrong. Right. I had a relationship with Merrill Lynch providing stock selections for their UIT program. And I was launching four no-load mutual funds. And Merrill called me and they’re like, why don’t you do load, man? We’ll put you on the system. And we could move you a lot of product. I’m like, no, load funds are dinosaurs.

Jason Buck

Yeah. And they’re still around to this day.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And they are still around to this day. Well, because you realize a friend of Patrick’s has this great demarcation, is someone pre-fall or post-fall. And it’s very useful. I don’t usually like these dichotomies because they miss so much.

Jason Buck

There’s two types of people in the world. The people that believe there’s two types of people in the world and the people that don’t.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s right.

Jason Buck

This dichotomy, though, I’m curious how you—because, okay, we both have this very egalitarian ethos. Right. That runs through everything we do, but at the same time, we’re both hardcore observers of human behavior.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Jason Buck

And sometimes those are in hard conflict with each other.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Sometimes.

Jason Buck

Right. Like you said, I’m highlighting the drawdowns and everything, but I know as soon as you have a run of good returns, this is why everybody’s talking to you. But you’re running a business, so you’re like, do I strike while the iron’s hot. I know I should be shouting this from the rooftops, but it feels skeevy to me. Right? But this is human nature. And then when we’re in drawdown is when they should be allocating to you, but they’re never going to. So it’s almost like you shut off the marketing efforts during that time. I mean, we try to just keep it consistent. And I just try to build a portfolio that I want and my family wants and hopefully other people like it too. But that’s what I’m saying. How do you deal with that?

Knowing exactly what they’re going to do is the exact opposite of what they should be doing. But I guess the hope is your product you believe is the best option for them, even though they may be buying in at a high point in NAV, instead of buying in at the low point in NAV. But at least you know what you built. And maybe that gives you the comfort of having that discussion or potentially taking their money. I mean, you know them better than I would.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, ultimately you’ve got to believe in your process, right? In fact, at OSAM, we had a rule that the only long-only equity portfolios or stocks people could buy were through one of our portfolios. We didn’t allow trading of individual names. We didn’t allow speculative stuff. And everyone’s pretty cool with that. We just passionately believe chefs should eat their own cooking. And another thing that we instituted, which, it boggled my mind that I didn’t see other managers doing this as aggressively, is the one rule was, when we are shitting the bed, we are all on the phone, all of us on the phone.

And the number of anecdotes I can give you, I mean, I wish I would have kept hard data on it, but they’re anecdotes where the people would say, you know, you are the only manager who’s calling me. And he goes, I’ve been sitting here trying to get my other managers on the phone and they’re all too busy or whatever. And I just think we’re back to human nature yet again, aren’t we? Because that’s just the way we behave. And so while we always did try to qualify the client and make sure that what we were giving them was going to be right for their particular situation, we did attempt to get clients to show us their overall allocation. And you’d be surprised by how reluctant many people are to do that. But it’s a matter of course, kind of for you, right? Or are they just adding you as a bolt-on, come the meteor hitting earth?

Jason Buck

It depends. So our overarching Cockroach philosophy holds passively global stocks, global bonds. We have a long volatility tail risk on, a long commodity trend on, a little bit of gold and cryptocurrency. So it’s all the world’s asset classes. So it is a set it and forget it. Great for you. The hard part is when people ask me, how much should I allocate? It’s like, well, I built it. I put 100% of my money, my family’s money. I think you should put 100% in. But nobody in the industry says that. Right. So it’s like, or if I’m talking to a wealth manager, it’s like, okay, put 10% in us and then you’ll forget about us for 10 years. And I’m clipping that coupon, right. And they’re like, you can’t say that. I’m like, but that’s how the industry works, right? It’s this radical sense of human nature.

But yeah, so I mean, that’s the way I believe. But then also what if I’m idiosyncratically wrong? You should still have some diversification outside of us. Right? It’s not that simple. And right now we’re just trading kind of the world’s liquid asset classes and there’s this whole world of illiquid private asset classes that would be a nice complement to a portfolio like that. I’m curious though, your hardcore thinking about human behavior as, when you picked up the phone, not only was that important to you in that drawdown to pick up the phone, but you also knew in the back of your mind that was going to keep clients invested. And so this is one—another thing I have a real problem with is we were saying earlier, the P&L is our black and white. There’s no faking that. Right. But then every month or quarter, everybody does their write-up about that month or quarter. Now I hate that part. I’m like, the numbers should speak for themselves. You can judge us on those. But I do know, and my partners know that this write-up and this narrative is what keeps clients invested. And that’s another opposing forces I have a really hard time with.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, it’s a challenge. And our default was always to be as, just bluntly honest as we possibly could be. And in our case, what we would do is, if we were really shitting the bed, we would go back and analyze all the other times we were really shitting the bed and try to at least put context into it because we did truly believe that particular portfolio did belong in that client’s portfolio. But it’s the hyperbolic discounting that is yet another thing that we humans are great at. And literally that’s by the way, because I want to get back to the exact experience that happened in ‘07-’08 with you. But during that period we literally had a bunch of our, who I viewed as incredibly sophisticated clients, literally taking $250,000 out of the bank and putting it in a safety deposit box.

And I would just be like, that’s probably not an optimal strategy for you to do here. But we lost a lot of clients because when all the correlations go to one, people need liquidity. Right. I saw so many really great shops and I mean that, go out of business because they were a source of liquidity. Right. And you mentioned private marks. We do a lot of private investing now. And one of the things that really bothers me is that they are not marked to market on a daily basis.

Jason Buck

The vol laundering of it is beautiful.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s—but it’s like borderline.

Jason Buck

It is but…

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Come on.

Jason Buck

As we both know, it’s incentives all the way down. And I don’t think people realize how much the actual allocators are complicit in that. Because if you’re at a mid-level seat at a pension or an endowment and you want to keep that seat and you want to compete with the other Ivy Leagues. So that’s the other problem is they put all of these endowments on a leaderboard table. Right. Coming out of Swensen. So everything has an opposing force. It’s like Swensen was great with the Yale model, but then it created ideas that we’d have superstars at these universities. And so now they have a leaderboard they’re trying to keep up with. And so if I’m sitting in that seat and I know if I allocate over here, we’re only going to have positive returns, no negative returns.

And if anything does happen, it’s probably 10 years from now and I’ve already switched my seat two or three times. Right. So why wouldn’t I allocate to the people that are making up their own marks?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jason Buck

So it’s just like, that’s what I’m saying. It’s turtles all the way down. So it’s—we’re all complicit, I feel, in a lot of that stuff.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I agree. And actually, before we started recording the podcast, one of the things I wanted to talk about was ‘07-’08, because that is where I started getting pissed off because I saw that everyone was complicit. Everyone. The ratings agencies, the banks. The banks knew that they were hawking shit, but they were encouraged to do so by the government, who always tends to like, we didn’t have anything to do with it. Oh, well, know your history a little bit. You actually did. And then the thing that offended me the most was nobody went to prison. And that talk about existential.

For the guy who was around for the savings and loan crisis, when more than 1,000 senior executives of those companies went to jail, and real jail, not country club jail, and that I really had to think deeply about what that implied. My thesis was, everyone is complicit here. Not just this group or that group. It’s everyone. And the government, which is supposed to be the referee, isn’t refereeing. And I’m like, this could be bad.

Jason Buck

It’s moral hazard all the way down. But it’s interesting, like you said, everybody tried to blame people getting liar loans or ninja loans at the time. And everything was like, who gave them those loans? We just went all the way up to scale. And it’s a diffusion of responsibility.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Jason Buck

It’s the same thing. We know if something happens in the park down there and everybody goes to help, instead of pointing at somebody saying, you call 911. It’s a diffusion of responsibility effect.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yep.

Jason Buck

And also be clear, I knew that people buying the condos and the developments I was doing. I saw the no income, no verification loans they were getting. Right. And I turned a blind eye. Right. Because I was trying to sell the project out.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Sure.

Jason Buck

So I’m complicit in that. And then also, like you’re saying, I think about this way too often, picking up the phone, everything. I did not handle it well. In 2007, 2008, I was in my mid-20s. A lot of hubris. I probably went more into turtle mode than picking up the phone. And so I did a lot of things that I’m not proud of that I had to reconcile and deal with from that experience as well. And part of it is I saw the writing on the wall. But it was interesting, too, at the time, I think it was late 2006. It’s always interesting. Real estate guys say 2007, financial guys say 2008, right?

But in 2006, I remember I got—I was young, naive, and so I got together some of the best or oldest real estate developers in that whole Charleston era. It was six guys, and all of them were over the age of 50 at the time, whatever. And I asked them, I said, look, I don’t have context. What do you think is—to a man, they said, this time is different. Right? But unfortunately, I learned a hard lesson in life that commercial real estate developers are the most preternaturally optimistic people on the planet, right? And as you know, they just declare bankruptcy and start over. Don’t think about risk. It’s all just YOLO, long 24/7, right, with leverage. So I learned that harsh mistake where I thought I was being smart. I clearly wasn’t. I truly didn’t understand human behavioral dynamics in my mid-20s.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I had a different experience in my mid-20s, and it was our family. I briefly ran a real estate operation that our family had done a bunch of investments in, primarily residential, commercial apartment buildings. And the Reagan tax reform went through, and I went and called on those same old guys, and I’m like, this could be disastrous for real estate because they’re taking away all the goodies. And they were all like, you’re just a kid. You have no idea. They’re all going to come back in. You don’t need to worry about it. And I’m like, would you guys like to buy our apartment buildings? And they’re like, hell, yes. So I sold everything. And like you, if you know real estate, you know what happened for many years after those tax reforms went into place.

So I just chalked it up as I was just dumb luck. It’s like I didn’t have the—it was because I’m also a context guy, right? If you don’t remember anything that happened before you were born, said Cicero, you remain forever a child. And but this was an instance where the lack of context really helped me because I’m like, that law looks really bad for this type of real estate. But I think that the quality that I really admire in you is you are very open about fucking shit up and learning from it. And that was the great unlock for me was I am going to screw things up all the time.

And what I have to do is I have to look at that as an opportunity to learn something, to modify my mental model, to modify what I do in the world, et cetera. And I see that in you. So, I mean, it’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of you.

Jason Buck

I guess I’m still surviving with all the scar tissue, but perfectly like you said, it always fascinates me. I don’t have kids, but I always think about child rearing because, as we study childhood psychology, we learn more about philosophy and all those things. So I’ve always been fascinated by it. But one of the things we do is, right, we want our kids to have a great life and we don’t want them to make mistakes that hurt them. But yet everything we’ve learned is by making mistakes. It’s this weird once again, contradiction that we deal with in life. And then I’ve always, I’m a student of history the same way you are, and I really started studying my industry and the history so I don’t repeat those mistakes.

But yet every time it’s so slightly different that you get caught up in it. Right? So it’s like I’m fooling myself, right? That oh, no, I have knowledge of this. It’s like, no, each time will be so slightly different that you’ll get caught up in the fervor. Right? And you’ll maybe be like, oh, in hindsight you’d be like, I was an idiot again. And I always hated that quote. That was like, what is it, a genius learns from others’ mistakes? Yeah, I’m like, where are these geniuses? All I’ve learned from is my own mistakes. And like you said, I’m trying to make as many a day as possible, but I’m trying to suck less every day. That’s how I look. I’m not getting better or smarter. I just hopefully suck a little bit less every day.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jason Buck

And that’s, it’s like, I think there’s great—did you ever—was it Shopsins? Was there a restaurateur here in the city? He had a diner. Did you?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, yeah.

Jason Buck

I Like Killing Flies was the name of the documentary. One of the greatest of all time. And there’s this great line he has. And it’s like the key to life I try to teach my children is you’re just a piece of shit, right? And every day you might do something that makes you less of a piece of shit. You might walk an old lady across the street. But you should just start from the metric that you’re a piece of shit. And occasionally you do something kind. It always resonated with me, I should say.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So again, it’s ‘07 if you’re a real estate guy. It’s ‘08 if you’re a market guy. What happened? I want to hear the story, Jason. I want to hear what happened that would cause you—I understand the rabbit holes, and I understand your nature pretty perfectly because I have a very similar nature. But what was the thing that ignited the, I have to completely reinvent the way I think about this?

Jason Buck

Like we were talking about, I think it’s pain more than anything else. And I thought I had a handle on things, but almost like we were talking about, each time’s different. So it’s like those Minsky moments, right? Stability breeds instability, but we don’t know what’s the aggregate tipping point, right? That’s the hard part. So I was already worried about those things. And I just thought I had—I thought I had life nailed down. I really did. It was one of those things where to me, wealth is going out to eat and not looking at the price on the menu. That’s one of the forms of wealth. Obviously, your health is more important than that. But I remember that time was like, oh, I’m not pinching pennies to buy a burrito or something.

I was like, oh, God, I got life nailed. It’s super sweet. It’s just all upside from here. And so I think it was that jarring juxtaposition of the crash and to make matters so much worse, the hard part. And this is what led to kind of the tail risk hedging is no matter—in real estate, you’re developing projects that might have one, two, and five-year timelines. And so you’re doing all of these. And so it gets into this idea of ergodicity and time horizon and sequencing. If you then have a liquidity crash in the middle, there goes all of your model. There’s your DCF. Fuck DCF. It didn’t have 2008 or COVID in my DCF, so to speak. And so that crash felt so bad.

But what was even worse is because I had clients that were getting all these loans to buy the buildings I was renovating or restructuring, I could see who the worst and most complicit lenders were. The WaMus of that, the Countrywide, all of those. Right. So I knew because it hit 2007 first, I’m like, this is going to cascade into 2008 in the financial markets. Gets even better. So I’m like, oh, I know how to trade options. I’m going to start buying put options on all these home lenders that I know are complete garbage. I lost money shorting the housing lenders that went bankrupt. You know how this works. And so the pain of that is I had to teach myself what are the true options Greeks, the first order, second order.

Because I thought I was just making a bet on going down. I didn’t realize it was the price I was paying for the implied volatility and going very short-term time horizon as well. I was trying to just nail that move. And so it was, not only did I go through the pain of that crash, any savings I had left over, I was trying to short the markets to make up for it and lost that money as well. I mean, you don’t hit rock bottom till you hit rock bottom.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, you don’t.

Jason Buck

And so, yeah, and I’m trying to think what the hard part is, as you know, was Adam Smith talked about the vivacity of impressions, right? And so at the time, that was, I literally fetal position on the floor. But now that we’re talking about it, what, almost 20 years later, it’s a story that happened to somebody else. So I’m trying to put myself there to answer your question and really walk through it. But as we know, we don’t have the detail, we don’t have all of the little things that happen because it’s just, it’s become only a chapter in the book anymore and our memories suck, as we both know. And so I don’t know if I’m answering the question.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, you actually are. And it also leads to some interesting jumping off points because…

Jason Buck

I also, to be fair, also had to move in with my mother too. So that’s—this is probably what you’re getting at too, there’s some—see, it comes up when you ask, right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think we might have uncovered something here.

Jason Buck

So part of it was, so you go through riding high in the crash and everything. And then at first I went and went to live with my sister in Chicago because she was doing her medical degree at the University of Chicago.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Wow.

Jason Buck

But she’s a few months out from graduating with medical degree, so she has no money. Right. Of course, it’s all loans and everything. Right. So she would get jobs at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s handing out samples or on street corners twirling signs. And so I moved over to Chicago. She’s like, you can come do this with me. And I’m like, all right. So we’re handing out, as you know, Chicago’s food festival. We’re handing out free packets of chili salsa and stuff like that. During the great food festival, we’re having signs like, come visit this on a street corner. And I’m doing it with my sister, so it’s making me laugh because she’s about to graduate from University of Chicago Medical School a few months ago. I’m worth $5 million or more, right?

And it’s all gone. Right? And then I used to drive a new Range Rover and everything back then, and every Range Rover that drove by, and my sister, I was like, you’re one bad decision away. It’s like, it’s coming for you, too. So I was probably one advertising, but then also just this doom apocalypse creature on the corner. And then eventually my sister graduates, and she’s got to go on with her life and everything. So I ended up moving in with my mother in California. And I was just lucky at that time that she had an extra room and was willing to provide housing and food. So I would live very cheaply for years and years. And part of that was it comes out to then what am I actually going to do?

And with insatiable curiosity, and I know this is what we were kind of getting at earlier about portfolios, it’s extremely personal to us. It’s praxis, right? This is my entire life philosophy that I’m putting into this business and this portfolio for you. So it’s deeply personal. And so to me, it was more of that alignment where maybe in my younger years and maybe living under what’s important to others or some sort of Girardian mimesis, where it got to the point of, this aligns with my values and who I am at this point, and this is deep practice for me. So this is all I want to do. If it works, if it doesn’t. But this is what I want to do.

I always, I joke with our mutual friend Senra about there’s that quote was like, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? And I’m like, fuck that quote. It’s like to me it’s, what would you do if you knew you would fail? That’s what we’re compelled to do.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s a much better question.

Jason Buck

Just run headfirst into walls every single day knowing failure is probably imminent.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Jason Buck

And if we do get lucky, great. But otherwise, that’s what it’s—not anybody would do anything. Yeah. What would you do if you couldn’t fail? Anything. I’d fly out this window.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right, exactly.

Jason Buck

But no, we’re compelled to do things. And this gets back to where you and I disagree about free will. It’s like I’m compelled to do this thing where it’s high likelihood of failure, but I don’t know anything else better to do because it’s just everything of who I am and this amalgamation of detritus I’ve collected from others throughout these years because I don’t even have any thoughts I can call my own. They’re really other people. I guess they’ve been uniquely put together into this body and brain. But that’s all I’m doing, is using those to the fullest extent of my abilities. I’m just giving my all into this. And if it works, if it doesn’t. Because we can’t help ourselves.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So I don’t know that we disagree on free will. I think that we have different shading on free will. I think that I’m not going to be so arrogant to determine that this tiny little human brain of mine is going to be able to conclude with 100% certainty and no ability to falsify that free will does not exist. Right. And so I make a choice and my choice is I’m going to act as if I have free will.

Jason Buck

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because again, I’m huge into evidence. Right. And like we were talking about it with the religions that the end is nigh and no end. No end. And yet we still get more members.

Jason Buck

Put the Nikes back on. Mix up the Kool-Aid. Let’s do it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly What were they? Tee and Dough? I can’t remember their names. One of my guys, one of my principal salesmen had that guy’s picture, that cult member. I can’t remember his name. This was the Hale-Bopp comet one and he had the guy’s picture on his board next to us. And I’m like, Chris, why do you have that? He goes, that is the world’s greatest salesman.

Jason Buck

Yeah, exactly. We pale in comparison to that. That’s our aspirational qualities.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But so on free will, I have—I’m not smart enough to be able to determine whether that ultimately. But I also share many of your ideas about this cloud of ideas, like Rupert Sheldrake. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Rupert’s work, but I’m fascinated by it because he posits that there is a, for lack of a better term to define it, a cloud of human knowledge that we all can interface with. Very brilliant guys like Tesla, Nikola Tesla, believe this. Have you ever read his really short autobiography? I’ll give you a copy. I think you’d really enjoy it because he’s very straightforward. These aren’t my ideas that I get them. They appear in my mind and I’m basically just a copy guy copying them down.

And that got me into a mode which I’m in now and have been in since I discovered this was very helpful, which is I am at best a co-creator. At best, right? To say, no, this is mine. I did this. No one else could have done this. You’re just feeding your own ego and that leads to bad stuff. When you realize, no, no, co-creator, it actually, guess what happens? You get a lot more creative because all of those ideas that, oh, those aren’t mine. Not invented here. I can’t think that way. You let them in and you’re like, huh, this actually is a really great idea. What if I tried it this way? That way.

Jason Buck

Do you feel like you don’t have writer’s block then, right? Because you’re not so stressed out about being the progenitor of these. To your point, I’m not sure if we’re the receptor or the progenitor. And to clarify, I think we are very closely aligned on it. We can know with pretty high probabilities that maybe free will doesn’t exist from everything we experience. But then at the same time, like you said, it’s like for me to be able to put on clothes and use a toilet, I have to believe in free will, right? But that’s the rub. I always think about it. That’s the paradox and the contradiction that we’re always going to live in, right? And that’s why when either you have a materialist or an idealist. It’s like yes and. It’s both.

Or the new mysterians or I think that our subconscious or our thinking apparatus is not the thing we need to actually discover the unconscious or any sort of cognition. Right. So we’re always at this paradox of we’re screwed. You’re never ever going to figure this out and that’s what you’re saying. The people that are super confident in it, that makes me even a weirder religion or a faith-based thing. But I’m curious, I’m really interested in—I think I’ve heard you say you’re agnostic before. Right? That’s fair. I always like the logical positivists for their deficiency even though they got a lot of things wrong. But what they talked about, agnostic. Right. It’s like until you can say anything, a coherent sentence about God, then there’s nothing to talk about. Which is kind of—right. If God is everywhere and everything, we don’t have any separation to understand. Right, I get it. But as soon as you use the word atheist or agnostic, you’re defining yourself by God and I find that very interesting. Right. You’re anti these things or on the fence about these things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But are you defining yourself by God or by society?

Jason Buck

That’s fair.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I think, I think that because religion, when you study history, you go back to Jericho. Vengeful gods show up when populations grow above a certain amount. Right. And that is a vengeful God showing up. That’s society saying, God damn it, we’ve got all these problems over here. Wouldn’t it be great if there was some vengeful all-seeing deity who could tell them—that’s by the way, that’s another religion is the best marketing ever.

Jason Buck

Of course.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s amazing.

Jason Buck

I’m trying to build a cult. I’m a cult leader. Exactly. I’m trying to get people to drink my Kool-Aid.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. Because the beauty of it is you could be wrong, wrong, wrong. And it doesn’t matter because it’s still going to happen someday. And let’s throw in, but wait, there’s more. You get to be one of the people who gets raptured if you believe, if you don’t believe, you’re going to the other place. And so I’m fascinated by religion and more importantly the effects that it has had on every human society since the beginning of time. We talked about this at my house. How Babylonia took over Mesopotamia is so brilliant to me. They were like, hey, we’re the coolest city-state. We should rule all of Mesopotamia. But we got a problem. Our God is puny. Marduk is like this. It’s like an afterthought in the pantheon of the gods. And the priests are like, no problem, we’ll do a rewrite.

And so they literally rewrote the myth of their God to make the God the greatest God of all time. He fought this mythical creature and tore it in half and threw half of it up, which created the stars and heavens, and threw the other half down, creating the Earth. And suddenly—and he absorbed 50 other gods. Right. And suddenly everyone was like, we like that guy.

Jason Buck

That’s a badass Marvel Universe God. I want that one.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I want that one. But it works.

Jason Buck

It works unbelievably well. And that’s what I was getting at. What I find really interesting. I assume you’re raised Catholic, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Catholic light.

Jason Buck

Catholic light, yeah. Which I think that’s most Catholics, right?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Not if you talk to my wife.

Jason Buck

Well, yeah, I should say my grandparents one side, they went to Latin mass, as you remember, back in the day. So I guess they weren’t light. But my mom was Catholic light.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I was on that edge. I wasn’t around for the Latin masses because of Vatican II.

Jason Buck

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But I did know—I was an altar boy. And I did know all the smart-ass—me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy. For mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Jason Buck

Oh, my God, I’ve never heard that one before. That’s so good.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And then there’s another one. Kyrie Christe, Kyrie Christe. That changes to carry carda, carry carda, carry credit carda.

Jason Buck

Oh, my gosh. But also, you remind me—actually, it popped in my head. I couldn’t remember for a second. Pascal’s wager. Right. The problem with Pascal’s wager is, which God? Right? So you know that one, but also—and then what also threw me off, mea maxima culpa. Did you see that documentary about the priests at the deaf school? I think it was in Minnesota. So it was your former neck of the woods.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jason Buck

It’s horrible. It’s horrific.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I haven’t seen it.

Jason Buck

But basically the priests were molesting kids that—parents didn’t speak sign language, so they picked those kids. Right. But there’s also some interesting things that came out of this documentary. Not necessarily positively. But one of the things was they had this therapist that worked with pastors, whether they’re drug addicts or alcoholics or whatever. And he’s like, I can rehab all of them except for the pedophiles. So he’s like, the only solution I can come up with is we need to—we have this—we own this island in the Caribbean. Let’s build a monastery there and let’s put them there instead of transferring them around to different parishes. And of course, that was the only solution he could come up with. And at the time they’re building it, it came out in the news.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Sorry, did Epstein buy this?

Jason Buck

But it came out in the news and they’re like, wait, they’re building a Club Med for pedophilic priests? And so it all got shut down, but it was the only solution they had.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

There’s so—by the way, there is so much of that. There is so much of solutions that actually make sense. Let’s put them all on an island that’s really hard to get to, call it a monastery. Keep them all in one place. We have these other things called fed max high-security prisons.

Jason Buck

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Nobody gets upset about those.

Jason Buck

But it’s like that’s—it’s actually—do you know that the monasteries actually came out, the Epicurean communes. So it already was coming along that line in that sense. But then I also—because my brain’s broken, in a way, I feel a little bit bad for the pedophilic priests, in a way. Stay with me. Just because I was luckily born with heteronormative beliefs. And so I can’t believe that if my sexual nature was turned on by that and I couldn’t control it. And that’s actually what that therapist was saying. These priests were pretty much like, please lock me away. I can’t deal with my nature wanting to do this. I can’t stop myself. So please lock me away. So they were dealing with—sorry, we full circle.

But I want to come back to Catholicism because I think it’s so interesting and I really wanted your take on this. I have found that anybody that was raised in Catholicism, it’s by far the best at getting all of your senses involved, right? From stained glass windows to beautiful art to music to the incense, it’s hitting all of your senses at such a young, formative age that I find Catholics, even when they say they’re agnostic or atheist, they never truly escape them because it got so locked in at the formative years of their life. Does that make sense?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It makes a ton of sense. And I have studied the Catholic Church deeply, but for different reasons. The Catholic Church is the world’s most successful cult. And I don’t mean that as a way to disparage them. They really knew how to grow religion. Right. So St. Paul, Saul falls, hits his head, sees the light. But if you look at the way he marketed Christianity, because it wasn’t a Catholic church at that time, it was absolutely brilliant. I mean, literally, he developed a mesh network of synagogues where he would go because he knew at that synagogue were the most important people in that town. They were going to be the connectors with everyone else. But the genius of it was Judaism remains small because it has so many really difficult to adhere to rules. Right.

You got the eating and the dressing and you can’t touch anything during this. And St. Paul is like, with this religion, you don’t have to do any of that stuff.

Jason Buck

But you think they had to do that because on Silk Road, because they’re money changers and lenders, you had to have that trick so you know he could trust. But then they… just come in ...

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Just come in man.. You know what’s great about our faith is there’s only one actual God. It doesn’t matter what gods you were brought up with, back to Mesopotamia, it doesn’t matter what your current faith. It doesn’t matter what color you are, what sex you are. Everyone can be a Christian. It was the original big tent approach to converting people and they made it extra easy to convert. And then they added just brilliant things like you’re referring to, the Catholic experience. Mine was more suburban, so we didn’t get the incense very much.

Jason Buck

You had smelly pilgrims coming into the church that you had to make up.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right. But you’re right, I mean, I can still recite many of the Catholic prayers just from memory. As it was in the beginning is now and ever and forever shall be world without end. Think about that for a minute. As it was in the beginning. We have defined the entire past for you. You don’t have any more questions about that. Is now. So we’re doing it for you now. And forever shall be. We got you. Yeah, shrink-wrapped. We got you, baby. For every part of your life. And then the way the ceremonies are, life events, baptism, confirmation, marriage, last rites, they’ve got it all. It’s just genius. It is genius the way they do it. But the thing that they did better than any other religion, confession.

Jason Buck

100%. I couldn’t agree more with this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

The greatest and smartest marketer in the world would never come up with that. And yet, are you kidding me? I get to lead a horrible and dissolute life and all I got to do is go in. Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been, you know, 30 years since my last confession. But I’m feeling really conflicted and bad about these sins. I absolve you. Boom, they re-virginize you.

Jason Buck

This is probably what actually made me explore religions was watching all of my relatives that were Catholics sin all week and then on the weekend be like starting over. And I was like, this can’t be right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

This just can’t be right. So, but brilliant.

Jason Buck

Yeah, 100%. But do you think as times change in modern times, there’s over 30,000 sects of Christianity in America alone, but I would even argue there’s over a billion because essentially everybody chooses their own religion. Right. There’s pieces and parts of the Bible or their past that they take and don’t take. And we choose and we pick and choose. And so when we’re trying to talk about these ideas, this is actually—you and I think about this a lot. It’s like by simplifying ideas we’re losing all the nuance and complexity. And actually individuals have their own religion and they may when they’re together in a congregation, it might sound like they want that community, but they’re really not Christian or Catholic based on all the doctrines. It’s pick and choose kind of your own religion and your own adventure along the way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, à la carte.

Jason Buck

Yeah. But we’re all individual in that sense.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I agree. And I should also, I am not anti-religious people.

Jason Buck

Yeah, it’s great community thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, it’s amazing for community. I mean you really do have to take seriously the Mormons for example. Look at again evidence, is there evidence that being a Mormon, not one of the ones in the crazy multi-wife tribes, but just a traditional Mormon leads to really good outcomes for the most part in terms of health, in terms of productivity, in terms of all of those things that are genuinely good for society. And so it’s just—I have no animosity other than for fundamentalist kind of religions where again certainty. I think one of my greatest things is certainty is absurd. And if you are—and of course, the hitch in our human OS is who are we drawn to pick for our leaders? The people who seem absolutely the most certain.

Jason Buck

Confidence.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so it’s just this endless wheel, like a hamster wheel, that we’re just like, well, that other guy didn’t work out, but this guy seems even more certain.

Jason Buck

Yeah, there’s nobody more annoying than a militant atheist.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right?

Jason Buck

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, right.

Jason Buck

The most annoying.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Talk about the truest of true believers.

Jason Buck

Exactly. It’s just like, yeah, it’s like when I guess goth kids think they’re different from everybody else. It’s like, no, you’re just running in the goth herd next to the herd, but you’re running off a cliff like everybody else. It’s the same thing atheists are. The militant atheist is like, I’m different. Like, no, you’re not. You’re still the same. Right. But I wonder, like you said, there’s beautiful things about community with religion and beautiful things about tradition. But I also wonder, I don’t know if you’re like me when you read about all this stuff about longevity, community, all of these things, I just assume we’re going to die young because if we’re just these really insular, just going our own way, why are we—we’re fighting these headwinds all the time.

So I assume that’s just taking years off our lives or because everything we read about longevity, we do the opposite of.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I got my fingers crossed. I’ve got lots of longevity in the genetic heritage.

Jason Buck

So do I.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I got that going for me, which is nice. I think that’s another aspect that I really like about true market aficionados. Generally, they’re a lot like you. And by that I mean they love to know about everything. Because I always thought of Wall Street as kind of the Olympics of business. Right. We had a family business that my family did very well in, my extended family, which was the oil business. And my uncle kept trying to get me to go, and I’m just like, Uncle John, I have zero interest. I mean, I think you’ve—it’s amazing what you’ve accomplished, but oil.

Jason Buck

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And that’s it. And I’m sure I would look ridiculous in one of those big hats.

Jason Buck

All hat, no cattle.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. All hat, no cattle. But I definitely think there’s a personality type that is drawn to do what you do and what I did. And it’s an interesting one that I always try to find the ur-pattern of.

Jason Buck

What’s ur-pattern mean?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Ur is the kind of the primitive primordial pattern of which other patterns are built. So it’s the primitive—if you’re doing AI, the models they refer to as the base model is—they call a primitive of that type of personality. Because I have a good friend who’s very smart. He’s a doctor here in Manhattan. And when he was here last time, he was like, Jim, would you shut the fuck up about telling everyone they should think probabilistically. He goes, because that’s a prescription for disaster.

Jason Buck

Yeah, well, as you know, he’s a mutual friend of ours and he’s 100% right. Because part of it too is a lot of people in our position want everybody else to be entrepreneurs or think the way we do. I don’t want anybody to think the way I do. And I actually think entrepreneur is a bug, not a feature. I think it’s terrible brain chemistry. Right. The way society’s set up for bimonthly paychecks, a salary, and then you get a mortgage and it all makes sense. Right. It’s bond-like income. Why do we want this equity VC-like income? There’s something wrong with us. And just I know to you and me, Hypomanic Edge was a really important book to me in my 20s.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Jason Buck

It made me understand myself if I have this mild bipolar. Right. Because part of that bipolar is that you get all the positive effects of really being able to lock in and focus on things and build businesses where you’re creating an entire world that you’re the fuel for that. But it also comes with a commensurate downside as well. Right. The darkness.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, well, everything does.

Jason Buck

Right, right. It’s just not a free lunch.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No. And when I was in my 20s, I was just staring way too long into the abyss. And as you—you know the quote, it stared right back into me. And I was like—for a while, I was just like, why bother? Nothing matters. There is no truth with a capital T. There is no such thing as enlightenment. And the way I came to kind of figure that out because that leads to nihilism. And my thought was, well, okay, let’s assume that this is mostly right, even though I think it might be mostly wrong. Let’s just assume it’s mostly right. Well, what can I do about it? And I call it walking across the bridge of nihilism.

And when you get to the other side, you’re like, okay, well if life has no meaning and there is no such thing as enlightenment and there is no truth with a capital T, that means that I get to determine meaning. That means that I get to say what matters in my life. And so once I really embraced looking at the world that way, that’s when all of the dark abyss staring stuff didn’t end, but it was just like, oh, there’s the abyss again.

Jason Buck

Okay, this is why I love talking to you. Because it gives us time to talk about, pull on strings of nuance. And so you say you’re saying nihilism and everything. And I’ve always—everybody thinks nihilism is a pejorative.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Jason Buck

But I think what got to the point, what you said is the true, I guess, definition for nihilism is there’s no grand meaning to life. Right. But like you just said, that means we get to make up our own quotidian meanings to life.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly.

Jason Buck

So our family, our friends, whatever we’re into, drinking or eating or whatever and just sitting in the park, having an espresso, that’s the meaning of life. Having conversations like this, that’s my favorite part of life. And so that’s what I mean. So it’s like, don’t you think that’s fair? It’s like, so you can be a nihilist on a grander meaning, but that’s totally different from making individual meaning on a daily minute-to-minute basis. Right. Totally. So, okay, that’s—I just want to clarify that because I always—people are like, because I get accused of being a nihilist all the time. And I’m like, yes and no. I mean there’s nuance there. But also I was thinking about your—I forgot I didn’t answer your thing on ur-pattern for people like us.

I really wonder how much of it is just competitiveness in the sense that—because you come across as not competitive. But I know there’s a beast of competition inside you and these guys know it too. Sorry I broke the fourth wall.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But I break the fourth... you know, we had a show that we financed through our Infinite Films.

Jason Buck

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

On cheese.

Jason Buck

Nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And he was here, he said he’s fabulous and he’s this really—talk about a charismatic guy. But they came on camera to test the cheese.

Jason Buck

Nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And they were like, yeah… You didn’t mic yourselves, though.

Jason Buck

See.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You screwed another one up, Danny.

Jason Buck

You had another—you had a Bourdain moment to bring in this. It’s just show your magnanimity. Let them eat cake as well. They can try the cheese. Just let me go first. But I wonder—so I think about competitiveness, when I was a soccer player, right, you want to compete at the highest level. Sure. That’s the way I always looked at it. But I had some friends that would go play on weekends with their friends that weren’t as good players and they’d dominate and that would make them feel good about themselves. I never understood that. It’s like, I want to play at the highest level even if I’m losing because—right, I can get better. And so I think that’s maybe what it comes down to is Wall Street, finance, investing is playing the game at the highest level.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Jason Buck

I mean, as a society, should we exalt that? Probably not. But it’s the highest remunerated business in the world, which means the highest amount of brain power comes into it. So it’s like, if you want to compete at something, this is the highest level to compete at. And it’s not necessarily about winning, but it’s about challenging yourself. Right. To me, it’s about self-growth and that self-challenge. And so maybe that’s, I guess the big part of it is competing at the high level. And then to your point, about conversations for both of us are our favorite things. And I thought this was the world I wanted to be in because I thought hedge fund managers are usually polymaths and have a lot of varied interests and they deep dive because they can’t help themselves either.

And so you can have much more interesting conversations a lot of times that way. So it was—for me, it was part of both. It was the competitiveness and then also trying to just have the best conversations possible.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I think that you also have to realize that, you know what did Feynman—his great quote, don’t fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. I fell into that. It was like the rake, man, you know? You a fan of the Simpsons?

Jason Buck

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, where the clown has all the rakes and he just steps from one to the other. I felt like that often.

Jason Buck

Do you resonate with the fool in tarot? We’re just stepping off the cliff, oblivious, just enjoying our lives. Well, the fool is a positive card to me. Not that I’m into tarot, but I’ve just always loved because also the number zero, which I thought you might like too, for the fool. But—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes, yes. But I definitely think that it is just a very liberating thing if nothing else. I mean, we both agree there is no enlightenment. We’ve both read Jed McKenna and I think the best thing he does is, enlightenment is a booby prize, man. It’s just like if you ever get—why do you think Buddha just sat beneath that tree for the rest of his fucking life? Because it’s just like watching a screen with static on it. And he posits that the real prize is what he calls human adulthood, which is being alive in the—or being aware, awake in the dream state and realizing how many cool things there are that you can play with and do whatever with.

Jason Buck

But you’re so good. You’re so much better than I am. How do you deal with the hubris and self-aggrandizement that comes from that? From thinking you’re a human adult? Right? That’s the idea is you’re essentially, I guess—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Oh, I don’t think I’m a human adult. I think I’m still in the—because—

Jason Buck

Because that’s my thing was there is no materialism and spiritualism. It’s all materialism.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Right.

Jason Buck

And all the spirituality, all the levels of attainment you get from meditation and everything is just selling trinkets in the marketplace. So I’m wondering, it’s like a video game. So it’s like I can be a human adult as opposed to a childlike adult way. Hold on, how do I get that? Now I’m better than everybody else, but I get to play with the Matrix while they’re living in the Matrix. And that’s what I’m always fearful of is how do you fight against that self-aggrandizement that you get from any of those—yeah, trinkets that you collect along the way.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I think that’s a challenge. Again, we’re back to personality types, right? And I think what happens is—I was very competitive when I was younger and I was also a proselytizer. I shall tell you, I don’t know if you’re a T.S. Eliot fan, but The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he walks in and he’s like, I shall tell you all. I shall tell you all. And then Eliot has a woman saying, turning away with her shawl, that isn’t what I meant at all. And so I was a proselytizer because I really believed I spent years figuring this stuff out. And guys, there is tons of evidence here that all you need to do is pay attention to the evidence and then use it.

And it’s like the South Park, you know, startup, bro down, sell out, profit.

Jason Buck

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But I would and then I realized that as you said earlier and I subscribe to it 100%. There are hundreds of paths to success investing in life. Right. The key thing is you’ve got to find the one that is right for you. And what do I mean by right for you? You can stick with. Isn’t one where you’re going to be like—and you know, oh, I’m just going to abandon that whole thing now. I do not by that mean you can’t improve it. Of course you can improve it. That’s what we spent all of our time doing on models.

Jason Buck

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We have a huge graveyard. Had a huge graveyard at OSAM. But I think graveyards are important too. Right. I think again it’s another human instinct if you will, part of our OS to really shy away from learning things via negativa. Right. And you can learn so much from what didn’t work and just keep that there in mind. Now does that mean that it will forever not work? No, of course not. But it’s at least on your radar over here. And just the open—again, open-mindedness is another one that is a real high on the OCEAN profile, the Big Five of people like us. And yeah, weirdo.

Jason Buck

Have you ever taken the personality test but take them a day apart or whatever and you end up with a different personality moniker?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I unfortunately have never done that.

Jason Buck

I’ve tried it because of our skepticism. I’m like this is awful.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jason Buck

Oh because there’s some of those questions where you’re hemming and hawing and you’re like—and so maybe on the next day you had a different breakfast so you go a different way and they’re gonna kind of—whatever. I can’t remember like the INTJ or you might be like an ENTJ. So it’s like an ENTJ. Whatever. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I have been and by the way it’s kind of astrology. Yeah, it’s astrology. Right.

Jason Buck

And self-aggrandizing it because all the good characteristics. You’re like oh that’s me. Open-mindedness. I’m the most open-minded person on the planet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Absolutely the most open-minded. How dare you say that I’m not open-minded. Yeah. But I do think the Big Five is interesting because it does replicate, it does remain rather stable no matter when in your life you take it. And so we have our own installation for AI and one of the things we’re working with is A/B testing a variety of audiences for—because we have a book publisher, we have a movie company and it’s been really fun.

Jason Buck

So you’re creating psychographic profiles. Yes, in AI. But I’m sure you’ve seen like Century of the Self and like Edward Bernays. My favorite part is the hippies came and they’re like we’re all individuals. And they had seven cohorts of hippies. You’re the Subaru hippie. We’re going to sell you Subarus.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And so it’s like Eddie Bernays. Yeah. That guy was a fucker beyond all imagining.

Jason Buck

Was it freedom sticks for the—freedom sticks for the women? I mean it’s brilliant.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And not only—who I’m talking about for everyone listening is Edward Bernays who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Make of that what you will, but this is the guy who was like no, no, it’s not propaganda, it’s public relations. And people would go to this guy like the cigarette makers 100 years ago. Right. What’s so funny is I was literally thinking about this last night and you bring it up because…

Jason Buck

Wasn’t—it was one of these avenues, right? Where they had the protests, they got them, they gave them all free cigarettes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes. So he’s like, well we are mimetic creatures and they didn’t want women smoking in the 1920s was a no. Right. They didn’t do it. So what did he do? He got the most glamorous debutantes in their, you know, flapper era dress all smoking at the thing. And those are the only photographs that any of the photographers took. They showed up in every newspaper around first New York, but then the world. And it started the—I mean just to think about that. Think of how many deaths he caused from that one thing. But his greatest hits goes on and on. The United Fruit Company was very unhappy with an outcome of an election in Guatemala. And he’s like, I got you. But yeah, the—I highly recommend all of his Century of the Self and they’re all available. Adam Curtis, I think his name is.

Jason Buck

Yeah. It just shows we’re once again lack of free will or we’re so susceptible to things way more than we realize, and we fall into cohorts especially. That’s what I find for you and I, we feel we’re so individual and nobody’s like us. But then they can nail you into a cohort pretty quickly. Right? But you’re like, but there’s less people in this cohort, so therefore I’m kind of special. But you said you were thinking about that the other night. I was actually thinking about the train right here. I have a great question for you, I think, is that I was thinking about with the fellowships and everything you’re doing, right? And I think about the history of trying to get people together, whether it’s Tuxedo Park, Bell Labs, Santa Fe Institute.

So my guess is you’re almost trying to create a virtual Santa Fe Institute, kind of what you’re doing, your fellowship a little bit. But I remember what dawned on me, though, on the train ride here was I remember a student years ago was telling me he was taking a class on dystopias. I was like, I go—just popped into my head. I was like, you know, what creates dystopias? And he’s like, what? I go, utopias, of course. Right. We would never have dystopias without somebody having a utopian ideal, right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly.

Jason Buck

But when we’re trying to create these fellowships and you’re trying to create the people around you to keep you engaged and everything, I’ve always been studying that as well, how do you create that utopia without it becoming dystopia? One bad apple. Right. Can ruin the whole thing. So I’m sure you’ve thought about way more than I have. So that’s—I was really curious, your take on that, because how do you create these great communities where people can really come together with divergent opinions and you find something better through that. But it’s very—it’s a delicate structure to maintain.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It definitely is. But that kind of gets to mesh networks versus command and control networks, right? A mesh network. That’s the Rothschilds. Why were the Rothschilds rich? They weren’t rich because they had all the gold. They were rich because they had brothers living in different cities, right? Very key. Because different culture in that city, different intelligence, different things that you’re going to know about. And they had a world-class, both spy and communication network with pigeons. Right. And so they had a distributed network, which we call a mesh network. Right? And the Republic of Letters, same thing. Raphael, his studio was a mesh network. People don’t think about that, but Raphael had one guy who did perfect hands, one guy who did perfect eyes and nose, one guy and so on down the thing, and he would literally let those guys do it, and then he’d come check it out, and he’d add his touch. But the reason mesh networks work so well is because they are decentralized and they are not subject to a central authority. Right. So the Republic of Letters is where for hundreds of years, people like Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great interacted through letters with natural philosophers, which became what we call scientists. Right. And the way it worked was just purely organic.

You got a—I got a letter from you, and I’m like, wow, Jason makes a really great point here. I annotate it and I put my opinion, and then I forward it to another friend. And then the value extractors come in and grab that network. What grabbed the Republic of Letters? The Royal Society, because they were all members of that. And then the minute you centralize it, what happens? You start getting orthodoxies, you start getting dystopias. Right. And I’m not saying that the Royal Society created a dystopia.

Jason Buck

Like we talked about, it was like, if Buddha came back and saw Buddhism, what are you guys doing?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

What is going on here?

Jason Buck

But did you think, for example, Bell Labs, it wasn’t centralizing, truly, in the fact it was just centralized funding coming from Bell Labs, and they let them kind of do whatever they wanted.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We’re making a documentary about it, and we’re using the book and working with the author. The book is called The Idea Factory, and Bell Labs is a perfect example because you’re right, the funding was coming in, but the way they ran it was very decentralized. I mean, you had Claude Shannon inventing trumpets that spit fire and a chess machine.

Jason Buck

Wasn’t the—The original one was in West Village before it went to New Jersey? Right, yeah. So how much of that is zeitgeist dependent? Right? Because wasn’t Claude Shannon and the others, they were staying up late at night to watch jazz in the Village, and it was just coming online right there to have the coffee shops and the kind of the bohemian lifestyle.

Jason Buck

The same way, back to mesh networks. That’s another great example. The way insurance emerged. It emerged when coffee shops got popular, right? And everyone’s wired on coffee, and suddenly we have an industrial revolution. But the reason it worked for insuring ships was distributed knowledge. Right. If you have uncorrelated priors among people who have some reasonable level of experience in that particular thing, beautiful things can happen and that’s how they ended up. Right. That’s created Lloyd’s of London. And so I think that to your point, we are—we would never be so prescriptive that we have any kind of utopian agenda and, or basically we have a very simple agenda which is we now can find and identify some of the most unconsensus intelligence out there and we can fund them. And so I kind of felt a moral responsibility to do that. Right.

If you look at all of human history, a genius could be born, live and die. And no one, including the person knew that they had any special talents at all. Because we’ve gone from a very—I mean think about the fact that your average human to ever live probably didn’t wander too much outside of—unless you were the earliest humans and hunter-gatherer. If you got around when we had villages and towns, you maybe walked five or 10 miles and that was it. Right. And so we are—I kind of believe that with all of the interconnectedness and all that, yeah, sure there are problems, but it also, there’s an emerging intelligence from that and I think that’s hard to deny and you could take advantage of that.

And I think that one of the keys there is that it be diverse intelligence. Right. And again, like you said, you can only learn by screwing things up yourself. I learned this by watching it happen. We have annual gatherings where all the fellows come and all the OSVers are there and watching the marketing guy talking to the pure science geek and having both of them come to me and say that was the most amazing conversation I’ve ever had in my life. Because the marketing guy got to learn about the, all of the things that he thought he knew because he was a, you know, self-quant type guy. The quantification of self. And I don’t, interestingly, I don’t do any of that. Yeah, I have real watches. I don’t have Apple watches.

Jason Buck

So analog and cool. You’re like the kids these days, you’re going back to cameras.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

But the point is each learned from each other because they were just both fascinated on figuring out how do we solve your problem. And her problem, the science geek, was that she was thinking about her invention, which is really interesting, in the completely the wrong way. And her marketing would have failed and nobody would have used it. And then our brilliant marketing fellow was like, oh, no, here’s the way you got to do that. So we don’t have really grand ambitions.

Jason Buck

That’s the best part about Santa Fe Institute was the cross-discipline nature, like interacting. And then the early days of Bell Labs. Right. Whether it was when Claude Shannon interacting with John Kelly or whatever, it just led to much more interesting things that way. And it’s just, how do you create those collisions? Because similarly, I was thinking about what is it Habermas has, communicative rationalism where it’s like, through dialogue. And that process is where we can get to better ideas. I always—I joked with you at your house. It’s like, I always love that writers think that writing’s the best way to think. Right. But I like dialogue. Iron sharpens iron. Right.

You might be able to sit in your room and write and then spend months editing, and then you bestow it upon me. But I can’t really argue against it. You’ve been working on this thing for months. Right. It’s a monologue, but in dialogue. Hopefully we can get there in two hours that took you two months to get to. But the hard part that they found out the hard way, let’s say, at Bridgewater, for example, is that part of that communicative process is everybody’s got to kind of be on equal footing and there’s no dictator. There’s nobody bullying the other people at the table. And I think given human nature, that’s the hardest part. Right. Is to make people feel comfortable in speaking up.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And again, touché.

Jason Buck

I don’t know how you do it. That’s what I’m asking.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, again, that gets to what is the real hierarchy of needs for the human. And I definitely think that prestige and status sit at the top of that. I think they—or bottom, I guess, they drive so much of everything we do.

Jason Buck

Oh, does the fellowship already give you that even playing field? Because you got the prestige and status of the fellowship. So then maybe that’s what lowers everybody.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Everybody is…

Jason Buck

That’s interesting. On the entry point.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yep.

Jason Buck

If you got in this room, you have prestige and status. So we’re all equal.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. And so we’re definitely finding that is something. And in fact, one thing that we’re going to do is we used to distinguish between fellowships and grants. Grants are smaller. They were fixed at 10,000. Fellowships were rarer and fixed at 100,000 for a year. Now they’re all going to be fellowships, and the grants aren’t going to be fixed because one of the things that my team convinced me of was, you know, there are some grants that 10,000 really ain’t going to move the needle, but they need 25. Right. And so one of my colleagues who is also here was polling everyone, and he’s like, let’s just call everything fellowships. And so we think that it’s going to serve that need even better. So I’m very interested to see that you picked up on that immediately.

Jason Buck

So, yeah, it’s like, you’re all a MacArthur genius. You’re all an O’Shaughnessy genius. We’re all—okay. This is a safe space.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. Yeah, it’s a safe space. And you can do—and look, I just think Tim Urban wrote the great book on this that I wish more people would have read. And it’s like we get put into these just confirmation bias bubbles. And literally it’s gotten to the point where you could have two people in the same building. Right. And my neighbor lives right next door to me. And the way we—we actually happen to get along fine. So this is a bad example, but he and I might have completely different filters. Right. On the way we view the world. I’m a huge believer that the lens you look through determines your experience. And by that, I mean the angry man lives in an angry world, the sad man lives in a sad world, the happy man lives in a happy world. And that people don’t understand that kind of freaks me out.

Jason Buck

But then you’re saying I’m doomed to curmudgeon pessimism, right? This is my—this is my lot.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

There is no hope for you, Jason.

Jason Buck

At least I find some—some humor in it, I guess, right? It’s like gallows humor. But I actually think about the lens is actually right behind you, like that beautiful Vik Muniz piece. I assume that’s what is. Right. He saw food and saw art in poverty. His story is the most incredible.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I had him on. He sat right where you are sitting.

Jason Buck

He’s always fascinated. Because I lived in Brazil for a while, and he always fascinated me, what he’s able to do.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I love his work.

Jason Buck

Just when you think every form of art has been done, they come up with a new one. How is that possible? Those are real creative people. We’re fake creative.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s right. They’re true creatives. Well, and that’s the thing. There’s just so much that we—I’m a huge fan of David Deutsch. Because I think he’s right. We are literally at the beginning. What did Edison say? We don’t know one-tenth of 1% about nothing. And we get this idea that, oh, we are the modern ones. We are the ones who know about—all right. They thought the same thing.

Jason Buck

You bring up Semmelweis all the time, right? My sister’s a urogynecological surgeon. Got that out properly.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Wow, impressive.

Jason Buck

And I always say, how do you not know? She does a lot of hysterectomies. I go, in the future, you might be known as the Butcher of Miami. This is what it’s like to have me as a brother. And she’s like, what are you talking about? And I’m like, 100 years from now, we might think hysterectomies were the most brutish thing we ever came up with.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Totally.

Jason Buck

But like you said, we act like we’re at the frontiers of knowledge and we’ve got everything figured out.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And we don’t. And the more you really internalize that. Right. It’s like when I’m always riffing on—on deterministic beings living in a probabilistic universe. Tragedy or comedy. Hilarity, result.

Jason Buck

Hilarity. Hopefully that. Or at least that’s the lens I want to see it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. Right. And again, that’s generally the two results. And it just amazes me that we return to our base rate, our set rate for—there’s so much evidence that certain ways of doing things really don’t work.

Jason Buck

But this maybe goes back to what we’re talking. I’m curious how you think about this. Because I know you’re a fan of normally Bayes and everything like that, but I have a—my general life philosophy is—it’s ironic being on Infinite Loops because my—I thought once again, you were stealing it from me before I got there is my life philosophy is open loops. So everything we know as human beings is a closed loop.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Closed loop.

Jason Buck

Right. But there’s always permeability around the edges. Right. And we live in this open loop world. And the closest—some of the closest things I found to that was there was a statistician called Savage. I think it was Jimmy Savage in the ‘50s.

Jason Buck

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Buck

Leonard. He’s known as Jimmy Savage, but he talked about small world and big world problems, or small world and larger world problems. And he said small world problems. And this is—I think it applies to AI interestingly too, that I always point out is if you have chess, Go, Jeopardy. Those are closed systems. They’re a known system with known probabilities and statistics to it. That’s a small world problem. And in a small world closed loop problem you can apply probability, statistics and even Bayesian theory too. But as soon as you get into large world problem, you need rough heuristics because you have no idea. I guess Taleb got close with Extremistan would be large world problems. So that’s the separation I see. So in a way it’s another contradictive dichotomy is we’re trying to solve a problem, right?

We know it’s a large world problem that we can never know the answer. But we use small world solutions in narrow fields to try to stack them up to hopefully do our best in a large world problem. Does that make sense the way I—this is the thing that bothers me every day probably.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you are absolutely right about the closed loop problem and trying by transitive property. Well, we can use that for all of these large world problems. Actually we can’t.

Jason Buck

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And that’s why I don’t yearn for a theory of everything.

Jason Buck

Oh, neither do I.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s like when I read because I, and I read these guys, right? Because I’m interested in what they have to say.

Jason Buck

That’s the height of hubris, right. I’m going to solve everything with one theory. How insane is that?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Crazy. Yeah, it’s just like yeah, probably not, you’re probably not going to do that.

Jason Buck

But on the flip side though, don’t you think the mental models of having 30, 50, 100 mental models and all this stuff is—that’s actually not helping you either. It’s actually because interesting. We would like to have childlike mind and go back to the beginning, but you’re going to shorthand things through mental models and therefore the map is not the territory. And actually mental models can be more of a handicap than a—they can be more a hindrance than a help.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

That’s interesting.

Jason Buck

So I just, I knew you’d like that because I knew that would get you because it’s a—that, you know—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I knew that just destroyed my 50—I guess I started working on this at about 15, so my 50 years—

Jason Buck

Of mental models.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Of mental models.

Jason Buck

But you know what I’m saying, now you just have shorthands. I hit the power button. Jim’s done. But this gives you joy too is pulling on that thread, if we pull long enough.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Your name is Jason. Right.

Jason Buck

We hopefully pull on that thread, unravels the whole sweater. Right? That’s the point.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jason Buck

And I know you get—see, I knew you’d get it right away, too. It’s like, oh, shit. I shorthand these things into mental models so I don’t have to think about them again. And I automatically put things in these boxes where it may not fit that box.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Which is my…

Jason Buck

Conservation of energy…

Jim O’Shaughnessy

My revolt against labels. Right. Labels do exactly the same thing. And what do we love to do? We love to label everything, because putting it in that label box, we don’t have to think about it anymore or we don’t—

Jason Buck

Right.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Whereas we should.

Jason Buck

Is it a conservation of energy principle. Do we have the ability to fight that entropy every day of not putting in those boxes? Because we’re going through such a complex world?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah… that is a great point. And I don’t know the answer. I have no idea whether we have the energy to do that. I think you’re probably right. I think that the—look, George Box famously said, all models are wrong, some are useful. Right. So again, I cling to that evidence. Right.

Jason Buck

Your VAR model just needs GARCH to attach to it, you know, and then—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I winsorize it a little.

Jason Buck

Eventually you’ll get there.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Cherry-pick. Hindsight bias. And then I’ve—You. You don’t understand. I’ve never made a mistake ever, in my entire life.

Jason Buck

Mistakes were made, but not by me.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And, you know, I—that was one of my most popular pieces that I wrote, which was Mistakes Were Made, and Yes, by Me.

Jason Buck

Nice.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Because that seems to be another thing, another reason I really love talking to you is I talked to so many smart and interesting people who just have this aversion to ever saying I was wrong or I don’t know. Yeah. Pomp had me on his podcast when he was still Mr. Crypto, and he said the thing that he loved best about it was half of my answers. He goes, we counted them. Half of my answers were, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know.

Jason Buck

That’s what I’m just creatively trying. Like you said, we started with, you evaded my question. I’m like, I’m gonna evade all of them. Because the whole setup here is for you to ask a question and me to provide answer.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Jason Buck

With every answer, I want to be like, I don’t know. Right. And that’s why I always tell you it’s my favorite at all of these finance or macro events, everybody wants to talk about the future. And my first question is, I don’t know the answer.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And by the way, that’s another thing that—I love AI. I think it, but I think of AI as a tool that leverages my ability to do things much better than I could do them alone. But and so I loved it when it was called machine learning. I loved it when I wrote at age 22 a 20-page thing in my journal about the computer I wanted. I called it a supercomputer back then, but it was literally AI. I reread it, but I was talking to a guy who is one of our O’Shaughnessy partners, OSAM partners, who do research using all of our data. And he had—he’d retired very early from one of the big tech companies, bored out of his mind and wanted to do some research. And he was an expert in machine learning.

And I’m so, I’m like, so I think this is amazing, but why are people resistant? And he goes, I can tell you exactly why. He goes, because we don’t answer that question. We don’t answer the question why. We can tell you this. This pattern is showing up repeatedly. It leads to these patterns and these outcomes, this percentage of the time and to these very different outcomes, this percentage of the time. And the first question you’re going to have is why? And the model is going to go, no idea. Move on.

Jason Buck

This goes back to your humans with probabilistic thinking. Do you remember Charles Sanders Peirce’s abductive reasoning?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes.

Jason Buck

And that abductive reasoning is actually your Bayesian priors. Right. And that’s what we are doing as humans as we’re making these predictions. We had this entire history of inductive or deductive reasoning. We don’t do that. We abductive reason quick and dirty probabilities and then see if that worked. All right, works pretty good. And then we move on.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I didn’t die.

Jason Buck

Yeah. And similarly, that’s what AI is doing is just predictive token analysis. Right. And then just getting to a probabilistic answer. And do you think part of it—I also wonder Charles Sanders Peirce reminds me of the American pragmatists in one of the greatest philosophies of all time, but never will be respected because it wasn’t continental philosophy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

No, I know.

Jason Buck

But at the same time, as you know, the history of philosophy is it took extreme wealth to have philosophers who had the free time. And so, as America is the wealthiest country in the world—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Another great marketer of all time, Plato. Plato knew how to market the shit out of everything he did. His whole academy, all of his dialogues were written after the—with the name of the rich patron that he would go hit up for the money. I mean, the guy was a brilliant marketer. Aristotle, not so much.

Jason Buck

Yeah. All he did was write down a great man’s ideas and create an entire system around it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly.

Jason Buck

Who didn’t want to write things down.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Exactly. And pragmatism, William James. Same thing, right? America, pragmatism is a very robust way of looking at things. And you’re right. That’s so American.

Jason Buck

Well, it’s—pragmatic is in the title.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

Jason Buck

We’re trying to actually get to a solution here. But also, I can’t almost—I wonder if Charles Peirce, also, he tried to pull away from the pragmatists and called it pragmaticism, have his own version. It’s like, are we just drawn to the people that are not only the weirdos of the weirdos. I think because he’s my favorite one a little.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

He’s one of my favorites too, actually. That’s really funny. I didn’t know he was one of yours.

Jason Buck

Yeah. Pragmaticism. So they get—we’ve talked about Diogenes the Cynic before or like EQ in Jim Harrison... It’s just like, are we drawn to the weirdos of the weirdos?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Kind of. Well, I think just life is so much more interesting in the tails. Right. And that’s another reason why I think that, you know, this interconnectivity is—there’s gold in them thar hills. And in the old days. Right. How many companies could you work for? We were talking about that. Right? And the man in the gray flannel suit was an outcome of the way that society was organized. And our society, because of this awesome ability to connect and convert, there’s lots of little hills that you can power law up. There’s not just one or two anymore, there’s thousands. And that’s why you see this proliferation of Substacks and podcasts and of all of these various things, because people have very different interests. And now you can do pretty well. Who’s the guy who does the 1,000 true fans? Yeah. I love his work. He’s right. You can definitely—your way of investing with the…

Jason Buck

1,000 true fans. That’s what you got. I got to fire 99,000 to get to 1,000. Right? So I’m still working out those numbers. Yeah, we’ve got like 300, so I’m getting there.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I also love the fact that the name Mutiny and Cockroach, when I first saw that from you, I just laughed out loud. I was like, perfection. It is perfection.

Jason Buck

And hey, our actual first working titles were either Ataraxia or epoché. And so now you get—no, come on. It got to the marketing side of my brain, thankfully. But Ataraxia is unprecedented, unperturbed by external things. That’s the idea. Cockroach. But then epoché is one of my favorites from, I think it’s Pyrrhonian skepticism. But it’s I determine nothing. So that’s what you and I are trying to say. You try to get to the epoché. I determine nothing. Does that give you Ataraxia, eudaimonia? I don’t know. But I can’t determine anything with certainty, right. Because I can’t help the countervailing force. It’s like, I’m susceptible to that argument too, right? And that’s where that juxtaposition—

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And I’m, as you know, writing my first fictional thriller, which is really fun because I’m learning a lot. But one of my characters names all of his shell corporations after Douglas Adams entities. And one of his fellow characters is like, do you name all of your shells using Douglas Adams? And he goes, no, no, just the ones that build worlds because Mega-whatever is the name of his shell. And that’s another thing. One of the things that I found is really cool about AI is I tend to when I’m writing a fictional character, I want to bring them to life as best I can. And so the character bibles I have for my main characters, some of them go to over a thousand pages. Because I’ll sit there for weeks and think about that character.

And then I’ll think, here’s the books that they like. Here are the TV shows they watch. Here’s the music they listen to. Here are the rabbit holes they dive down. And I’m thinking of it for this character, but I can’t remember the 20 pages on Douglas Adams. As much as I love Douglas Adams that I gave to one of my characters, the AI serves as a second brain. And it’s like, yeah, you should name it this because he loves Doug Adams. And after all, dude, you wrote 20 pages.

Jason Buck

Oh, good, he’s in here. I was wondering if Jean-Marc was in here, because one of my other theories is we’re complex schizophrenics. So that’s—you’re like, these characters write themselves. I’m like, do they. Or is this part of Jim we haven’t seen before? Right. It goes back to the homunculus, right? It’s like, no, there’s just one person in here, but no, there’s 30 voices screaming at one time, and the loudest one comes out.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I contain multitudes, my friend. I contain multitudes.

Jason Buck

Do I contradict myself? Therefore, I contradict myself.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Therefore, I contradict myself.

Jason Buck

That’s my favorite line.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s one of mine, too. It’s infuriating to people I know, but Jean-Marc will say to me when I’m telling him about the villain who’s named Reinhard Falkenbach. And this is an epic, right? It starts in World War II and ends next year. And it’s—I won’t give it away, but when I’m in the—when I’m in the super villain mode, Jean-Marc will look at me and go, Jim, you’re making those arguments of Reinhard very compelling. So he actually made me a sign that says, never go full Falkenbach. So, yeah, I contain multitudes. What can I tell you, dude? As do you.

Jason Buck

Yeah. When you’re saying about AI, though, I’m curious. You said, this is what I love. You’re like, okay, we called it AI. Before that, we called it LLMs. Before that, we called it machine learning. Before that, we had Excel sheets. Before that, we had human computers. Before that, we had double-entry bookkeeping. Right? You’ve seen it all. So I’m sure you’re aware Schopenhauer had this theory that it was, for every generation you live, it’s selling tickets to the conjurer show, selling tickets to the magic show. And so you’ve seen it all before. So I’m saying we were around when Madonna came out and, oh, my God, look at what Madonna did. Then it was Britney Spears, and then now it’s whoever—whoever the newest one is.

But it’s like, for every successive generation you live, you’ve sold tickets to that conjurer show. So you see it. But what I’m always jealous or envious of with you is, how do you not—how do you maintain your levity and enjoyment when you’ve seen it all before?

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, I haven’t. See, that’s the thing. I haven’t seen it all before. You’ve never seen my villain, right? And you’ve never seen my good guy. And I think that it’s—I’m having so much fun remixing. And believe me, Jason, I know it’s a remix, right? I’m not fooling myself. I’m not like, I am the greatest storyteller of all time. I am creating an entirely new universe and no one will have ever—come on. I mean, it is informed by everything I’ve ever read. I love science fiction, I love Tolkien, I love philosophy. And how do I make Nietzsche fun? Maybe I do contain multitudes, but so do you, my friend.

Jason Buck

I appreciate that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

This has been even more fun than I thought it was going to be. I’m definitely—next time you’re in New York, you got to come back. Because this is what this podcast was really meant to be. Just a very non-formal, non-formatted discussion between people who are interested in stuff. And man, you are that. Why are you going to London?

Jason Buck

There’s a volatility summit that 36South puts on in London and then my wife’s gonna meet me over there. She’s in Bordeaux and Barcelona right now. And then we go to Copenhagen after it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So oh well, la-di-da.

Jason Buck

Yeah, I’m very fancy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, you are much fancier than me, man. I’m just slaving away trying to write a fiction thriller. Well, this has been super fun. As you might or might not know, our final question is the one that we ask everyone. We’re going to wave a wand. We’re going to make you the emperor of the world. And I knew—I was thinking about this on my way here because I’m thinking, I think he might just refuse to answer.

Jason Buck

I totally forgot about the question. And then you’re just asking, I’m like—and I almost went to you. What do you think I’m going to say? And like you—okay, okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So you’re the emperor of the world. Just for people who haven’t seen the show before, you can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a reeducation camp. But you can—we’re going to give you a magical microphone like these here, and you can say two things into it that are going to incept all 8 billion plus people on the planet. Whenever their morning is, they’re going to wake up and they’re going to say, you know, unlike all of the other times that I woke up with two great ideas, this time I’m actually going to act on both of these. I’m going to put both of these into action in my life. What are you going to incept?

Jason Buck

This is the scariest question I’ve ever heard.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Thank you.

Jason Buck

And like you said, I bristle at it tremendously.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I thought you would.

Jason Buck

But I do know what you’re doing. This is your feral trickster energy because you just want to see how people respond. And so I think that inherently, as you know, there’s so much solipsism in this question. Right. And this is why I always hated some other questions, like what would you put on a billboard for everybody to see? Which is kind of similar. It’s like, I don’t have ideas I want everybody to see, nor do I want people to think like me. So what would I want people to do? So the first thing that actually popped into my head was actually, I think Stephen Colbert said he was gonna write a children’s book called Fuck It, We’re All Gonna Die. But maybe that’s not a thing to incite people with.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, probably not.

Jason Buck

And maybe it goes back to our idea of nihilism and it’s really the quotidian pleasures of the day and I’m thinking about maybe it was over a decade ago, maybe on the Nerdist podcast, it was one of the guys on there was talking about he had moved to LA to become a comedian and he didn’t know anything about LA. So he got a place in Long Beach because it was cheap, which is pretty far from LA and the comedy scene. But he was kind of living, barely getting by, and he’d go and do comedy, everything. But luckily in his neighborhood, there was a Mexican spot that had this great burrito that was very large and very cheap. And every day, this was the joy of his day, was going to eat this burrito.

And it got to the point though, where he would get there, he’d order his burrito, he’d start maybe a third of the way into the burrito, he’s like, this is my joy of my day, everything. And then he’d start thinking about all the shitty things left in the day. And so through the second two-thirds of the burrito, he’s thinking about all the bad parts of his day. So he missed the joy of his day because this is a very human condition, right? So he eventually came up with this moniker, enjoy your burrito. And people tattooed it on—this is a very old thing. And to me that’s the quote, enjoy those quotidian pleasures, enjoy your burrito. So I don’t know if I had a better succinct way of saying that, but we need two.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

We need two.

Jason Buck

The second one, this is very personal and we were just talking about me traveling and having a multi-city tour. I want to incept Americans and Westerners to the joy of the Japanese washlet toilet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I have two in my house.

Jason Buck

I have them in my house too. And it depresses me every time I leave my house and go out in this world of barbaric paper. What are we doing in 2026? Water is better than paper.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Amen, brother. That one will get you a hallelujah.

Jason Buck

I’d build a whole house around that Toto toilet.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yes, absolutely. They are the bomb. And we at the point in our house, anyone who comes to our house of the family, where did so-and-so go? They went to the bathroom. You mean the one at the end of—yeah, because it’s the Japanese toilet. They really—I think that is maybe one of the greatest inceptions I’ve ever heard.

Jason Buck

I hope, I hope it catches on.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I do too.

Jason Buck

I hope I have superpowers.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Jason. This has been super fun. Thank you for chatting with me.

Jason Buck

Thank you.

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Highlights

No, you don’t want to live in the past

Chelsea Follett: But I think you’re right that unfortunately, a lot of people have this romanticized notion that in the past, yes, people might have been poor, but they had these very close-knit, caring, wonderful families. They had these very strong social ties. And so that sort of made up for it. There were things that were better about the world prior to modernity and capitalism and all that. And one of those things was that we had these incredibly wonderful close-knit families that really cared for one another.

But if you look at the actual past, unfortunately what you see, as you say, is that they had extremely high rates of violence toward their spouses, their children. One example would be rather horrifying law from 1595 in London that said, “No man shall, after the hour of nine at the night, keep any rule whereby any such sudden outcry be made in the still of the night as making any affray or beating his wife or servants.”

In other words, no beating your wife or servant after 9pm and that was a noise regulation. It existed in the same group of laws that forbade using a hammer after 9pm. It was just accepted that of course you would beat your wife until she screamed. That was as ordinary as using a hammer. But so that your neighbors could hopefully get some sleep, you should maybe cut that out after 9:00pm, you know, stop. Just have your beatings at 8:00pm instead of 9, so people could get some sleep.

This, to a modern mind seems so absurd, it almost strikes you as some kind of parody. But this was the actual world that our ancestors experienced. Spousal abuse was not given any thought. Beating your servants was also completely acceptable. Beating your employees and beating your children, of course, also no one saw any issue with for most of history. And now we have made real moral progress along all of those dimensions. If your boss is displeased with your work, he can fire you or she can fire you, but they cannot kill you. And in the past that was sometimes unfortunately the case.

There was an example in very early America of a couple in what is today Maine that went too far and actually did face a trial over killing their servants. A free servant, not an enslaved person. A free servant by cutting off his toes, which led to his death. And they did not actually end up being found guilty of homicide, just cruelty. That shows you how far we’ve come. Beating your servants acceptable. Cutting off their toes, maybe a bit far, but you probably didn’t know that would lead to the servant’s death.

That was the world our ancestors lived in. This kind of extreme violence against one’s servants, one’s wife, one’s children, and certainly animals. Oh my goodness. No one gave a second thought to violence against animals. We can talk about fox tossing, which you mentioned at one point, in case your listeners are not familiar with that, if you want. That was the lived reality of people in the past, extreme violence. And it was very far removed from this romanticized notion that some people have today of family life in the pre-industrial era.

Everyone in the past was drunk all the time

Chelsea Follett: The degree to which people drink, as I mentioned earlier, is something that most people are not aware of. Let me give you one of my favorite examples from the book The Grim Old Days. The Order of Temperance in Hesse in Germany in 1600 had this rule that their members could only drink seven glasses of wine with each meal for two meals a day, for a total of 14 glasses. And this was the Temperance Society. These were the people who were focused on reducing alcohol consumption. So when I say people were drinking a lot in the past, I don’t just mean that they were enjoying a glass now and then. I mean that their level of alcohol consumption is truly ridiculous compared to the modern day.

And I think that must have had a huge effect on their experience of the world. And women were drinking at that same level while pregnant as well. So fetal alcohol syndrome was probably quite widespread. Children were drinking from preposterously young ages, and no one saw any issue with that. It would sometimes be watered down, but still the cumulative effect was that people were always at least slightly inebriated.

Transcript

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, hello, everyone. It’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops. I am so excited about my guest today, Chelsea Follett, managing editor of Human Progress at the Cato Institute, author of Centers of Progress, and the forthcoming, I love this title, The Grim Old Days. Chelsea, welcome.

Chelsea Follett

Thank you so much for having me, Jim.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

So, Chelsea, everything is better than it’s ever been in history, and everybody is anxious and worried and pining for the bad old days. What’s going on?

Chelsea Follett

Oh, my goodness. There are a bunch of psychological reasons why people are biased to imagine that the world was better in the past. And so we’ve actually seen this throughout history. If you look into the distant past, you’ll see that even in what we might imagine were the good old days, people were pining for an era that was earlier still. There are so many examples of this. You can even find in the Old Testament a line saying, “Say not thou, why were the former days better than these?” You can find quotes from so many people throughout history talking about the good old days in eras that we think of as the distant past. So this seems to be actually a constant of human psychology.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And I was thinking it’s probably an apocryphal story, but when they translated a Sumerian tablet, it was like, all of the good poems have already been written. But let’s make this personal, because your story about the C-section. What a lot of people don’t understand, in my opinion, is human lives are at stake. And you can have the luxury beliefs of, oh, it was so much better back then. But we both know that the data is incredibly conclusive. It was not better back then. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Chelsea Follett

Absolutely. I think one of the most dramatic ways in which life has become better in the modern world compared to the past would simply be that our children are able to survive now. That was not always normal. Today, it’s very rare for a child in a modern developed country not to make it through childhood and to adulthood. But there was a time in history when half or more of your children were statistically not expected to survive. It was extremely normal for most of our ancestors to experience child loss, and people were much more familiar with death in the past for that reason.

And the op-ed you’re referring to with the C-section would be the story of the birth of my first child. It was what seemed like an ordinary pregnancy, but then she seemed to stop growing, or to be growing at a pace that was much slower than they would expect, according to all the ultrasound measurements. And so we ended up doing an induction. When that failed, we had an emergency C-section. And what they learned when they did the emergency C-section was that her umbilical cord was actually wrapped around her neck not once, not twice, not three times, but four times over. It’s called a quadruple nuchal cord. It’s very unusual. And that’s both what prevented her from being able to descend and be born the ordinary way, which is why we needed the C-section, and also what was preventing her from getting the nutrition to grow properly, which is why she had what’s called IUGR, intrauterine growth restriction.

Basically she wasn’t growing enough because the umbilical cord was becoming more and more compressed being wrapped around her neck. So that is an example of a baby who, had I given birth in the pre-industrial era or prior to modern C-sections, would probably not have survived. And today she is a thriving first grader.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m delighted to hear that. And the reason that hit me so square between the eyes is all three of my sisters had emergency C-sections, talked to the doctors and literally, this long time ago, but the doctors were like, yeah, no, she would have died and the baby would have died too. And it just, to me, I get almost emotional about it because we have this set of attitudes, the Malthusian or Rousseau. I mean, I was thinking about Jean-Jacques Rousseau when I was preparing for this and the contradictions.

For those who don’t know his work, he was the, oh man was uncorrupted back in nature and it was society that corrupted mankind and all of these things. He wrote a lot of books. He ended up getting exiled for those books. But in Emile, for example, which was about education, he prescribed you should have a natural attentive child rearing so that you can preserve the natural goodness. And then you look at what he actually did. What he actually did was put all five of his children in orphanages and paid no attention to their upbringing or their education.

And it seems to me that struck a chord with me. We see a lot of that. My friend Rob Henderson coined the term luxury beliefs. And it seems like there’s an epidemic of those going around back to the kind of the cause you say, human nature. One of the things that I think is, I wonder if the nostalgia. My mom used to always say, yeah, quite grab your rose-colored glasses because you’re going to need them. But why with all of the, I’m a former quant. That’s what I used to do before what I do now. I was an algorithmic quantitative investor. So I really like data. And all of the data is on your side, my side. Why do we still have all of these various cults of doom and we’re going to destruction?

Chelsea Follett

Well, I think that most people, you and I are exceptions. Most people do not realize how bad the past was because they’ve never been told that story of history. You have this very common view, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau had, that the distant past was this lovely place, the state of nature was great, medieval peasants had more leisure time than us is a very common misconception you hear going around. Otherwise very well-informed people will state that as though it is fact and it’s not. That actually comes from an estimate by historian Gregory Clark that he later revised. And we know that actually medieval peasants worked significantly more days of the year than we do today. And also their work was backbreaking agricultural labor, not nice office jobs in an air-conditioned building. People have this false view of what the past was like.

And when you are comparing the present, which does have problems, to this imagined utopia in the past, then yeah, the present seems pretty bad compared to that wonderful utopian vision. But when you compare the present to where humanity has actually been, you find a very different story. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with this book, give people a proper historical perspective of what life was like.

And that story you told about Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a great example. Here was a man who idealized the state of nature. He was a sort of counter-Enlightenment figure. And yet if you look at how he treated his own children, he abandoned them in orphanages that had an extremely high rate of death. In an era when all children had a much worse likelihood of survival than today, they almost certainly were doomed because of that. And he said that he needed to send them off to orphanages so that he would have the tranquility of mind to do his writing, including a book on how to educate children and how to raise children, which I find deeply ironic.

And unfortunately, he was not unique. There were many people abandoning their children in these orphanages, often due to poverty. And if you look at just the rate of abandonment and the number of children who were dying in the past due to poverty, due to poor nutrition, poor sanitation and extremely high rate of disease, it’s astronomical.

And I think another reason why people don’t appreciate how far we’ve come is because we have in eliminating so many problems of the past also eliminated the memory of those problems. This is often said of vaccination. We have not only eliminated many childhood diseases, but we have eliminated even the memory of those diseases. Most people today have never met someone who had polio, and all of the effects of that are thus completely out of mind.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Let’s give our listeners and viewers a bit of a taste of your forthcoming book. Because I think here, I mean, it’s a dark place, our past. I think Hobbes over Rousseau. Life is nasty, brutish and short. And that wasn’t him editorializing, that was him being a journalist.

Chelsea Follett

Yes, on that line I agree with him. Obviously not all of his political conclusions.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Nor I. Yeah.

Chelsea Follett

He actually did have a very realistic view of what it was like in this state of nature. But when we look at most of human history, not just the pre-state societies, although those were also absurdly violent. But if we look at all of history up through the early modern era, just prior to industrialization, we see a world that was much nastier, it was more violent. Often people, there are still issues with crime today. But if you look at the crime rates in early modern London, for example, they had a rate of violent crime that’s actually even worse than the rate of crime in the United States today, and certainly much worse than current crime rates in Western Europe. People do not have a sense of just how brutal the past was. They had extremely high rates of crime.

They had very low clearance rates in terms of actually catching the criminals. But when they did catch criminals, they also had sometimes absurdly disproportionate punishments. You could be executed in the past for so many crimes that today no one would dream of executing someone for. And yet, despite those extremely harsh punishments and the fact that you could be executed for things like trespassing or very minor theft, they had these extremely high crime rates. So it was more brutal, it was also short. As Hobbes tells us, people in the past lived far shorter lives. And it’s not just due to those high rates of childhood death that we were discussing.

Actually, if you look at people’s likelihood of surviving to old age, people lived longer at any age that you look at. People sometimes today think, well, there was a high rate of childhood death, but if you can make it to adulthood, then your chances of reaching old age were the same as today. This is not actually true. If you look at someone who was 60 years old in the past, their chance of making it to 70 was worse than a 60-year-old’s chances today. If you look at someone who is 70 years old in the past, their chances of making it to 80 were worse than that of a 70-year-old today, and so on. At every single age bracket, every decade, your chances of survival have improved.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

You know, often I don’t do it every time, but whenever I get into a hot shower, I often say, thank you universe. Because if you’ve ever been in a situation where you didn’t have hot water, where you didn’t have any of those amenities, it’s not a fun thing. And I wonder, what modern convenience do you think gets the least amount of credit? You know, hand washing, antibiotics, which one would you say? Wow, people really aren’t thinking this through.

Chelsea Follett

Oh my goodness. I think that people fortunately do have a sense that electricity has been a big improvement. I think the most underrated advancement might be air conditioning.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

It’s so funny, I was just thinking that.

Chelsea Follett

Yeah, if you look at the rates of death due to extreme heat, even with average temperatures having gone up, the deaths from extreme weather have actually dropped. And that’s largely due to the spread of air conditioning. Also better medical care in general. But I don’t think we appreciate fully just how important it is to modern health and well-being that we now are spending much of our lives in temperature-controlled environments. Most of our ancestors did not have central heating. They froze in the winter and they did not have air conditioning. They were slaving away, harvesting during the summer and many of them suffered the health consequences of that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And you know, I was just reading something that really caught my eye and it was about medieval times. Often the most valuable thing you possessed was a bed. And just to think about that kind of freaked me out.

Chelsea Follett

Yes, the modern beds and mattresses are another thing that I think people do not fully appreciate. Most of what our ancestors slept on would not be recognizable as beds to modern people. Often they would just stuff hay into a piece of a sack of cloth and that would be their bed. Sometimes they would sleep directly on hay. Furniture in general is something that we have today that most of our ancestors did not have in recognizable form. Even the very wealthy who did have furniture would often have to have that furniture serve multiple functions and it would move around throughout the day. And so the word for furniture in most languages was very similar to the word for moving or movable. Actually, the word movable referred to furniture in English for a long time as well. You can see that word used in some of Shakespeare’s writing.

Because when the wealthy wanted to clear room for dancing, they would move aside all of their furniture, they would fold up all of their tables. Tables that did not fold and were just meant to stand permanently in one spot are fairly recent. You can find writings in history of very wealthy people bragging about owning couches and their letter correspondence not knowing what was being referred to. Because a sofa was once something that even the absurdly wealthy did not have. Upholstered furniture, very new, once an extreme luxury, now something that is unremarkable. Having furniture with drawers that open and shut would have once been something that only the highest members of the nobility had access to. Now no one would consider that very impressive.

Everyone has access to pieces of furniture that once were extreme luxuries. You can often get them for free off of secondhand marketplaces. It’s incredible how far we’ve come in terms of home furnishings. And I think you’re right that’s another kind of progress that most people don’t even think about. They’re not aware of it. I do think most people hopefully have some sense that electricity and vaccines and modern medicine have been great innovations. But things that are more mundane, like having furniture, having central heating and air conditioning, modern dentistry is another one. Plumbing, running water, these are things that people often take for granted.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I’m always struck by people’s inability, it seems to me, incredible lack of imagination to understand, viscerally understand, how hard our ancestors actually had it. Bill Bryson has a great book called America, One Summer. And oh my God, literally, the president’s son died because he got a sliver playing lawn tennis at the White House. And sepsis ensued. You’re dead because no antibiotics.

But it also just boggles my mind that we just can’t seem to process it and we continually have the same voices of doom. And again, I mentioned in our earlier chat that, look, I’m largely an empiricist. What does the data show me and is that good or bad? And yet I think obviously of Malthus himself. He claimed to have the data. He made a mathematical error. But I mean, it goes on and on. William Miller in 1843 said he had mathematically figured out that the world was going to end in 1843. He had a hundred thousand followers who joined him on some mountain here in the east, waiting. They sold all their possessions and they were waiting for the end of the world. Nothing happened, of course. And then he was like, hold on, wait a ticket, I got to rerun the math. Oh, I see. My mistake. It’s actually going to end in 1844. Again, nothing happens.

And you would think, if we’re in science, that would be, no matter how beautiful your theory, if the evidence does not support it, it’s wrong, and you got to get rid of your theory. But today there are 19 million followers of what became Seventh-day Adventism. And that got me thinking, are a lot of these arguments really more theology, more orthodoxy, more religious in nature than scientific?

Chelsea Follett

I mean, you’ve seen, obviously many doomsday prophecies that failed to come to fruition that were advocated by religious figures. But I think that you also see them, as you pointed out, with many more secular figures as well, unfortunately. And either way, you do have to wonder whether it’s just a facet of human nature that we see these predictions of doom over and over again appearing that fail to materialize, whether it’s Malthusianism and this idea that overpopulation will cause a societal collapse and an ecological crisis, or more recently, whether climate change will not be a practical problem that we are able to address through innovation, through policy solutions, but rather the actual end of the world. We’ve seen people claim that in just 12 years, the world will become uninhabitable for that reason. And then, of course, that didn’t actually happen.

If you look at history and you see some of these doomsday beliefs, it’s easy to dismiss the people then as ignorant. But we have a lot of doomerism today as well. So it might unfortunately just be something that humans are very psychologically prone to and that we need to work against with evidence and data.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, and you know, Paul Ehrlich, very famous for The Population Bomb, and everything was going to, people were going to be starving to death. And he gave testimony in Congress in 1974, in June of 1974, basically saying within a decade, billions of people will die from starvation. And he was taken very seriously, and he continued to be taken very seriously right up until he died. And you know, Julian Simon, who wrote The Ultimate Resource about human nature being the ultimate resource, actually made a very famous bet with Ehrlich about rare minerals. And Ehrlich said, they’re going to be more expensive 10 years from now because we’re running out of them. Simon was like, nonsense. We’re going to figure out a way to get more of them. And Ehrlich, of course, lost the bet.

And I thought that it was indicative of what kind of guy he was, because he didn’t make the check out to Simon. His wife did. And yet they just continued soldiering along. The thing that I have the hardest time with is you mentioned the apocalyptic forecasts like Al Gore’s, you know, An Inconvenient Truth. He was nice enough to put dates on all of those, and we passed all of those dates. And yet the fervor and everything else has not diminished. I’m not arguing that we have problems that need solving. We do. We absolutely do. But I don’t think that it gets harder for me to take people who are nice enough to put a date on something and then continue to propound the same theology, even though all of their forecasts have proven wrong. And that’s why I said it seems more like a belief system to me than any kind of serious inquiry.

Chelsea Follett

I think I would agree with that. Greta Thunberg is another example where she at one point made a doomsday prediction with a specific date that she posted on social media. She tweeted it out on Twitter, and when that date came and passed, she quietly deleted the tweet, apparently, rather than updating her beliefs and admitting defeat, as at least, you know, Ehrlich’s wife sort of did, by writing that check. It’s unfortunate, but if you look at why people believe these things, sometimes it is based on the level of evidence that they have at the time, to be fair to them.

When we first saw this great panic about overpopulation and its strain on resources and the ensuing ecological collapse and societal collapse that would come out of that was at a period in history, in the 60s and 70s, when the population of the world really was growing very fast to unprecedented levels that we had never managed to support before, because that level of population had never existed before. And so I think it is somewhat understandable that people were concerned about that.

Of course, what we saw when death rates for children went down and lifespans lengthened, which is what caused that ballooning of population in the 70s, when global development was reaching these corners of the world that had not yet had access to modern medicine or modern prosperity. And we saw people surviving childhood for the first time, living to old age for the first time at rates closer to that in the modern world, in rich countries. And we saw that population rise instead of the population just continuing to explode to the point where resources were strained and people starved. We saw a couple of different things.

We saw, on the one hand, people actually started to have fewer children because they knew that half of their children were not going to die anymore. As childhood survival went up, birth rates actually came down, which slowed the rate of population growth. And now we’re actually at a point where birth rates have fallen so much in many countries that some people are worried about the opposite, population collapse.

And on the other hand, we also saw resources explode. What we saw was this incredible growth in agricultural productivity, the Green Revolution, which allowed us to not only produce enough food to feed everyone, but actually produce a huge surplus. Today, even in the poorest area in the world, sub-Saharan Africa, more food is produced than is strictly speaking needed to feed the population. They produce more than the recommended 2,000 calories per person per day. And where there is still malnutrition, hunger, starvation, that is not an issue of not having enough food. That is an issue of war and instability preventing the incredible amount of food that humanity produces from getting to where it needs to go to market to be purchased by the population and feed them.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, and sort of back. I also agree our current world is not perfect, and yet I think that progress is the way out of many of these problems. And it annoys me sometimes. Back to Ehrlich. I’m not going to use him as my only horse to beat here. But another thing he said again, I think in testimony, when asked, what proof do you have for this? And his answer was, “We have mathematically based computer verified absolutely scientifically verifiable forecasts.” And okay, if you do, then they should prove true. And they continually failed. They continually didn’t work.

And then you see this, the rise of, I think of Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota who juked his stats, because his theory was proven wrong by the evidence. And then you start polluting the data pool and that’s poisoning the well. If you’re a data-based investigator and there’s a lot of fake data in there, that is, it definitely is not science. And I’m a huge believer in the scientific method. I love it because it’s kind of like punk rock. It’s take nobody’s authority, you know, we’re going to prove it for ourselves, all of that.

And then that somehow drifted over into scientism, which is more marketing than anything else. Whenever I hear people say the science is settled, it just makes me go crazy. Because the very nature of science is it is never settled. Imagine if it’s 18, whatever, and everyone’s like, nope, Newton got it all right. We don’t have to look into that anymore. We’ve got all the knowledge. And it just seems to me to be such an arrogant point of view. But I guess that brings us back to human nature.

And because it, look, I think that evolutionarily speaking, we are all essentially the descendants of cowards. And by that I mean we have, I think most of our thinking is driven by not rationality, but by emotions. And the king of all emotions is fear, specifically fear of the unknown. And if you look back in time, that makes a lot of sense. If you and I were wandering around the savannas of Africa and we saw a big bush moving and we ran away because we didn’t know what that was, and we thought it might be a saber-toothed tiger to come kill us. We were the ones who survived, as opposed to the guy who was like, oh, I wonder what that is? And then they get eaten.

But so I get that’s in our base code, but you would think that all of the centuries of advancement would have at least altered that base code a little bit, no?

Chelsea Follett

If you look at the world today, compared to the extreme level of superstition that our ancestors lived in, I do think there has been some progress there. But unfortunately, as you say, there are some people who engage in the logical fallacy of argument from authority to just try to shut down debate. As you say, true science means you have to continuously be open to updating your beliefs if new evidence comes in. And instead, what you often see is if someone has made their career on expounding a certain theory or a certain idea, like Paul Ehrlich, again with overpopulation.

Then when new evidence comes to the fore and brings that into question, instead of updating his beliefs, what he would do would be just appeal to authority and all of the scientific awards that he’d won to argue that he must be correct regardless of the evidence. This is very unfortunate.

And if you look at our ancestors, though, I do think we have come a long way despite those problems that persist. People were horrendously superstitious in the past to the point where, oh, my goodness, even in the 18th century, there was a case in Romania of a stake being driven through the heart of a corpse to prevent it from rising up as a vampire. That’s maybe an extreme example, but our ancestors had such a great fear of ghosts and goblins and so many superstitions that would be horrifying to a person today that it’s difficult to wrap the mind around.

But one way that I’ve been, one thing that makes more sense about that, once you realize it, is the fact that almost everyone among the common people and actually all levels of society was at least somewhat inebriated all the time, which makes their encounters with the supernatural, and that makes more sense to me when you think of it that way, why they were having these constant encounters with the supernatural that they were writing about. What was going on there? Sometimes they actually did die of fright. There were real repercussions of these beliefs.

There are many deaths recorded in England, for example, at one point of people being killed by fairies, being frightened by fairies, by the supernatural. What was actually happening? I think that probably people who were under the influence got a terrible fright when they saw something moving in the darkness and went into cardiac arrest. That’s what I assume actually happened. But I do think some of the superstition at least must relate to that fact that everyone had at least some alcohol in their system at one point in time. Even children were drinking weak beer, watered down wine. That was just the case throughout most of history in much of the world.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

And primarily because potable drinking water was scarce and that’s why everybody drank so much. And you know, we got the term drunk as a lord, because the lords could get better booze than the peasants. But you know, that is a fact that very few people, I think, are aware of. Coffee shops, for example. Coffee shops really revolutionized human society because instead of being drunk, everyone was wired.

And yet also your idea about superstition and scapegoating, I think scarcity breeds that and a scarcity mindset breeds that because, you know, if you go through your grim old days, witch hunting, fox tossing, you know, death was omnipresent. When I was, I got married very young, I was 22 and I was on my honeymoon in 1982 and we had the pleasure of meeting a, in his 90s guy. His name was Percy Cowan and he was a delight. We were 22 years old and yet we had drinks with him every night because his stories were so great.

And so I asked him about the Spanish flu and he just started to laugh and he’s like, Jim, you don’t understand. We had a fundamentally different view towards death back in those days because we were surrounded by it. He, you know, he had other great exploits. He was a pilot during World War I and got shot down three times. But it really illuminated for me the way that people used to look at death. And him saying no, I mean, the people just naturally assumed that they would lose family members. And I was like, wasn’t the emotional torture? And he goes, well, there’s just so much of it that, you know, you got inured to it.

And I wonder if we flip that. Is the fact that we now, at least here in the west, live in relative safety, with relative scarcity. Is that a cause for people, the anxiety I led with? Man, what would happen if I couldn’t find drinking water or whatever? And does the very prosperity that our forebears granted to us cause the mindset that we’re discussing right now?

Chelsea Follett

Yeah, quite possibly. As I said earlier, I think a lot of people have never been told the story of how hard their ancestors had it. When you met that fellow on your honeymoon, the world that he described to you was very far removed to the one that you were experiencing. It was almost beyond your imagination. At one point in graduate school, when I was on an Amtrak train, the fellow who sat next to me, who I struck up a conversation with, told me that he was illiterate. He did work with horses on farms. He was this sort of traveling worker, and he could not read or write. And that blew my mind because I had never met someone who could not read or write. And I didn’t understand how he could even survive.

And he said, you know, he would use an X to mark his name on documents. But when you research the past, you learn that actually the vast majority of our ancestors could not read or write. William Shakespeare’s parents could not read or write. So many people, even in the upper echelons of society, were illiterate. And this is something that today we forget. Most people cannot even imagine what it would be like to go through the world not being able to read.

The degree to which people drink, as I mentioned earlier, is something that most people are not aware of. Let me give you one of my favorite examples from the book The Grim Old Days. The Order of Temperance in Hesse in Germany in 1600 had this rule that their members could only drink seven glasses of wine with each meal for two meals a day, for a total of 14 glasses. And this was the Temperance Society. These were the people who were focused on reducing alcohol consumption. So when I say people were drinking a lot in the past, I don’t just mean that they were enjoying a glass now and then. I mean that their level of alcohol consumption is truly ridiculous compared to the modern day.

And I think that must have had a huge effect on their experience of the world. And women were drinking at that same level while pregnant as well. So fetal alcohol syndrome was probably quite widespread. Children were drinking from preposterously young ages, and no one saw any issue with that. It would sometimes be watered down, but still the cumulative effect was that people were always at least slightly inebriated.

And people were much more familiar, as you said, with death in the past than people today, to an extent that most people do not realize. Again, the average family lost children before adulthood, and people often would bury their own family members in the grave when they passed away. So the average person had firsthand experience of loss that was very visceral. The average person had seen and perhaps handled multiple corpses. Today, it’s very common for someone in young adulthood to have never had a firsthand experience with death, to have never lost a family member. Most parents today, very fortunately in rich modern countries, will never lose a child. Their children will not predecease them. That was not the norm throughout most of history. And to just take all of that for granted is, I think, unfortunately, the result of people never being told that was once the case and not even being aware of it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And as a parent and grandparent, the fear of losing a child or grandchildren is real. And I think we experience it just because we don’t have any familiarity with it. And when that happens, it is truly a tragedy because it is such a low probability event. And I think that, but the same is true when we look at the past in terms of even family structure. Families were a lot more violent in the past than they are today. Do you think that’s also because everyone was sauced all the time?

Chelsea Follett

That was part of it. I think that people in a world of dire poverty, who were often hungry, sleeping on the floor or on very rough surfaces, and thus sleep deprived, doing backbreaking labor all day, bitten by fleas and other insects, having aching teeth constantly due to a lack of modern dentistry. They were not really acting their best, in part, I think, because they were in such discomfort and such pain. That’s not to excuse their actions, of course. But I do think that makes it a bit more understandable. If you were inebriated and suffering in all of these different ways, you probably would not be acting your best either.

But I think you’re right that unfortunately, a lot of people have this romanticized notion that in the past, yes, people might have been poor, but they had these very close-knit, caring, wonderful families. They had these very strong social ties. And so that sort of made up for it. There were things that were better about the world prior to modernity and capitalism and all that. And one of those things was that we had these incredibly wonderful close-knit families that really cared for one another.

But if you look at the actual past, unfortunately what you see, as you say, is that they had extremely high rates of violence toward their spouses, their children. One example would be rather horrifying law from 1595 in London that said, “No man shall, after the hour of nine at the night, keep any rule whereby any such sudden outcry be made in the still of the night as making any affray or beating his wife or servants.”

In other words, no beating your wife or servant after 9pm and that was a noise regulation. It existed in the same group of laws that forbade using a hammer after 9pm. It was just accepted that of course you would beat your wife until she screamed. That was as ordinary as using a hammer. But so that your neighbors could hopefully get some sleep, you should maybe cut that out after 9:00pm, you know, stop. Just have your beatings at 8:00pm instead of 9, so people could get some sleep.

This, to a modern mind seems so absurd, it almost strikes you as some kind of parody. But this was the actual world that our ancestors experienced. Spousal abuse was not given any thought. Beating your servants was also completely acceptable. Beating your employees and beating your children, of course, also no one saw any issue with for most of history. And now we have made real moral progress along all of those dimensions. If your boss is displeased with your work, he can fire you or she can fire you, but they cannot kill you. And in the past that was sometimes unfortunately the case.

There was an example in very early America of a couple in what is today Maine that went too far and actually did face a trial over killing their servants. A free servant, not an enslaved person. A free servant by cutting off his toes, which led to his death. And they did not actually end up being found guilty of homicide, just cruelty. That shows you how far we’ve come. Beating your servants acceptable. Cutting off their toes, maybe a bit far, but you probably didn’t know that would lead to the servant’s death.

That was the world our ancestors lived in. This kind of extreme violence against one’s servants, one’s wife, one’s children, and certainly animals. Oh my goodness. No one gave a second thought to violence against animals. We can talk about fox tossing, which you mentioned at one point, in case your listeners are not familiar with that, if you want. That was the lived reality of people in the past, extreme violence. And it was very far removed from this romanticized notion that some people have today of family life in the pre-industrial era.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I have a friend, Jason Zweig, who talks about risk, but I think his example is applicable here. He says the way we try to show people about risk is we show them a picture of a snake. And he goes, the real way you want to show people that is by throwing a live snake in their lap. And I wonder, is there, I mean, hopefully your book will let people in on what the past really looked like. But you know, there’s going to be a limitation to the number of people who read it. And is, how about a show where we put people under conditions that were common and not that far back?

My grandfather, we have extremely long generations in my family. So my grandfather was born in 1885 and he was the youngest child and I’m the youngest male grandchild he had. And then my son was born 100 years after my grandfather. But let’s just pick his birth year of 1885. Can you imagine a reality show where we put people back under conditions of 1885? I mean, honestly, I think that might do more for getting people to understand. Oh, man, no way. I don’t want to churn the butter.

Chelsea Follett

Oh, absolutely. I think that there, as we get farther and farther from that reality, more and more of a market of people wanting to know what it was like to actually live back then instead of the sanitized, whitewashed view that you sometimes get. And I think that we are seeing the market respond to that. Actually, there is a reality show called Back in the Frontier that kind of has that as its premise. It basically takes families and puts them into this extreme camping scenario where they’re not allowed to use modern technology, they’re not allowed to interact with the camera crew, and the cameras are the only piece of modern technology that are technically present. And that’s just one example.

There’s also a book just came out, I’ve bought it, I haven’t read it yet, called Yesteryear, which has as its premise that a woman who is a very successful influencer showcasing a traditional lifestyle where you make your own bread, you churn your own butter. This sort of online trad wife phenomenon that we now see somehow goes back in time and has to actually experience what life was like in the era that she’s emulating, which I think is a really interesting premise and I’m excited to read that and see how the book is.

But yeah, we are seeing these different responses in the market from that reality show to that novel I just mentioned. We’re seeing more of an appetite, I think, for people trying to find out what life was really like in the past. And we are seeing this market response to try to provide that insight. And you know, my book, The Grim Old Days, An Introduction to the Pre-Industrial Past, is part of this. Hopefully it will give people that insight and take them on a tour of what their ancestors actually experienced. Not the whitewashed fairy tale version, but the very unfortunate and grotesque reality.

And as you said when you first mentioned the book, it is in some ways very grim and very depressing. But I think it’s also in some ways very heartening and uplifting because as I was doing the research for this book and writing it, I would go back and forth between, on the one hand feeling revulsion and horror at some of the things that I was learning and chronicling, and on the other hand feeling this extreme sense of gratitude that I live in a world where we no longer have to contend with so many of the horrors that our forebears experienced.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I tend to think of everyone alive today, no matter what the conditions, as, can you imagine the poorest among us today, what that would have been like 100 years ago? I mean hell, 30 years ago, global poverty has collapsed essentially. I think it was two point whatever billion in 1990 and now I think it’s something like it’s under a billion, it’s in the 800 millions and the access that people now have to clean drinking water, again, that has skyrocketed.

And I wonder because most of that is happening in the non-industrialized world, why maybe we just don’t clock that. It’s very difficult to imagine the difference in a life where you suddenly have access to clean drinking water. You suddenly are living on more than $2 a day. That’s just utterly transformational. And it’s very difficult for us in the west, in the rich west, to even conceive of either of those problems. And so again, back to your idea that it’s almost a failure of imagination of the people here in where we’re living pretty well, I would say, and don’t really remember that, you know, there’s huge levels of progress happening around the world. They’re just not evenly distributed.

But that kind of brings me to, I’m a big believer in systems. And if you look back historically, systems were usually autocratic. They were centrally ruled. And it really wasn’t until the emergence of more freedom for individuals and the development of distributed value networks that we started really cooking with gas, so to speak. And you know, there’s so many examples of this. You know, tech people call them mesh networks. But essentially a distributed value network is, as its name implied, the value is distributed widely and you have expert nodes that are expert in different things.

I brought up the coffee houses. Coffee houses are what gave rise to the ability to price insurance for ships properly. Because essentially all of the insurers with different specialties would gather at the coffee house, get wired on caffeine, but they would pass around slips and each would put their mark on what they were willing to insure and what. And of course that gave birth to Lloyd’s of London. But that’s not the only example. The Republic of Letters is another one. It wasn’t a government or a church or a university that gave birth to the Age of Enlightenment.

It was essentially the Republic of Letters where people would write to each other with their interesting insights. They called themselves natural philosophers back then, before we started calling them scientists. But one of the problems with that, of course, is value capture. And distributed networks, when they can be captured, like for example, the Republic of Letters got captured by the Royal Society and you shift because institutional priorities are different than diffuse priorities. So you start caring more about process rather than discovery. You start caring more about credentials rather than curiosity.

But I do think that systems that allow for maximum curiosity, maximum ability at experimentation, obviously look at the United States of America right now. We’re much more heavily regulated than we used to be, but that spirit is still very much alive. Have you read Howard Bloom’s book The Genius of the Beast, A Radical Revision of Capitalism?

Chelsea Follett

I have not read that book. But what you’re saying is right in line with my own beliefs. And one of the hopes I have for this book, The Grim Old Days, An Introduction to the Pre-Industrial Past, is that it will spark conversations about why the world has changed so dramatically since the past. In my prior book, Centers of Progress, 40 Cities That Changed the World, I tried to look at some of history’s most innovative and creative cities and examine also what they had in common with each other. What sorts of conditions lead to progress, to innovation. Paris during the days of the Enlightenment is one of the cities featured in that book. Also Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment when their reading societies had a similar function to the Republic of Letters that was centered in Paris, that involved intellectuals conversing across the world.

If you look at Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age, you also see this incredible openness to different ideas and this incredible tolerance for different viewpoints. And you see thinkers as diverse as Thomas Hobbes, who we started out this podcast discussing, an absolute monarchist. He was able to publish his writing in Amsterdam when presses in no other city in Europe wanted to touch some of his more radical ideas. Figures as different as him and John Locke, the father of liberalism, took refuge there for a time. This degree of openness is what helped the city flourish during its golden age.

If you look at ancient Athens and the philosophical discussions in its agora, again, we see something similar. It’s when different views are all able to be aired, when true freedom of thought flourishes, that we see society make massive leaps forward. And unfortunately, we also see that throughout history, that is fairly rare to have freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of thought. And it’s a very abnormal circumstance that often only lasts for a brief moment in time before fizzling out.

And so I think one lesson from studying history is just how abnormal it is to live in a society like the one we have today in the United States with modern liberal democracy. Obviously, that’s very different from most of human history. I think speech constitutionally guaranteed is something most of our ancestors didn’t even know to dream of. The ability to criticize the government is something that many people around the world unfortunately, still lack. And so safeguarding that freedom, I think the importance of that is really driven home when you study history and you realize just how unusual our current moment in time in this country is.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And you know, again, back to this distributed value idea that when you move from very highly concentrated power to diffuse power, you mentioned Athens and the various city-states of ancient Greece, they were diffuse. There was no central authority. The reason Germany won with Gutenberg, China had the tech. China had the tech a long time before Gutenberg. But the Song dynasty and the mandate of heaven was, no, no, no, you’re not going to be writing that. Whereas the Germany that Gutenberg lived in was highly diffused. There was, it was not a unified country. And so they, you know, they had the topology, if you will, versus China, having the tech and topology won. Germany won.

And if you look at England versus Germany, England had a much more centralized authority, and they actually gave a royal monopoly on printing to the Stationers’ Company in 1557. And the Star Chamber would persecute anyone publishing anything not with a royal warrant or license. So over in Germany, you get Luther doing the Reformation because no central authority, not even the church, because they governed the Papal States, but there were a lot of other states in Germany that their reach did not get to. And so you got the Reformation.

Then you look and you see Bismarck unifies Germany. What happens? Well, not great things. So I definitely think that, it’s why I’m so passionate about our at least theoretical form of government in the United States. A constitutional republic that intentionally separates the powers. Now that hasn’t always worked out perfectly, but the, as you mentioned, I honestly think that the Bill of Rights is more responsible for more prosperity, more progress, more everything than almost any other document. Because essentially, if you have the freedom to speak, if you have the freedom to inquire, if you have the freedom to, you know, tinker, you know, innovation, steam oftentimes comes from, wow, that’s weird. Penicillin. The only reason we got penicillin was because he forgot to clean up his lab.

And so I just think that, you know, cognitive failures can emerge in a diversified mesh network just as well as a centralized society. But that happens basically when everybody in the network starts having correlated priors. That’s how, by the way, in the market, that’s how you get booms and crashes. Suddenly everyone starts thinking the same way, and then that destroys the value of the distributed value network and you get a narrative lock and the rest is history.

And it does seem to me that institutions and their goals are also need to be looked at very closely. Because institutional goals are very different than individual goals and they optimize for very different things than the crazy. I think of Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory, which is why we have these little beauties, I’m holding up an iPhone here for people just listening to us. And yet, a lot of what he did was just kind of fart around. You know, he did a trumpet that burst out fire when you played it, and he did mechanical machines that had no real value other than to his curiosity. But those two seemed inexorably linked to me.

Chelsea Follett

No, absolutely, I agree with you. We’ve got this unfortunate constant tendency as human beings toward groupthink and toward ideological conformity and trying to force everyone to think the same way and only express a very limited range of ideas. But, you know, maybe it’s my bias as someone who works at a think tank, but I truly believe that ideas can change the world. And so when you have an environment of true intellectual freedom where people are able to express ideas, including unpopular ideas, then you have the actual possibility of change, including positive change. That is how you get progress, I would argue.

Now, in my books, I don’t hammer any particular narrative about how the world changed so dramatically. I hope people will become curious about that and have those conversations and think for themselves and hopefully come to the right conclusion, which, in my view, is that freedom, institutions and policies of freedom, as well as a culture of true intellectual freedom, have been a key driving force in the transformation of the world.

In the epilogue of The Grim Old Days, I very briefly describe some of the theories regarding what actually prompted the Industrial Revolution. This is one of the key questions in economic history, and people disagree. Some people credit the Enlightenment. Steven Pinker of Harvard University, who is an advisory board member, I should say, of Human Progress, credits much of our progress to the Enlightenment. My colleague Deirdre McCloskey, an economic historian, believes that it was ultimately a change in how people thought about commerce and the respect given to people who were engaged in the marketplace that helped create the Great Escape, that huge liftoff in economic growth that utterly transformed human lives.

And you know, other theories abound. There is this idea of decentralization, maybe because Europe, for example, was so fragmented with different governments in competition with each other. Perhaps that allowed technology and competition and technology to progress as it could not in consolidated empires that you saw in other parts of the world. Because if you are ruling over an empire, you actually have an incentive to fear technology. Because that could be destabilizing in your empire. But if you’ve got many different little states in competition with one another, then you have to allow some level of technology to move forward just so your state can remain competitive.

These are all different theories. And ultimately, I don’t tell the reader which to endorse. And some of these theories may also be, they might not necessarily be mutually exclusive. Maybe they’re all true to some extent, or maybe several of them are true to some extent. But somehow or other, we got this utter revolution in how humanity lived. And it does seem to have occurred around the same time as the rise of classical liberalism, new forms of government, new forms of thought. And I do think that there is some relationship there.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. And it’s funny to me, because the other thing that we see emerging and primarily really facilitated by our technological inventions is the idea of basically you can live in your own cognitive bubble forever. And if you’re only listening to people who agree with you, you’re probably going to be hard pressed to understand the other people’s point of view. Something I always try to do is I always try to read people I know I’m going to disagree with, theories that I know I’m going to disagree with because it isn’t that there might not be some value there.

I’m addicted now to steel-manning the ideas of arguments that I don’t agree with. Because when you do that, and thank God that we now have large language models that allow us to do that really easily, you start looking and you’re like, you know, they do have a point there. And I think that the more that we do that, the more we can understand some of these basic topics that we’re talking about right now. If you’re trapped in a confirmation bubble, literally you lose the ability to understand a person whose point of view does not conform to your own.

And so I’m what I would call a rational optimist. And by that I mean that, you know, there will always be problems, but we will, you know, hopefully come up with better solutions and continue to move forward. I’m a huge fan of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity because I think he nails it. And I think that the idea that is floating around here is that back to kind of institutions and centralized authorities and everything. If I’m the king, I probably want to stay being the king. And so I could see being threatened by innovations that make it less likely for me to be continually the king.

But that metaphor travels. It’s like if I’m the CEO or if I’m the head of this particular group, or if my guild has the better spot versus the other guilds, you’re going to probably want to slow down that other guild’s speeding up and embracing new technologies. When you’re the king or you’re the emperor with the mandate from heaven, you like things to remain pretty much the same. And I definitely think that has been the constant battle throughout history. Every bit of human freedom for everybody has been hardly fought for.

And you oftentimes can get discouraged by people being more comfortable with, hey, freedom, safety, freedom, food, I’ll take safety, food. And I’m not saying that those are not desirable things, they’re incredibly desirable, but you sometimes lose the plot. Because how did you get that safety? How did you get that food? It was from the system over here that was working on very different principles. And so I wonder, what do you think right now is kind of the biggest roadblock in favor or in front of people who are arguing for progress and for innovation?

Chelsea Follett

I think right now the big battle is probably fear of AI. As you said, it’s important to take your critics’ views seriously. And I think that a criticism of innovation in a free market system is that creative destruction does have that destructive aspect. Someone usually does stand to lose when there is a new innovation, even if on the whole it lifts everyone up. You do have to acknowledge that destruction. And as you point out, rightly, the incumbents, centers of power or businesses, they stand to lose when a new technology appears.

We saw at one point in time Uber and Lyft and other rideshare companies being this new innovative force in the world that had to go up against the incumbent taxi business and all of the regulations that protected the taxi companies. And now as those rideshare companies have flourished and become profitable, you’re seeing them actually act as the incumbent business that is trying to block the rise of self-driving cars. In situations like that of Waymo and its self-driving cars, they’re trying to block with regulations, these even newer business models that there is a great appetite for in the market. Many people stand to benefit. Not just these new companies which will enrich many people, but the public as a whole will benefit in terms of greater convenience and also much greater safety. They’ve shown that the deaths, the car accident deaths with self-driving vehicles will likely drop significantly. And so that’s actual human lives being saved by this new technology.

But the incumbent that stands to lose has an incentive to try to block the new technology from arising in a situation where I think you see that prominently today is with the rise of AI in many different areas. And I think that the incredible amount of pushback that you see against AI is just another manifestation of this same thing that we’ve seen again and again throughout human history. Where people are, they’ve got some psychological biases against change. And also whoever is the incumbent who stands to lose from a change, even if that change is positive on the whole, is going to fight that change tooth and nail. And that I think is what we’re seeing.

And I think that these anxieties in our current digital age are also manifesting in this weird rise in nostalgia for the distant past that we’re now seeing online. And more and more on both the far left and the far right, you see it in different ways, this longing for a past that never was. And so that is what I’m trying to push back against in my book. And as you say, too many people only interact with viewpoints that they know they agree with. They don’t seek out alternative viewpoints. I’m so glad that you do, but unfortunately, most people are not like that. The world would be a better place if more people like you, Jim, were constantly seeking to test their ideas against the alternatives. But most people don’t.

And so that’s why I think that it’s very important for people who have a certain view about how the world should be, like myself, to not just preach to the choir and put out policy papers for people who may already agree with me, but rather to try to do outreach through books like The Grim Old Days that are meant for a popular audience and that are not ideological. Again, the book does not push any particular viewpoint about how the world has changed so dramatically. It just tries to prove to the reader that we really have made a great deal of progress. And while the world is not perfect, we have come so far and hopefully diffuse some of this very misinformed nostalgia that we’re now seeing for the distant past that I again think is motivated in part by the anxieties of our current digital era and the rise of AI.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Yeah, I think that what’s interesting is when you do go back and look at innovations and how they were received. Same playbook every single time. When photography came out, portrait artists were nonplussed. They were very upset about this. And what you see is the same thing. When radio first came out, everyone was, they would show photographs of dead birds around radio towers and you know, it’s poisoning our, the air, it’s poisoning our minds.

And look, I get that. I totally understand people wanting to be cautious when a new technology comes around because you know what? Electricity was dangerous and fire was dangerous. And the answer isn’t no more fire, no more electricity. It was, okay, we’re going to have to come up with some safety rules. We’re going to have to come up with innovations to make it less dangerous. So, you know, you don’t ban fire. Every technology is, in my opinion, dual use. And it ends up being the operator who determines whether that use is morally correct or even just socially, whatever, correct.

So, you know, a hammer can build a lot of houses or it can kill somebody. Fire, same sort of thing. And so rather than banning the technology, we didn’t ban fire. We came up with fire escapes, fire departments, fire alarms, fire extinguishers. Because the very nature of that technology was so incredibly good for humanity. I mean, after all, when we figured out how to control fire, we started cooking our food and guess what made the prefrontal cortex? Cooked food. And so it literally changed humans in a way that if we hadn’t had it would have been inconceivable.

So I definitely am not, you know, I’m not Panglossian about any of this. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds, but we can strive to make the one we do live in a lot better. And I think that’s the message of your book. By looking back and seeing the world and humanity for what it actually was, maybe more people will be like, oh, you know, on second thought, maybe I’m not going to wax all nostalgic about that because, you know, we tend to, all of us are incredibly unreliable narrators and we tend to update our own memories based on what we think and believe now.

And I’m an inveterate journal keeper and I’ve been called a liar in my own handwriting often enough to understand that it’s like, oh, okay, I really didn’t think that back when I was 33. I thought the opposite. Tell us when and where people can get your new book. When is it coming out? And can they get it everywhere like the normal?

Chelsea Follett

Yes, The Grim Old Days, An Introduction to the Pre-Industrial Past again as the title. And it is available for pre-order right now wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, whatever your bookseller of choice is online right now, you can buy it for pre-order. The publication will be in October, mid-October, so that’s when you can expect the book to ship out and you can receive a copy.

And yeah, I just want to say I couldn’t agree with you more, Jim. The message of this book and of the whole broader Human Progress project is hopefully to help people think about what kinds of policies and institutions can help drive progress forward. And one criticism you often get when you talk about progress and how far we’ve come is this accusation that you are Panglossian or that you are complacent, you are encouraging complacency and you will ultimately slow down further progress if you talk about how far we have come. Because when you talk about how things have gotten better, some people will assume, well, that means you’re saying that things will just inevitably keep getting better regardless of what human beings choose to do. And so you might as well sit back and just wait for the world to get better and be complacent and not try to make any positive change. And that could not be further from the truth, in my view.

Realizing how dramatically life has changed, how far we’ve come, and seeing that hard evidence that progress is possible, dramatic progress is possible, I think is very heartening and encouraging to people who want to solve the problems we still have today, who want to change the world. To know that is possible and to take courage from that fact that we have already come so far, know that it is possible that our descendants might live in a world one day as different from the world today as our world is from that of our distant ancestors, the people who lived in the grim old days described in my book.

And it really drives home just how important it is to learn the right lessons from history and get it right. What sorts of conditions lead to societal progress? How can we create the sort of society that will allow innovation, that will allow new ideas to be tested, and that will hopefully lead to positive changes, because change is a constant. The world is always changing. But hopefully the world our descendants inhabit will have changed in positive ways and they will not look back at our era and think, now, those were the good old days. I have a line something like that toward the end of my book.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

I guess that I’m certainly rooting for you. And after this podcast, I will go pre-order your book. But there’s a reason why the quote, what we learn from history is we don’t learn from history is now a cliche, is because we’re fighting an uphill battle. But that also fits right in with what you just said. Ideas are great, but you have to take action. You have to make those ideas come into the world. And that requires perseverance, it requires courage, it requires action, and it also requires the ability to do so. If you are prevented from doing a bunch of stuff like those poor printers in London, guess what? You’re not going to have a diffusion of progress, and Germany’s going to have the Reformation and not you.

So I could not agree more with the idea that for progress to flourish is an ultimately great thing for humanity. But that does not mean that there are not going to be a ton of problems. There are not going to be a ton of things that we have to overcome. That’s just part of the way things work. So I will definitely be reading your book and hope many others will as well. Chelsea. So our final question on this show is a fun one, at least for me. Some people look at me and they’re like, I knew you were going to ask me this and I was thinking about it and just, it’s too hard.

So, Chelsea, we’re going to make you the empress of the world just for a day. You can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a reeducation camp. You can’t do any of the things that would retard progress. But what you can do is we’re going to hand you a magical microphone and you’re going to say two things into it that are going to incept all 8 billion plus human beings on the planet today. For whenever their next morning is, when they wake up, they’re going to say, you know, I just had two of the greatest ideas. And unlike all of the other times, I’m actually going to act on these two. What two ideas are you going to incept in the world’s population?

Chelsea Follett

I’m going to wave my magical wand and allow the people of the world to experience far higher levels, ideally perfect levels of economic freedom and social freedom. Let’s start with the latter. Many people around the world today do not have the right to criticize their governments and their policies. They do not have freedom of speech. They do not have the ability to have religious freedom, to have any ability to question the presiding order. It must be total ideological conformity all the way down. And there are so many great ideas that humanity itself could be missing out on, because the people who have those ideas in their heads live in societies where they simply are not allowed to even propose change.

And the other one would be economic freedom. I don’t think that this gets enough credit for driving change forward. So many people with great ideas also might not be able to implement them because they live in dire poverty and they are just focused on the basics of survival. But when you allow people to enrich themselves through free and voluntary exchange in the market, when you allow new innovations to actually take hold and improve human lives through, you know, not being hampered by overregulation, then you can see truly dramatic change. You know, not overregulating AI and allowing for, you know, data centers to be built, for more compute power to exist, that could have a truly dramatic change on living standards, perhaps beyond what we can even imagine right now.

I do not think progress is guaranteed. I do not think it is inevitable. And actually I think that when you study history, there is a very dark and pessimistic lesson there, which is that progress is the exception, not the rule. So many societies throughout history, in fact through the vast majority of history, have seen stagnation or have seen moves backwards in terms of living standards. And so we cannot know that our descendants will live in a world that is more technologically advanced than ours. We cannot know that they will be freer than us or experience higher standards of living than us. It all depends on our choices today and what path we take as a society.

And it is my hope that we will choose a society that is freer and that allows us to create a future of true progress so our children and our children’s children will have happier, easier, more exciting, wonderful lives, maybe in ways we can’t even imagine. And they will one day look back at our time period and maybe have a reality TV show about how terrible it was to live in the 2020s, or read a book about how horrible people had it in the 2020s, and they’ll look back at what we’re experiencing now and think, wow, our ancestors were tough. They had it really bad. You know, that’s my hope. I want my children and my grandchildren to hopefully live in a world that is better still.

Jim O’Shaughnessy

Well, you’re preaching to the choir with that one, Chelsea. I endorse both of those. And having six grandchildren certainly helps because you desperately want them to live in a world that is better than the one you lived in. And I think that’s a very common thing among anyone with children or grandchildren. We want the world to get better for them, but it’s incumbent on us to make that happen, because you’re absolutely right. Long periods, you know, like a thousand years of Dark Ages, where progress is either going backwards or progressing very slowly.

So, Chelsea, congratulations on the new book. It was delightful chatting with you and wish you all of the best of success with it.

Chelsea Follett

Thank you so much, Jim.

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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.

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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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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

Links

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Apple Podcasts

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.