Shani Zhang is a writer and illustrator based in San Francisco. Over the past three years, she has built an unlikely career as a live event painter, capturing weddings, Eid celebrations, and Kamayan dinners in watercolor. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

This year, she turned down graduate school to pursue something different: a year-long public art journal documenting the stories of San Francisco - from the man serving soup beside an art gallery to the mail carrier climbing the city’s tallest hill.

We spoke with Shani about observation as a practice, the unexpected path to becoming an professional artist, and why AI will never replace drawing.

Shani Zhang is a 2025 O'Shaughnessy Grant recipient. The O'Shaughnessy Fellowships & Grants are now accepting applications for 2026 - offering up to $100,000 in equity-free funding for builders, researchers, and creatives working on transformative projects. Applications close April 30, 2026. Apply here.

You lived in six cities over four years. How did that shape your art practice?

Because I was constantly going to new places - South Korea, India, Berlin, Buenos Aires, I started keeping sketchbooks. I would draw things I saw and write down whatever was on my mind. Sometimes snippets from conversations I’d overhear. It became something I did just for myself, and I was known for it in college. I was always doodling at student concerts, on the bus, at dinners. I’d always carry a sketchbook around.

You never thought of art as a career. How did that change?

It was completely unplanned. After college, I was living in San Francisco, going to tech happy hours, and doing what I always do: doodling. One organizer approached me and said, “This is cool. If you come back next week and do this again, we’ll pay you as long as we keep the painting.” I thought that was a great deal. I enjoyed doing it anyway.

From there, someone asked me to paint their wedding. They offered a few hundred dollars, and I’d never really done a wedding before, so I said yes. I realized weddings were way more fun than tech events.

Your viral Substack post, “21 Observations About People Watching,” came from this work. What did you learn from painting so many strangers?

The short answer is I didn’t expect it to go viral. I wrote it in one sitting at a cafe. It was actually a journal entry where I was reflecting on my job and all the interesting things I’d noticed painting events.

skin contact

21 observations from people watching

Painting weddings for a few years now, I have spent a fair bit of time observing strangers move through a room. Seeing someone new, I always have a feeling of noticing their internal architecture. I did not realize that some people do not feel this way, at least not as intensely…

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a year ago · 11942 likes · 383 comments · shani

One thing I’ve learned: there is happy, and then there is polite. They look very different. Polite has a mechanical quality, you’re carrying out all the right movements like replacing batteries in a remote. True openness is when you allow another person to surprise you.

My attention goes to places where attention usually doesn’t go, very close observation of people. Most people hold back from that because it feels impolite or intrusive, or they’re too busy living to be that observant.

How would you describe your drawing style?

My art teacher used to say my lines never meet each other. I don’t have a lot of corners. Things are loose, dreamlike - little watercolor vignettes. That wasn’t something I chose on purpose. It’s just the way I see things.

I think the way someone draws reflects how they see the world. How heavy their pen marks are, how confident they are. I didn’t have four years of art school, so I didn’t learn best practices. My art reflects both the imperfections and the quirks in my perspective.

This year, you started the San Francisco Sketchbook project instead of going to graduate school. Why?

I was at a crossroads - weighing grad school offers, wondering if I should work full-time or go all in on wedding painting. But the biggest clue I had about what I wanted to do were these sketchbooks. Before I ever made money from art, this is what I was already doing.

So I decided to start talking to people in my city. I began with local businesses I already knew. The first people I talked to were Tom and Vida. They have a coffee cart near one of the parks. They met working at a coffee shop, fell in love, found a giant tricycle on Facebook Marketplace, installed a coffee counter, and started selling coffee in their neighborhood.

After talking to them, I became fascinated with storefronts - how small business owners spend ten hours on their feet grinding coffee beans or kneading dough for empanadas. They seemed fulfilled by this work, even though the margins were slim. They had a strong sense of purpose. So I just kept on going - talking to more and more businesses, illustrating them, and giving these paintings away for free. I didn’t want to stop!

What drives you as an artist now?

I’ve realized that the two things I want to spend my life getting better at are interviewing people and illustrating them. I want to become a better question asker and listener - to capture someone in a way that feels sincere and compassionate.

You’ve also started interviewing older adults in San Francisco. What draws you to that?

I center those conversations around objects that are important to them. Sometimes things they had as kids, or something they saved up for months to buy that they still cherish. Through doing this, I feel like I get to know my city on a deeper level.

AI can now generate art. Does that affect how you think about your work?

It doesn’t really, because art for me has never been about making a living, even though that’s a nice bonus. Drawing is something I want to do for the rest of my life, even if it makes me no money. For me, it’s about training my attention, focusing on something, and studying it. That doesn’t happen if I ask ChatGPT to transform my picture of a pear into a painting. I need to actually study that pear, look at the light on it, the shape of it, and capture it myself. By moving through those actions, we get changed by the art we make. That’s very different from uploading a picture to an AI platform.

After painting hundreds of weddings, what has stayed with you?

Painting so many weddings has made me idealistic about love. I’m seeing couples on one of the happiest days of their lives, full of grand proclamations, surrounded by loved ones. Even though the couples are all quite different, the feeling at each wedding is similar: a hopeful buoyancy.

I enjoy being in that environment, being idealistic with the couples as they plan their future together.

Shani Zhang writes and illustrates at Skin Contact. You can find more of her work at shanizhang.com and follow her on X and LinkedIn.

The year is 1977. A young musician named Wayne Jobson leaves the lush green hills of St Ann, Jamaica, and heads south to Kingston. For the first time in his life, he is going to step inside the Black Ark.1

Every kid in Jamaica who cares about music knows the stories. The tiny backyard studio in Washington Gardens that somehow sounds like the center of the universe. And every kid has heard of Lee “Scratch” Perry, the eccentric firebrand who calls it home. Perry is famous for coaxing otherworldly textures out of the cheapest, most battered equipment on the island. He’s also famous for being, by any normal standard, completely bananas.

Jobson knows the reputation. He doesn’t know what it will feel like from the inside.

He’s there as a working musician, hired to play a session for the English soul-singer, Robert Palmer. The Englishman is there on his own pilgrimage to Perry’s temple. Like many before him, he wants to harness whatever invisible force animates the Black Ark.

Jobson is greeted by a bizarre scene. A pineapple stands proudly in front of a rattling fan, its purpose unclear — some sort of scented air-conditioning? The walls are dense with symbols and pornographic images. And there, perched in an elevated control room, is the high priest himself, a diminutive figure in full shamanic mode, bouncing behind the desk, pounding on the perspex window to bark instructions at the musicians below.

Jobson watches the ritual unfold. For eight hours, Perry hounds Palmer, forcing him to redo a song until the singer’s vocal cords are reduced to broken glass. At one point, Perry yells for Pauline. His wife. She emerges, covered in flour. She’s been making dumplings. Perry wants her to sing a line. After brushing herself down, she obliges. Line delivered, she returns to her dumplings.

“At the time you could sense his genius,” Jobson recounted. “But it was this kind of madness.”

The madness is infectious. A few days later, Jobson returns to the Black Ark. No session gig this time. He cuts a five-track demo of his own. Perry stays up all night producing it.

The Black Ark had claimed another acolyte.

During a brief but glorious period in the 1970s, Perry’s Black Ark generated one of the most distinctive, inimitable sounds of the twentieth century. For a few years, this ramshackle compound in Washington Gardens became the gravitational center of Jamaican popular music. Bob Marley, Max Romeo, and Junior Byles all recorded there. Paul McCartney bent the knee. The Clash attempted to secure their own audience with the king, eventually recording with Perry in London instead.

It was a world made in Perry’s image. His technology was comically unsophisticated. Rivals were upgrading to eight or sixteen-track recorders; Perry settled for a simple four-track. When he needed to rewind tape, he used a screwdriver to reset the counter. “We didn’t have anything professional,” he later said. He didn’t need it. “The sound was in my head and I was going to get down what I hear in my head.” 2

Besides, what need was there for complicated machinery when he had the flesh and blood of the Black Ark itself at his disposal? The studio was his partner, his muse, “like a living thing, a life itself.”3 He created a deep bass sound by burying a microphone under a tree and hitting the trunk. Percussion came from the clanging of garbage pails, from screwdrivers and pliers, from the heel of his foot banging against the bin. He folded the sounds of crying babies, breaking bottles, kitchen utensils, and assorted yard debris into his productions, often mutating them beyond recognition.

It was a “shamanistic” approach to music-making, said Linton Kwesi Johnson, who interviewed Perry in 1977. “A kind of magical act, an act of conjuring up things, whether they be evocative of Africa, judgement, Armageddon, or whatever.”

Perry worked to strengthen the Ark’s connection with those other realms. He conducted spiritual rituals over the machinery. He covered the walls with painted handprints, kung-fu posters, album sleeves and pictures of Haile Selassie. A Bible sat in pride of place, uneasily sharing the room with lewd magazine cutouts of naked women. The equipment itself was caked in ash, candle wax, and fluids, including faecal matter, which Perry would spray to enhance his machinery’s spiritual properties. All of it floated in thick plumes of ganja smoke.

From madness, a method emerged. There was more to Perry than vibes. “He’s a very technical guy,” said singer Earl George. “You can be playing a drum pattern and he say, ‘Play that upside down.’ His way of working is very unique: his rhythms have a different sound, as the mix is totally different from everybody else […] When he mix all the sounds together, you get some way-out kind of sound. You see, Scratch is a genius.”

He wasn’t great with instruments. But he knew exactly what he wanted, and exactly how to get it. “He have a sound that he call the ‘conk’”, said singer William Clarke. “he would take his finger and knock it on your forehead and say, ‘This is what I want to hear, the conk.””

Unlike many producers of his era, Perry wouldn’t just sculpt the recordings after the fact. He produced songs live, riding the mixer during the recording itself. “The musicians they won’t even know what goes on!” he later said, “While the musicians are playing, I am doing the phasing. I take the musician from the earth into space, and bring them back before they could realize, and put them back on the planet earth.”4

By 1976 and 1977, the Black Ark housed a maestro at the peak of his powers. It was during this time that the ‘holy trinity’ of Black Ark recordings was made: Max Romeo’s War Ina Babylon, Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves, and the Heptones’ Party Time. But even those touchstones pale next to the Congos’ Heart of the Congos, an astonishing record that nearly didn’t exist. Perry had been searching for somewhere to plant a breadfruit tree when he stumbled across Roydel Johnson playing guitar. Perry hadn’t seen Johnson in years, but liked what he heard. He invited him down to the Black Ark. Another musician fell under his spell.

Perhaps he flew too close to the sun. In the late 1970s, Perry began to turn against his creation. He became convinced it was possessed by evil spirits. He scrawled unintelligible symbols on the walls. Whispers spread of him walking through the streets of Kingston, hitting poles with a hammer. The studio slipped into disrepair. In 1979, it burned to the ground. Perry would later claim that he had set the fire himself.

It was the end of an era. Roots reggae was on the way out. The digital pulse of dancehall was on its way in.

Before the Ark died, Wayne Jobson found his way back to it. His five-track demo had been a success while he was in the UK studying for a law degree. Now, he wanted a full album under Perry’s guidance. But something had changed. The Ark’s productive madness had curdled into something harder to harness. Perry began proclaiming that bananas were God, insisting Jobson carry a bunch whenever he was present. He spent hours scrawling a massive X on the wall. The studio itself was decaying, yet Perry refused to buy new equipment until his recently dead car battery healed itself.

The writing was on the wall. Jobson took his album elsewhere.

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If you enjoyed this, check out our previous instalments on David Byrne, Salvador Dalí, Tchaikovsky, David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock.

Before we get to food, let’s talk cars.

The latest version of Tesla’s Full Self Driving is too good to believe on hearsay, you have to experience it to understand. One drive isn’t even enough. It requires time spent with the system, observing how it notices and understands when a driver — in another car, on the other side of the intersection — does that quick hand gesture to indicate you should proceed first. Without any input from you, the car understands. This is a level of nuance that we normally don’t expect from computer programs. Consider the variables: a 2-3 ton rolling metal projectile containing human life is being entrusted to a program. It’s not just the lives of the people inside the vehicle, it’s also the lives of people in surrounding vehicles, pedestrians, even property. Compare this to our prohibitions for who can drive such a vehicle. Humans have to age nearly fifteen years before society entrusts them with this level of responsibility — a responsibility that a programmed neural architecture is now handling with shocking ease.

The safety stats are even more impressive: Tesla’s Full Self Driving technology is already safer than a human. Much safer. I speak from experience. I’ve only been driving with FSD for nine months and it has saved me from at least two collisions, one of which I’m fairly sure would have left me with debilitating injuries. But FSD is just one system. The nuances capable here point at a radical reimagining of all systems on Earth that humans depend on. And I can think of one system that is particularly ripe for this kind of innovative disruption. Food.

What was the last meal you ate? Chances are you have no idea where each part of the meal came from. Milk from hundreds of miles away, eggs from a totally different farm, blueberries from Argentina, coffee from Colombia, prosciutto from Italy. For now, let’s just focus on fruits, vegetables, and the complete mechanization of human labor that reshaped civilization. In other words,the industrial revolution. Much of food production today is automated. Sort of. It’s automated, but not in the way a Tesla can navigate Manhattan traffic. The automation of agriculture is more like the subway — a fairly dumb automation. Subways are locked onto rails the same way tractors are rows. We’ve created enormous rolling machines that can harvest a dozen or more rows of a single variety of fruit or vegetable, and most of these rolling machines still require a human at the wheel.

But what happens when we extrapolate the level of dynamic nuance we see in FSD to an industry like agriculture? First, we might ask if there is any need for that. Don’t the giant rolling machines that harvest many rows simultaneously work just fine? Sure, they do what they were built to do. But reaching even this degree of technological leverage required heavy tradeoffs.

Such machines require monocrop farming — many ordered rows of the exact same species. This arrangement has radical downsides. One is soil depletion. With so many of the same species with identical nutrient requirements drawing from the exact same patch of earth, that earth becomes deficient in those very nutrients. Compare this to the Amazon rainforest, which never needs to be fertilized or left fallow. The vast variety of species in a forest creates a give-and-take symbiosis in the soil. What one species takes, the other gives back, and vice versa. But in our farmlands, we have chronically depleted soil — and it’s only getting worse. This destroys the nutrient density of the actual plant that we eat. One quick example: You’d need to eat eight oranges today to get the same amount of Vitamin A your grandparents got from one.. No wonder our health is in crisis...1

Another tradeoff of monocropping is pesticides. What happens when you leave a picnic table full of food outside unattended? Well, the critters and the bugs find it pretty fast. Farming, especially monoculture farming, is no different. What happens when a few bugs whose favorite food is corn find a field of corn? Well, they start eating, then they start multiplying, and that field of food can disappear overnight. Humans, in their infinitely iatrogenic ingenuity, decided that dosing the food with poison would be a good idea. And yes, if we are thinking only about first order effects, it does the job. Any bug that tries to eat the food also ingests a healthy amount of poison and promptly dies, leaving the majority of that field of food untouched. Unfortunately, the world we live in — and the fruitfulness of its future — is determined by second and third and nth order effects. It doesn’t take much cognitive horsepower to spot them here.

Pesticides were invented to kill small bugs and bacteria, but not the plant. The dose makes the poison, right? If it doesn’t kill the plant, then it should be fine for humans. Humans are much bigger. Seems reasonable enough, until you remember that our gut is home to trillions of tiny non-human organisms that belong to the exact same bacterial kingdom being targeted by pesticides. Every year the importance of gut microbiota gains more and more footing, yet we’re eating food laced with a poison designed to kill it. That’s certainly a tradeoff. And given the rise in chronic disease, obesity and other conditions, it certainly makes you wonder.2

But a complete grocery list of the problems with our current food system is not the goal of this essay. We need only a taste of such questionable practices to ask: Is this the best we can do? Where can we go from here?

To get a clearer picture of what’s coming down the pipe, it’s worth looking backwards for a moment. Many centuries ago — perhaps even millennia — a technique of intercropping was developed in Mesoamerica called a ‘milpa’. It’s one of the most sophisticated agricultural systems ever devised. Here’s Charles C. Mann’s description from his landmark book 1491:

A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama, amaranth, and mucuna... Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin;... Beans have both lysine and tryptophan ... Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, “is one of the most successful human inventions ever created.”

This food system — the milpa — is what powered the Aztec empire. So why don’t we use it today? It would make the soil richer, our crops nutritionally denser, and humans healthier. Additionally, the variety of crops would make it more resilient against pests wiping out the entire growing effort. So we wouldn’t need pesticides, which would mean our health could (and should) improve across two dimensions: less poison ingested, more nutritious food.

The issue is with our current state of ‘automated’ agriculture. An enormous machine designed to harvest 32 identical rows of corn (The Calmer 3215) can’t do anything with a milpa, except maybe destroy it. A milpa is nuanced and agile; monoculture, blunt and straightforward. Thus, monoculture requires blunt and straightforward machines. And these machines are not cheap. Calmer 3215 corn heads can cost more than $200,000—and that price doesn’t even include the tractor that pushes them! Not to mention the fuel and the manpower required to drive the tractor. Imagine spending nearly a quarter of a million dollars on one piece of equipment and then some hipster teenager walks up to your farmer’s market stall and starts lecturing you about milpas. “Oh yeah, kid? How am I going to harvest 30 acres with a dozen different species all mixed together?” It’s an understandable mindset, but it’s not an innovative one.

Remember, the blessing of monocropping is its bluntness: a single species planted at the exact same time, so those 30 acres of corn become ripe for the picking at the exact same moment. But this is also the curse of monocropping. Farmers have an incredibly narrow window to harvest enormous areas of food. It’s months of waiting, then a mad rush when harvest hits.

With milipas, on the other hand, different species are grown and harvested at different times having different growing times. You might harvest summer squash in July, corn and beans in August, and winter squash in September. The work is spread out, the returns are diversified, and the system is more robust to the whims of weather and pests.With a milpa, basically, there’s less acute stress. If conditions aren’t ideal for the corn this year, other species still make it through. Monocrop farmers live and die by the conditions required for the particular species they have planted. They put all their eggs in one basket and hope that circumstance doesn’t drop it.Milpa farmers, however, have many irons in the fire — if one doesn’t work out, it just becomes fertilizer for the rest.

Hopefully, the path forward is starting to look a little obvious. Unsurprisingly, the same automotive company that figured out how to get cars to drive themselves realized that the same neural architecture behind that breakthrough could be applied to nearly any physical task. So now they’re building a humanoid robot. Tesla aims to ramp up production of their Optimus Robot for about $20,000 each. The economics here are so compelling that the likelihood agriculture doesn’t radically change is close to zero.

Here’s what’s going to happen. One curious farmer is going to realize that for the price of just one Calmer corn head ($200,000+), he can buy ten Optimus robots at $20,000 a pop. This is the Model T moment for agriculture.

A slight detour into the history of car adoption is useful to understand the economics of disruption.

When Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, it wasn’t just novel. It was cost competitive. Operating costs? Two cents per mile, according to Ford Times. And what was the alternative it was poised to replace? Horses. An animal that required daily feed, even when it wasn’t being used. To say nothing of the stabling, medical care, and constant maintenance. Think about it. Imagine feeding your car several times a day, even when it’s just parked for a week. And what would you rather change, a tire or a horseshoe? When Ed Tucker, a stagecoach operator in Michigan, switched from horses to a Model T, it cut his travel time from half a day to 50 minutes. He went from one trip per day to four — quadrupling his profits while eliminating the time and expense of horse care.3

The Model T wasn’t just better. It wasn’t even comparable. The same paradigm shift is about to happen with agriculture. Our current monocrop behemoths are Titanics. They’re huge. They’re expensive. They’re completely lacking in versatility. And they’re headed for a graveyard. Humanoid robots won’t be used for picking 30 acres of corn. They will be used to plant, tend, and harvest an enormously varied and dynamic food forest — dozens of crops, if not hundreds. And the economics of these robots? The upfront costs, maintenance, and power required to operate them? Well, that’s about to turn traditional agriculture upside-down.

Right now, farmers are forced to take big bets. They buy the $200,000 corn harvester, along with millions of dollars worth of other equipment, and pray the sun and rain are in their favor. Tragically, for this and many other reasons, many farmers operate with huge amounts of debt. They run a risky business, riddled with absurd regulations, subsidies, bad incentives, and insidious economic overlords.4 As it stands, traditional farming is like taking all your money and going all in on one stock. As investment portfolio managers love to say, ”Diversify.’ And despite the poor performance of such managers, it amounts to the sage advice of your grandmother. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. But that’s exactly what farmers are forced to do.

Here’s how it’s going to play out. One enterprising farmer orders an Optimus, figuring it can help with housework. After a while, he’ll ask it for other use cases. The robot accesses the internet, reads this essay, explains my thesis, and makes a suggestion. “After I’m done with the housework, why don’t we start small with a permaculture experiment? Just one acre?” And that’s the first domino. After seeing how cheap and robust it is, the farmer orders a few more robots — and so begins the conversion of his monoculture farm to a complex, year-round, milpa-style permaculture operation.

This first farmer who goes rogue and fully commits to such automated diversification is going to find an entirely different reality on the other side of the switch. No longer is the year divvied into a few enormous purchases of seed and fertilizer in order to reap the benefits with one or two enormous sales of a single crop. Instead, the diversified farmer, now with a robotic army of gardeners, can rely on the sale of dozens and dozens of species, many of which are staggered through the growing season.

The key difference? The hand. That $200,000 corn head can only harvest one species in orderly rows. But just as our own hands enabled our first agricultural revolution and our entire technological flourishing, a robotic hand with a human form factor can harvest literally anything — in any order. From a business standpoint, it makes all the sense in the world. Would you rather try to make back your investment with one risky product? Or would you rather have several dozen products on the market, all with lower costs?

And what about risk? A new bug mutation that renders a pest resilient to pesticides can wipe out an entire crop. With a giant milpa — a food forest — the risk is minimal. So what if one crop gets wiped out? There are several dozen more. Not to mention that many species of plants attract many competing non-plant species, making total crop destruction less likely. The system is robust in the exact ways that our current system is fragile.5 A well-designed food forest also doesn’t need fertilizer, further lowering costs. And the fuel that’s used to run the tractor pushing the Calmer 3215? Not cheap. Robots, on the other hand, are going to get most of their energy from solar panels. After the initial investment, the operating costs for an army of robotic gardeners can become shockingly cheap. (Worth noting: solar panels have now become so cheap that it’s cheaper to build a fence with solar panels than with wood.) And unlike humans, robots don’t need to sleep.And unlike giant tractors, robots can learn.

Imagine, for a moment, that a few hundred thousand acres of farmland in the United States have been converted to milpa-style food forests that are tended, maintained, and harvested by an army of robotic gardeners. All of the data required for the robot to function — the visual input primarily — gets fed to the same system. This robotic army experiments continuously, tracking with extreme accuracy which species do best with which neighbors, at what proximity, and in exactly what conditions: temperature, humidity, altitude, latitude, etc. Any new discoveries can instantly propagate to the rest of the robot army so that every operation with similar conditions immediately benefits.

What happens to the cost of food? Imagine you are that farmer looking at your numbers for the year after investing in a robotic army to tend and harvest a food forest. The new equipment? Much cheaper than the old equipment. The fuel? Free, after that investment in solar panels and batteries (getting cheaper by the month) has been recouped. Factor in the savings from fertilizer and pesticides, neither of which you need anymore. The profit margins are suddenly in a different league.

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Substantially lower equipment and operational costs mean an ability to undercut the market. Now this is where things could get a little… weird. Imagine multiple farmers with this setup suddenly engage in price competition. It races to the bottom real quick, because long-term operating costs could end up being very low. (Realize, after a certain scale, robotics will hit an inflection point where they’ll not only repair one another, they’ll assemble all future generations of robots.) At first this sounds like an odd disaster, but think about a minute. Dirt-cheap, high-quality food?

Yes. A solar-powered robotic army of gardeners tending and harvesting hundreds of thousands of acres of food forest will usher in the Solar-Punk utopian dream of extremely cheap, potentially free, definitely highly-nutritious food for all. Sounds fishy. But before succumbing to skepticism, consider oxygen. We need it more than food or water. We die in minutes without it. But do we pay for it? No.Why? The distribution system is perfect. Trees and algae produce and diffuse it throughout the air. Our relationship to oxygen required no analogous agricultural revolution because the manufacturing and distribution systems for it were already perfect. The same was not the case for food, but it could be. With enough solar-powered gardeners tending, harvesting, and transporting, food could become as freely accessible as oxygen.

The future of food as foreseen here doesn’t resize the slices like so many novel socio-economic models do. Instead it grows the pie. By a lot. And this pie is one that we’ll literally eat. It is important to keep in mind,this isn’t going to happen overnight. The process will be gradual, even glacial. But I personally don’t think it’s wise to consider all of this and glibly conclude: “Not in my lifetime!“ The future is no longer a distant dream to be confined to the pages of sci-fi novels. It might be hard to see the future, but that’s only because it’s just around the corner.

So, next time you pull up to a red light while driving, ask yourself: If a car can see that red light and understand it, what’s stopping similar systems from roaming forests of food and stopping to pick a big juicy tomato?

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David Le was bored at his job, so he got a new one—and never quit the old one.

It was just that he was super efficient—he got more done in a 20 hour work week than his coworkers did with 40. “If I can do your job twice as fast,” he thought, “why can’t I do two 20-hour a week jobs rather than pretend to work 40 at one?”

So he took two salary jobs, both in tech, and was earning more than six figures at each. That’s when he realized he could meet his savings goals much faster. “If you can double dip for three years, then technically you’re working six years,” he told me. “You’re actually getting to retirement in half the time.”

This idea became more common during the pandemic, when jobs went online and working two of them became as easy as running two Slack instances. That’s when Overemployed began, a community of more than 5,000 workers, helping each other navigate the logistical and legal hurdles of double employment.

“A common colleague had nine jobs at once,” Le said. “I think he was earning $900,000 at one point.”

That’s not to say there aren’t risks. A friend of Le’s participated in an online interview and doxed himself, losing both jobs in the process, and high profile cases have exposed individuals who worked the system a little too hard. (David Le, incidentally, is not my source’s real name.) But unless there is a conflict of interest between the two companies, why shouldn’t workers pursue two jobs if they are performing well in both of them?

As Le points out, it’s better than quiet quitting—there are plenty of people who spend the bulk of their 40-hour job doing nothing. “Pre-covid and pre-remote work, it was the water cooler talk, right?” Le says. “Everyone had their long lunches, their walk, their smoke breaks.”

@leah.claudiaaLike what am i supposed to do now?? #work #officelife #9to5 #creator #influencer #officejob #bored #administration

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Why not be more productive with those hours? “I don’t like quiet quitting because I’m too active,” Le says. “It’s the over ambitious quiet quitters who are working two jobs.”

I count myself among them. For most of my career I’ve had a day job and a side writing practice. It started in my early 20s, when I worked for a tech startup in the San Francisco Bay Area. I wanted to be good at my job, but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my personal ambitions. So I came up with a hack, focusing my limited energy only on the most important tasks. Every morning I woke up early and asked myself: “what is the most important thing to me today?” I spent two hours writing, pitching writers and media outlets, and building my online publication before work. When I got to the office, I switched gears and asked myself, “what is the most important thing to my CEO today?” Whatever it was, I spent the morning tackling it with gusto. If he was pitching investors, I worked on his slide deck and researched people he could pitch. If he was trying to impress important analysts, I made marketing campaigns custom tailored to their needs.

The result was that I was always working toward my personal dreams while my boss thought I was doing a great job. Eventually I was the head of marketing at a 100-person company and the founder of a publication with more than 100 writers on the side. Best of all: I got both things done by noon every day! I saved less important administrative tasks for after lunch, but even if I didn’t get to them I always felt that I was delivering in both jobs—I went on long lunch walks with colleagues and could even leave early and still have plenty of time to enjoy my life. When I eventually traded my tech job for journalism and started working remotely, I spent more of my afternoon on personal hobbies and leisure.

Then the pandemic happened and the rise of remote work meant everyone was doing it. We were using our work hours to do laundry, cook meals, and pick up the kids from school.

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Many of my friends started side businesses or pursued passion projects. “I spend three hours a day on my job—tops,” one friend, who works for Amazon, told me. She’s so effective at her work that she knocks it out early and spends the bulk of her “40-hour” workweek remotely heading up a nonprofit.

The net result is that we are using the corporate system to fund a parallel system—a passion economy built on the stability of our salary jobs. As Alex McCann put it: “They’re not quitting. They’re using the corporate infrastructure, the steady salary, the laptop, the stability, as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn’t died; it’s become a funding mechanism for actual work.”

Our salary jobs have become a stable mechanism through which we can pursue nearly anything else. As tech writer Ashlee Vance put it: “Pretty sure most white collar/office work takes about five hours a week and is basically UBI already to keep people content.”

That will only continue to be the case with the rise of automation. One of my friends recently professed to automating all of the reports he needs to run as a financial analyst, freeing his time up for his consulting practice.

“Honestly, a lot of my work could be done with AI,” Le tells me. “This could all be done with a robot.”

“Work has become very easy due to using AI. What are you doing with your free time?” one user asked on the anonymous tech platform Blink. “I haven’t written a line of code in months.” Another responded. “I just refine my prompts.”

This isn’t true across all industries, of course. Some jobs can’t be automated. Others require 40 hours, or more, on the job. But, during the height of the pandemic, 42% of the workforce went fully-remote which means nearly half of the workforce could be detached from any kind of hourly baseline. According to a recent poll of my subscribers, 31% are still fully-remote, with another 42% mostly remote. And most people aren’t working a full 40-hour work week—51% said they spend less than 30 hours working their salary job and 29% admitted to working less than 20 hours a week.

As we accomplish more of our work in less time, and with the aid of AI and automation, a 20-hour workweek might very well become standard. Hourly jobs could even be tapered to match it. After all, the 40-hour workweek started out as the factory rate before it was expanded to the office sector. Forty is an arbitrary number picked because the 24-hour day could be split into three eight-hour shifts—there’s no reason it’s the “right amount” of work. Why couldn’t the office rate eventually become the new hourly standard?

Eventually we could even achieve the Jetson’s ideal—working 9 hours a week for our companies, but relying on tools that help us get quite a lot of work done in that time, even as we’re supported by the overall earnings from the companies we work for through a decent and livable salary.

Le quit one of his jobs earlier this year. He wanted to take on a more advanced position at work, as well as enjoy more leisure time. For the first time in four years, he’s working one salary job, spending less than 20 hours a week on it, and using the rest of his time for his social life.

Still, he’s getting bored again. “Work is slow,” he told me. “I’ve actually had my boss say, ‘Why do you care so much about taking on extra projects?’ I’m like, ‘I’m just trying to get involved and learn and build.’ If I were to sever these extra projects, I would be bored.”

“Or, have a lot of free time,” he amends. “Which is good.”

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1. Barry Ritholtz | Let Your Opponent Beat Themselves

Tennis is two different games. The winner's game is the game that the professionals play. You score by hitting aces, by just kissing the line, by slicing, by hitting with power, by putting the ball in all sorts of challenging places with all sorts of swings that require a lot of technique and expertise. Professionals win tennis by scoring points.

The rest of us, the 99 point whatever percent of us amateurs, that's not how we win a tennis game. We actually lose by making unforced errors. We double fault on a serve, we hit it into the net, we hit it wide, we hit it long, we hit it with not enough spin so it just bounces right up to the sweet spot of our opponent's swing. And so, if you just make fewer of these unforced errors […] if you just stay within your own skill set and don't try and do much, let the other person beat themselves, that's how amateurs win games.

More from Barry: Make Fewer Errors, Make More Money (Ep.261)

2. Joe Hudson | Weaponize Shame

Uber successful folks. They at the same time feel like they're better than most people and they hold a deep shame inside of them. So both of those two things are happening at once. They're subtly putting themselves above folks and at the same time they're trying to prove to the world that they're good enough. And so that, that component is there for a lot of hyper successful.

More from Joe: The Art of Accomplishment (Ep.280)

3. Billy Oppenheimer | Make the Work the Win

David Senra, I think, is a great example […] He just loves doing the thing that he does, and getting to do it is the win for him. And the things like the external recognition, the people reaching out to him, the cool conversations he gets to have, the cool dinners he gets to go to are a nice cherry on top. But for him, the best part of it is sitting down in his room and recording a podcast. And that, I think, is the common trait that I see across the people I write about and read about and look up to. For them, it doesn't seem like they have to get themselves motivated to go do to put in the persistent work. It's the thing they just are compelled to do.

More from Billy: On Curiosity, Creativity & Conceptual Ancestors (Ep.158)

4. Derek Sivers | Just Show Up

When we live in a place like New York City or LA, you can see this happen firsthand, even the pedestal of Hollywood. There's some people that, oh my God, when you see them on a big movie screen, you go in person to a theater, and their face is huge. Then, you get to know them as people, and you go, ‘Oh, wow, that's just somebody applied for the gig. That producer hired a director, the director needed an actor, and the casting person just needed somebody to play that role to say those lines with a certain look on the stage to make this vision happen, and this person that I know just went for the audition and got it.’ Suddenly, their face is huge on the screen, but they're not a special person in a... They're not a special breed. They're not a different type. They are just like you. They just took the chance and showed up to the gig. 90% of success is just showing up […] They just went and did it. They did the thing instead of watching TV, and that's all the difference it took.

More from Derek: How to Become a Picasso (Ep.185) | Just Do the Thing (Ep.186)

5. Anne-Laure Le Cunff | Replace the Ladder with the Loop

It really requires changing your mental model of success, and going from that linear model we've been talking about, which I visualize as a ladder. And the reason why I visualize it as a ladder is because it implies that you have a certain order in which you need to do things […] And the problem with this linear model, the ladder that we're supposed to climb, is that first it assumes that you know where you're going, which in many cases, as we've been talking about, is not the case. It also assumes that you know what you want, which there's tons of research showing that we're actually absolutely terrible at predicting what we will want in one year from now, two years from now, five years from now. And it also assumes that you as a person, you are this monolithic, static person, and then that the world is not changing as well. So it just assumes that whatever variables you're working with right now are going to be the same in the future. […]

So it's really about letting go of this linear approach and replacing it with a more cyclical approach, which you see that in so many philosophies, in particular Eastern philosophies, but a more cyclical vision of what growth looks like. And this is really replacing the ladder with the loop, where you don't try to climb and go to a specific destination. You just try to go through one cycle of growth, where you don't know where you're going. You're just trying to learn to grow, to try something.

It starts with that word that you used earlier. Maybe. Maybe if I do this, this will happen, but I'm not quite sure. Let's go through the cycle and let's see what happens. And that means that it becomes really impossible to compare yourself to other people because you're going through your own cycle. And it also means that you can grow without this illusion of knowing where you're going.

More from Anne-Laure: Experiment Your Way to a Better Life (Ep.259)

6. Ben Reinhardt | If You’re Successful, Pay it Forward

An idea I'd love to inculcate in culture is this idea of paying it forward. Many people in tech made a lot of money because someone in the past did really important research. And that person is not going to be able to capture the value of their research, because often there'll be someone who tried something, it failed, but it gave someone else the idea. And it's just like, you can't propagate it back. The time scales are long enough that they might be dead. So we can't really pay it back, but we can pay it forward and enable to do the research that will then enable someone in the future to make a fortune off of some new technology. That is a thing that I would love to incept in culture.

More from Ben: Speculative Technologies (Ep.248)

7. Danielle Strachman | The Success is Doing the Thing, Not Getting the Badge

We're constantly reminding Thiel fellows, ‘Hey, it's cool to be building and doing what you're doing out in the world. It's not cool to be a Thiel Fellow.’ Having a badge isn't the cool thing, it's what you're doing.

More from Danielle: The 1517 Rebellion (Ep.279)

8. Morgan Housel | Tell the Best Story

A thing that I really believe is true for all, everything in the world is that the best story wins. It's not the best ideas, it's not the right ideas, it's not the complex ideas. It's just the best story wins. I've used this example before of Ken Burns, the documentarian. His documentary on the civil war came out in 1990. When it came out in 1990, it was such a success. More people watched the civil war documentary in 1990 than much the Super Bowl that year. It was just like a ridiculous blowout success. This is a documentary on the civil war, which is like one of the most documented. How many books are there on the civil war? Thousands and thousands. There is nothing new in Ken Burns’ documentary, nothing new. This is not like he was the guy to uncover Gettysburg. There's nothing new in there, he just told a really good story about it. An amazing story with captivating music and amazing editing. Because of that, he took an event that everyone had known about, and everyone has known the detail about. He got more Americans to tune in than watch the Super Bowl that year.

I think there's so many examples of that, of things that everyone knows, have been discovered for centuries. Nothing's new but if you can tell a good story about it, you'll get people's attention. That is what I think a lot of academics, in particular, miss. Is that they have all the right answers but they are the worst storytellers. I think a lot of the times they go out of their way to be bad storytellers. They want to use big words to fit in with their colleagues, to fit in with the academic tribe. I think there's so much room to take what academics know and explain it to a layperson in a story that they're likely to remember and likely to hook onto. There's so much room doing that.

More from Morgan: The Best Story Wins (Ep.100)

9. Dan Shipper | It Takes 10 Years to Have an Overnight Success

People think that progress is linear and it actually does not feel linear at the time. It happens in jumps, it happens, you see a clear beaker, and then you drop a crystal of salt in it and it suddenly all just turns into salt. It's a similar feeling. And I think that's why there's that sort of adage about it takes 10 years to have an overnight success. That is actually what it looks like from the outside is an overnight success or an overnight whatever. But that's sort of the crystallization of all the salt that's been boiled in the water happening because of one little thing. That little thing doesn't matter. It's the years of adding salt to the water and boiling it that matters.

More from Dan: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Allocation Economy (Ep.237)

Explore previous instalments of our ‘Guide To’ series: Decision-Making, Money, Agency, Getting Sh*t Done, Leadership, Failure, Communication, Creativity, and Happiness.

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I.

Achilles: (confidently scrolling through charts on his tablet) Tortoise, I’ve cracked the code! My new predictive model accounts for every conceivable market scenario. I’ve backtested everything from the Tulip Mania to the GameStop squeeze.

Tortoise: (raising an eyebrow) Every conceivable scenario? My, what a comprehensive imagination you must have.

Achilles: It’s not imagination, it’s mathematics! Fifty years of data, seventeen different asset classes, forty-three statistical factors. I’ve modeled crashes, bubbles, corrections, recoveries, and even those pesky “black swan” events everyone keeps nattering about.

Crab: (scuttling closer with evident amusement) Your “Black swan” events seem to waddle through the markets with suspicious regularity, I notice.

Achilles: Exactly why I’ve tamed them with proper quantification! Look, let me demonstrate the elegance of probability theory with something beautifully simple.

Achilles pulls out a coin.

Achilles: This humble coin embodies perfect binary probability. Heads or tails, 50-50, elegantly predictable over any meaningful sample size.

Tortoise: (dryly) How refreshingly straightforward. A universe of exactly two possibilities.

Achilles: Precisely! And if we can model this simple system flawlessly, surely we can conquer more complex ones. Mathematics is mathematics, after all.

Achilles flips the coin with theatrical confidence.

It spins, descends gracefully… and lands perfectly upright on its edge, balanced like a tiny monument to impossibility.

Tortoise: (after a long pause) Well. That’s not very binary of it.

Achilles: (speechless, then sputtering) But… but this is mathematically preposterous! Coins don’t do this!

Crab: (circling the defiant coin) Apparently this particular coin hasn’t read your probability textbook.

II.

Crab: (tapping the table beside the rebellious coin) Your binary model has encountered a ternary reality.

Achilles: (frantically consulting his tablet) This is statistically impossible! A probability so close to zero it might as well be zero!

Tortoise: And yet here it stands, your zero-probability event occurring with stubbornly undeniable certainty.

Achilles: (desperately) It’s a fluke! An aberration! A one-in-abillion cosmic joke! The laws of physics haven’t been repealed just because one coin got confused!

Crab: (interrupting with sideways logic) Ah, but you didn’t flip a billion coins in a lab. You flipped one coin, one time, in reality. And reality, it seems, has a sense of humor about your probabilities.

Sloth: (emerging languidly from behind a potted fern) Models… assume… tomorrow’s… universe… operates… by yesterday’s… rules.

Achilles: Well, of course! That’s the foundation of all scientific prediction!

Tortoise: The coin has presented us with what statisticians call a “model failure”—an outcome that exists outside our framework of possibilities.

Achilles: (staring at the coin with growing horror) But if my binary model fails for something as simple as a coin flip, then… then…

Crab: (gently) Then perhaps your forty-three-factor market model might have a few blind spots?

III.

Achilles: (desperately examining the coin from multiple angles) There must be a rational explanation! Perhaps there’s an imperceptible table tilt, a localized magnetic anomaly, or some quantum interference pattern…

Tortoise: (amused) You’re retrofitting explanations to salvage your worldview rather than updating your worldview to accommodate inconvenient evidence.

Crab: The classic gambler’s fallacy in reverse. Instead of changing your bets when you lose, you’re changing reality to preserve your betting system.

Achilles: I’m not changing reality! I’m uncovering the hidden variables that explain apparent anomalies!

Sloth: (with drowsy wisdom) Hidden… variables… are… often… just… visible… humility… in… disguise.

Achilles: (frantically scribbling equations) Look! If I incorporate edge-landing probability as a third variable, adjust for microgravitational fluctuations, account for molecular surface tension effects…

Tortoise: (watching with fascination) Observe how quickly certainty transforms into increasingly elaborate uncertainty. Your simple binary model is becoming a hydra of complexity.

Crab: Each new variable you add creates three more questions. Soon, you’ll need a model to model your model.

Achilles: (looking up from his calculations, disheveled) But that’s… that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m building a meta-model to explain why my original model failed to predict its own failure to predict…

Tortoise: (with gentle satisfaction) You’ve discovered recursive model uncertainty. The deeper you dig into explaining the unexplainable, the more unexplainable your explanations become.

IV.

Achilles: (staring at the defiant coin in dawning horror) If coins can spontaneously develop tertiary landing preferences, then anything unprecedented could manifest without warning!

Tortoise: (pleased) Now you’re beginning to grasp the delicious enormity of the problem.

Crab: Consider the sideways implications: how many other “impossible” market behaviors are absent from your model simply because they’re patiently waiting for their debut performance?

Achilles: (pale) There could be entirely new species of crashes… novel varieties of bubbles… correlation patterns that emerge ex nihilo…

Sloth: (with uncharacteristic clarity) The rarest… events… often… cast… the longest… shadows.

Achilles: (frantically updating his tablet) I need to expand my model! Account for previously unaccounted variables! Build in provisions for the unprecedented!

Tortoise: Your comprehensive model prepared you exquisitely for every financial apocalypse that had already occurred, but left you naked before the maiden voyage of a fresh catastrophe.

Achilles: (weakly) But how does one model the previously unmodeled?

Crab: (with philosophical precision) One doesn’t. One simply accepts that every model is an elegant confession of ignorance about what it fails to include.

Achilles: So my fifty years of backtesting, my seventeen asset classes, my forty-three factors… they’re all just sophisticated ways of preparing for battles that have already been fought?

Tortoise: (nodding) While tomorrow’s battle might be fought with weapons that haven’t been invented yet, on terrain that doesn’t exist today, according to rules that no one has written.

V.

Tortoise: (leaning back thoughtfully) Consider this paradox, my quantitatively-minded friend: the more comprehensive your model becomes, the more seductively it whispers that you’ve captured all possible futures in your mathematical net.

Achilles: (defensively) Well, yes, that’s rather the point of comprehensive modeling.

Tortoise: But confidence born of comprehensiveness might be the most expensive cognitive bias of all.

Crab: (tapping the table) Your perfectly predictive model couldn’t predict the limits of its own predictive perfection.

Sloth: (with drowsy profundity) The most… dangerous… models… work… flawlessly… right up… until… the moment… they… catastrophically… don’t.

Achilles: (gesturing helplessly at his tablet) So what am I supposed to do? Abandon quantitative analysis? Embrace financial mysticism?

Tortoise: Certainly not. But perhaps treat your mathematical masterpieces as useful approximations rather than divine revelations.

Crab: Models are maps, not territories. And occasionally, the territory sprouts cliffs that appear on no existing map.

Achilles: (with dawning realization) Like that coin. My probability map showed only two destinations, but the territory contained a third.

Tortoise: (pleased) Precisely. The question isn’t whether your maps are wrong—all maps are wrong. The question is whether they’re useful despite being wrong, and whether you remember they’re maps.

VI.

Achilles: (realizing) This happens in investing all the time, doesn’t it? Events that weren’t supposed to be possible…

Tortoise: Indeed. How many “six-sigma” events have occurred in markets over the past few decades?

Achilles: Too many to count. But we called them outliers, anomalies, once-in-a-lifetime events…

Crab: Even when they kept happening every few years.

Sloth: (softly) Perhaps… the outliers… are trying… to tell us… something… about our… inliers.

Tortoise: That our models systematically underestimate the probability of outcomes that fall outside their scope.

Achilles: (staring at his tablet) So all these backtests, all these statistical models… they’re just sophisticated ways of fighting the last war?

Crab: They’re useful for understanding what has happened. Less useful for predicting what’s never happened before.

Achilles: (with growing humility) And the most dangerous moments are when I’m most confident in my model’s completeness.

Tortoise: (with satisfaction) Now you’re thinking like someone who understands that the map is not the territory, and that the territory has a mischievous tendency to redraw itself when no one is looking.

VII.

Achilles: (after a long contemplation of the sideways coin) I came here to demonstrate the elegance of probability theory, and instead discovered the probability of elegance breaking down.

Tortoise: The coin has taught us something profound about the nature of prediction itself.

Achilles: What’s that?

Tortoise: That the most important outcomes are often the ones we haven’t thought to predict.

Crab: And that certainty about the future is usually inversely related to actual knowledge about the future.

Achilles: (looking at the still-balanced coin) So I should expect the unexpected?

Tortoise: You should expect that the unexpected is always possible, even when—especially when—your models suggest otherwise.

Sloth: (with final wisdom) The wisest… investors… are those… who build… portfolios… that benefit… from being… wrong… about things… they can’t… predict.

Achilles: (with newfound humility) Like position sizing small enough that even a sideways coin can’t destroy you?

Crab: (with approval) Exactly. When you can’t predict the direction, at least control the magnitude.

Tortoise: (as they prepare to leave) The coin will remain balanced for as long as it chooses to remain balanced. We cannot predict when it will fall, or which way. But we can appreciate that it has taught us the most valuable lesson of all.

Achilles: Which is?

Tortoise: That wisdom begins with admitting the limits of our wisdom and that those limits are closer than we think.

The coin continues to balance impossibly as they leave, a small monument to the beautiful impossibility of complete knowledge and the infinite creativity of an universe that refuses to be fully modeled.

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1. Barry Ritholtz | Don’t Panic!

“I started on a trading desk and the most interesting thing I learned from the senior traders, one was a former Army ranger, one was a Navy SEAL, another was a Marine jungle combat instructor, and these guys used to tell stories, literal war stories about the prep they did before they would go on a mission. And they literally map out everything that happens. “What do you do if this goes wrong here?” There's a plan A, plan B, set plan C every step of the way.

But the thing that the SEAL had mentioned that I found so fascinating was, your gun jams in a firefight, what's your plan B? How do you deal with it? How much time do you take to try and fix it? When do you abandon the weapon? And what is your emotional state?

If your reaction is panic, you're going to get yourself killed and your teammates killed.

But if your reaction is, "Hey, mechanical things break. I have another sidearm, I have another piece. I could grab this weapon…"

Panic is when things go bad and you don't know what to do. But if you have a plan A, plan B, plan C and you are prepared for the emotionality of the moment, they just say, ‘We just do our jobs and keep moving towards the objective.’”

More from Barry: How To Live a Stress-Free Financial Life (EP.196)

2. Anne-Laure Le Cunff | Your Curiosity Will Tell You If You Are Following Someone Else’s Script

“Most people listening to this will be familiar with the scripts of Silicon Valley. You work at a big tech company, you save a bit of money, you build your network. Then you quit and you start a startup. So I did that. Thinking at the time that I was finally making my own decisions, that it was what I really wanted to do. But not realizing that it was just yet another script of success that I was following because that's what success looked like around me and my environment.

It's only once that startup failed a couple of years after that that I found myself again in a liminal space of not knowing what I was supposed to do next, and where I finally allowed myself to really explore what it was I was actually curious about, if money was not part of the equation, if traditional success was not part of the equation. If nobody was watching, what was something that I was actually curious and excited about?

And for me, it had always been the brain. I had always been curious about the way we think and we feel and how that all works, and how that shapes our realities and our relationships. And so I went back to university to study neuroscience.”

More from Anne-Laure: Experiment Your Way to a Better Life (EP.259)

3. Anthony Pompliano | Most of Your Decisions Don’t Matter

“80/20 is kind of the Pareto principle. All that I say in the book that I actually think it's like 95/5. It's not 20% of your decisions, it's less than five, maybe even one in 99 […]

And so we've done this in some of our businesses. At the end of the year we look back and we say, ‘If we only got to make two or three decisions, what were the two to three decisions that we made that led to most of the outcome?’

And one year, I mean this sounds insane, one year we looked at and we had a very good year, we made one decision with the balance sheet to invest some capital off of the balance sheet, and that drove 99% of the return for that year. And so we sat there and we said, we could have made that one decision and all just not worked the whole year and we would've had nearly the same outcome. That makes us dumb. Why would we spend all this time, energy, all this stuff, whatever? And so then going into the next year, we said to ourselves, ‘You can't say that every year it's going to repeat and you're not always going to make good decisions, but maybe we should actually change the way that we think about decision making and what's important.’ And you learn, right, and you kind of go from there.

And so I do think that understanding power laws is less about trying to replicate them all the time. And it may be about avoiding the big amount of decisions or actions that aren't going to have an outcome. So it's like less than it being a creative ‘Let's go find 20 more new power laws.’ Instead, maybe it's about, well, ‘Let's just reduce the 20 things we're doing down to two because we think one of these two is the power law.’ ”

More from Anthony: How to Live an Extraordinary Life (EP. 242)

4. Derek Sivers | The Choice You Commit to is the Correct Choice

“If you're ever wondering what is the right decision, ‘Should I do this, or should I do that? Should I live here, or should I live there? Should I take this job or that job?’ that just the act of choosing one and wholeheartedly committing to it makes your choice the best choice. It is your commitment itself that can make any choice the right choice for you that you can [...] because they're all parallel worlds, you pick one, and by committing to it and making the best of it, it makes it the best choice.”

More from Derek: How to Become a Picasso (EP.186) | Just Do The Thing (EP. 186)

5. George Mack | Don’t Be the Midwit

“And I think the ultimate midwit razor or filtering process is to just always try and avoid being the genius, because that's the mistake the Midwit makes is, he thinks he's the guy on the right. And unless you've got some Tesla level of IQ, and even then I still don't think it's necessarily useful, certainly not for a midwit like myself.

As a recovering midwit, going through of like, ‘Well, how can I dumb this down? What is the dumbest version of this?’ Because if I can't dumb this down where it's super simple of ‘calories in calories out’, or ‘if feeling bad, good night's sleep’ [...] If I can make it appeal to the idiot, therefore it may have the chance of passing to the genius as well.”

More from George: The Game of Life (EP.195) | Marketing, Mental Models, and Technology (EP.114)

6. Dr. Pippa Malmgren | Buckle-In

“So what I learned is that when this chaos happens, buckle your seatbelt and be grateful because this is the education that money cannot buy. You cannot learn this in a classroom. You can only learn it by being chucked into the deep end of a catastrophe. I'm not saying we want more catastrophes, we don't, but if you have the chance to be in the front line of one, and it's your job to get us through it, then instead of going, ‘Oh, my God, this is terrible. How are we ever going to handle this?’ just be like, ‘Great, and thank you for giving me this privileged position to be here where I can observe how things really work.’ So it's a blessing. It's not a disaster in other words. That mindset, that attitude changes how you handle it. It really does.”

More from Dr.Malmgren: Why Leadership Has Gone Wrong (EP.167)

7. Mark Daniel | Stop Overcomplicating Things

“Marriage, health, building a business, building a great portfolio. All of those things are quite simple and quite hard. Whenever I find myself trying to overcomplicate something, it's usually because I know what the answer is. I don't want to accept what the answer is, because it's going to require me to sweat. It is always the guy who's out of shape who's asking about push-up variations in the gym. It's always the guy who can't do one push up, he's like, ‘But do I put my hands here? And then do I do a jumping push-up? Or do I do underhand?’ It's like, ‘No. Just keep going until you can't anymore’ and I think that that tends to be correct in every stream of your life that's worth developing. You just have to do the simple, hard thing 90% of the days each year and then do it for 10 years and then look up and see where you're at, and that tends to work out pretty well.”

More from Mark: How to Find a Kaleidoscopic Alien (EP.254)

8. Tiago Forte | Use Your Envy

“A few years ago, I started noticing that was actually a very pure signal. It was such an honest signal, it can't be faked. You know, a lot of times your desires and your goals and your dreams come from somewhere else in a bad way. They come from your parents or society's expectations or a fear that you have. And those can be more or less useful. But envy, you can't fake envy. Envy is really telling you what is missing in your life. I think then you can act on it. You can decide to just accept that part of your life. That's one option. Or you can make a plan to change it.”

More from Tiago: Unlocking the Power of the Annual Review (EP.267)

9. Chuck Beames | Do Something Else

“I think it's important that people have a hobby or a diversion that takes their brain out of the details of what they're doing and does something different, because when they come back, then it's almost like a little mini holiday for their brain and they can come back to those problems and they can all of a sudden see them in a slightly different light. And so whatever it is, I just happen to like cabinet making. And a lot of that is because growing up, that was a thing. Shop class was a big deal when I was growing up as a kid, and I was particularly good at it. So I really took to it.”

More from Chuck: The Second Space Race (EP.269)

10. Natasha Joukovsky | Tear Down Your Walls

“Success generally rests on disarming the very cognitive defense mechanisms designed to protect one's fragile psyche […] Our brains are self-protective devices and ironically, you need to tear down your cognitive protection in order to access the type of truth that makes for really good art. The kind of art that when you encounter it, you think, 'Oh my gosh, that's so true and nobody wants to admit it.’”

More from Natasha: On Recursion, Status Games & Manufactured Nonchalance (EP.268)

Explore previous instalments of our ‘Guide To’ series: Money, Agency, Getting Sh*t Done, Leadership, Failure, Communication, Creativity, and Happiness.

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1. Jared Dillian | Stop Stressing About the Little Things

“A lot of the stuff that's focused around cutting expenses puts you in a position where you're thinking about money all the time. Even the decision of whether to go to a soda machine and get a soda for a dollar becomes this complex decision-making process about, ‘Do I need it? Can I wait until I get home? I'm thirsty,’ whatever. So it really gets people thinking about money all the time. And I think the ideal state is to get to a point where you don't think about it at all. You never think about it because there's better things to worry about than money. There's a lot better things to worry about than money, like family, kids, job. There's all these other sources of stress and money stress is completely avoidable depending on how you structure your life.”

More from Jared: How To Live a Stress-Free Financial Life (EP.196)

2. Sahil Bloom | Money Buys Happiness. Until it Doesn’t.

“In the early years of your life, money directly buys happiness. We know this scientifically. Early on the curve of income, money and happiness are very strongly correlated because you're reducing these fundamental burdens and stresses. You're getting food, you're getting shelter, you're getting the ability to take one or two vacations a year. You can take care of people that you care about. There is a very clear correlation, but what happens is we then get patterned in those early years into saying more money equals more happiness. And so we create this equation in our heads that gets firmly entrenched in those early years, and it's very hard to break that equation. So once you got to the point where you were already past the clear relationship where we know it starts to level off, where we know your incremental happiness is going to come from these other areas, we might know that in the back of our mind, but in the front of our mind, we have this equation that says, no, if I make more money, I'm just going to be more happy. It's just the equation just continues. So I'm just going to keep marching down that path and then it's too late.”

More from Sahil: A Multitude of Wealth (EP. 251)

3. Christine Benz | If You Want to Give Your Kids Money, Don’t Wait Until You Die

“I have become a huge fan of lifetime giving. And the simple reason is when you look at the data on when people pass away, well, their children are typically in their mid-50s, perhaps even early 60s. Their financial fortunes are pretty well set at that life stage. Now, it might be impactful certainly for them to inherit money at that life stage. But I believe that you can make a bigger impact on your kids' lives earlier and with smaller sums of money.”

More from Christine: The Art of Retiring (EP. 257)

4. Guy Spier | Don’t Ignore the Trade-Offs

“So one of the experiences, sitting at this famous lunch with Warren Buffett […] is the realization that I would not want to be living Warren Buffett's life because this is a guy who genuinely enjoys researching and analyzing and investing and understanding companies and businesses. But if he gets a book about, I don't know, behavioral psychology or the history of Rome, or he'll send it to his friend, Charlie, God bless him, before he even decides to read it, because he's not all that interested. So he has a very, very narrow focus. And I realized for me that's not a plus. It's just not a plus. I don't want to have a narrow focus. If you could tell me that I could have 10 times more money and speak one language less, I don't want to do it.”

More from Guy: Wealth, Wisdom & Enlightenment (EP. 197)

5. George Mack | Money is a Video Game

“I think money is the best video game ever designed because it's multiplayer, it's a single number going up and going down. And you can contrast yourself constantly to where it was last year. It is the single best video game ever. You can even look at Brazilian jujitsu, which has become so big right now. And when I speak to people who do it, one of the most rewarding things they find is the belt system. You go from white belt to one stripe, two stripe, three stripe, blue belt, and all the way at purple belt, brown belt. And you're constantly getting these little stripes. Even with CrossFit, the way they do the rep maxes and things like that. And you notice everything that really begins to take off is a super well-designed video game or a game period. And things that really struggle both from an individual and as societal perspective are when just the game mechanics are terrible.”

More from George: The Game of Life (EP.195) | Marketing, Mental Models, and Technology (EP.114)

6. | Imagine the Money Pile

“This saved my ass so much. This thought exercise is the only reason that I didn't lose everything that I put into crypto, because when you buy something for $1,000 and now it's worth $50,000, you're not thinking, ‘Oh my God, I made $50,000.’ You're thinking, ‘I'm going to make another $50,000.’ You're thinking, ‘It's going to 100, it's going to keep going up.’ And the question I started asking myself was, ‘Okay, pretend I don't own any of this. Pretend I don't have any of these tokens. Forget about what I bought them for,’ all of that. Just try to really get into that headspace and imagine I have all of that money in cash in my living room. It's in fat stacks of $100 bills.

It's like the Walter White scene in the storage unit where he is swimming on the pile of money. I guess that's his bodyguard who's doing it, but try to imagine that and then ask yourself, ‘If I had all of that money in my living room, would I then take it and put it into Dogecoin? Would I put it into this video game currency? Would I put it into this bored Ape?’ And it'll probably be no.

More from Nat: Crazy, Crypto, Confidential (EP. 244)

7. | Don’t Follow the Money

“And in almost all cases, if you study great scientists or you study great artists or you study great startup founders, it was an obsession with a new frontier of something that was interesting to that person. And they did it not because it was going to be popular or not because it was going to make a money necessarily, but because they couldn't not do it, and they just kept going. When someone's a teenager, I always encourage them, always have a project that you're working on that doesn't make you progress in any way in the normal social dominance hierarchy. Work on a project that's not going to look good on your college application, that's not going to help you get better grades. But that is interesting only because it's interesting to you, a project of your own by yourself defined on your terms. And because that's where the breakthrough ideas come from is people willing to engage that way. It's a different way of showing up in the world, but it's a really valuable way of showing up in the world, and I think it's going to be increasingly valuable.”

More from Mike: How To Become a Pattern-Breaking Founder (EP.233)

8. | Money is Irrelevant to Financial Security

“Financial insecurity, basically, I don't think it has any correlation to how much money you have. I'm talking to somebody who has like 100 grand in college debt, and he's 22 and he's like, ‘I'm not going to work in a traditional job. I'll be fine. Just tell me how to carve my own path.’ Right? And then I talk to the Google employee who has $3 million in the bank, he tells me, and he's like, ‘What if I can't get a job after six months?’ I was like, ‘Well, you can live forever pretty much anywhere.’ But he doesn't experience that […]

You got to figure out what your actual traits are. How are you wired? For me, this current path is great for me. The uncertainty of not knowing how I'll be making money six months from now is super exciting to me. It's like, ‘Oh, what will I come up with?’ At first, it was really hard because I hadn't experienced it, but I really enjoy it. It cracks me up. But I can't give you that natural tendency towards that.”

More from Paul: The Pathless Path (EP. 112)

9. | Avoid Successfluencer Dopamine

“People will listen to podcasts, read books, and take courses on how to be successful without ever actually taking action on a thing that would help them be successful. And it tricks your brain, you're getting that dopamine hit without actually doing the work. It's actual success when you've had a very successful career in a lot of endeavors and a lot of it was probably doing a lot of boring work that compounded over time. It wasn't this flashy, you didn't take some course then a year later, you were making millions of dollars. It's just doing a lot of small decisions right along the way, but that doesn't sell.”

More from Jack: The Authentic Path (EP.170)

10. Nick Maggiulli | Debt is Most Useful to Those Who Need it the Least

“The point about debt is like it's not necessarily good or bad. It's how you use it. And I think a book that really helped me a lot was called The Value of Debt and Building Wealth. And it talked a lot about how you can use debt and manage it properly. And I think the main takeaway here is the people who could best use debt are the people that don't know it. That's really the truth.

If you could buy a house cash, you should probably use some debt, right? Like that's the thing. If you can't get to a 20% down payment and you're like ‘okay, I'll just put five percent down.’ Those people are probably more likely going to run into trouble […] So it's like if you don't need it, use it because then it's a benefit for you.”

More from Nick: Just Keep Buying (EP. 103)

Explore previous instalments of our ‘Guide To’ series: Agency, Getting Sh*t Done, Leadership, Failure, Communication, Creativity, and Happiness.

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Few artists have weaponized nonsense as effectively as David Byrne.

Here’s the chorus of “The Great Curve,” the third track on Talking Heads’ Afro-tinged masterpiece Remain in Light. Good luck figuring out what this means:

Not to mention the Dada-infused ramblings of “I Zimbra”:

Anyone who's listened to Talking Heads will recognize how Byrne’s lyrics function like an instrument, riding the groove as an element of rhythm more than melody.

His influence endures. Many contemporary lyricists adopt similarly nonsensical stylings. “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon,” declares Thom Yorke in Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place.” “I’ve come here to make a ceramic shoe,” exclaims Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, who collects her lyrics from adverts, drawings and stray thoughts, then scatters them over her band’s jagged guitar licks and staccato rhythms.

So, why nonsense? What purpose does it serve?

Well, for one, these spiky little provocations can be surprisingly catchy. There is alpha in the unexpected. Chances are the “water flowing underground” refrain from Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” is burned somewhere into your memory.

But Byrne’s reasoning is a little more interesting than that. In How Music Works, he writes about his wariness of conventional lyrics, calling them a “dangerous addition” to music.

Why? Because lyrics can destroy a song’s “pleasant ambiguity,” the mystery that lets us bring something of our own to the music:

“Ambiguity allows listeners to psychologically tailor a song to suit their needs, sensibilities, and situations, but words can limit that, too.”

Byrne is hardly the first to suggest that ambiguity — the space between what’s given to us and what we take away — is the essence of art. We’ve all been told to “show not tell” in high school English class, to leave our readers’ imaginations room to roam. Nonsense, then, is this premise on steroids, leaving all interpretation up to the listener.

What makes Byrne’s approach doubly fascinating is that his lyrics balance literal nonsensicality with rhythmic, melodic, and emotional specificity.

To put it less pretentiously, they fit.

So, even though the following, from album opener “Born Under Punches,” sounds like nonsense:

“Take a look at these hands. The hands speak. The hands of a government man.”

In context it feels almost cosmically inevitable. It slams into the opening verse like a kick drum. You could replace it with something equally abstract, and it wouldn’t work.

Byrne walks us through his writing process, which begins by improvising melodies while singing nonsense syllables. Once he’s established the melody, he transcribes the recording, replacing the gibberish with actual words. If he’s overthinking it, he will “distract the gatekeepers” of his mind by jogging or cooking, or cycling, recording phrases that match the song’s meter as they occur to him, enabling the emergence of “surprises and weirdness from the depths.”

Throughout this process, he is seeking to find words that sound as close as possible to his original gibberish:

“I do that because the difference between an ohh and an aah and a B and a th sound is, I assume, integral to the emotion that the story wants to express. I want to stay true to that unconscious, inarticulate intention.”

Notice how Byrne acknowledges that the lyrics, while seemingly meaningless, serve a specific artistic purpose. It’s nonsense, yes, but it’s intentional nonsense. It’s nonsense as art, achieving an emotional truth that resonates beyond literal meaning.

And (this is the best part), the more space he gives to nonsense, the more what first appeared nonsensical suddenly…. makes sense:

“I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, somewhat surprisingly, in words that have an emotional consistency and sometimes even a narrative thread, even though those aspects of the text weren’t planned ahead of time."

Byrne calls this “emergent storytelling.” Listeners of Infinite Loops may know it as complex adaptivity. Whatever you want to call it, if you’re feeling creatively restrained, perhaps the answer is to loosen up a bit — to embrace nonsense or, as the great man himself would put it, to Stop Making Sense.

If you enjoyed this, check out last week’s installment: The Creativity Diaries #4: Salvador Dalí

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Millions of potentially great projects have been slaughtered at the altar of originality.

The urge to create something untethered from the past starves more than it inspires, diverting artists from the fertile creative soil that nourished their ancestors.

At first glance, the wacky art of Salvador Dalí certainly seems original, an orgy of melting clocks, lobster phones, and spindle-legged elephants. Yet even the great Spanish surrealist began on a well-trodden path. He immersed himself in the works of the old masters. He meticulously studied and replicated the techniques of Renaissance artists like Vermeer and Velázquez. He explored everything from Impressionism to Cubism.

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing," he argued. Only by first mastering the techniques of those who came before him could he develop his own eccentric, boundless style.

Dalí's approach mirrors that of history’s great artists: Shakespeare, who borrowed liberally from older myths, Italian comedies, and historical accounts; Picasso who famously declared, "Good artists copy, great artists steal"; and The Beatles, who built their revolutionary sound by first imitating blues, skiffle, and rock 'n' roll.

Some creators worry imitation makes them unoriginal. They’re wrong. In order to break an art’s form, one must first understand the art. If you refuse to engage with existing ideas, you risk creating in a vacuum, producing work that is directionless and uninformed.

Here’s the thing: you cannot help but be yourself. There’s no other option. You will always bring yourself into everything you create, no matter where you started from. That’s what’s original, not the idea itself, but what you are doing with it.

Dalí didn't just copy the old masters. He took the precision of their work and injected it with the absurd, the bizarre, and the subconscious. His paintings, dripping clocks, distorted figures, and landscapes that defy logic were built upon centuries of artistic tradition, but they were unmistakably his own.

Imitation, then, is not the enemy of creativity. It is the starting point. The key is to move beyond mimicry, to use your influences as a springboard, not a destination.

Next time you struggle with originality, remember…those who refuse to imitate produce nothing at all!

If you enjoyed this, check out last week’s installment: The Creativity Diaries #3: Tchaikovsky

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1. Jimmy Soni | Imposter Syndrome? Do it Anyway

“Every single person you think is successful, also believes they are the imposter. That is totally, it's a fact of life. When you go and really peer into the lives of the people who are the greats […] Maybe not now, but at some point in their lives they thought they were gigantic imposters, and some of them still do, and they still do it anyway.”

More from Jimmy: The Courage of Creative Risk (EP.214) | Make Things, and Be Playful (EP.108) | Unleashing the Future of Publishing (EP.157)

2. | Persistence is Overrated

“It's the difference really between being persistent and tenacious. Persistence will just keep running and running and running on the same path, whereas if you are tenacious, you'll find a side door if you need to. You will leap into a different area. You will try a different avenue. So these are people who are tenacious rather than just persistence, because persistence will have people giving up, hitting against walls, trying to force things that aren't going to happen, and tenacious people will find [...] avenues for ways of things to work.”

More from Dr. Gurner: Ultra Successful (Ep.176)| Five Paths to Peak Performance (our synthesis)

3. Julie Fredrickson | Adjust Your Programming

“And the set of programming, I assume that I came in even straight out of my mother was human that was evolved to survive as an animal on the Savannah. And then it turns out a lot of that programming wasn't particularly useful. I have to go through and learn a whole set of histories and experiences, and I had to become a playable character in my own life. I had to develop my own agency. And so this idea that we are all programmed is true. We're all programmed not only by our biology, but the books we read, the people we talk to, everything is adding just a little bit to our programming.”

More from Julie: “Circumstances change. Humanity doesn't. Plan accordingly.” (EP.181)

4. Todd Goodwin | Don’t Label Yourself

“I just don't label people. I also think that a lot of the time, a lot of the time, diagnoses, while useful for categorizing things like, ‘What species is this weed growing in my garden?’ It is very disempowering for a lot of people because there's a lot of baggage that goes with diagnoses, and a person can identify with, ‘I'm an addict. I have major depressive disorder. I'm an anxious person. I'm a smoker.’ Whatever. And then when their identity gets tied up in the unhealthy behavior, it makes it much harder for them to change their behavior because the identity is going to dictate the behavior.”

More from Todd: “Revelation is not Resolution” (EP.175) | Hypnosis: Separating Myth From Reality (EP.164)

5. George Mack | This is a Game

“And that seems to be the fundamental stack that creates high agency […]

A, this is just a video game. I can change this.

B, I've got some kind of skill to be able to do it.

And C, if not, I will eventually figure it out.

And D, that determinism that they will not quit.

So it is a weird mix of different things paired together that you immediately know it when you see it.

Which is why everybody who's listening to the podcast now can immediately go, ‘Oh, I know who'd I call to break me out of [a] third world jail.’

And I'm willing to bet, typically, they aren't the most academic person in their group. Typically, they're not the most athletic person. It's something else of those combination or factors that we discuss there that those people have.”

More from George: The Game of Life (EP.195) | Marketing, Mental Models, and Technology (EP.114)

6. Michael Garfield | What World Do You Want?

“We all assume that, ‘I'll just be happy if I get this, and so how do I get that?’ And that kind of thinking tends to promote suffering of yourself and of others. If you start by being like, ‘What world do I want? Because I can assume that I will make it closer to that world if I start in a clear vision of that thing,’ I think that that's a really useful […] I do think that learning how to get better at reallocating our attention, and at telling stories that excite ourselves and excite other people, is a far better way to engage with the daunting complexity of the world that we have made for ourselves.”

More from Michael: Play the (Mind) Jazz (EP. 246)

7. Mike Maples, Jr | Prepare for Surprise

“The best founders that I work with, I've noticed that about them. That every time they engage with the world, they're prepared to be surprised by something because only by being surprised will you ever find the breakthrough. Breakthroughs have never happened yet, they've never been discovered. So if you're trying to discover the undiscovered you have to be surprised ultimately. So people who show up in the world wanting to be surprised often find that clue in a discussion that the average entrepreneur wouldn't find.”

More from Mike: How To Become a Pattern-Breaking Founder (EP.233)

8. Derek Sivers | The Choice You Commit To is the Right Choice

“If you're ever wondering what is the right decision, ‘Should I do this, or should I do that? Should I live here, or should I live there? Should I take this job or that job?’ that just the act of choosing one and wholeheartedly committing to it makes your choice the best choice. It is your commitment itself that can make any choice the right choice for you that you can... because they're all parallel worlds, you pick one, and by committing to it and making the best of it, it makes it the best choice.”

More from Derek: How to Become a Picasso (EP.185) | Just Do The Thing (EP.186)

8. Jack Raines | Travel

“I think there's this idea that people have of going to Europe or whatever and finding yourself, and I think that's a load of shit. I don't think you can go find yourself in a nightclub in Budapest or anything like that. But something that I did realize is once you get out of your home environment, for me, getting out of Atlanta and going to... I didn't know anybody in Barcelona when I got there, that was my first stop. It kind of separates the parts of you that were a byproduct of your environment, where you fit in and the social hierarchy of where you are. And then the stuff that's left is what you actually like. So I don't think you find yourself when you're going in hostel-hopping, but you do get a lot better idea of what stuff you did was actually stuff you wanted to do or what stuff you value.”

More from Jack: The Authentic Path (EP.170)

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A January gift for you: we’ve each picked three of our favorite media discoveries of 2024. As with our previous recommendations, there were no rules about the original publication date, so get ready for some deep cuts from the last 50+ years…

Let us know some of your favorite discoveries in the comments!

Jim O’Shaughnessy 🇺🇸

1. 🎥 Flipside (2023) | Of course I picked this one! Chris Wilcha’s Flipside, which was released in association with Infinite Films, was rightly hailed as his “masterpiece,” weaving Chris’ abandoned projects into something new and defiantly triumphant. If you’ve ever experienced creative failure (I know I have), this documentary is as cathartic as it comes. I chatted to Chris about the film back in May.

2. 📖 Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future; by Mike Maples Jr & Peter Ziebelman (2024) | Once again, for those at the back: I believe that the collapse of the old models presents enormous opportunities to those savvy enough to seize them. It was, therefore, a delight to read Pattern Breakers, which articulates a new model of foundership, one built on the simple premise that transformative startups upend rather than improve current practices. A hint: the book's lessons extend well beyond startups (why else do you think OSV is so interested in books, films & other media?). I chatted with Mike about the book in September.

3. 📖 William Blake vs the World; by John Higgs (2021) | "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." The English poet William Blake was WAY ahead of his time. This sharp biography is an excellent intro to his life and work.

Atman Pandya 🇮🇳

1. 📖 Self-Control: Its Kingship and Majesty; by William George Jordan (1905) | This century-old, eloquent, self-help philosophical book stands the test of time and delivers exactly the kind of advice we need to hear a lot more of. Freely available on Project Gutenberg.

2. 🎵 Breathtaker (Live at Hangar 30); by SYML (2024) & Lights Are On; by Tom Rosenthal (2018) | These piano tunes are beautiful and haunting. Some of the best music I've heard this year.

3. 🖥️ Supernote Nomad | A product for media consumption and creation. My favorite purchase of the year. Perfect e-ink notebook and reader. In a world of purely digital devices, this one manages to strike the perfect balance between the physical and digital. Think of it as a magic notebook that never runs out of pages.

Camellia Yang 🇨🇳🇳🇿

1. 📖 The Red Book; by Carl Jung (1914-1930) | I’ve tried reading Carl Jung’s Red Book a few times, but it was only this year that it truly resonated with me and I finally made it through to the end. If you’re curious about exploring the depths of the human psyche and gaining a richer understanding of your inner world, give it a go! You might find it as meaningful and enlightening as I did.

2. 🎙️ Creative Codex Podcast by MJDorian (2018-present) | This is one of the best podcasts I found this year! If there's one show that nearly rivals my obsession with Founders Podcast, it’s this one. MJDorian has an incredible talent for crafting a cinematic experience with every episode, blending deep research with exceptional music-scoring skills. The result is something super unique and captivating!

3. 📺 Ripley (2024) | If you enjoy psychologically complex stories and rich visual symbolism, consider watching the new Ripley series. It integrates Caravaggio’s dramatic artistry and the myth of Narcissus to offer a riveting exploration of identity, morality, and human nature. I wrote about it here.

Diego A. Rojas 🇨🇴

1. 📺 Arcane (2021) | Adapted from the world of League of Legends, this Netflix series is an emotionally rich, visually stunning tale of power, identity, and resilience. It blends steampunk aesthetics with vibrant artistry that immerses you in the city of Piltover and the undercity of Zaun. Its story explores universal themes — family, betrayal, ambition—through unforgettable characters. A must-watch!

2. 🏛️ The British Museum | On my most recent journey to London, I spent hours wandering the halls of the British Museum. What struck me most was how deeply interconnected we are as a species. The museum reminded me of our shared heritage and our boundless capacity for creation.

3. 📖 Nexus; by Yuval Noah Harari (2024) | Harari combines rigorous research with thought-provoking insights into technology, ethics, and the human condition. I left this book with more questions than answers: How do we balance technological innovation with humanity’s ethical compass? What role will artificial intelligence play in shaping our societies and relationships? Lots to think about!

Dylan O’Sullivan 🇮🇪

1. 📖 An Anatomy of Inspiration; by Rosamund E. M. Harding (1940) | A book that dives into the creative processes of famous artists, going deeper than any book published in the 21st century.

2. 📖 Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius; by Jorge Luis Borges (1940) | A short story that will, quite simply, break your brain (in a good way).

3. 🎥 The Idea Dictates Everything (2006) | A black-and-white documentary that basically revolves around David Lynch talking about ideas in the abstract for 40 minutes. What more could you want? It's free on YouTube.

Ed William 🇬🇧

1. 🎥 A Different Man (2024) | A jet-black comedy that upends its Elephant Man premise, weaponizing our own pity against us. Not the film you expect, and all the better for it. One of my favorites of the year.

2. 🎥 The Driver (1978) | A bare-bones cat-and-mouse chase between an elite getaway driver and the ruthless cop obsessed with catching him. A clear inspiration for films like Drive. The set pieces still rip. Just the coolest shit in the world.

3. 📖 The Man Who Was Thursday; by G.K Chesterton (1908) | I tore through this (very short) strange, hypnotic thriller in two sittings. It feels like the urtext for the modern spy/crime thriller, featuring proto forms of all the motifs we’ve come to know and love: globetrotting conspiracies, a mano-a-mano-central rivalry, a Reservoir Dogs-style flashback, a Blofeld-adjacent arch villain, etc. But then it goes somewhere much more weird and metaphysical. Overwhelming.

Ian Davis 🇺🇸

📖 The Dune Series; by Frank Herbert (1965-1985) | Recently, I've restarted the Dune series by Frank Herbert. One of my favorite thoughts comes from Dune Messiah:

"Between depriving a man from one hour of his life and depriving him of his life, there only exists a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy."

It reminds me to try not to waste someone's time in things that I do or say.

Jack Connor 🇺🇸

1. 🎥 Sorcerer (1977) | One of the tensest, coolest, best-looking movies ever put to celluloid. It's about four desperate men driving explosive trucks full of nitroglycerine through the South American jungle as a way of regaining some version of their former lives. Sorcerer is a movie unlike any other ever filmed, and my favorite William Friedkin movie of all time.

2. 📖 Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes; by Daniel Everett (2009) | A linguist takes his family to live with the Pirahã and becomes the first man to speak the strangest language we've ever discovered, which is so unlike any other language we know that it completely upended several linguistic rules we thought were universal.

3. 🎵 Me and Bobby McGee; by Kris Kristofferson (1971) | The great actor, songwriter, and cool grumpy dude Kris Kristofferson died this year, and I used it as a chance to learn more about his musical œuvre. While Janis Joplin recorded the popular radio version of Me and Bobby McGee, Kristofferson's version has soul for days. It is honestly one of the best pieces of songwriting to ever accompany an acoustic guitar. He sings it country, just like he was, telling the story of love lost while hitchhiking through America and the wistful feeling of knowing you'll never get her back.

Justh 🇮🇳

1. 🎥 Tumbbad (2018) | A movie about supernatural, mythological themes, exploring desires like greed and power. I absolutely loved watching this. It was re-released this year, and I saw it for the first time. Loved it so much that I went to the theatre to watch it twice.

2. 🎵 A Thousand Years; by Sting (1999) | I heard this song for the first time earlier this year while attending a concert by Sting in Mumbai. The song has done something to my soul, moved me in ways that is difficult for me to express. I have heard the song countless times this year. Rarely do I get moved by a song as much as this one moved me.

Mateusz Złakowski 🇵🇱

1. 🎥 The Substance (2024) | Coralie Fargeat said in an interview that her script-writing process starts with images and sounds. To say that the opening sequences of The Substance were brilliantly edited would be missing the point. There's hardly any dialogue, and yet, within minutes, we are immersed in the psychological torment of the main character. The story's premise and the protagonist's background are established by just two shots, without any words spoken. Fargeat's command of the cinematic language is unparalleled and it allows her to tell the story of merciless self-hatred caused by the impossible demands placed on women's appearances.
   The Substance is very funny at times, and yet it is a tragedy. There are no easy solutions, and there is no one arch-villain that could be blamed for everything. The fiercest and most unforgiving critic is, simultaneously, the victim — the main character herself. Throughout the movie, I wanted to hug her, knowing at the same time that it wouldn't help one bit.

2. 📖 Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution; by R. R. Palmer (1941) | A book about the Committee of Public Safety from 1793 to 1794, the only serious government Revolutionary France had (as Napoleon would later note.) There are many simplified stories about this period, which, of course, all are wrong. The Great Terror wasn't that "great,” especially in comparison to the terrors inflicted by the 20th-century totalitarian governments (it was a terror nonetheless), nor was Robespierre as blood-thirsty as he's sometimes portrayed, nor was he as influential as he was later made to be by his enemies within the Committee, who brought him to the guillotine. The author gives us living portraits of all of the members of the Committee (some of them actually pretty bloodthirsty) and shows how many things that we would consider obvious today in terms of the functioning of the state weren't obvious in late 18th-century Europe.

3. 🎵 Herr Mannelig; by Garmarna (1996) | A recording of a Swedish folk ballad. It tells the story of a female mountain troll proposing to a young man, who refuses her. Not much to write about it. Just listen.

Michael Graham Richard (Liberty) 🇨🇦

1. 📺 Counterpart (2017) | Short-lived TV show starring J.K. Simmons. The premise is sci-fi but it plays mostly like a thriller. Our universe split in two 30 years ago. Ever since, what started as mirror universes have been diverging. There’s only one way to travel from one universe to the other: a special portal in Germany, where diplomacy and espionage take place.

2. 🎥 In Bruges (2008) | Very funny and very dark film. The script is incredibly well-written and structured. The economy of how they show you what you need to know and set things up is impressive (including for things that don’t pay off the way you expect). Great performances, and great cinematography.

3. 🎥 The Wild Robot (2024) | Best animated film for the whole family in many years (maybe since Moana in 2016?). The painterly art style is very well executed and the composition of many shots is much better than what you’ll see in most animated films these days. The story feels like a mix of Wall-E, The Iron Giant, Castaway, Tarzan, and the Red Turtle.

Michelle Wang 🇺🇸

1. 📖 Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy; by H. T. Odum (1971) | I first learned of Odum when Vaclav Smil's work referenced him. Since then, he and Smil have formed the base of my studies in energy systems, focusing on materials and energy balance. It's worth exploring his ideas on the maximum power principle and energy circuit language.

2. 📖 The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms; by Mae-Wan Ho (1998) | In a similar vein, I am interested in energy systems in biological organisms. I think Ho's ideas, along with Robert O. Becker's, will prove increasingly prescient with modern research into bioelectricity and immunotherapy, which I believe will replace invasive treatments. I would also keep an eye on developments in mitochondrial replacement.

3. 📖 Phaedo; by Plato (translated by Benjamin Jowett, adapted by Gregory Nagy, Miriam Carlisle, and Soo-Young Kim) (2018) | This is a beautiful translation of Plato's last dialogue on the death of Socrates. Besides its central arguments, I have particularly dwelled on the moment when Socrates admonishes his weeping followers after drinking poison hemlock. He says, "I have heard that a man should come to his end in a way that calls for measured speaking. So, you must have composure, and you must endure.” Link to translation.

Monika Seyfried 🇵🇱

1. 🏛️ Exhibition of Glass Models of Plants at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (2024) | One of the most beautiful collections I’ve ever seen, and definitely the most stunning exhibition I visited in 2024. Over fifty years, from 1886 to 1936, the Blaschkas, Czech glass artists, created 4,300 glass models representing 780 plant species.

2. 🎭 The Talking Car; by Agnieszka Polska (2024) | A beautiful play that invites you to fear and dream alongside AI in an intimate setting.

3. 📖 Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture; by Emanuele Coccia (2018) | I discovered this book years ago, but its beautiful exploration of the metaphysics of nature continues to grow and evolve with me in 2024.

Nick Tawil 🇺🇸

1. 📖 One Summer, America 1927; by Bill Bryson (2013) | The book covers more than the summer of 1927, instead covering most of the ’20s: its icons, technology, and culture. Amazing parallels to today.

2. 📖 Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship: The Correspondence of E. B. White and Edmund Ware Smith (2020) | A view into a rugged, rural life in Maine seen through the letters of a fond friendship between two natural storytelling greats.

3. 📖 Influx; by Daniel Suarez (2014) | A fast, thoughtful (yet still obvious) sci-fi story that includes elements of elite underground, rogue mad scientists, and good mad scientists. Easy, fun reading.

4. 🎥 True Grit (1969 & 2010) | Both the original, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne, and the 2010 remake, directed by the Coen Brothers and starring Jeff Bridges. While one’s more of a classic Western and the other a darker and more faithful interpretation of the Portis novel, both showcase the scenic Western landscapes and the epic horse-charging duel. “Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!”

Rohan Uddin 🇨🇦 🇵🇰

1. 📺 Berserk (1999) | A beautiful hand-drawn dark fantasy anime series. I watched the whole thing while I was recovering from a flu, which gave it even more of a fever dream feel. This medieval-horror tale is elevated by its unexpectedly perfect jazzy space-funk soundtrack, and the animation of Kentaro Miura’s intricate source material (especially the nightmare fuel scenes) is exhilarating.

2. 📖 Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Arts Agency; by James Andrew Miller (2017) | Miller’s oral history of Hollywood’s most influential agency tells its story through a fascinating chorus of voices (agents, actors, executives, writers) and shows first-hand how a handful of ambitious agents rewrote the rules of entertainment. The level of access is unprecedented, from Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer to the assistants who witnessed it all. My favorite parts were when these people would talk about key deals in minute detail. Huge fan of this behind-the-scenes treatment.

3. 🎥 Where’s My Roy Cohn (2019) | This documentary provides an intimate look at one of American politics’ most notorious power brokers through extensive archival footage and revealing interviews. The film does a great job revealing the contradictions of a man who built his career on attacking others while harboring the very qualities he condemned. Through Cohn’s story, we see how his influence shaped decades of American politics, from the McCarthy era to modern times. A twisted tale, but worth knowing - I even wrote an essay about the guy.

Vatsal Kaushik 🇮🇳

1. 📖 Drunk on Love; by Vipul Rikhi (2023) | A collection of iconic poems and couplets from the ancient Indian poet-philosopher Kabir. Kabir did not read or write, but his poems have been recited for centuries, reminding us to look beyond duality, right vs wrong, yes vs no, and to always question orthodoxy and authority.

   Kabir kuaan ek hai, panihaari hain anek
   Bartan sabke nyaare hain, par paani sab mein ek
   
   Kabir says, the well is one
   Water-bearers many
   Each one has a different vessel
   But they all contain the same water

2. 🎵 Neeraj Arya's Kabir Cafe (2013-present) | I went into the Kabir rabbit hole right after reading Drunk on Love and stumbled across the band Kabir Cafe. They compose Kabir's verses for the modern-day audience by blending Indian folk music with western styles. Kya Leke Aaya Jagat Mai is a great song to start with.

3. 📖 Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School; compiled by Carl Japikse (2003) | One of the most notable polymaths of all time, Ben Franklin was a great statesman, scientist, and philosopher, but also a controversial and satire-loving human being. Along with all the laughs, this book is a tribute to freedom of speech, which is upstream of most other freedoms. So, "Fart for freedom, fart for liberty—and fart proudly."

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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

~ Incorrectly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi

1874. Claude Monet was frustrated.

French art had become so stultified, so academic — dominated by carefully detailed, refined classical forms painstakingly crafted to appease the conservative tastes of middle-class Salon attendees.

The gatekeepers ruled the roost. Quality was determined not by passion, innovation, or excitement but by the jury of the Paris Salon, a comfy clique who unilaterally determined which works were worthy of display.

Monet and a group of his contemporaries had grown weary of the arbitrary proclamations of the jury; and the rigid ‘official’ art it endorsed. Their anger was fueled by a healthy dose of personal grievance — many of them were still smarting from the sting of rejection by the Salon.

Time to f*ck the system. They organized their own exhibition, bypassing the cumbersome jury system to present their work directly to their audience.

On April 15, 1874, two weeks before that year’s Salon opened, the newly christened Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculptures, graveurs, etc, launched their opening salvo — an exhibition at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, just a few minutes north of the Louvre.

165 works were on display, including paintings by Renoir, Pissarro, and Degas. Monet, too, staked his claim to the counterrevolution, exhibiting his atmospheric, languid, Impression, Sunrise (pictured above).

Though stylistically diverse, the collected works constituted a dramatic departure from the refined precision of classical art. They presented, in other words, one big, colorful middle finger to the establishment.

The art critic Louis Leroy was one of the 3,500 people who visited the month-long exhibition (a far cry from the 400,000 or so who visited that year’s Salon).

His verdict? Scathing.

He published a satirical article in the newspaper Le Charivari which, though doubling as a criticism of Paris’ snooty establishment, was unsparing in savaging the exhibited works. Monet’s painting came under particular attack; breezily dismissed as a half-finished scribbling:

“Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”

Leroy’s mockery extended to the review’s very title, which deprecated the movement with a dismissive moniker:

"The Exhibition of the Impressionists."

1952. The 20th century had birthed numerous earth-shattering scientific breakthroughs, but none were bigger — nor more controversial — than those of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, whose respective theories of relativity and quantum mechanics questioned the very nature of reality itself.

A problem. These theories did not make for comfortable bedfellows. The cosmic sweep of relativity simply could not connect to the subatomic bizarreness of the quantum world.

Enter David Bohm.

Bohm wasn’t content with patching together the existing frameworks. He sought something more radical: a new paradigm entirely, one that could unite the cosmic and quantum realms under a single, coherent vision.

His theory of “hidden variables” was nothing short of revolutionary, questioning the premises of Bohr’s dominant Copenhagen interpretation.

Bohm made his move. He submitted his paper, A Suggested Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in Terms of ‘Hidden Variables,’ for publication in the Physical Review journal, anticipating that he had just fired the opening salvo of what could become a scientific revolution.

But Bohm had made powerful enemies. Before the paper’s publication, he had been forced into exile after being caught up in McCarthy’s Red Scare, a victim of a youthful dalliance with the Communist party (all he’d wanted was a safe space to discuss Hegel!). And his theory, which challenged the very foundations of scientific consensus, was too hot to handle.

One man’s support may have made the difference. Over the ‘30s and ‘40s, Bohm had become close friends and a loyal student of the brilliant, mercurial J. Robert Oppenheimer.

While Bohm lingered in exile among the sweltering lecture halls of Sao Paulo University, Oppenheimer called a conference at Princeton to discuss the paper. There, a group of leading physicists began to apply the scalpel, dissecting Bohm’s theory to find the flaws.

But they couldn’t. Bohm’s thesis proved stubbornly, defiantly persistent.

Science had failed them. To be rid of Bohm, they would have to rely on a blunter instrument. It was Bohm’s mentor, Oppenheimer, who stood up and delivered the final betrayal:

“If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.”

1981. A young Australian physician named Barry Marshall was about to stumble onto something extraordinary.

He and his colleague, pathologist Dr. Robin Warren, had identified a distinctive, corkscrew-shaped bacteria in the stomachs of ulcer patients (later named Helicobacter pylori.)

This seemingly innocuous observation threatened to upend scientific consensus. Everyone knew that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy food, and excess stomach acid. Obviously, no bacteria could survive in the acid bath of the human stomach.

Marshall and Warren had other ideas. They persisted. They devoured the research, connecting disparate parts of previously isolated literature. They tested, tested, and tested again.

The more work they did, the more they began to believe that their hypothesis had legs. Maybe bacteria really was to blame.

But, though Marshall and Warren received periodic support, the establishment remained cynical, even hostile. Marshall was labeled a “brash young man,” a “zealot.” In 1983 the Gastroenterological Society of Australia rejected Marshall and Warren’s abstract, claiming it was in the bottom 10 percent of only 67 applications.

“Everyone was against me,” claimed Marshall. “But I knew I was right, because I actually had done a couple of years' work at that point. I had a few backers. And when I was criticized by gastroenterologists, I knew that they were mostly making their living doing endoscopies on ulcer patients. So I'm going to show you guys.”

Furious, Marshall decided to take a page from medical history. He’d heard stories about John Hunter, who infected himself with syphilis. Now, Marshall would have to take things into his own hands.

Or, more accurately, his own mouth.

In 1984, he prepared a cloudy broth containing a cultured version of bacteria taken from a patient with gastritis (“we calculated out later that it was a thousand million bacteria.”)

“Well, here it goes, down the hatch."

The Exhibition of the Impressionists was a failure.

The Société, buried in debt, was liquidated within months.

But the Impressionists had the last laugh.

By the mid-1880s, the mighty Salon’s influence was crumbling, its stranglehold on Parisian art slipping away.

Meanwhile, after seven more exhibitions, Monet and his band of revolutionaries had earned what the establishment had denied them: significant public and critical acclaim.

The coup-de-grace? Their movement had adopted a new name, one whose origins lay in the breezy dismissal of a Parisian critic:

Impressionism.

What had started as a sneer was now a badge of honor.

After Oppenheimer’s edict, the grand old men of physics sharpened their knives.

Bohm had written “a cheque that cannot be cashed,” scoffed Wolfgang Pauli. He’d indulged in “a physical fairy tale for children,” sneered Albert Einstein.

Bohm himself was forced into giving up his U.S. passport in 1954. But hidden variables theory was not yet dead, and neither was Bohm.

In 1964, physicist John Bell, inspired by Bohm's work, began investigating the fundamental questions of quantum mechanics. "In 1952, I saw the impossible done," Bell would later write. "It was in papers by David Bohm."

Through Bell's theoretical work and Bohm’s own collaboration with Basil Hiley, his theory gained new life.

Today, Bohm’s thesis remains an influential interpretation of quantum mechanics. Says Roger Penrose: “If you’re looking at ways of interpreting quantum mechanics, the Bohm-Hiley approach has the most satisfactory ontology.”

In 2020, a documentary on Bohm’s life and ideas was released.

Oppenheimer’s edict had failed. Bohm’s ideas were ignored no more.

Marshall was sick.

After drinking the bacteria-laden broth, he’d developed gastritis, the precursor to ulcers. A biopsy confirmed what the medical establishment had refused to accept: bacteria had invaded his stomach lining.

After some stern words from his wife, he began taking antibiotics.

The result? He was cured.

Despite publishing his findings in 1985, it would take another decade before the medical establishment accepted the role of H.pylori in stomach ulcers.

In 2005, Marshall and Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery.

The “zealot” was right. No one was ridiculing him now.

"Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth."

— John Milton

"When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him."

— Jonathan Swift

Sources & Further Reading

• AN IDIOT’S GUIDE TO THE IMPRESSIONIST PAINTERS; by Mary Anne (Maryne Anne’s France)

• 150 years ago today, at precisely 8pm, the world of art changed forever; by The Cultural Tutor

• Before the Impressionists, These Artists Dominated the Parisian Art World; Demie Kim (Artsy)

• 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF IMPRESSIONISM (The Clark)

• First Impressionist Exhibition (Wikipedia)

• 8 ‘IMPRESSIONIST’ EXPOSITIONS (Impressionism)

• Bohmian Mechanics and NPQG III; by J Mark Morris (Neoclassical.ai)

• David Bohm (Wikipedia)

• Infinite Potential: Film director Paul Howard talks about his new film on the life and ideas of the physicist and philosopher David Bohm (Beshara Magazine)

• David Bohm silenced by his colleagues (Infinite Potential)

• Bohm, David Joseph (Encyclopedia.com)

• On the Impossible Pilot Wave; by J. S. Bell (Foundations of Physics)

• Interview: Barry Marshall, Nobel Prize in Medicine (Academy of Achievement)

• Barry Marshall, from Quack to Nobel Prize; by Dr. Gabe Mirkin

• The Doctor who Infected Himself to Solve a Medical Mystery (Guts UK!)

• Barry Marshall (Wikipedia)

• How Easter Helped Bring Down a Medical Myth About Ulcers; by Megan Gannon (Live Science)

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Vienna General Hospital is haunted by the sound of screaming mothers.

It is 1846. Puerperal fever, a putrid cocktail of pus, sweat, and blood, is ravaging the maternity ward. Mothers and their newborn babies are dying by the hundreds.

Into this dreadful scene steps the 28-year-old Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis.

Determined to stem the torrent of death, Semmelweis begins to run some experiments.

He notices that of the two clinics comprising the maternity hospital, one alone bears the brunt of the Puerperal plague, recording a mortality rate of 11% (the second clinic boasts a rate of under 3%).

In fact, so severe is the reputation of the former, that mothers are desperately pleading to avoid it. Writes Semmelweis:

“The patients really do fear the first clinic. Frequently one most witness moving scenes in which patients, kneeling and wringing their hands, beg to be released in order to seek admission to the second clinic.”

Trained scientist that he is, Semmelweis begins to test hypotheses. Maybe overcrowding is the cause? Perhaps it is fear, accelerated by the mournful toll of the priest’s bell echoing down the hallways? Perhaps conception itself is the problem?

No, no, no. One by one, Semmelweis dismisses these theories. He is beginning to lose hope.

But then, a tragic breakthrough. His friend, who had suffered a minor cut from a dirty scalpel used during a post-mortem, dies. His symptoms suggest he has been slain by the same killer who has been stalking the maternity ward.

Though the Great Detective would not be introduced to the world for another 40 years, Semmelweis now engages in a Holmesian act of deduction.

He has known for a while that, while the relatively safe second clinic is populated primarily by midwives, the death-ridden first clinic is filled by doctors, men whose pre-birth routines could quite literally involve picking through corpses.

Perhaps there’s a connection? If his friend died from a dirty scalpel used in an autopsy, could the same thing be happening to the poor women who are being treated by doctors?

Emboldened, Semmelweis imposes a dictum. Doctors and students should wash their hands after the act of autopsy and before examining mothers.

You can guess the results. The mortality rate plummets. The curse seems to have been lifted.

Alas, beliefs are stubborn things.

Not only does Semmelweis’ revolutionary, madcap theory contradict medical consensus, it proves awfully embarrassing for the proud doctors who would, of course, never do anything to cause the deaths of the patients they were sworn to protect.

In any event, everybody knows it’s a simple fact of life that gentlemen simply do not have unclean hands.

In 1848, a wave of revolutionary fervor sweeps through Vienna. Semmelweis is caught in the turmoil. His relationship with the establishment crumbles. In 1849, he retreats into self-imposed exile. His hand-washing policy is brushed back under the carpet from which it came. It wouldn’t be until near the end of the century that hand-washing became a universally accepted medical practice.

Fast-forward 16 years. It is 1865. Semmelweis lies alone in a mental asylum, clutching a wounded hand. He is dying.

The cause?

Sepsis.

During his last visit to the show, said:

“So many people right now have problems that already have solutions and they just don't have a connection to the solution […] Any case study we discuss, we can find that the fact that a solution exists or could exist is a sign that we live in a very possible, possibility-bubbling world, but the fact that it hasn't happened yet means that we got work to do.”

Point is, Semmelweis’ success didn’t require any grand new invention or development (the theory underpinning his hand-washing dictum was actually wrong). The elegantly simple solution — wash your hands! — was in front of him all the time.

We’re all guilty of assuming certain problems are unsolvable without some sort of external breakthrough. Well, perhaps the lesson of Semmelweis is that the solution we’re looking for is already under our noses. ‘All’ we need to do is reframe the problem.

But finding the solution is only half the battle.

Semmelweis had persuasive data. He was ensconced in a hub of European medicine. He was young, ambitious, and intelligent. Yet he could not persuade the medical establishment of his theory. He failed on his own terms. Following his exile, he resorted to writing incendiary letters that merely entrenched the opposition. Argues Greg Satell:

“Semmelweis, thinking his results were enough, didn’t see the value in communicating his work effectively, formatting his publications clearly or even collecting data in a manner that would gain his ideas greater acceptance […] The truth is that ideas alone, even breakthrough ideas, rarely amount to much. Innovations need to be communicated effectively if they are to spread and make an impact on society.”

Harsh, perhaps, but a useful way to frame (that word again) this story. Whether it’s a theory, a creative project, or a startup idea, the solution alone isn’t sufficient. If you can’t communicate, if you can’t coalition build, you’re cooked.

Easier said than done. For a start, as Jason Zweig argued on the show, Semmelweis’ story shows us how it is seriously f*cking hard to change someone’s mind.

At the time, medical consensus was wedded to the “four humors” model of disease — a complex theory dating back to the fourth century BCE.

The theory is too complicated to explain here, but suffice it to say, it hasn’t aged well. Nor has its primary mode of treatment: bloodletting.

It’s easy to dismiss this as barbaric quackery, but this wasn’t the Dark Ages. This was fewer than 200 years ago, in one of the most advanced medical institutions in the world.

So institutionalized was the four humors theory that the establishment simply could not accept a paradigm-shifting perspective like Semmelweis’, even when supported by compelling empirical data.

It didn’t help that their identities — as doctors and gentlemen — had become wrapped up in their beliefs.

Cultural change did eventually happen, of course. Semmelweis won, if not in his lifetime. But it took decades. Cultural lag is real. As the saying goes, science progresses one funeral at a time. Its plans are measured in centuries.

This raises uncomfortable questions. What paradigms are we clinging to today? What consensus views will our descendants look back on with embarrassment in 10, 100, 1000 years’ time? What does this tell us about the importance of intellectual humility in the face of the great unknown?

Perhaps, as Jim often argues, we should treat our assumptions not as core parts of our identities but as gentle, loose, provisional hypotheses. They are not castles to be defended but theories to be prodded, tested, teased, and, when necessary, washed away.

Sources & Further Reading

• The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing And Briefly Saved Lives; by Rebecca Davis (NPR)

• In 1850, Ignaz Semmelweis saved lives with three words: wash your hands; by Dr. Howard Markel (PBS)

• The man who discovered that unwashed hands could kill -- and was ridiculed for it; by Meagan Flynn (Washington Post)

• ‘Wash your hands’ was once controversial medical advice; by Nina Strochlic (National Geographic)

• The Semmelweis Myth And Why It’s Not Really True; by Greg Satell (DigitalTonto)

• Keep it clean: The surprising 130-year history of handwashing; by Amy Fleming (The Guardian)

• The Tragic Fate of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis; by Julius Bauer, M.D. (California Medicine)

• HUMORAL THEORY (CURIOSity Collections)

• Ignaz Semmelweis (Wikipedia)

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Author’s note - if you’re a regular reader or listener of Infinite Loops, you know that we have a soft spot for new paradigms here at O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Chief amongst these is the concept of The Great Reshuffle. It’s the idea that our world is in the midst of an economic, social and cultural rearrangement - a feng-shui of epic proportions - largely propelled by the pervasiveness of the Internet in the 21st century, and a confluence of emerging technologies that are all ripening at the same time.

Our job as envoys of The Great Reshuffle is to unpack these changes alongside you - our dear OSV community - so we can together sharpen our mental models in preparation for optimistic future. Today’s essay, then, is firmly on trend. It was conceived on the back of three disparate pieces of information colliding (and getting cozy) in my brain -
1. The European ‘Age of Discovery’ (or Age of Exploration, depending on your sensibilities);
2. Balaji Srinivasan’s ‘The Network State’;
3. OpenAI’s launch of its new ‘multimodal’ AI model ‘GPT-4o’ in May 2024

This essay posits the thesis that we may be standing on the cusp of a new epoch for human exploration, fuelled by the dissolving of language barriers in the age of Large Language Models. The objective is not to present a definitive portrait of the future, but to illuminate one colourful timeline of how things may play out. As always, we hope this invites a kaleidoscope of varying responses from our readers - feel free to kick off in the comments section below. So without further ado, welcome to The Great (Linguistic) Reshuffle.

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The Pope knew that the only way to stop them from fighting was to carve the world in half.

In 1494, still nursing its wounds from the Hundred Years' War, Europe found itself caught in a geographical vice grip. To the East, the Ottoman Empire cast a long shadow. Its scimitars still gleamed from the conquest of Constantinople just four decades earlier. The Ottoman Turks represented an overland blockade to the spice-laden lands of the East Indies, choking off the arteries of commerce that had long fed European coffers. To the West, the vast, untamed Atlantic stretched to the horizon and beyond, a liquid wall that had rebuffed explorers for centuries.

The continent was seemingly at the mercy of two unconquerable forces - trapped between a Turk and a wet place.

Iberian Sunrise

Yet, it was on the Western fringe of this landmass that the crucible of a new age was forming. On the sun-baked Iberian Peninsula, two kingdoms had emerged at the vanguard of maritime innovation and ambition. Their eyes were fixated on the edges of the Earth. Their astrolabes and compasses yearned for uncharted stars and unfamiliar winds, their ships poised to punch through the barriers that had long hemmed in their world.

Spain and Portugal, perched on the edge of the known world, were preparing to turn their shores into a launchpad for global domination.

Portugal, a small nation nestled on the Atlantic, had spent the better part of a century perfecting the art of exploration. Under the stewardship of Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese caravels had methodically probed southward along the African coast. Their mariners had diligently added miles of coastline to their mapmaker’s lexicon, one padrão (stone pillar) at a time.

Spain, on the other hand, was newly unified under the Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. It was a rising power with grand ambitions. Fresh from the Reconquista - the centuries-long campaign to expel the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula - Spain sought new frontiers to conquer and new souls to convert.

The stage was set for fireworks between the two longtime neighbours and rivals. The spark would be provided by a Genoese adventurer named Cristoforo Colombo (known as Christopher Columbus to Anglo-Saxon buddies). Columbus had convinced Queen Isabella to finance his westward voyage to Asia, after having first been rejected by the Portuguese court. He had been steadfast in his belief that, given the spherical nature of the world, a quicker Westward sea route to India could be charted.

When he returned to Europe in 1493, he bore news of lands across the Atlantic, apparently convinced that he had found India (ignorant of the fact that he had really been the first European to set foot on the islands of the Caribbean). With his claim seemingly vindicated, his revelations rumbled through the European halls of power. Spain, emboldened by Columbus' discovery, prepared to stake its claim on whatever riches lay in the West. Portugal, which had claimed exclusive rights to the African route to India through papal bulls, now faced a rival in its quest for maritime supremacy.

The potential for conflict was immense. Both kingdoms, their coffers drained by years of war and exploration, saw in these new lands the promise of untold wealth. More than gold was at stake; this was a battle for the future of empires, for the souls of heathens to be converted, for glory everlasting. The tenuous balance of peace between the Iberian rivals again threatened to tip into chaos.

The Treaty

Enter Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia in Spain. As head of the Catholic Church, he wielded enormous influence (and as a Spaniard, he was not immune to the politics of his homeland). His solution to stave off the brewing crisis was audacious in its simplicity: a line drawn on a map, running north to south, 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.

This invisible boundary became the ultimate real estate deal of the 15th century. It was a masterpiece of diplomacy, appeasing both parties while setting the stage for centuries of exploration and conquest. Spain received rights to lands west of the line, effectively granting them most of the Americas. Portugal secured an exclusive route around Africa, to the Middle East, India, and beyond.

This line in the embryonic world map would be enshrined in the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on 7 June, 1494.

The Treaty did more than prevent war; it legitimised the concept of European dominion over distant lands and peoples. It was the legal and spiritual foundation upon which vast empires would be built, a document that would shape the destinies of millions of people across multiple continents.

As Spanish galleons and Portuguese caravels set sail towards an unseen finish line, they carried with them not just the hopes of kings and conquistadors, but the weight of a new world order. Tordesillas was the starting gun for the Age of Discovery. The map of the world would never be the same again.

The Age of Discovery

As ships sailed and colonies were founded, the Treaty revealed itself to be both more and less than its creators had intended. On one hand it was a framework for conquest, a license for exploitation, and a catalyst for cultural exchange on a scale never seen before. On the other, it was also ultimately unenforceable. Other European powers, hungry for their slice of the New World, would ignore the Treaty altogether.

"The sun shines for me as it does for others. I would very much like to see the clause of Adam's will by which I should be denied my share of the world."

- Francis I, The King of France (1515)

It was as if the Pope's line had not divided the world, but rather unfurled it like a scroll, inviting the boldest and most ambitious to write their names upon its blank spaces. The dragons of the Great Unknown stood no match against the marauding mariners from Iberia and beyond.

Over the next two centuries, European powers raced to paint the plains of the world in their own colours. Portugal's Vasco da Gama charted the fabled sea route to India in 1498. Spain's conquistadors pushed deep into the American continents. The Dutch, led by intrepid navigators like Willem Janszoon, began sketching the shores of Australia in 1606. English explorer James Cook's voyages in the late 18th century finally unveiled the vastness of the Pacific, charting New Zealand and eastern Australia with remarkable precision. Meanwhile, French expeditions penetrated the North American interior, mapping the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.

The world map gradually transformed from a patchwork of conjecture and myth into an increasingly detailed representation of global reality. The Age of Discovery had not just expanded European empires; it had fundamentally reshaped humanity's understanding of the planet we inhabited, shrinking the world even as it revealed its true immensity.

A little over a century after Columbus had returned from his groundbreaking voyage, previously disparate compartments of the globe began to seep into one another. By 1600 the great Columbian Exchange was in full swing, with crops, animals, and diseases crossing oceans and reshaping ecosystems. Potatoes and maize from the Americas revolutionised European agriculture. African slaves toiled on Caribbean sugar plantations. Silver from the Americas fuelled a global trading network that reached as far as China.

Suddenly, the world seemed both vastly larger and surprisingly small. A ship leaving Seville might touch four continents before returning home. A Portuguese trader in Nagasaki could discuss the latest news from Lima. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci could explain Euclid to the Chinese emperor, while Incan gold adorned Spanish churches.

This newfound interconnectedness brought profound changes. Ideas and technologies spread rapidly. The Renaissance gave way to the Scientific Revolution as European thinkers grappled with the flood of new information about the world's peoples, flora, and fauna. New forms of economic organisation, like joint-stock companies, emerged to manage the risks and rewards of global trade.

Yet this shrinking world came at a terrible cost. Indigenous populations in the Americas were decimated by disease and conquest. African societies were ravaged by the slave trade. Ancient ways of life were upended as the world's ecosystems and economies became increasingly intertwined.

As the 19th century dawned, the map of the world had been filled in, its blank spaces replaced by imperial claims and trade routes. The Age of Discovery had given way to an age of global connections, for better and for worse. The world, once vast and mysterious, had become a single, interconnected system - smaller, perhaps, but infinitely more complex.

Cloud Cartography

The face of the world today owes much of its wrinkles, freckles, lines and scars to the Age of Discovery. Our geopolitical boundaries, our economic systems, even our diets bear the indelible marks of those centuries of exploration and conquest. The physical map, once riddled with terra incognita, now lies fully charted, its contours known down to the last island and inlet.

We seldom pause to marvel at the world map adorning our walls or glowing on our screens. Its completeness feels almost mundane, a given in our age of satellite imagery and GPS. Yet this comprehensive cartography, now taken for granted, represents one of humanity's greatest collective achievements. It is the fruit of centuries of daring exploration, scientific innovation, and often deadly perseverance. Countless souls were lost to uncharted seas, unmapped jungles, and unexplored mountain ranges in the quest to fill those blank spaces (to say nothing of the perils of indigenous people that had to make room for their unruly visitors).

The development of tools like the marine chronometer and theodolite revolutionised navigation and surveying, turning the art of mapmaking into a science. The sextant, the chronometer, and advanced navigational mathematics were all born from the pressing need to know precisely where we are on this pale blue dot.

Today, we reap the benefits of this fully mapped world in myriad ways: from the GPS that guides us home, to the digital maps that allow us to hail cabs and order take-out; from the weather forecasts that predict hurricanes, to the geopolitical awareness that shapes international relations. From disaster relief to international shipping to international travel, cartographical progress has done more than fill in the blanks on our maps—it has fundamentally shrunk our world, transforming a vast, mysterious planet into a known, navigable sphere.

Yet in the digital age, our concept of planetary "smallness" has flipped.

Our world has shrunk not through the charting of physical terrain, but through the invisible threads of the internet. We navigate a new geography - divided by the Earth but united by the cloud - where distance is measured in clicks rather than leagues, and where information flows as freely as the trade winds that once carried Portuguese carracks across vast oceans.

But just as the European powers of the 15th century lived in a time of cartographical blindness, largely unaware of the vast continents that lay beyond their horizons, we too are oblivious to the real limits of our digital exploration. We sail the seas of the Internet, believing them boundless, unaware of the shores we cannot see.

These digital vistas are not marked by coastlines or mountain ranges. Instead, they manifest in myriad, subtle ways. They are the niche subreddits, hidden like secluded coves, teeming with life yet unknown to the broader digital world. They are the walled gardens of social media companies, each a virtual continent with its own laws and customs, often impenetrable to outsiders. They are the political echo chambers, like digital archipelagos where like minds cluster, isolated from opposing views.

But superseding all these boundaries, more insurmountable than any digital wall or algorithmic filter, are the linguistic frontiers.

Lingua Incognita

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Languages are the rivers, mountains, and deserts of our digital world. They divide the internet into distinct territories, each with its own culture, memes, and spheres of influence. The Chinese internet, the Russian internet, the Arabic internet - each is a vast realm, largely invisible and inaccessible to those who don't speak the language.

This linguistic balkanisation of the Web (which doesn’t even include the billion+ people living behind the Great Firewall of China) creates invisible barriers to the free flow of information and ideas. It shapes our world-views, influences our access to knowledge, and impacts global discourse in ways we're only beginning to understand. Just as the early explorers could only guess at what lay beyond the horizon, we can only imagine the vast swathes of the internet that lie beyond our linguistic reach.

The disparities between linguistic internets are stark and consequential. Take, for instance, the Chinese internet – a vast digital ecosystem largely isolated from the Western web. When COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan, early warnings and on-the-ground reports circulated on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat weeks before the news broke in the English-speaking world. Could access to this crucial information, trapped behind the language barrier, have accelerated global preparedness to the virus?

Similarly, during the 2011 Arab Spring, Twitter and Facebook were awash with real-time updates in Arabic, providing invaluable insights into the unfolding revolutions. Yet many Western observers, reliant on delayed translations, struggled to grasp the nuances and rapid developments occurring on the ground.

In the realm of technology, Japanese Twitter has long been a hotbed of cutting-edge AI and robotics discussions, often months ahead of similar conversations in English-speaking tech circles. Innovations and breakthroughs discussed in Japanese frequently take time to percolate into the anglophone tech discourse, potentially slowing global advancement in these fields.

Even in entertainment and popular culture, linguistic divides create parallel universes of content. The Korean web, for example, buzzes with discussions about K-dramas and K-pop long before these phenomena break into global consciousness. By the time "Squid Game" became a worldwide sensation, Korean netizens had already dissected its themes, critiqued its execution, and moved on to the next big thing.

These examples underscore a crucial point: valuable information, innovative ideas, and cultural phenomena often remain sequestered within their linguistic domains. A Spanish-speaking scientific forum might hold the solution to a problem puzzling English-speaking researchers. Russian social media could be discussing a novel approach to climate change mitigation unknown to French environmentalists. Indian theology could be a solution to Nigerian ennui. The linguistic barriers of the internet don't just separate us – they hinder the global exchange of knowledge, ideas and even goods and services, creating a siloed digital world that could be economically, socially, and culturally richer if we could just understand each other better.

Over the past three decades, the commercial Internet has radically transformed our world, compressing time and space in ways that were previously unimaginable. It’s allowed us to make connections, purchase products, and find love, work, and entertainment outside of our immediate vicinities. The irony of the Internet Age is that today it may be easier for you to leave the physical place of your birth than the digital domain outside your native tongue.

But we are perhaps at the onset of a new era. Just as advances in shipbuilding and navigation once opened up the physical world to exploration, emerging technologies hold the potential to bridge these linguistic divides. We might be witnessing the dawn of an Age of Discovery v2.0, one that could illuminate the expanse of uncharted digital terrain around us and reshape our understanding of ourselves. Again.

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Deus in machina 

The seeds of this essay were planted on 13th May of this year, when OpenAI1 announced the launch of its flagship new AI model - GPT-4o, or ‘Omni’, for short. In their own words:

The company’s (non-profit’s?) messaging around GPT-4o emphasised the unprecedented ‘multimodal’ and ‘multilingual’ capabilities of the new model2.

The former just means that Omni can seamlessly process audio, visual, and text-based instructions and generate outputs across any of those modalities.

Most important for us is the latter, where GPT-4o was hailed as a polyglot par excellence, having been trained on datasets that include 50 languages (covering 97% of the world’s speakers). Compared to older models, the new kid on the block had made significant strides forward in its reasoning capabilities for languages outside of English. Beyond mere translation, a post-Omni ChatGPT can even understand tone, inflections, context, and cultural nuance when it comes to multilingual comprehension. All told, the Omni launch was intended to be a peek into the “future of interaction between ourselves and machines.”

Amongst the pageantry around the launch event were two demos that caught my attention. One showed how ChatGPT could ‘look’ through the camera lens and ‘call out’ the names of everyday objects in Spanish. Another demonstrated how it could function as a ‘real time’ translator for two people in the same room who didn’t speak the same language.

While neither of these are particularly earth-shattering (given that there are apps and services that do this already), the model itself was apparently far superior than anything else in the market up to that point with regards to its proficiency with audio translation.

And it was also far superior to OpenAI’s incumbent text-to-audio service Whisper.

Given how fast the AI arms race is progressing, it’s likely that these rankings have been reshuffled already. But back in May, OpenAI was proudly touting its shiny new model as the apex of instant, machine-based, language translation.

Among the commentary following Omni's release was a viral tweet highlighting the immediate impact of the event on Duolingo's share price - an apparent market verdict on the future of the world's biggest language learning app in an age of real-time AI translation…

…which, though it turned out to be a simple case of markets being markets…

…bore an implication that was provocative enough to consider deeply (and perhaps even spawned a self-fulfilling prophecy)

In other words, that tweet clocked high on my ‘Hmmm that’s interesting’ meter.

To be clear, the implication that language learning will be either replaced or supplemented by conversational AI interfaces is not itself controversial. In fact, Duolingo itself pioneered the integration of GPT-3 and GPT-4 in earlier versions of its app to perform the role of a personalised on-demand language tutor for its users.

What is controversial, however, is the idea that we may not need to learn foreign languages at all in a post-AI world.

Consider, for instance, that the new and improved GPT-4o allows you to do things like give ChatGPT an instruction in English to tell you a story in Hindi (which it does a pretty good job at). It lets you post a link to a Youtube lecture in French, and receive detailed notes on it in Japanese. You can take a picture of a sign in Spanish outside the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and ask for an audio explanation in Vietnamese. That’s the hope once it’s fully rolled out anyway.

OpenAI claims that its new model can orchestrate these requests in near real-time, with minimal loss in fidelity, with a performance that will likely get better, cheaper, and faster with each new release. Other multimodal LLMs like those from Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini) or Facebook (Llama) offer similar capabilities, with promises to preserve localised context and cultural nuances of individual languages.

All to say, that there may be something both very interesting and very important happening at the intersection of language and AI. If you don’t see it yet, if none of these developments or demos have aroused your curiosity so far, especially given that we live in an era of Google Translate, that’s understandable.

It’s also a sign that Douglas Adams was right.

The Subtitle Economy

Buried in the heap of gold that is Douglas Adams’ posthumously released Salmon of Doubt, is a particularly shiny nugget depicting the author’s observations on how humans typically grapple with new technologies:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

As someone only just on the ~wrong side~ of 30, it feels strange to use the verbiage of in-my-lifetimes, but *clears throat* in my lifetime, we almost certainly take for granted the ubiquity of instant language translation.

We barely register how, with a few bleep-bloop-bleeps on our keyboards, we can open up portals into other worlds.

We don’t even blink before whipping out our translation apps to haggle with a street vendor in a foreign country. Or marvel at the ability to learn a new language on our phones as a way to stave off boredom on the commute to work. Or appreciate how we can be moved by the words in books, shows and movies that were originally cast in languages that are not our own.

Instant translation is a gift of modernity that lubricates the wheels of the world in more ways than we realise. It is a gift that our ancestors would have equated with its weight in gold. Let’s return briefly to our Iberian friends from the start of this essay.

Back in the 16th century, having just stepped foot into Aztec-ruled Mexico, the Spanish conquistadors were faced with a formidable roadblock. Confronted with an Aztec Empire that was as incomprehensible to them as their steel weapons were to the natives, Hernán Cortés had to enlist the services of a legendary interpreter - a woman known as La Malinche - to negotiate alliances with rival indigenous groups, to understand the fault-lines of the Mesoamerican political landscape, and ultimately to engage in a tenuous diplomacy with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II.

A controversial figure, La Malinche is remembered as the architect of the linguistic bridge that allowed the Spaniards to plant their flag in the New World. In our species-long quest to build more such linguistic bridges between ourselves, La Malinche may well be the great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of the Large Language Model.

LLMs are the latest sequential step in our employing of specialised intermediaries to play the role of translators, a task for which computers have found themselves to be extraordinarily capable in recent times. Generative AI is the next chapter in a journey that began as far back as the 1950s, amidst the frost of the Cold War, when the Georgetown-IBM experiment first offered a glimpse into the potential of machine translation (albeit for a machine with a vocabulary of just 250 words and six grammatical rules).

“A girl who didn’t understand a word of the language of the Soviets punched out the Russian messages on IBM cards. The “brain” dashed off its English translations on an automatic printer at the breakneck speed of two and a half lines per second,” — reported the IBM press release.

The fruits from Georgetown would be harvested in the 1970s, when SYSTRAN launched one of the world’s first machine translation companies as part of their efforts to decrypt Russian text for the United States Air Force. IBM would spearhead the move into statistical translation in the 1990s, before Google made instant translation a ubiquitous commodity with the launch of Google Translate in 2006 (allowing millions of teenagers around the world to understand the lyrics to Gangnam Style).

Many of these nascent translation ventures were imperfect, sometimes comical, often clunky, but ultimately good enough to get us from A to B. It’s only really in the 2010s, when we began to transition from machines that could compute to machines that could ‘think’ (via neural networks), that the game has levelled up. From Google to DeepL to OpenAI and everyone in between, the LLM era has exponentially increased the natural language processing capabilities of computers.

Modern AI translation systems use neural networks, specifically a type called transformers. Unlike previous statistical methods, these systems don't just match words or phrases; they understand context and nuance. For example, when translating the English phrase 'I'm feeling blue' to French, the system recognises this as an idiomatic expression and might translate it to 'J'ai le cafard' (literally, 'I have the cockroach', a French idiom for feeling down), rather than a literal colour-based translation. 

This contextual understanding allows for more natural, accurate translations across a wide range of languages and domains. It’s the result of machines getting smarter, and catching up to the linguistic capabilities of their human counterparts at breakneck speed.

It means we are getting closer to crossing the chasm from science fiction to science fact, harking back to another one of Douglas Adams’ literary inventions - The Babel Fish - courtesy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

LLMs might prove to be the perfect habitat for rearing Babel fish3. And with the launch of multimodal, multilingual LLMs like GPT-4o and others, humanity is preparing to set sail into Babel fish-infested waters.

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Age of Discovery v2.0

But where are we going? Well, the past provides a precedent.

If early navigational tools like the astrolabe, the compass, and the sextant helped to expose the edges of the Earth, and sophisticated shipping vessels helped colonial explorers to explore every inch of it, it was the Internet that finally killed the ‘idea’ of geographical barriers.

Similarly, three pertinent questions to ponder over the coming decade are:
- to what extent will the application of LLMs succeed in bridging our linguistic divides - both online and offline?
- will AI meaningfully kill the ‘idea’ of language barriers in the same way that the Internet killed the idea of geographical barriers?
- and if so, how much of the world is about to open up to us - individually, collectively, culturally, socially and economically?

None of these questions will be answered overnight, but given the pace of progress in the field of deep learning over the last decade, it’s fair to characterise the Generative AI era as another Padrão - a stone pillar in the linguistic dirt - a tangible marker of progress in our mission to explore the territory beyond our linguistic confines.

The early explorers are already rounding the Cape.

Roblox, the virtual world and gaming platform, announced that they had built an in-house LLM, and were using it to enable ‘real-time AI chat translations’ so that people who spoke different languages could communicate seamlessly with one another in their immersive 3D landscapes. Their custom multilingual model can facilitate direct translation between any combination of the 16 languages they currently support.

The feature has already driven ‘stronger engagement and session quality’ for the 70 million global users on the Roblox platform. Their CTO, Daniel Sturman, declared that “The ability for people to have seamless, natural conversations in their native languages brings us closer to our goal of connecting a billion people with optimism and civility”.

This same notion also extends to the wider creator economy. Popular Youtubers like Mr. Beast have realised that they can vastly expand their Total Addressable Market (and their subsequent monetisation potential) by dubbing their videos in languages outside of their native tongues. Mr. Beast, the world’s biggest Youtuber, has even launched his own company that delivers this as a service for other creators, allowing them to simultaneously publish their videos in multilingual form.

Here’s Samir Chaudry from the popular Youtube channel Colin and Samir, recently articulating the impact of AI dubbing on the retention of their viewers.

The 2024 Indian Premier League (the world’s premier club cricket competition) saw AI being used for the first time to dub the words of international commentators in Hindi so they could be accessible to the billion+ audience in India. Steve Smith, current analyst and former Australian cricket team captain, said at the time:

“Namaste India! Being a part of the StarCast with such a stellar line-up of commentators has been a thrill for me. More importantly, my family, friends, and fans around the world got very excited after the hologram clip went viral last year. This season I’m part of another breakthrough technology where you’ll hear my IPL insights in Hindi. I’ve received some great feedback from fans, and I’m excited to connect with millions of viewers through the Star Sports Hindi feed.”

But translation isn’t just for fun and games. A recent study from MIT’s Sloan School looked into the effects of better machine translation facilities on the volume of e-commerce on digital platforms. Researchers found that improvements in machine translation increased international trade by 10%. As Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick pointed out, translation caused “the same effect as shrinking the world by 25%”.

Another groundbreaking paper from May of this year demonstrated how researchers had assembled a ‘virtual company’ staffed by AI agents employed in the task of translating literary books. These agents - called TransAgents - were given specific roles and tasks like ‘CEO’, ‘junior editor’, ‘translator’, ‘proofreader’ et al, effectively mimicking the environment of a real publishing company. The thesis behind this approach was to leverage the ability of LLMs to tackle the complexities of literary translation, which pose a different kind of style/eloquence challenge than ordinary plain text.

The study found that readers preferred the accuracy and authenticity of the TransAgent versions of translated Chinese novels over the ones translated by GPT4 or manually by humans. It opens to door a world where the ‘beauty and depth of literature transcend linguistic boundaries’.

Is it all just future-looking business stuff?

Nope.

Outside of strictly commercial applications, AI is proven itself integral to historically significant linguistic pursuits too. It is being used to unravel the mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Herculaneum papyri, two ancient pieces of text that have confounded researchers since they were discovered over 70 and 270 years ago, respectively.

Advanced machine learning algorithms have helped to identify linguistic patterns in these documents, giving us clues about their authorship, and, in the case of the Herculaneum scrolls, confirming that the Ancient Romans did indeed love the colour purple and the taste of capers. These breakthroughs have arrived only in the past half-decade, increasing the likelihood of us being able to open up a fresh dialogue with the past.

AI also gives us a way to preserve the present for the future. Outside the risks of biodiversity loss, the 21st century is in the throes of a different kind of extinction that perhaps doesn’t pack the same guttural punch to our socioeconomic sensibilities. Of the world’s ~7000 native languages, an estimated 90% are expected to be extinct by 2050, with roughly one language dying out every two weeks.

It is tricky to calculate the true costs of a mass extinction event of this scale. We are not just staring at a loss of words, but entire worldviews that have been crystallised in these linguistic systems for millennia. Every month we are impoverished by the evaporation of discrete cultural knowledge, of observations of environmental phenomena, of collective wisdom and oral histories that have accumulated over generations.

As the world moves towards a linguistic consensus, we risk losing a little bit of what makes us, us. It should be no surprise then that LLMs have become a potent weapon in the arsenal of linguistic conservationists everywhere.

There are scores of efforts underway worldwide to train AI models on local language datasets - using text, speech and video to preserve many of the world’s endangered languages in digital amber. This has the potential to increase the representation of ‘low resource’ languages on the global Internet i.e. languages that are spoken by many people in the world but don’t have a strong digital footprint. In theory this means that:

• you could record a podcast on indigenous fishing techniques with a Sami fisherman residing in rural Lapland, and help spread that knowledge to the English-speaking world

• you could build a digital neobank product exclusively for the 80 million strong cohort of people that speak Tamil in India, allowing them to engage with the product through their phones via voice, text, or video-based messaging

• you could create a global online book club to discuss (translated) Polish literature, where everyone chats with each other using a keyboard trained on their native language

The AI genie is out of the bottle. Similar to how the Internet changed our lives in millions of unpredictable ways, it’s impossible to say for sure what the second or third order effects of super-powered machine translation will be. Some would say, at the very least, we have a chance to learn from our past.

Redesigning The Tower

On one hand, we could be standing on the precipice of an epic era of global collaboration, built on the foundations of liberated remote knowledge and real cultural empathy.

We could see more examples like Japan’s lung-bursting ascent into industrialisation in the 19th and 20th centuries, fuelled by the translation of 10,000 European technical books on everything from medicine to astronomy to physics, chemistry, geography, and military science.

We might witness the birth of more institutions like the Toledo School of Translators, which ignited a knowledge revolution in 12th and 13th century Europe via the translation of a treasure trove of Arabic texts into Latin. This compendium - which included the works of Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy and Euclid - planted the seeds of Europe’s eventual Renaissance.

Or maybe we will see the emergence of new founding memes and myths - a return to the monoculture that has dissipated with the fracturing of mass media? Something resembling the spread of Buddhism through East Asia on the back of Kumārajīva’s translation of the Buddhist Sutras into Chinese? Or the creation of documents like the translated King James Bible, which transcended religion and altered the fabric of English language and culture forever.

What would a Rosetta-Stone-as-a-service look like?

What would a ‘subtitle-for-everything’ economy feel like? (eg: Infinite TAM for the world’s best creators; Small businesses describing their products to customers worldwide, handling international inquiries, and navigating export regulations - all without hiring multilingual staff)

How would these changes impact the Internet? How could it spill over into the offline world? What inventions are now inevitable?

🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

It’s hard to say for sure. And there’s every chance it won’t all be rosy. We can again gaze into the cheat sheet of history for clues on how this could play out. In fact, perhaps the most famous instance about the consequences of linguistic uniformity (or lack thereof) can be traced back to the pages of the Bible.

The story of the Tower of Babel - recorded in the Book of Genesis - is both a cautionary tale against the hubris of man, and an appeal to (linguistic) diversity. It follows the journey of Noah’s descendants after the devastation of The Great Flood, and it’s also short enough to replicate here in it’s entirety:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”

So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Like much of the writing in the Bible, the passage above is subject to multiple interpretations. In our case, we can extract from it a warning about our current infatuation with artificial intelligence, about creating digital experiences that veer uncomfortably close to playing God - those that are only a few standard deviations away from magic.

Perhaps we will also be similarly too bold, venturing too high, before we are brought back down to Earth. Perhaps will will rue the outsourcing of our thought to machines, which may perpetuate our worst biases and neuroses. Perhaps rather than preserving linguistic diversity, LLMs will plaster over the most colourful quirks of our various dialects, in favour of an efficient, brutalist homogenisation of global discourse.

Perhaps we won’t like what we find in a world of porous linguistic borders. Maybe nations of the Earth will want to preserve the right to record their own versions of world history, without subjecting our regional memories to a shared global consensus? Maybe we’d rather protect our own secrets.

A Babel-esque world where we can all “understand one another’s speech” might have different rules than the one we know. Maybe the dragons of the great unknown won’t be as friendly? Influence and Power might rear their heads in strange and unwelcome ways. Soft power might turn to hard power. Fringe might become mainstream.

Perhaps the socioeconomic earthquake will be too jarring, leading to an upsetting of incumbent status hierarchies? If multilingualism becomes commonplace, who will be the winners and losers? Where will leverage tilt across the translation value chain?

Time will tell.

It’s hard to make confident predictions given the pace of progress over just the past two years, progress that itself built upon the breakthroughs in transformer-architecture in the 2010s. The only safe bet is on the fact that the quality of AI outputs right now is the worst it’ll ever be, so just imagine what comes next?

Ten years from now, you might find yourself waking up in your Tokyo apartment, your AI assistant briefing you on Brazilian commodity news in perfect Japanese while you sip your morning coffee. Same as every morning, you hop on a video call with your Kenyan co-founder, the real-time translation so seamless you forget you're speaking different languages. For lunch, you step into your favourite Thai restaurant, your AR glasses instantly translating the handwritten specials board. Every Wednesday you might find yourself video calling your Parisian therapist for a check-up, your AI earbuds translating her advice flawlessly.

On your evening jog, you listen to a podcast in Hindi, understanding every reference as if you were born in Mumbai. Before bed, you help your son with his homework, effortlessly explaining a math problem originally written in Ancient Greek. Before bed, you're live-streaming a cooking class from a chef in Bogotá, following his rapid-fire instructions as if Spanish were your mother tongue.

If nothing feels out of the ordinary, on a day like this, that's probably a good indication that The Great (Linguistic) Reshuffle is in full swing.

Finding Hanno

In 1514, it had been 20 years since the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed, and almost a hundred since the Portuguese had begun systematically exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa.

The intervening period had been one of wanton exploration. The Kingdom of Spain had established its first permanent settlement in the Americas at Santo Domingo in 1496. By 1508, they had colonised Puerto Rico, and by 1511, Cuba. The Portuguese meanwhile had planted their flags on the coasts of Malabar and Malacca, and extended their maritime handshake as far as the Middle Kingdom of China. They had built a robust network of coastal bases all the way from Brazil to Mozambique to the Spice Islands in the East. The scope of European knowledge and influence had expanded exponentially in these two decades, reshaping the trade routes and power dynamics of the Middle Ages.

There was plenty of cause for celebration on the Iberian peninsula. To punctuate the breathtaking scale of their progress, the Governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque, saw fit to send back two exotic gifts for the incumbent Portuguese monarch King Manuel I. From Roger Crowley’s Conquerers:

“It was probably at the same time that he sent two rare animals to Manuel, one a white elephant, a gift from the king of Cochin, the second an equally rare white rhino, from the sultan of Cambay—the first live rhinoceros seen in Europe since the time of the Romans. The animals caused a sensation in Lisbon. The elephant was paraded through the streets and a fight arranged between the two animals in a specially built enclosure, in the presence of the king. The elephant, however, taking the measure of his opponent, fled in terror. In 1514, Manuel determined on a spectacular public projection of the majesty of his reign and his conquests of India. He delivered the white elephant to the pope under the command of his ambassador, Tristão da Cunha. A cavalcade of 140 people, including some Indians, and an assortment of wild animals—leopards, parrots, and a panther—entered Rome, watched by a gawping crowd. The elephant, led by his mahout, carried a silver castle on his back with rich presents for the pope, who christened him Hanno, after Hannibal’s elephants in Italy.

“At the papal audience, Hanno bowed three times and amused and alarmed the cardinals of the Holy Church by spraying the contents of a bucket of water over them. He was an immediate animal star—painted by artists, memorialized by poets, the subject of a now lost fresco and a scandalous satirical pamphlet, The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno. He was housed in a specially constructed building, took part in processions, and was greatly loved by the pope. Unfortunately, Hanno’s diet was ill-advised, and he died two years after his arrival, aged seven, having been dosed with a laxative laced with gold. The grieving [Pope] Leo X was at his side and buried him with honor.”

Despite his untimely demise, Hanno became a sensation, a living symbol of the new worlds that had opened up, and a tangible representation of how exploration was expanding European horizons. Just as the white elephant represented undreamed-of wonders from distant lands, our impending breach of linguistic barriers could unveil intellectual and cultural treasures we can scarcely imagine.

Who knows what we’ll see first?

If this journey takes the path of incremental progress, like the transition from sleek, wind-dancing caravels to imposing, wave-crushing carracks, we could see the discovery of faster sea routes to India i.e. improvements in familiar translation use cases built on the back of cheaper, faster, more accurate, multi-modal translation. This could include things like instant subbing and dubbing for all content, universal multilingual newsfeeds and RSS feeds, AI-assisted keyboards, multilingual voice assistants (that we don’t just click by accident), contextual advertising, wireless translation ear-pods, translation plug-ins for remote workers, and more. The second and third order effects of these alone merit another essay.

Outside of steady improvement, there remains the possibility of a world-altering discovery in the coming years. At some point someone’s going to ‘discover’ America. Who knows what that will mean in practice - maybe a brain machine interface that does true ‘real-time’ offline translation, changing the face of global travel and work. It could be the documentation of an indigenous conservation practice that unlocks the conundrum of global climate change. Or it might be the excavation of some ancient parchment that challenges our understanding of ourselves.

If the digital map was the logical end to the first Age of Discovery, what is the equivalent for translation? Imagine what the explorers of antiquity would have given to have a perfectly mapped representation of Earth in the palm of their hands, where with a few swipes of their fingers they could get a precise location of where they were in the world with instructions and timelines on how to get to their destinations. What will be the Google Maps of the Age of Discovery v2.0, a product that is so outrageously revolutionary, so indispensably useful, so ubiquitous to the point we take it for granted, that it would be offensive to the sensibilities of colonial explorers who had to figure out how to navigate the world ‘in the dark’. (NB: I don’t think Google Translate is the Google Maps of translation, yet).

And finally, once these artificial brains are ready, in what body will they fit most snugly? What will be the most natural interfaces and form factors of the AI era? Smartphone apps? Browser plug ins? Specialised earpieces? Or something else entirely.

Replicating the immortal words of Ernest Hemingway in response to the question of how he went bankrupt, the AI translation era has the makings of a revolution that will occur in two ways - “Gradually, then suddenly.”

As the caterpillar of humanity wraps itself in an AI cocoon, there’s no telling what kind of mysterious creature will emerge on the other side. Here’s hoping that, at the very least, we’ll be able to understand what it’s saying.

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Footnotes

A publishing industry built for Charles Dickens. A Hollywood ecosystem gorging on formulaic slop. Schools and workplaces churning out drones, not dynamos. News outlets injecting humanity’s worst impulses into your every waking moment. 

The gatekeepers are losing their grip. They cling to a world that no longer exists. They scoff at ambition, clutch to credentials, dismiss the dissenting. 

But the toothpaste cannot go back into the tube. The COVID pandemic, coupled with rapid technological advancements, has turbocharged trends that have been unfolding since Tim Berners-Lee first unveiled the World Wide Web over 30 years ago. 

Credentialism is dying. The tools are in your hands, a cornucopia of resources at your fingertips. Passion projects are the new résumés. The question is no longer, “Where did you go to university?” but “What have you made?” 

In the new world, your birthplace does not dictate your workplace. For millennia, countless geniuses lived and died in obscurity, their potential hidden even from themselves. It was a tragic loss of talent, an Alexandrian obliteration of global knowledge. 

No longer. 

Geography has become history.  Today, a teenage prodigy in rural Karnataka can collaborate with a scientist in Kansas. A researcher in Mombasa can be funded by an eccentric in Manhattan. Seven degrees of separation have collapsed into one; nearly anyone is just a mouse click away. 

As geography contracts, opportunity expands. There has never been a better time to be creative. Your audience is no longer at the mercy of the mainstream. No matter how niche your interests, a global community of like-minded weirdos and obsessives is within reach. One man with a YouTube channel can rival Netflix; one woman with a Substack can take on Fox News. 

But even as our external constraints dissolve, our internal ones tighten their grip. We remain limited by our own biology, our own psychology.

We did not evolve for this. 

While our world has transformed, our minds still run on a paleolithic operating system (HumanOS). We are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world. Facing an unprecedented deluge of information, our tribal brains yearn for certainty and recoil from doubt. We hunt for patterns, seek consistency, and crave security. We find comfort in familiar narratives and shrink from information that contradicts them. We cosplay as our beliefs, searching only to prove what we already think.

But our HumanOS can be upgraded. 

We can smoke out our stubborn beliefs. We can discard our outdated assumptions. We can embrace new models and new methods. We can learn to revel in uncertainty; to celebrate being proved wrong. 

The stories we tell ourselves — as individuals and societies — shape our reality. They guide us towards certain outcomes, like lighthouses in a storm. By changing our focus, we can change our futures.

We stand at an inflection point. We each face a choice: be overwhelmed by the seismic shifts reshaping how we work, live, and connect, or harness these changes for our benefit.

We’re here to make this choice easier.

By telling better stories. By finding things to root for, not against. By spotlighting the zealots and the voices confronting consensus. By unearthing old wisdom and embracing new models. 

Will you join us?

1. Lulu Cheng Meservey | Humanity Beats Perfection

“It is better to mess up a word and say the wrong word than it is to come across as an automaton. It is better to not have the exact right words than it is to sound mechanical, because if you mess up a word, your message might be 80% received instead of 100% received. If you mess up sounding like a human being, it'll be 0% received, because the words aren't what matters. You're the thing that matters. The medium is the message, and the person delivering it and the delivery, that's the message. And so do not sacrifice sounding human for the sake of getting the words right, ever, and that goes to TV interviews, podcast interviews. That's the first principle. And if you as a startup founder are a technical genius who is not a Barack Obama-level orator who is able to put on that performative sense of being natural, then don't try. Just make it so that you don't have a script to remember and that you actually have to ad lib every time.

More from Lulu: Going Direct: What Founders can learn from K-Pop, Crypto, and the Early Christians (Ep.133)

2. Ellen Fishbein | Constraints Breed Clarity

“A lot of writers these days get started with writing by tweeting. And when the tweet constraint was really, really rigid, when you could never extend a tweet that was really good, either the 280 or 140 characters, that constraint creates an exercise that forces you to get better at saying stuff within that constraint. And that was what the sonnet was for Shakespeare as well. You can see him going through the reps of learning how to handle this constraint and getting better and better at saying something worth saying within this quite challenging constraint of the sonnet form. Kind of similar to a tweet. Yeah, it was the proving ground. It was the training ground, it was the Dojo. And so whenever I'm confused, that's where I go.”

More from Ellen: Make Art, Not Noise (Ep.220)

3. Ateet Ahluwalia | Stop Dodging the Question

“If I asked you a question and you answer an adjacent question, you think either I'm stupid, or you don't know the answer, or you're hiding something. It can be nothing else. And so, how they answer the question, do they answer it? Do they skirt around it? That really matters. "Hey, how many robots are you guys producing this year?" If you don't know the number, there's a problem there. If you answer a different question about your production facility, there's a problem there. And so, I think how someone answers the question or degree of hesitation there matters […] I also think that, when someone says, "Hey, we're the Uber of X or the Airbnb of Y," No, you're not. Uber is the Uber of Ubering and taking cars from here to there. You are not that. Stop telling me that, because you're trying to anchor my perception on the most survivorship-biased focused firm that you think I will like and I don't like that. I just want you to just give me the facts […] I need you to answer my plain, English questions as if I'm five to 10 years old.”

More from Ateet: The Many Bosses of a Venture Capitalist (Ep. 227)

4. Vitaliy Katsenelson | Enter Scientist Mode

“You have four modes of communications. There are three Ps, and they're all externals.

You have a Politician […] they'll lie just for you to like them. Well, we do this all the time. When we go for a job interview, because we want to be liked, we want people... So we tell people what they want to hear.

Then you have a Preacher […] I think about Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field, how successful that was. I'm trying to add a positive connotation to that, though you also know the negatives, what the negatives are.

And then you have a Prosecutor, which is like when somebody in the courtroom trying to get somebody to change their mind. I would argue, we spend probably maybe too much time in the prosecutor mode.

But here's the problem. These modes, they have positive and negatives, but here's the thing, this one commonality they'll have, if you spend all your time in those modes, you're going to learn very little, because they are outward facing modes. You're just trying to change somebody's mind, or influence other people.

And then you have a Scientist mode, and this is the mode that you and I, and I'm sure you are already, but people like us should spend 80% of our time in […] And in this mode, anything enters your mind is hypothesis, which you examine from different directions, and then for careful for examination, you're like, "Okay, this is what I think." And by the way, if somebody else changes my mind, I'm fine to this.””

More from Vitaliy: Soul in the Game (Ep. 121)

5. Alex Lieberman | Be Simple. Be Specific.

“When I'm talking to people who either are starting to write internet essays or build a brand online, I'm like, the number one test really to know if you have written something that people are going to enjoy is, there's two criteria. It's one, “Could a fifth grader understand this?" Because I truly believe if you cannot write something for the fifth grade reading level, you're not explaining things simply enough, which probably means you don't understand it well enough. And the second thing I would say is if you can cover your name and replace it with any other person's name, it probably means that it's not high specificity enough, and it doesn't pull from enough lived experience.”

More from Alex: On Voice, Unicorns & Intrinsic Motivation (Ep. 192)

6. George Mack | Don’t Be the Genius

“I think the ultimate midwit razor or filtering process is to just always try and avoid being the genius. Because that's the mistake the midwit makes is, he thinks he's the guy on the right. And unless you've got some Tesla level of IQ, and even then I still don't think it's necessarily useful, certainly not for a midwit like myself. As a recovering midwit, going through of like, "Well, how can I dumb this down? What is the dumbest version of this, because if I can't dumb this down where it's super simple of ‘calories in calories out’, or ‘if feeling bad, good night's sleep’” ... if I can make it appeal to the idiot, therefore it may have the chance of passing to the genius as well.”

More from George: The Game of Life (Ep. 195) | Marketing, Mental Models, and Technology (Ep. 114)

7. Lisa Feldman Barrett | Excavate Your Deeply Held Beliefs

“What I often tell my students is that when you are reading something or you're talking to somebody or you're listening to something, and your response in listening is, "That's exactly right. That person's brilliant. This is exactly correct." In those moments […] as well as in the moments where you listen to someone or read something and you think, "That's just crap. There's no way that's... That's just garbage." In both of those moments, you should use your affect as a cue to pay attention because something has either confirmed a deeply held belief or challenged it and your job as a scientist, and I would actually say just as a well-functioning person, is to unearth those assumptions and hold them up into the light of day and evaluate them, consider them from all sides and intentionally adhere to them or discard them."

More from Lisa: Why does the brain exist? (Ep. 82)

8. Shreyas Doshi | You Don’t Know Everything, and That’s OK

“I've made this observation in the past about certainty theater. Because a lot of what's going on around us, and this is not just in the business world, this is so common in news and current events, where we are basically engaging in certainty theater. Everybody is certain about everything. In business for instance, if I am at a high stakes meeting, making a high stakes proposal, my competence in most organizations, the vast majority of organizations, is measured by the degree of certainty I express for everything that I'm proposing. But the fact is, there are so many things that we just don't know. It gets back to your point about, if you ask somebody a set of questions and they have a well packaged answer for everything, you've gotta question, what's going on there really?”

 More from Shreyas: Making of a Great Leader (Ep. 118)

9. Will Schoder | Assume that You Are Both Partially Wrong

“A rule that I live by is that there are very few, if any, arguments in life where someone is not a little bit right and a little bit wrong. It's very rare to be in a discussion with someone that's totally wrong and someone else is totally right, it's exceedingly rare. And so, I think, the reason why dogma is so dangerous is because you don't get to pick up on the nuances of the other person and the places where they might be right. You've already framed it as completely wrong from the start.”

More from Will: On Curation, Consumption & Compression (Ep. 190)

10. Dr. Julie Gurner | Pretend to Be the Professor

“Oftentimes when [Ed: very technical] people end up as managers or leaders or CEOs, part of the challenge is that they are very fast in their head. They can think quickly, they can come to conclusions, they can calculate things quickly, but they don't take anyone along on the journey. So they'll say, "This is what this is, this is what that is." And everybody's like, "Wait. What? How did we get here?” […] And so sometimes a model I like to use is to say, “Let's pretend that you are a professor and that you are not teaching someone, but you want to bring people along for the journey of how you got to where you're going. Tell me how that would change how you speak to this group of people.” And they would say, "Oh, well, I'd start from here and I would show them how I worked through X or Y." And I said, "Well, so let's make it a little less detailed than that and let's just kind of take it in pieces and just walk them through." […] But when you're able to calibrate that and they see people light up as they follow them on the actual journey of how they get there and they get it, I think that that inspires them to do it again.”

More from Dr. Gurner: Ultra Successful (Ep. 176)

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Now, grab yourself a cup of coffee and settle in for the show.

“We can easily represent things as we wish them to be.” —Aesop

“Here we go again, Perception trumping reality once more.” —Dick Fuld

“The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.” —Paul Watzlawick

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, Babe Ruth stood tall at Wrigley Field’s home plate. 

The stakes were high: it was Game Three of the 1932 World Series.

The count was against him: no balls, two strikes. Worse, the Chicago Cubs were riding him unmercifully from their dugout. 

And yet there he stood, silent and determined as he clenched his jaw. Slowly, methodically, he raised his arm and pointed to a tall flagpole rising from the crowded bleachers that occupied deep center field. 

It was show time. 

As he settled back in the batter’s box, pitcher Charlie Root wound up and hurled a heater Ruth’s way.

The rest, as they say, was history. In Ruth’s telling:

“Root threw me a fast ball. If I had let it go, it would have been called a strike. But this was it. I swung from the ground with everything I had and as I hit the ball every muscle in my system, every sense I had, told me that I had never hit a better one, that as long as I lived nothing would ever feel as good as this.

I didn't have to look. But I did. That ball just went on and on and on and hit far up in the centerfield bleachers in exactly the spot I had pointed to.

To me, it was the funniest, proudest moment I had ever had in baseball. I jogged down toward first base, rounded it, looked back at the Cub bench and suddenly got convulsed with laughter.

You should have seen those Cubs. As Combs said later, ‘There they were-all out on the top step and yelling their brains out - and then you connected and they watched it and then fell back as if they were being machine-gunned.’

That home run - the most famous one I ever hit - did us some good. It was worth two runs, and we won that ball game, 7 to 5.”1

Ruth’s legendary called shot has entered the American sporting canon. Its influence continues to this day where, emulating the Great Bambino, batters at home plates across the world still raise their arms to point before facing a pitch.

But Ruth’s greatest moment carries a lesson that extends well beyond baseball. To understand, we must avert our eyes from the bleachers and gaze instead into the madcap world of financial markets.

Much like Ruth's famous called shot, the concept of reflexivity suggests a potent link between our beliefs and our reality.

Popularized by financier-cum-philosopher-cum-philanthropist George Soros, reflexivity posits that our perceptions do not just reflect the world around us but shape it. He argues that financial markets are not merely passive mirrors of reality but are instead shaped by the perceptions and beliefs of the participants. This creates a feedback loop where initial beliefs influence actions that change outcomes, thus reinforcing or altering the original beliefs.

In Soros’ words, “Stock prices are not merely passive reflections; they are active ingredients in the process in which both stock prices and the fortunes of companies whose stocks are traded are determined.”

The investor Howard Marks goes further, writing: "Security prices are determined by events and how investors react to those events, which is largely a function of how the events stack up against investors’ expectations.”

Much ink has been spilled about the reality - perceived or otherwise - of market reflexivity. Some may see events like the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and Theranos saga as reflexivity in action. Others may point to the Amazon bestseller list as a self-perpetuating reflexive loop that keeps top books at the top and bottom books at the bottom. Even humble toilet paper can be analyzed through the reflexivity microscope: recall the sudden spike of panic-buying and hoarding during COVID, a wave of activity caused by fears of shortages that led to, you guessed it, actual shortages.

But I’m not here to talk about markets. This theory carries a wider implication. In a behavioral context, reflexivity suggests that our expectations (Ruth's prematurely triumphant finger) can mold our future outcomes (the ball sailing into the bleachers). In other words, across the chaotic variety of our daily lives, a simple but seismic fact holds true:

Reality is a lot more malleable than we think. 

Take the happy story of the Confident Job Seeker. She believes she is highly qualified and deserving of a job and, therefore, oozes steady confidence during her interview. This wows her interviewer, who proceeds to offer her the job, once again shaping reality in line with her initial belief.

Or, if you prefer non-hypotheticals, upcoming Infinite Loops guest Nir Eyal has a great series of pieces exploring the different ways that research has shown our beliefs can impact our outcomes. For example, did you know that feeling lucky can improve our performance, it may be possible to “think yourself thinner”, and thinking positively about aging may improve your lifespan?

Sounds great, doesn’t it!

But it’s not all sunshine and roses. Sometimes, our beliefs and perceptions can serve to entrap us, not liberate us.

For example, the sad tale of the Nervous Public Speaker. He is convinced that the audience will find his topic excruciatingly dull—so convinced, in fact, that the poor fellow proceeds to read his speech as quickly as possible from his notes, stumbling over his words and not once making eye contact. The audience, picking up on his discomfort, disengages, thus confirming his initial belief.

Even positive behaviors and beliefs can become self-defeating. If you’re a creator, you won’t need me to tell you about the scourge of audience capture. No one warns you that when you’re known for being a certain way, the pressure to live up to, reinforce, and further your reputation can become so overwhelming that the mask becomes the face and the theory the practice. We create personal myths and stories about who we are, and these myths gain a life of their own. They shape how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves. Over time, we begin to conform to these narratives, even when they no longer serve us. The initial belief about who we are becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, dictating our actions and limiting our potential.

In this way, the celebrated artist becomes shackled by her particular style, and the bold executive tethered to her reputation for decisiveness. The self-mythology that once empowered them becomes a constraint, a cage in which the fear of shattering the myth outweighs the desire for growth, evolution, or change.

Understanding reflexivity allows us to see that, like Ruth's called shot, we often set the stage for our outcomes through our beliefs and expectations. 

The Reflexive Theory of Everything, then, plays on the "first principle" of René Descartes's philosophy. In place of Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), I propose Credo, ergo erit (I believe, therefore it will be). 

Belief is not just a passive reflection of inner thoughts but a powerful force that actively shapes reality. When we believe in something fervently, our actions and behaviors align with that belief, influencing those around us and creating a ripple effect that transforms our environment. Collective perception and shared beliefs can drive cultural shifts, economic booms, and societal changes. The world is not just a mirror reflecting our thoughts; it is a canvas painted by our beliefs. 

Like gravity, reflexivity is all around us but barely noticed unless we pay it attention. It exerts pressure that brings perception and reality ever closer. Though the past is analytic, the future is reflexive. I imagine both Dunning and Kruger are beside themselves.

We are all umpires in our personal game of life, calling balls and strikes, deciding what is real and what’s not based on our perceptions. Reflexivity teaches that our understanding of the world is not merely a passive reflection of reality but an active creation. Like Ruth, we must be mindful of the power of our beliefs to shape our actions and, in turn, our reality.

Derek Sivers once wrote: “Since almost nothing is absolutely indisputably true, you should choose beliefs and ideas that are useful to you now — that help you take the right actions.” If you take one thing away from this essay, it’s this. Choose your beliefs wisely.

When this is understood and used well, you can call your shot and send a ball over the left-field wall; however, beware of swinging at pitches that just aren’t there. 

Batter up and be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.

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1. Alex Komoroske | Admit That You Have No Idea

“So many people, I think, are driven by this insecurity of, ‘People will know I'm dumb or will know I don't know what I'm doing.’ And there's something so liberating in saying, ‘Yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing.’ I don't think any of us do really. We're just doing the best we can and we're trying to learn from it and take actions that over time, we get smarter and we understand and we develop an intuition about what kinds of ripple effects will likely come out of a certain thing. On a very fundamental level, in looking at even deep learning systems or any formal information theory or evolutionary biology, you just can't learn if you don't try and fail.”

More from Alex: Complex Adaptivity All The Way Down (Ep. 208)| Batman Was Wrong (our synthesis)

2. Dr. Julie Gurner | Adopt an Internal Locus of Control

“[M]ost people will fear failure, not because it's failure, but because of other people seeing them fail […] [W]hen you have an internal locus of control, it puts you in a position to take more chances and risk because the only person you really risk disappointing is yourself. And that's usually very tolerable because we watch ourselves fail at things all the time. A child that is learning to walk and falls down doesn't go, ‘Oh, well now I've fallen, so now I can never step again.’ […] And so there is a lot that we, if you can move with an internal locus of control, external things can happen. They come and go. You can take those hits very easily […] You have the freedom to iterate, to try, to fail, to just move forward and to do other things.”

More from Dr. Gurner: Ultra Successful (Ep. 176)| Five Paths to Peak Performance (our synthesis)

3. Luca Dellanna | Avoid Game-Over Fail States

“In the book, I use the example of my cousin who's a skier. And he was an excellent skier, very young. He made it to the World Cup for his world record, and then a couple of injuries stopped his career very early. And the lesson I got from him is that it's not the fastest skier who wins the race, but the fastest one of those who finish the race. And the principle will be that survival matters a lot for performance.”

More from Luca: On Survival, Signals & Success (Ep. 174)

4. Jim O’Shaughnessy | Own Your Mistakes

“The point is simple—mistakes provide a lesson-rich environment. But you’ve got to own your mistakes. You’d be compounding them if you tried to point your finger at anything or anyone other than yourself. The most successful people I’ve met have usually also been the ones who not only made the most mistakes but also always owned them. If you have the ability to say ‘I was wrong’ and truly believe and learn from it, you’re close to gaining a new superpower in life.”

More from Jim on failure: Mistakes were Made. (And, Yes, by Me.)

5. Jeremiah Lowin | Make Original Mistakes

“If you go out and all you do is make the same mistakes that I could have gotten in some other company, then there's no ROI on this investment […] I can buy those mistakes somewhere else. I think that, in some ways, this pursuit of original mistakes is sort what one is doing as a startup founder in a constructive way, right? […] It's a huge red flag if someone goes out believing that they're going to do things right. It is one of the most dangerous attitudes […] Our skillset is to go out, encounter a mistake, which we must, because we're trying to do something new. We must not do it perfectly at first. It's ludicrous to think we would do it perfectly. Second, that is how we do it and encounter that mistake and fix it and move on to the next one. That's the skillset over and over and over that I think we need to optimize for.”

6. Anna Lorena Fabrega | Encourage Others to Fail

"[I]f you really think about it, failure should be something that we encourage, not punish. And the way that we approach failure in school, it's like we make kids fear failure, so what happens is they don't want to take risks, right? Because there's a consequence for taking risks. They don't want to try out new ideas and they're not very certain. There's not this notion of, ‘Let me try something. I failed. Let me try again. Let me get better.’ You don't go through that process in school. And this is very detrimental because in the real world, that's how you come up with crazy new ideas, that's how you innovate by getting comfortable with failure. And I often think if kids don't have a chance to fail, often as kids, when they really don't have big responsibilities or life-changing consequences, then when are they going to practice this skill…”

More from Ana: Gamification of Learning (Ep. 76)

7. Jimmy Soni | Are You Taking Enough Creative Risk?

“Michael Jordan left basketball to play baseball and it didn't go exactly as he had planned, there were a bunch of reasons why. And then the baseball strike happened and he starts playing with the Bulls again […] That to me is actually not a story about him getting back to the thing he was good at. It's a story about somebody who had the courage to try something that they thought they might fail in, and that's amazing. He was the best basketball player in the world […] as one person put it in that Last Dance documentary, maybe the best person to do anything ever in anything. And he says, ‘I'm going to abandon all of that and I'm going to go do this thing because my dad always thought that I should be a baseball player and I love my dad and I love baseball. I'm going to try that.’ And he puts on a White Sox uniform and he almost makes it. And that, talk about the courage. You have Nike contracts. The world is watching you. People admire you. Literally, the entire planet thinks of you as an icon and you're like, ‘I'm going to go play baseball.’ It blows my mind. And it makes me think, ‘Boy, maybe I'm not taking enough creative risk.’" 

More from Jimmy: The Courage of Creative Risk (Ep. 214) | Make Things, and Be Playful (Ep.108) | Unleashing the Future of Publishing (Ep. 157)

8. Frederik Gieschen | No One Really Cares

“I think we overestimate the cost of failure. First of all, I think the Internet for the most part, unless it's really meme-able, forgets very quickly.  That people just move on and there's something new happening every day, every week. I think what you might find is you might find yourself with people who are envious of your success and who become sort of public detractors, right? I think that does happen. Whether you call it trolls or something else, right? You might have specific people who will keep pointing out your failure. But […] I think people are in general somewhat forgiving of failure. Unless you're stealing, or you're doing something that's obviously wrong. But if you had the best intentions and people follow along in your journey, my hope is that people are forgiving and that it overall creates a better culture to try things out.”

More from Frederik: Learning and Failing in Public (Ep. 85) | On Agility, Agreeableness, Alchemy & the Arena (Ep. 177) 

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“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

~Cormac McCarthy

I am one of the luckiest people in history.

To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical (Google tells me around 1 in 400 trillion).

But I think there’s more to luck than that.

I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know have a talent for (1) recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that are conducive to a favorable outcome, and (2) quickly taking advantage of those circumstances.

“Dumb” luck is, as the name suggests, dumb. It requires no awareness of your situation or action beyond simply being there when it hits. “Smart” luck is different. Smart luck involves awareness followed by action before the circumstances change.

So, I have good old dumb luck to thank for being born when I was and for coming of age just as computers were advancing to the point where I could use them to write What Works on Wall Street. Try as I might, I cannot claim that any stroke of genius on my part set up these circumstances.

Was I also lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates, allowing me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling-rate environment?

You betcha!

BUT… these favorable conditions would have been meaningless if I hadn’t fought hard to get the data for my book.

Likewise, this stroke of timely dumb luck would have been wasted had I allowed the conventional wisdom of my youth to sour me on the stock market. For those too young to remember, everyone HATED the stock market for most of the 1980s and much of the 1990s. In the early ‘80s, all the “smart” folks were going into real estate and hard assets. Stocks were for losers. It wasn’t until the late ‘90s that everyone loved the stock market.

So, yes, circumstances were nearly ideal for me to succeed as a stock market investor and author, but I needed to actively decide to take advantage of them.

I’ve also experienced being in the right place at the right time and yet making the wrong choice. In 1999, I founded an online investment advisor called Netfolio. It was one of the first robo-advisors. In early 2000, we got a ridiculous offer from one of Wall Street’s largest investment banks that would have made everyone associated with Netfolio crazy rich.

I said no.

Even at the time, I realized how incredibly lucky I was to get the offer, but I failed to grab it. I failed to take advantage of the wonderful spot Karma had placed me in and passed on the deal. In other words, I failed to act when the rare, favorable, and lucky circumstances were at hand. Had I done so, I’m sure many people would have attributed my incredible luck to skill on my part. I’m pretty sure I would have attributed my luck to skill, too.

And yet… I don’t regret the experience. On reflection, it gave me a really good understanding of the role of luck. The writer Damon Runyon once said, “The race may not always be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that's the way to bet.” I agree. Having been on both sides of luck, I think luck is bound up in many outcomes in life, yet how you react and play your hand determines how lucky you will be.

My friend and past guest George Mack phrases it another way with his “Luck Razor.” He writes: “If given 2 options, pick the one that has the most luck potential. E.g. Cocktail party vs watching Netflix. Which one has the highest potential for future luck?”

In my opinion, people who can suss out potentially random favorable circumstances and jump in to take advantage of them will end up being “luckier” than those who can’t.

I’ve always loved Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, which is based on a series of medieval poems about the cruelty of fate. The first, “O Fortuna,” has some cool lyrics. It’s in Latin, but since it’s been a long time since I took Latin, here are the opening lyrics in English:

“O Fortune, like the moon

You are changeable, ever waxing, ever waning;

Hateful life

First oppresses and then soothes as fact takes it;

Poverty and power

It melts the like ice.”1

The point is that humans have alternately blamed and praised fate for our condition in life forever.

I think the key to being luckier than the average person is having an open mind, looking for potentially unusual (i.e., lucky) circumstances, and then acting quickly to take advantage of them.

So, next time you find yourself blessed with a stroke of dumb luck, remember, that’s just the beginning. The real question is: what are you going to do with it?

This is an updated version of a thread I posted on Twitter/X in March 2018, which was inspired by this Tweet from Morgan Housel.

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