Monthly Rewind: June 2024
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News & Updates 🗞️
OSV Book Club
Join us on 12 July (at noon EDT) for a lively discussion - hosted by Nicolás Forero - where we’ll dive into Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense by Rory Sutherland.
As a reminder, you can join our book club (for free) by heading over to Discord using this link.
Our Fourth and Fifth 2024 Fellowships
Huge congratulations to Monika Seyfried and Jason Carman, who have each received a $100,000 O’Shaughnessy Fellowship.
Monika Seyfried
Monika is a multidisciplinary interaction designer based in Poland. Her research focuses on leveraging living systems and the natural world to develop sustainable data storage technologies.
During her Fellowship, Monika will leverage the biotechnology expert community to conduct technological research into storing digital data in plants and living organisms. She will also build a scientific research venture aimed at transforming how we interact with data and addressing the significant carbon dioxide emissions caused by data storage. To learn more about Monika and her project, check out this announcement.
Jason Carman
Jason is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who has been creating films since his childhood, with one of his films winning Best Visual FX at the 2016 All-American High School Film Festival among thousands of other entrants.
Jason will use his Fellowship to continue growing his weekly documentary video series, S³, which makes the field of deep technology more accessible by spotlighting pioneering founders and companies. Since launching S³ in 2023, Carman has released over 40 episodes, accumulated over 30,000 subscribers on the show's YouTube channel, and given multiple startups their first media coverage.
As well as building S³, Jason will work on several other original film projects, including documentaries exploring controversial deep technology topics.
For more on Jason’s Fellowship, just follow this link.
Applications for the 2024 Fellowships are now closed and will reopen on January 1, 2025. You can learn more via our website.
Thoughts 💭
“The best listeners listen between the lines.”
- Nina Malkin
"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."
- Clifford Geertz
“All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.”
- Fernand Braudel
"Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information."
- Idries Shah
Explore our Two Thoughts series: doses of wisdom delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday. Warning: may trigger incurable curiosity.
Conversations 🗣️
Chris Wilcha — Flipside (Ep. 218)
The award-winning filmmaker joins us to discuss his rapturously received documentary, Flipside.
“And what I think surprised me was the people who came up after who didn't want to just talk about the film, they wanted to talk about their own failed projects. Like a guy came up and said, ‘I've been trying to write a book for years, and I stop and I start, and how did you do it?’ And there was this unexpected self-help kind of throughline that I didn't totally foresee that it really seems to awaken in people that feeling of ‘there's a thing I always wanted to do or make or a business I wanted to start,’ and I feel like that's been a really unexpected bonus of the conversations that have come around that kind of stuff. You know what I mean? The creative failure, but the fact that there's still time to try to do things and finish things and follow through.”
John A. Paulous — Avoiding Innumeracy (Ep. 219)
The professor, mathematician, and writer shares 50+ years of learning on all things mathematical!
“[S]tories, vignettes are, if possible, and often they are, a better way to impart mathematical ideas than just the equations and formulas […] But to the extent you can tell a story and give a little vignette, give a little aphorism sometimes, even that'll do, you can get a mathematical idea across without raising people's unnatural fear of mathematics.”
Ellen Fishbein — Make Art, Not Noise (Ep. 220)
The founder of the independent publisher Altamira Studio joins us to discuss the state of the publishing industry, her advice for aspiring authors, and why Shakespeare’s sonnets were the Tweets of the 16th century.
“The publishers, they used to be talent scouts, they used to go looking for undiscovered talent and try to find that and bring it to market. But now what they're doing is they're scouting out people who have already brought themselves to market by building a large social media following […] Now, the problem is that that skill set around building online distribution is not the same skill set as writing a really, really, really, really, really awesome book. Sometimes people who can do both of those things overlap, but most of the time, they don't. And also, there's a lot of really, really smart readers who don't use social media. They don't use Twitter, they don't use these platforms. They don't sign up for newsletters because again, they value their time. They don't want emails all the time. And so those people aren't being taken into consideration with these decisions.”
Mona Sobhani — A Neuroscientist’s Journey From Materialism to Beyond (Ep. 221)
What led a cognitive neuroscientist to break out of the box of materialism, and what did she discover along the way? Mona talks us through her journey.
“So a lot of these things that we in mainstream science or physicalism take for granted, we keep saying they're established, they're really not. And it is a very odd thing to watch in science because if you flip over to a quantum physics journal, it's like a different world versus when you flip over to mainstream biology because they're living in two separate worlds.”
For root access to your humanOS, dig into our back catalogue of 221 episodes (and counting).
Words ✍️
Happiness Springs From Within | “You will always be only as good, only as happy, only as successful as you perceive yourself to be. Happiness springs from within, never from without.”
Flipside is in Theaters! | “Sometimes, an early failure can lead directly to a project’s success. Other times, it can result in its abandonment. On rare occasions, the latter can become the former.”
The Infinite Loops Guide To… Leadership | “I like to work behind the scenes and get people to align towards the vision. When you do that and when you successfully do that, it looks like magic.” ~ Shreyas Doshi