My guest today is Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs and author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.
On paper, Anne-Laure had it all: top grades, a high-flying job at Google, and a life that seemed to hit all the markers of success.
But something was off. No matter how “traditionally” successful she became, she felt… “empty.”
So, she decided to do something about it. A neuroscience PhD, 100,000+ newsletter subscribers, and a newly published book later, she’s developed a new model of success — one built around conducting “tiny experiments” that help her build a life on her own terms.
She joins me to discuss how we get trapped in cognitive scripts, the hidden dangers of productivity culture, how we can experiment our way to a better life and MUCH more!
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
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Highlights
The Life Scripts of Silicon Valley
“Most people listening to this will be who's 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 one, 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?”
Our Closest Friends Can Be Our Biggest Blockers
“And it's also interesting how you mentioned that very often, it's the people who love us the most, that might be the biggest blockers when it comes to pursuing our deep curiosities. The ones where it is an unclear end and where we might very much fail. That's possible. The people who love us, they want us to be safe. And so they will very often push us towards those scripts that give us this illusion of safety, because they want to make sure that we're going to be okay. And so it comes from a very good place, but it can be very limiting in terms of the options that we actually explore..”
Embrace the Non-Linear
“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.”
Why People Tie Self-Worth to Productivity
“In our society, the way it's designed right now, we are valued, paid, compensated based on our level of productivity, our contribution, how much we can contribute to a business, to society in general. And so because of that, there is an incentive to be perceived as the expert in the room. There's an incentive to look like you know everything. There's an incentive to look like you are certain about where you're going. And this is also why a lot of people now tie their productivity, their level of productivity, to their own self-worth. Where they feel like if they're not being productive, if they're not creating something of value to society, then they're not a worthy human being, which is absolutely horrible when you think about it.”
Books & Articles Mentioned
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned; by Ken Stanley
Thinking in Bets; by Annie Duke
Collective Illusions; by Todd Rose
Maybe Logic; by Robert Anton Wilson
Beginning of Infinity; by David Deutsch
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics; by Alfred Korzybski
The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better; by Will Storr
Transcript
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Well, hello everybody. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another episode of Infinite Loops, and now my guest knows that I'm going to screw up her name, because we practiced it many, many times. Maybe we'll even put my practicing and butchering it into the actual podcast. Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I think I'm getting that close, correct me.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
That's impressive, and that's your best attempt so far.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Oh, thank God. Anne-Laure is the founder of Ness Labs and the author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. I have been following you diligently for several years. I am so impressed by you, so this is going to probably be one of your easier interviews. I just have such great admiration for everything you've accomplished.
You were at Google for a long time. I mean, talk about being over-indexed on credentials. You have a PhD from King's College and you have masters and you were at Google, and then you decided, "You know what? I'm just going to start a Substack." You built that to 100,000 subscribers, and then you were like, "I think I'll probably write a book too." I love your energy, but more importantly what we were talking about before we began the official recording, I love your courage.
Let's talk a little bit about…was there a single event, was it a confluence of events that made you think, I might be doing this wrong, maybe I should rethink, maybe I should do new things?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah, actually, I think about my life in terms of two chapters, and there's definitely a first part, the first chapter where I was, as you said, over-indexing on a traditional definition of success. I think it comes a little bit from being from an immigrant background and having my parents who really wanted me to succeed, not wanting to disappoint people, but also not having that many role models around me that had been a little bit more explorative with their careers.
So in the first part of my life and my career, I did good in school, I got a job at Google, as you mentioned, and I was kind of person who always focused on how to get the next promotion, how to be the one that they would pick for the next interesting project. There wasn't a massive big event that happened, but a few things that made me realize that maybe my priorities were wrong.
One of them was when I was still at the time based in San Francisco and working out of Mountain View at Google, and I woke up one morning and my arm was almost black and I could not move it anymore. I went to the Google infirmary and asked them what was wrong. They said, "It looks pretty bad, go to the hospital." Went to the Stanford Hospital, and the doctor said, "You have a blood clot in your arm that is threatening to travel to your lungs, and we need to schedule surgery as soon as possible."
My reaction to this was to open my laptop so I could check my calendar and see when I could schedule this so it would not disrupt any of the product launches I was working on. That was the first thing that happened where I caught myself, just almost an out-of-body experience where you see yourself doing something absolutely ridiculous. I felt like, wow, I can't believe that that's what's on my mind right now at the hospital checking this. So, that was one small event that happened.
I did the surgery. Hopefully for anyone watching this on video, both my arms are still here-
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
They look great.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
... so it worked out. A few months after that ... and I went back to work and I kind of buried that experience. It was just something that happened and that felt kind of crazy, and I just ignored it and went back to work. At the end of that year, I went back home in France for Christmas with my family and someone asked, how's life? For the first time in a very long time, I actually listened to the question and tried to answer honestly. I realized that although from an external standpoint, life was great. I had a great job at an amazing company working on amazing projects with amazing colleagues. On the inside, I actually felt a little bit empty and I felt bored out. Not necessarily burned out, but bored out. I felt like I already knew where I was going. I knew how to play this game, I knew what I was supposed to do, and I knew what success looked like in that current career, in that current industry. And that's when I felt like I needed to change something. I need to do something else.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So I'm glad by the way that your arm got fixed. But I'm fascinated because that fits into the death and rebirth. I'm really fascinated. If you really do a deep dive and go down the rabbit hole of most religions, most apotheosis and change of people, you always get to the death and rebirth segment. I'm a big fan of the ... I don't even know what to call him, the anti-spiritualist. Because he hits hard. His name's Jed McKenna. He's very mysterious. Nobody knows who he is. And that's what I use as my signal, that he might be the real deal. Because he's not selling any courses on Instagram. He doesn't have a million followers on Twitter. I always say he's a fictional character whose purpose in life is to remind us that we're all fictional characters, that we often are being the self-author of.
And so after you had that experience, it's like Churchill saying, "There's nothing quite like the feeling of being shot at and missed." And then what was the feeling when you were like ... Was there some kind of an a-ha moment when they asked how you doing? I always say when people ask you how you're doing, they really don't want to know. They're expecting a scripted response. So I experimented for a while with actually telling people how I was doing and the looks on their faces. It was like, "Ooh, too much information!" But did that lead to the big change?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah, I don't think I subjected that poor person to actually telling them how-
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
You're much kinder than I am.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah. It was more of an internal realization, that that's how I was feeling. And I wish I could tell you that I went from this period in my life to actually live freely. But I didn't because I felt quite lost after ... So I decided to quit my job at Google based on those two back-to-back experiences that happened in the span of a few months. And so I went back to the US. I told my manager that I was quitting. And that's when that first time around, I found myself in what you can only describe as a liminal space. I was in this in-between. I had quit my job at Google. I had no idea what I wanted to do next. I felt pretty lost. For the first time, I did not have a clear plan and a clear vision for what I wanted to do. So what I did is just cling to another script and I stopped following one script just to follow another one.
And for anyone wishing ... Most people listening to this will be who's 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 one, 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, which quite a few people around me said that it was crazy at the time because I was in my late 20s. Neuroscience studies are quite long. It's not something you do in one year. They all told me, "You're not going to become a neuroscientist at that age and you had such a great job at Google. Maybe just go back to something in tech where you'll be able to contribute and have fun with your current skills." But the thing that was really different at that time for me, is that I actually did not have the goal of becoming a neuroscientist. That was not why I was going back to school.
I went back to school because that was the thing I felt most curious about in that moment. I wanted to do something that I would be excited to wake up in the morning and explore, with no further goal or ambition around it. Just pure curiosity. And that's why I went back to university.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And that has been one of my soapboxes in Hyde Park, the guys who are crazy on their soapbox. I have many of those. And one of them is that, this idea of there is a single or two or maybe three paths. They're prescriptions, they label. And when you label something, you negate it because you stop thinking about it. We chunk and it just drives me crazy. In fact, I wrote a long Twitter thread on how I get triggered by these, "10 things millionaires do every morning," and I am just like, "This is bullshit." Why it's bullshit is because there are no 10 common things that millionaires and billionaires do every morning. Everybody is looking for a script as you call them.
I was thinking as I was reviewing the stuff to talk with you, Ken Stanley's, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, greatness can't be planned. And if you think that you are going to ... "I'm going to follow the script where I'm a Googler and then I get promoted, promoted, promoted, promoted," you just put yourself on a hedonic treadmill that gets really difficult to escape. That's why I bring in the courage part. I love people who are near the top of their fitness landscape. And then they're like, "Ah, fuck it. I'm going to go do this." But that takes a lot of ... Most people will look at you like you're crazy. And that's another part of the thread. I'll re-put it up on Twitter and say that you sparked me to get worked up about this again. Because people who love you and really, really, have your best interests at heart, they can be huge roadblocks, because they too are imprinted with the culture.
I think of the industrial era. I think we are still working on this old script that doesn't work anymore and it hasn't worked for quite some time. And now, we're seeing all these inflection points like a global colossus of humans being able to talk to one another. You and I being able to have this conversation, no matter where we are in physical space. And the world, in fact, we're calling it the great reshuffle. Everything is getting reshuffled. Yet, we still have this default to those old ... I really think soul and curiosity destroying Imprints from the industrial era. One of the things you say is that goal-setting is broken. So I was born in 1960, I'm the tail end of the baby boom. And so I got imprinted with all that stuff too. I've kept journals for 45 years and I was just showing one to a colleague the other day. All goals, but written in no particular order. I was 29 when I wrote it.
And the funny thing was most of them I accomplished, but I never went back ... I never stopped thinking of them as goals. And I just started thinking what would be a good process, as opposed to looking at everything as an outcome, looking at everything in a single ... It would be like you doing a tiny experiment and then saying, "Okay, the result of this tiny experiment was this. Therefore, I will never do this again." Or, "I will always do this again." It's the bane of deterministic thinking. It's a bone I have to pick with the Greeks because Aristotle, that guy, yes, no, zero, 100, black, white. The world doesn't work that way. We are deterministic thinkers with linear goals, living in a probabilistic universe with exponential possibilities. How did you get the courage, really, to when I'm sure family members, I'm sure friends were like, "Really?"?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah, I love everything you just said about the contrast between those linear goals and also the fact that in those journals, you wrote those goals and never went back to them and they somehow ended up happening. I think to me, it was really about detaching from the outcome and starting more from a hypothesis. This is really the big difference from a linear goal and an experiment, is that when you have a linear goal, you have this very clear destination in mind. And you say, "I'm going to get there. I'm going to work really hard. And success is getting there." When you design an experiment, and that's how a scientist works, they say, "I'm actually not quite sure what's going to happen. Here's my hypothesis. It could be correct or incorrect and I'm going to do the thing. I'm going to collect data and then I'm going to see whether I was correct or not."
And so for me, it helped a little bit in communicating to people around me that I was just going to give it a try, and that the other options, the linear options, were still going to be there. Even though I knew deep down that I had no intention of going back to that, it just helped in communicating it to other people saying, "It's just an experiment." And that was a few years ago. I did not necessarily use that language at the time. So it's like retrospectively realizing that that's what I was doing. But just communicating, that don't worry, I'm giving this a try. If it's not working out, I haven't gone completely crazy. If it's not working, I will go back to something safer and more predictable. Or at least if I was being honest, that gives the illusion of predictability. So everybody can chill and relax and know that it's fine.
And it's also interesting how you mentioned that very often, it's the people who love us the most, that might be the biggest blockers when it comes to pursuing our deep curiosities. The ones where it is an unclear end and where we might very much fail. That's possible. The people who love us, they want us to be safe. And so they will very often push us towards those scripts that give us this illusion of safety, because they want to make sure that we're going to be okay. And so it comes from a very good place, but it can be very limiting in terms of the options that we actually explore.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And I think ... So my main background is in asset management, and one of the things that we see happening in asset management time and time again is that the client has the wrong timeframe. We call it hyperbolic discounting. And they focus on the individual outcomes of bets. My friend, Annie Duke, wrote a book called Thinking in Bets. It's a better way in my opinion to think about things. You don't say, "Oh, I made Investment A and it failed. Therefore, I will never make an Investment A again." Because that's what Annie calls resulting. Tthat when you telescope down into a single event and a single outcome, hyperbolic discounting literally makes your mind, your brain, which you're fascinated with, focus in and narrow its focus to such a degree that you are really totally missing the forest for the trees. And it happens so often in ... Human operating system is amazing. Because God, it'd be great if there was an instruction manual, but there isn't one.
But then you think, "That's great," because we all get to write our own instruction models. And I think that one of the things that fascinated me, as I was getting ready to chat with you, is we all are the product, whether we like it or not, of how we evolved. I'm a big fan of Will Storr who writes a lot about storytelling and status obsession and all that. And one of the things that he says is the first thing evolutionarily we want to do is to fit in. But the minute we fit in, then we want to stand out. And so it's very interesting though because ... There's a great book by Todd Rose called Collective Illusions, and I think a lot of us perceive the thoughts of others incorrectly. Here's an example. In Saudi Arabia, not a great place if you're a woman, for the most part, in my opinion. Maybe that's changing, maybe I'm wrong. But in Saudi Arabia, it was widely thought that men thought it was a moral failure to have their wives work.
And that is what Todd would call a collective illusion. People thought that's what people think, but that wasn't what men thought at all. When they did a special kind of poll, and they found that 87% of Saudi men thought that it would be fine if their wife worked, all of a sudden, it's like the little child who calls the emperor naked, the number of women getting jobs increased 187%. And so it's one of those great examples of you can't mind read what the collective of humanity thinks about things. You think you can, but you really can't. But it's also one of those million invisible threads that bind us, or we think we're bound by these precepts, that people think this, people think that. Well, maybe they don't. And it's hard though, if you are programmed evolutionarily to want to fit in to break those boundaries.
And so one of the things you talk about in the book is we also get trapped in busyness, productivity tools. I'm probably ... I'm going to out myself here. I don't use any productivity tools. Even though I was a quant, I do not believe in the quantified self. Because I think that they can ... Ben Goodspeed had a great line, which is, "Don't confuse activity with effectiveness." Yet, to get back to what you're trying to help people and let them learn, is we got to take a different path. You referenced Tim Urban, who I've had on the podcast. One of my favorite graphs of his is the way we see the world, and it's a flow chart with a green line, I think it is, and it just shows basically one path. And then he goes, "The way the world really is." And it's millions of paths. And then the one that we took is highlighted. How do you get people to return to beginner's mind, to restore a childlike wonder?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah, I actually ... Oh, and by the way, I just want to do a little side note, but it was super interesting that you use that example from Saudi Arabia because I am half French, half Algerian. And it is also fascinating just noticing when I visit Algeria with my family, what is considered okay or not, okay for a woman to do, does impact my behavior. And sometimes, I also catch myself lowering my voice when I'm talking to a man or those kind of things that you're supposed to do, because they're more acceptable. I come back to you to France or the UK or the US, and I go back to being more of my normal self. So it's very interesting how all of those different scripts that we have can be very insidious. Even if you're someone who's fairly self-aware, this will have an impact the way people behave around you. The way people expect you to behave in certain situations is going to have an impact.
And in the book I talk about the concept of cognitive scripts, which I find absolutely fascinating. So there was a study that was conducted in 1979 where very simple, they ask people, "In this given situation, how would you behave? What would you do in this situation?" And what they realized is that most people, given a certain situation, will behave in exactly the same way. So they did that with going to the doctor, going to the restaurant, and a bunch of different things that we do in everyday life. And everybody went through the exact same step. It's as if everybody had written the exact same script that you were going to give to an actor and say, "This is how you're supposed to behave." Then they kept on conducting research and they found out that those cognitive scripts actually are not just in simple situations, like going to a doctor or the restaurant, but we use them for making a lot of decisions in our life. Choosing our career, choosing our partner, choosing how to dress, choosing what to eat. All of those decisions in our daily lives.
And some of them, pretty consequential driven by cognitive scripts. So what I recommend doing for anyone who's wondering, "What path am I on? Is that the default path or is that something ... Is that what I really want?," is becoming aware of those scripts. For that, I talk about self-anthropology. It's really the idea that just like an anthropologist goes to a new culture and studies it and they go there with fresh eyes, they know nothing about that culture. So they bring their little notebook and they're field notes and they just capture observations. And they ask questions like, "Why do people behave in this way? Why do people care about this and why do they talk like that?" And they just take those notes.
Without any judgment at this stage, it's really just about observing how people behave, how they think, how they communicate. You can do the exact same thing by acting like an anthropologist, but with your own life as the topic of study. And so you can spend ... I recommend around 24 hours, doesn't need to be very long. But really, take a notebook or on your phone and observe your own life, pretend that you know nothing about it. And have this very, almost like this childlike curiosity of asking questions. Like, "Why do we care about this and why do I spend so much time on this, and why does my life look like that?"
I've done this exercise with a bunch of people and every time, they all find different things. But the one thing that keeps them coming back is I hadn't realized how many of my decisions were automatic and how many things in my life I do just because that's the way I've been doing it or that's just the way we do things. Very often, that's enough for a lot of people. Just to realize ... A little bit like for me, that realization when someone asks me, "How are you doing, how's life?," is just having this moment of self-observation. Where you can realize that although you think that you've been acting with a lot of agency, actually, a lot of your decisions are automatic, and a lot of your behaviors and even ways of thinking are scripted.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And that's another part of the thing that I think is just in our base code, which is this fear of uncertainty. And so we will do virtually anything to gain what is really an illusion of control. It isn't control. It's an illusion. But we so believe and invest ourself in that illusion, that we make the mistake to think that it's real. Whereas that isn't the way the world works at all. At all. The world is very messy. And if you go in, like, "I am going to be in control of everything," you are going to hit a wall really, really fast. And when you do, I think sometimes that's an opportunity to wake up. I started doing serious ... That's why I kept journals, was because I realized, "I probably am not optimized here. I think maybe that I could upgrade some of my mental models."
And so the general semantics, I'm sure you're familiar with Korzybski, where, "The map is not the territory," the menu is not the meal. And yet, words are magic spells, I think. And if you can really indoctrinate yourself, to a point where you so narrow your perception field, that literally you don't know that what you don't know. And it becomes self-reinforcing. So it's not just the external. We were talking earlier about how people who really love us. I had that in my own life. I was absolutely certain that writing the book, What Works on Wall Street, would make my career. Everyone in my family disagreed. Doing it took years of sitting in a room alone thinking about this stuff, and then doing the actual research. And my dad would come and say, "Dude, you are really fucking up. Why are you doing this? Why don't you do something that meets your talents and abilities?"
And I know that that came from a good place in my dad. He wasn't trying to browbeat me. And yet, I had mentioned earlier, which might end up as part of the podcast because we're wild and crazy here. But Shakespeare, Sonnet 29, which is, "When, in disgrace with fortune in men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, and look upon myself, and curse my fate. Desiring this man's art and this man's scope, with what I most enjoy contented least." He nailed it. He nailed it back then. But he also nailed the fact that we are highly mimetic creatures. Let's not be deterministic about this and say being highly mimetic is always bad or always good. It's not. You can learn a tremendous amount through mimicry. We have mirror neurons, as you know, and it's a great way to learn.
And our motto here at OSV is crawl, walk, run. It's the people who don't want to do the crawl and walk part that sometimes take issue with us. And yet, watch a baby. I highly recommend this to anyone watching or listening. I am blessed with six grandchildren, and I just love watching the babies because literally, they are learning at a rate that is incredible, almost impossible for we adults to duplicate. Crawling, making mistakes, falling over, pulling one ... If you ever have watched a baby, everyone knows this. Why do we think that once we are all grown up that that doesn't still make sense? And if it does, how can reading your wonderful book help people have their a-ha moment?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah, actually, in a strange way, I think it connects back to what you were saying earlier about our industrial age and the incentives of our society. In our society, the way it's designed right now, we are valued, paid, compensated based on our level of productivity, our contribution, how much we can contribute to a business, to society in general. And so because of that, there is an incentive to be perceived as the expert in the room. There's an incentive to look like you know everything. There's an incentive to look like you are certain about where you're going. And there's also a really big incentive for leaders in particular, to look like they know, "It's okay if it looks messy. It's okay if things are not necessarily ..." Looking like they're going to plan. "But don't worry. I know and I will lead you to a safe place and we will succeed."
And those are the incentives. And this is also why a lot of people now tie their productivity, their level of productivity, to their own self-worth. Where they feel like if they're not being productive, if they're not creating something of value to society, then they're not a worthy human being, which is absolutely horrible when you think about it. And I think this is the crux of it, is that children haven't developed a knowledge of these incentives yet. They don't know that they're supposed to know. They don't know that they're supposed to be the experts. So they're just learning. They're crawling and they're having a lot of fun while doing it.
We have this amazing capacity as human beings that develops in adulthood. And that as far as we know, we are the only mammals that are capable of doing this. And that's metacognition. That's the ability to observe our own thoughts. Which by the way, journaling, I also journal every morning just like you, and it's a big part of my life. That's a metacognitive practice. It's really taking your thoughts out of your own head and putting them in a place where you can actually look at them, observe them, work with them. So metacognition is something that we develop and it's a wonderful capacity that we have as human beings because it allows us to also look at some of our instinctive responses, fear of uncertainty, our stress, our anxieties, and say, "Okay, I see you, but I am not necessarily going to follow you. I'm able to think my way through this at a cognitive level."
But the flip side of that, because as you were saying, there's really nothing that's really bad or good. It's really how you apply it and how you use it. Metacognition also has this more negative effect of making us always think about the way we're being perceived and trying to, as you said, trying to belong. And to me, that's the problem. And this is why it changes so much, and this is why we lose this childlike curiosity, or rather it's not that we lose it, but we stop expressing it because we feel like that's not the most appropriate way of behaving and showing up in the world in today's society as it is designed with our current incentives.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. I think you would be a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson. I always recommend people read his nonfiction stuff because that is something that he covers in great detail, about the idea that ... And he's always on a tirade against deterministic thought. And he even wrote a really interesting thing called Maybe Logic in which he says, "Look, to succeed at the way the world is going ..."
He was remarkably prescient. He wrote, in 1975, things that are only now becoming germane with AI and all that kind of stuff. But with these new capabilities, the deterministic yes, no, right, wrong, is going to be a dead end for people.
And so again, back to Wilson and Maybe Logic, in the book, he's like, "You have to embrace uncertainty, flexibility, multiple perspectives, and be aware of them." That's metacognition, right? And he pushes it much further and says, I love what he once quipped, "I don't believe anything entirely, but I have many suspicions." And so I've tried to always look at the world that way because with a broader aperture, you're going to see more.
We get so judgmental. And kind of back to our talk about society, I'm currently reading Will Storr's new book about stories being a deal. And essentially what he says is, "Look, we are forever being trailed by an exhaust of social cues." And it's at the subconscious level, and that's why we instantly care about hierarchy. That's why we instantly care about status. But hey, you're not going to be able to change that, but you can work with it differently. So if you're going to care about status, don't go for ...
Like Henry Ford. I was reading the book last night. Henry Ford had a morality police, and if you were going to get the extra $5 a day, you had to submit yourself to unannounced inspections of your home, your family. Then you got marked off, whether you were a Ford man, not quite a Ford man, or horrible, we're going to fire him.
And this ridiculous idea of treating human beings as if they were cogs in a machine. Taylorism, writ large, for those who don't know, look this guy up, scientific engineering. And essentially, what he did was he turned every human in a factory into a robot. And that worked for the factory, but we're not doing factories in America anymore and most of the Western world. The world that is becoming is a world of ... It's the world where the curious person is going to be king or queen. It is the world where doing things like you are doing is going to result in amazing new things.
But we get imprinted, right? Timothy Leary, who is unfortunately mostly known for his affection for LSD, actually was a very serious psychologist, and had the idea that we get imprinted at various times in our life. And he uses antiquated language, obviously. He was writing in the 1960s. But one of the things that I read I really reflected on, is ... He said, "By the time you're four years old, you've already, through no choice of your own, been imprinted with a winner's script or a loser's script, top dog or bottom dog." And he advanced the argument that if you want to solve that and re-imprint yourself, you got to go with psychedelics. Obviously, there are other ways to do it, but I think that we also have to understand that we're all human. And to try to deny that you're not going for social acceptance, that you're not going to play by the implicit game rules ... It's also part of our human history that in the past, if you were like that, they burned you at the stake.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yes. No, absolutely. And I think this is really all about being aware of those scripts and being intentional as to when you actually decide, based on your current circumstances, current priorities, you might actually want to follow some scripts in some areas of your life. The issue is that for a lot of people, this is completely subconscious. They have no idea that this is what they are doing, but I personally think that it's also completely fine.
There have been also so many books, and I think are quite dangerous, just telling people, "Just quit your job, go and do your thing." And they are, I think, a little bit disconnected from the reality of a lot of people. You might be the primary carer for someone. You might have ... Whatever it is in your life that makes it very difficult to do this.
So to me, it's more about waking up and being aware of where you decide to fill your scripts and where you decide to not to, and making sure there's always a little bit of space for curiosity and experimentation. And I think it's completely fine if you say, "You know what? I currently have a job where I know I'm a little bit of a cog in the machine, and I actually have wonderful colleagues. They're great. We have nice conversations. I work on nice projects. It's maybe not the most intellectually stimulating kind of work I could be doing because I have been doing it for a while, and so maybe I could do it with my eyes closed, but that's what I choose for this part of my life, and I'm fully aware of it. This is the script. I'm following it, and this is fine. Give me the script. I'll be a good actor here, and I'm going to follow it here."
But then I have other areas of my life. Maybe it's my health, maybe it's my relationships, maybe it's some sort of creative work that's calling me where I will be a lot more experimental. And I might experiment with different ways of taking care of my health, different ways of eating. Maybe it's my diet. Maybe it's with my partner, where we say, "Actually, let's experiment a little bit more and let's talk more. Let's figure out what our relationship could look like if it's not just following the scripts that it's supposed to follow."
And so you don't necessarily have to be experimental in every single area of your life, but being aware of this, as you were saying, Timothy Leary calling it imprinting, being aware of the parts of your life where you've been imprinted, and decide where actually this script of success is fine in that area, but in that other area, I want to be more experimental. I think this is really the mindset shift that you want to have, is this awareness and then taking action based on knowing this sense of, as you said, self-authorship.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And what I love what you just did there, was you used a probabilistic argument as opposed to a deterministic ... You have to quit your job, you have to follow your bliss, you have to do this. Those are just prescriptions. And oftentimes, as you well noted, they're not one size fits all. We are going and we are firmly on our way into a world where the idea of mass-produced anything is going away. In the 1950s, there were three TV networks in America and two major newspapers. Talk about a reality tunnel that was really difficult to escape.
And yet, in the world that we're going into, in my opinion, is one that is bespoke. We go from mass production to mass customization and the ability to, as you note ... You can keep your job, you can experiment with these tiny experiments, keep field notes, and not do it all at once. I love the idea that you're not just saying, "Nope, you got to do it this way, or it's just not going to work." That's bullshit. There are a lot of different ways that you can do things.
So when you read your book ... Listen, for my listeners and for our viewers, I first off highly recommend this book. It's really, really good. But when you read it, think, as she just noted, it's not a one size fits all. Maybe try the idea of being your own anthropologist. Keep field notes.
We all walk around with these. I'm holding up a smartphone. And I got into the habit of ... I didn't do it the way you outline it in your book, but just anytime I would feel a little off or feel great, I would say, "Hey, I'm doing this, and wow, I feel such energy," et cetera. And then guess what happens? If you just keep doing that, keep doing that, all of a sudden, you notice, "Wow, I always feel great when I'm doing this. I always feel horrible when I'm doing that. Maybe I'll do a little less of that and a little more of this." It doesn't have to be a quantum leap. It can be a pivot, as it were. Adaptability, the ability to be agile.
We also, at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, we do early stage seed investing. And one of the things that we really like to see in a founder is agility. The ability to pivot, the ability to say, "We thought that that was going to be the thing, but guess what? We learned, through getting feedback, from putting the product out there on the market or the service or whatever, that that's not the thing. But we learned some of the things it might be, so we're going to pivot." And it just seems so obvious to me that that's the person you want to bet on. And yet, again, our underlying enculturation gets us the leader. And some companies are indistinguishable from cults, right? Oh, the leader is going to lead us to the promised land. I'm always the guy in the back, going, "We'll see. I don't know."
But I say that about myself too, right? We are unreliable narrators who confabulate our own hero's journey. We're authors of ourselves. And guess what? We're going to add some maybe white lies in there to ourselves. That's the thing that's hard to see, I think. And so the field notes, I love that idea. And I also love your idea of getting it out of your own head. I passionately believe that writing is thinking, and it is thinking because you get it out into what I call the real world, or which I perceive as the real world. And it also gives you a really quick clue that ... I don't have the faintest clue what I'm actually talking about here, or wow, I really do have a pretty good idea about how to proceed. But Wittgenstein said, "Don't look for meaning. Look for use."
What you're advocating, what I'm advocating, it seems so sensible to both of us. And yet there's the Red Queen effect, which you talk about in the book. I'm a huge fan of Lewis Carroll. And the Red Queen is basically saying, "Oh, no. Here, you got to run at the top speed if you just want to stay in place." And so it's almost like we get infected with these mind viruses. And I'm always searching for ways to inoculate myself because I'm a human being and I'm no different than anyone else, and I'm ... Probably very easy for me to get that mind virus.
You also talk about kairos, which is a Greek idea of just ... I think it's the right moment or the-
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Opportune moment.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
The opportune moment. But how would you advise our listeners and viewers? How do they get there? How do they notice it? And then once they get in the habit of noticing it, what do they do from there?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah. 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 it's a little bit like a classic platform video game where you need to collect all of the points, all of the artifacts and everything you're supposed to get on one level to be allowed to go onto the next one. 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 there are lots of problems with this linear approach where you say, "That's the ladder I'm going to climb. Here's the goal. Let's do it and let's climb it."
And it also creates social comparison because you can almost see it as a bunch of ladders against the same wall, and you can look right and left and you can see other people climbing their ladder. And you can't really help yourself from asking, "Am I climbing fast enough? Why is this guy I was in school with up there already and I'm still here? Am I being too slow? Am I doing this right?"
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.
And you talked also about chronos. You mentioned kairos. So the ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos is the definition of time that we tend to use in our society, and it's linked to that linear approach. So the linear things have to happen in a certain order, quantitative definition of time. This is what we use. Switching to a kairos definition of time is a more qualitative definition of time. And I think the best way to describe it is how ... Well, I guess right now, this conversation we're having, you and I right now, I don't know what it is. And I'm sure when I will finally look at the time, I'll be like, "Whoa, I can't believe it's been ..." Because when you find yourself lost in a good conversation, you lose track of time. The quality of this moment is so rich that you forget how long it's taking. You don't know. You lose your sense of chronos time, really. You're in kairos.
And so I would just ... Not in a prescriptive way. More, I hope, in an inspiring way, that might inspire people to try and seek that in their lives, but try to inject a little bit more kairos time in your life. Try to seek those moments, and to notice them. A little bit like what you were saying, where you take a little voice note on your phone and you say, "This gave me a lot of energy. This was really, really nice and beautiful. I want more of this in my life." You can do that whenever you notice you had a kairos moment. Where has the time gone? What happened? That was amazing. Make a little note. Add that to your field notes, and start noticing those patterns so you can optimize your life, not in a quantitative way of trying to make the most of every minute, but in a qualitative way where you optimize for depth and richness of your experience.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And that seems to be the secret hiding in plain sight because we all, everyone, has had that experience where they are having a great conversation like we are right now. And when you said, "Time," I literally glanced up at the time because I had no idea what time it was. And I joked with you earlier that my nannies ... I have multiple nannies because I'm often a naughty boy. And my nannies will start trying to do the hook that takes you off-stage. And what I do is, when I'm really enjoying what I'm doing, I turn the cellphone upside down because what they do is they text me. It's like, "Jim." For people who are not watching but listening, I'm pointing at my watch.
But we've all experienced it, all of us. I don't think I've ever met somebody who hasn't had that ... Being out of time. And it's almost always a flow state. And it's almost always when you are doing something that is just so enjoyable, just for its own sake. It can be a conversation like this, where you learn things or think about things or spark things, or it could be sitting in a room ...
Another thing I do, I'm kind of crazy, every morning, my first thing that I do is I literally sit or stand for 15 or 20 minutes with nothing. No books, no phone, no music, nothing. And the first time I tried it, I failed very, very badly. But in building it out as one of your growth loops, it was kind of like, "Huh. I think what I'm going to note here is that it's probably pretty bad that I can't sit." And of course, it's the Pascal quote, "The huge problem with humanity is that man can't sit alone in a room for 15 minutes." And it was that quote that made me think, "God dammit, I can," and failed very badly. And I think of Beckett's, "Ever tried, ever failed, try again, fail better." And that's kind of the way I think.
You were talking about the ladder aspect of the linear nature of things. I always try to mess with people, and I'll say to them when I'm talking to them, "Failure is a ladder." And they're like, "What?" I'm like, "If you insist that you want to climb a ladder, climb that ladder," because that's where you get new knowledge. That's where you get new information. It's not through great successes. It's often through failures. And we were talking earlier about how a lot of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time was not followed by, "Eureka," but, "That's strange." And so making room for that and building them into what you call growth loops, I'm very, very simpatico with that.
You also talk about procrastination. Again, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty of that, but I don't think of it as like a waste of time at all. And so how do you advise your readers to stop punishing themselves and stop wearing the hair shirt? Oh, I'm procrastinating. I'm a bad person.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah. I mean, the response we have to procrastination is also linked to a lot of things that we talked about, right? Productivity and self-worth. So usually, when we find ourselves procrastinating ... Which is actually really funny because that's something I noticed with procrastination, is that we're very happy to have those more high-level conceptual conversations about it, but at work, very few people would walk to their boss and say, "The reason why I haven't made any progress on this is because I've been procrastinating," right? You'll say, "Oh, something came up," or whatever, but you're not going to say that. And so there is also a bit of a taboo around it. We don't really talk about it at the real experiential level, where just conceptually, we say, "Oh, yeah. Of course I procrastinate sometimes."
So I think first it would be really helpful if, as a society, which I know it's going to probably take a lot of time and a few more podcast conversations to actually have people start shifting their view on this, but as a society, if we actually stopped really labeling procrastination as bad, I think that would already be a very good first step.
And the issue here is that, as well as with fear or anxiety or any of those emotions we decided to label as bad, what we try to do when we experience them is to just squash them, get rid of them, beat them. What procrastination is is just a signal from your brain that something is not quite working right now. That's really what it is. Your brain is trying to tell you, "This is not working." And if you choose to listen, you can actually learn what it is that is not working, and it's very helpful.
So what I recommend people do is next time you find yourself procrastinating ... And it is really not about never procrastinating, because I don't think that's possible. I still procrastinate a lot. You just said you also procrastinate. Everybody procrastinates. So it's not about trying to never procrastinate. Even the most productive people, the most successful people, procrastinate. It's about changing your response when it happens, and almost go like, " Oh, hello, you're back. What are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to teach me here? I'm listening. I'm listening. Let's have this little conversation."
And in the book, I share a little tool that I find helpful if you need a more structured approach to do this. After a while, you probably don't even need the tool, but at the beginning, if it's your first time having this conversation, it can help. It's a little bit like having conversation prompts, wherein you don't know someone and you want to be guided. And so the way you can go about it is ask, "Okay, tell me, is the problem coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand?"
If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced that you should be doing that thing in the first place. And that might mean that the task itself is wrong, is not aligned with your wider priorities, or the task is badly designed. So it is trying to solve a problem, but it's actually not going to solve that problem, or it might mean that you're not the right person to do it. And so that might mean that you should delegate it or that maybe ... This is something you can say today, but maybe AI should do it, maybe not you. And at a subconscious level, rationally, you're not convinced that you should be doing this thing, and this is why you're procrastinating. So you ask this question. And if it says, "Oh, yeah, rationally, that doesn't make sense," then also you can go back to your team and say, "I'm not fully convinced. I've been struggling with this because it doesn't make sense. Can we go back to the drawing board?"
If the head says, "Yes, I'm convinced, let's do this," then move on to the heart. Ask the heart. Does the heart want to do this? Is the problem coming from the heart? If the problem comes from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, you don't feel like that's going to be a lot of fun. And there are tasks like these where rationally, you're like, "Yeah, I should do this," but it doesn't look like it's going to be fun. In those cases, make it fun. Maybe go to your favorite coffee shop, grab that friend or that colleague that's always fun to work with and tell them, "Let's do a little coworking session. Can you just sit with me, bit of banter, we do this thing, and I get it done." Or create a reward for yourself for afterwards if you do it. So make it fun.
If the head and the heart say, "Yeah, let's go," but you're still not doing it, you're procrastinating, then it's very likely that the problem comes from the hand. And that means that, although rationally, emotionally speaking, you're convinced, you don't believe that you have the right skills, right tools, right support in order to do this. And so again, once you start surfacing this, listen to your procrastination, the solution becomes obvious. You can literally raise that hand and say, "I need help." Is that mentoring? Is that coaching? Tutorial, online course, whatever that looks like, you can get yourself unstuck.
And so that's really what it is. It's really about having this conversation. And instead of judging yourself, try to understand what is my brain trying to communicate here? And how can I use that information to actually move forward without any of the self-blame normally associated with procrastination?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. The self-blame is a really ... We police ourself to an extent that we are completely unaware of. And I think that the way you break it down makes it make a lot more sense. My earlier solution was always to just say to people, "Oh, no, no, no. I'm probably the laziest human you will ever meet. So I'm not procrastinating. No, I'm just lazy." And the looks that I would get were pretty interesting. And again, I think that you made a nod there to your network, right? I definitely think that Don Tapscott was right, in that your network is your filter. And that you now have the opportunity that we never, ever had in human history ever before, we now can search worldwide to create our network. That's how I found you. It's how I found virtually everyone who is a teammate at O'Shaughnessy Ventures. And yet we still feel almost like we're still captives in many respects of 19th century thinking, captives of time, space, geography, they're all collapsed. And now we have AI. We are using AI in everything we do at OSV. And we think that people who aren't doing that are going to get really upset in a couple of years because it's, for example, I was looking into three different authors and I wanted a review of... They're my favorite authors, and I was talking with a teammate and saying, "Yeah, no, you got to really read," in this instance, "Robert Anton Wilson."
And he said, "Didn't he write 30 books?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, he did, but just focus on this one and this one." I thought, "No, you know what?" We have an in-house AI. I said, "Yeah, I want you to go through everything Wilson's ever written, capture the main points of the book with a suggestion," and boom, Bob's your uncle. It was done in 35 minutes. 10 years ago, I would've needed a dozen smart people like you with PhD's and everything. And it would take months and months and months and months and months and the power that you are holding in your hand right now, they used to say this just about the internet.
Now that we have AI on, literally we carrying it around with us. We're carrying entire universities of really smart people around with us. And one of the things that I suggest to people is use that for your rabbit hole. Like your what-ifs are really great to have conversations with AI about. It can actually, it's a great way to have a conversation with yourself in many respects. And I'm getting to the point where I'm just going to train it on everything I do. I'm going to put everything I've ever written in there, and we call it Sim Jim. And I used to joke that I'm doing Sim Jim so that I can have the AI explain me to me because God, I don't have a clue.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
This is actually something I'm excited to try. Also, I journal on paper notebooks and after I'm done launching my book, I actually want to send them to an OCR company that can scan them and so I can upload them to an AI and do that kind of, this is self-anthropology on steroids really. You can probably uncover things that because it bypasses the conscious level, it finds patterns and connections in between behaviors and thoughts that you've been having sometimes across many years, especially if you're someone who's been journaling for a long time. And even if you don't journal, as you were saying, by having these conversations, you can ask meta questions about who you are, what you care about, the big questions, what you can contribute. And I find it absolutely amazing, and I agree with you, there is going to be a massive divide in the next few years between people who have decided to embrace that new technological revolution, and people who are not using AI out of resistance sometimes, but sometimes unfortunately out of ignorance.
So I know personally that I installed ChatGPT on my parents' phones and I showed it to them because I felt like it was my duty as a daughter to make sure that they were not left behind. And even though the way they use it is quite simple, at this stage, I feel like it's so important that they can use it. And I use it as a researcher as well, where I have conversations with other researchers that I have never talked to.
Some of them are no longer alive, and I can upload their research papers and ask questions. And again, that's what I love is that I can ask questions about what are they saying, what are the methods and why did they design it this way? What is the data saying? But also what's not there? I can ask about limitations that the researchers did not even think about writing because the AI is able to look at the entirety of the paper and compare it to other papers and surface things that would take me, even though I have a PhD, another 10 PhDs to work with me also to be able to do this.
So I completely agree with you, and that's something I'm very excited about. And I think that if anyone is comfortable with AI today, if you want to do something that is going to have a positive impact on your community, and I'm not talking about even changing the world or anything like that, but just making sure that the people around you, the people that you love, are aware and have the basics of how to use AI sorted, go and install either Clover or ChatGPT or something on their phone and show it to them. I think that's one of the best things that you can do for your community.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Amen. I feel exactly the same way, and I always try to do it in a really fun way. And so my 98-year-old mother-in-law is living with us, and she's still all there cognitively, which is pretty remarkable. And so she was asking me at dinner one night, could you show me? And I'm like, yeah, sure. So I put ChatGPT Pro in voice mode and I said, "Terry, just ask it whatever you want to ask it." And she did. And it answered the... And look on her face was just one of childlike wonder. And it just made me feel so good because here she's 98, she's having a wonderful conversation with the AI. And then I'm like, wait until you see this.
"Yeah, could you give Terry the same response but do it in Mandarin?" And then it translates into Mandarin and her eyes just literally were saucers. And I said, "Terry, what would you like translated and into what language?" And I can't remember exactly what she said, but I think it might've been German because it was a language she was familiar with. And she hadn't spoken German in ages, but she said, "Well, I want this translated into German." And then, literally, perfect translation. And she was just literally in awe. And so I love the idea that... And listeners, viewers, if you take nothing else away from our wonderful conversation today, do this. If you have parents, or you have friends, who are skeptical or not interested, just put... And it doesn't matter which one, by the way. Put any of the large language models or the generative stable diffusion models on their phone, they will flip out.
And then it's very consistent too with that crawl, walk, run, right? You just start a little bit and then you end up, like my wife always says, "You always go too far. You always just don't... You never know when to stop." Because one of the things that I was doing was putting a lot of things that I had made machine-readable from journals into the AI and basically saying things like, "I want you to analyze this text and pages and pages and tell me about my Jungian shadows." And I got to tell you, holy shit. I was like, "Ooh, this really, really knows me too well." So what else would you tell somebody? If somebody could book a couple of hours with you and they wanted you to be their coach, what would your couple of hours with them look like?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah, I just want to say first that you made me feel quite emotional with the story that you just shared because I lost my grandmother in 2020 from Covid and she did not speak French. I don't speak Arabic. And I was just visualizing in my head what it could have been like and the conversations that we could have had if those models existed at the time. So one more reason, if people are not convinced yet to try and do this with other people you have with you and especially maybe older people where you want to have conversations with them. And if you don't speak the same language, that's another great use case, I think. In terms of if you were to spend two hours with me, the main way I like to have conversations with people when they feel a bit stuck is to ask them two things. First, what would it look like if you defaulted to curiosity? So default to curiosity. And so whatever challenge it is, very often people try to find a solution straight away, or get rid of the problem. But what would it look like a little bit when we were talking about procrastination, what would it look like if you looked at it and just say, "Oh, hi, that's interesting. What can we learn from this?" And very often very good things and new ideas come out from just changing your stance a little bit, it's a little bit like fame and falling in love with problems and having your favorite problems. And so look at the problem and almost say like, "I love you. Thank you. What can we learn? Let's do this together." Default to curiosity would be probably one of the main takeaways they would take from this conversation.
And then the other question I love asking people is, what would it look like if it was an experiment? And this is also an amazing way to start looking at challenges, doubts, or even phases in your life and work where you feel a little bit lost. And again, there's this temptation to try and find a solution straight away. When you think about those liminal spaces, those in-betweens where you don't quite understand the rules, you're not quite sure what you want yourself. And it can be very anxiety inducing for a lot of us because as we were saying earlier, our brain is designed to limit uncertainty and that's for our own survival in an environment where you don't know what is that noise in the bushes and there might be a lion that wants to eat you, having the most information possible in a sense of certainty, actually means survival.
But in today's world, you probably want to do a little bit more than just surviving. And if you want to do a little bit more than surviving, you do need to be able to quiet that uncertainty just saying, "I know you're here and that's okay, and I am not going to try to get rid of you, squash you." And I am going to stay in that liminal space for a little bit longer. Just by being able to sit with the uncertainty a little bit longer, you are going to be able to find more interesting solutions. And I've had people say that, actually say, "Okay, cool, sit with the uncertainty. What does that look like? Do I just relax my shoulders and just wait?" And I tell them that, "No, it's not necessarily that, although it helps if you can relax your shoulders also, but it can actually be a pretty active process."
And this is why experiments are so helpful is because you don't need to have a solution. You don't need to know where you're going. You don't need to have any level of expertise, really. All you need to know, you need to do, is start from this place of curiosity and say, "What would it look like as an experiment?" And so you have a hypothesis, you might have a little hunch that maybe this could work, and you try it, you just try it and you see what happens.
And while you try it, you pay attention to the signals. You see how you feel, you see how the variables are changing and how the world is changing around you and you keep on adapting based on this. When you do that, when you go from what's the goal to what's the experiment, you'll be able to get to places where, and that's really what you want. You want to be able to look back in a few years and feel like, I have no idea this is where I could get to. I could not even imagine that this was possible and this is really what you want to optimize for.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And I love the idea of treating everything as an experiment. That's something that I've done. I didn't use those words, but it was like, it's just so helpful because you start out by basically saying, "This probably will fail, but hopefully I'll learn something. Maybe I won't though. Maybe I'll learn nothing, but it's an experiment. So I'm not investing myself into this or my self-image or who I am. It's just like an experiment." And lots of experiments fail. And yet again, we come almost full circle, don't we? Because one of the other things that we're going to do at OSV is we have an in-house AI and we're going to build an agent that basically just generates null hypotheses because human nature is always the opposite. Nobody goes looking for funding with the opening line, we're probably going to find that this has a null hypothesis and there's no positive value. And they're going to go, "And you want me to give you $10 million to do this? I don't think so."
However, learning via negativia is massive alpha. Learning at OSAM, we had what we called our idea graveyard. And boy, there were a lot of headstones in our idea graveyard, but the learning that we got through finding things that didn't work was so incredible. And so this idea that, okay, now that we have AI, let's just have the agent again, never gets tired, doesn't get bored, doesn't get angry, isn't cranky or hangry. It just keeps churning out those null hypotheses. And then we're going to auto publish them to a public database where researchers, thinkers, et cetera, can go and browse, hopefully by category. But we will probably have a surprise me with a single null hypothesis. And yet the full circle part of this is, to a lot of our thinking, all of us, and I include myself in this, is antiquated and we're optimized for a world that no longer exists and hasn't existed for a long time.
And we tend to, I'm a huge fan of David Deutsch, and he says one of the big problems with people, and again, I'm including all people here, we're not singling anyone out, is that we think we know everything, and therefore we think, "Nope, we know that, we'll never have to worry about that again." And the way he did it was great. He was like, so what were physicists arguing about in quantum physics in 1900? They weren't, because nobody was thinking about quantum physics yet. We have this flaw in our mind that we know everything and that prevents us from generating the new knowledge.
And his book is aptly named the Beginning of Infinity. I think we know half of 0.0000001% of nothing, and that we are literally at the beginning here, we are so brand new. And when you think about it, if you have any context at all, it was 100 years ago that the first human spoke to more than 10 million people at the same time, and it was the guy announcing on radio Lindbergh's return journey from France. That's like in the blink of an eye. We're babies. We're at the beginning of discovery, not the end. And so the reason I love what you've done with your book and your work, everything you're doing, you can take real small stop tiny experiments. And believe me, if people do this and really keep at it, you'll see, "Wow, I'm literally at the beginning of infinity and there's so much to learn. There's so much to unlearn. That's the other thing. We get the negative side wrong, right? It's like you need to learn. Well, really, almost equally as important is unlearning.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yes. That used to be my header on Twitter.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Oh, I love it.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah. The Alvin Toffler quotes that the illiterate of the 21st century would be the people who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn, which is actually, I found out when I wanted to include it in my book, that it's not an exact quote, which happens so often. So I actually had to rewrite it a little bit to include it in my book, and I had it on my header for so long. But I completely agree with you, and I think this is also why experiments are so helpful. It's because when you have this linear approach, you feel like you absolutely have to build on top of whatever it is that you did before. It needs to make sense. You spend so much time and energy acquiring these skills and building a network in a certain industry, and of course you're going to use these for the next rung of the ladder.
Whereas when you have an experimental approach, that doesn't matter because you're designing a new experiment. So you're going to use whatever skills make sense that you have acquired so far that are helpful for this. But you also can start from scratch. And when it comes to AI that, for example, it is so lucky when you are alive at a time in human history where you can start from scratch and everybody else is starting from scratch. And don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean that you should not start from scratch. If there's something where you don't know, it's okay to start from scratch anytime, but it's especially powerful if you're starting from scratch, you're conducting your first experiment, and so is everybody else. You are part of a giant experiment where nobody has no idea what they're doing, and everybody is fully aware of the fact that they have no idea what they're doing. This is really the best time to be experimenting,
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Could not agree with you more. I mean, literally, I have long believed... I say thank you to the universe every night and every morning when I get up that I feel like I've won the cosmic lottery, that I am alive at this point in human history just gets me so excited, just like I can't believe it. I can't believe I actually get to do all of this stuff. These tools are amazing. You know how Steve Jobs said computers were bicycles for the minds. AI is a rocket ship for the mind. And rather than say, "Oh, it's going to take my job." No, another human using AI might take your job, AI itself is not going to take your job. And the idea that the leverage it gives us, even right now, trying to put it into words, it's almost indescribable, the leverage that it gives everyone.
And so I think that if people listening take anything away from our conversation, number one, buy her book. She's got a lot of great ways in there to build out these tiny experiments. And that's the other thing I want to emphasize here. I love the title because it's like, who can't do a tiny experiment? Anybody can do a tiny experiment. And all you need though is that little push, I think, because what'll happen is you might get hooked on it and you might just think, "Wow, I guess that I've had my entire life wrong for all of the time that I've been doing this."
But like you say, we're all in the same boat right now. We are literally all in the same boat. So it's not like somebody's 100 years ahead of you on this stuff, even one year ahead of you on this stuff. And so we're all at the starting line, the gun has gone off, let's acknowledge that. Don't just stand there just thinking, "Well, why should I run? They've already started running." Well, because you're going to run in a completely maybe different direction. It reminds me of Monty Python. I love Monty Python, and they do joke Olympics with Greek philosophers playing soccer and stuff. And the one that I love are the very out there thinkers at a track race and they shoot the gun and they all go in different directions. So, well, now they're actually buzzing the thing because, and one of my nannies is saying, "Jim, you are running up 15 minutes. You have another thing you have to do." So they're using the hook on me. This has been absolutely delightful for me. I hope you've enjoyed it as well. I certainly lost all sense of time.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Same. That was a high-risk conversation for sure.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Well, if you've listened to us in the past you know that at the end of all of our chats we make you the empress of the world, and now there's some rules. You're empress of the world just for one day. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a re-education camp. You can't force anyone to do something. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magic microphone and you can say two things into it that will incept the entire population of the earth. Whenever their morning is, the next morning, they're going to wake up. Every human on earth is going to wake up and say, "I just had two of the greatest ideas, and unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually act on these two." What are you going to incept in the world's population?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
I would say first you can just do things, and the second, in 100 years, nobody will remember you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Wow. Well, maybe, though. They're going to remember me because I'm going to make Sim Jim. I joke to my youngest daughter who used to be a stand-up comedian. She's like, "You know, dad, I am your last thin tether to reality. You're going to float away, and I know that I'm going to be the one taking care of you when you're old and spitting." And I said, "Oh, no, no, no, honey. I'm going to do a simulation of myself to bother you until the end of your days."
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
That's so true, though. You just made me realize that, because I've always used that phrase with myself whenever I was a little bit anxious about something, going on the stage, doing a big thing. And so for me, it's a very positive statement saying, whatever happens, even if I screw up spectacularly with this thing, in 100 years, nobody will remember me. But now you just made me think about the fact that actually, with AI now, this might not be true anymore, so maybe I'll have to go and brainstorm a second one instead of this one.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Leave it to me to throw you into an existential angst moment. It's like, "Oh, they will remember me? Oh, no." I solve that by just doing pratfall after pratfall after pratfall. And so it's just kind of like, yeah, of course if they remember me, they'll remember me for all of the idiotic, stupid things I did, and that's fine. But I actually, all joking aside, love that attitude because you're right. One of the things it took me a long time to learn is that when I was younger, I really was concerned what other people thought of me. And then as I got older and I had more and more experiences, I realized they weren't thinking about me at all. They were thinking about themselves, just like I was. So that's one of the universals of humanity, and that's actually, don't worry about it because the AI might still be there, but nobody else will really remember you. So I think it's great advice.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Thank you. I feel better.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
This has been absolutely delightful for me. Tell your book is available everywhere and people can find you on Twitter, your Substack.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Yeah, absolutely. Just look up Tiny Experiments anywhere books are sold. You can find it on Amazon or you can support your local bookshop by going there and getting a copy. And I'm on Twitter and everywhere on social media @Neuranne, N-E-U-R-A-N-N-E. Thank you so much.
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