OSV Book Club! Our First 2024 Fellowship! The Great Reshuffle!
OSV Book Club! Our First 2024 Fellowship! The Great Reshuffle!
PLUS February's Monthly Rewind
Lots going on at OSV HQ! Before we get to February’s Monthly Rewind, we wanted to share a few updates together with a couple of ways that YOU can get involved…
1. Introducing… the OSV Book Club!
“To be able to talk to your heart’s content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.”
― Haruki Murakami
Looking to explore some new reads in 2024? Desperate to discuss how a book made you think and feel with a living, breathing human being? You’re in luck! Whether you’re a seasoned bookworm or a curious newbie looking to meet some like-minded thinkers, the OSV Book Club is the place for you.
Alongside intellectually stimulating, fun and provocative discussions on an eclectic range of books, we’re offering exclusive giveaways, IRL meet-ups and more. To join (for free), just head on over to our Discord using this link. See you there!
2. We’ve Awarded Our First Fellowship of 2024
"We can learn so much about a culture's history, traditions, values and more from its language. We are delighted to be able to support Jack in saving as many languages as we can."
― Jim O’Shaughnessy
HUGE congratulations to Jack Connor, a linguist, programmer, and author who will use his $100,000 fellowship grant to save dying languages by using AI.
Using existing and collected audio, video, and written content, Jack will train a large language model to communicate fluently in Navajo, an endangered language spoken primarily in the Southwestern United States. He will then build a repeatable process to use on the over 3,000 other endangered languages that exist today. Jack also aims to create a documentary to showcase his mission's importance and demonstrate the human face of the Navajo language.
You can learn more about Jack and his project here.
Fellowship applications remain OPEN until and including 30 April 2024. Wherever you are, whatever you do, if you have a game-changing idea, a simple application can be the only thing standing between you and your dream future. Apply here.
3. Are You Ready For The Great Reshuffle?
The Great Reshuffle touches every facet of our lives, from where we live to how we work, play and communicate.
Faced with such seismic change, legacy institutions are choosing to stick their head in the sand. Even as the old models collapse, the knee-jerk deference to the default way of doing things is a powerful impulse.
With their reticence comes YOUR opportunity. The gatekeepers are losing their grip. For those who truly understand The Great Reshuffle—what it is, what it means, and where it’s going— the opportunities in our new world are unlimited.
To learn more about The Great Reshuffle, check out our YouTube series. Last week’s installment, The Future of Cities, can be viewed here.
Monthly Rewind | February 2024
Thoughts 💭
"Few people have the imagination for reality."
- Carl Friedrich Gauss
"Design your life to minimize reliance on willpower."
- B.J. Fogg
"I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it."
- Katherine Anne Porter
“It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.”
- Mary Beard
"A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading."
- Italo Calvino
Explore our Two Thoughts series: doses of wisdom delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday. Warning: may trigger incurable curiosity.
Conversations 🗣️
Jim O’Shaughnessy — Turning the Tables
A 200th episode bonanza
“If we had a time machine and we went back 500 years and we found the 12 most brilliant people on the planet, 99% of everything they believed was wrong, just flat out wrong. And that's like ... History, we, society, humans, we are about becoming, we are not about being, we are about becoming. We're forever changing and hopefully growing and learning…”
Rohit Krishnan — Demystifying AI
Taking stock
“I encourage people to tinker more, to produce more […] There's a large amount of learning that is impossible to get by reading. Almost all of the useful learning in my opinion, which is I still don't know exactly how or why, but there is a certain process where doing something actually teaches you a lot more than reading something or listening to something.
Alec Stapp — Progress is a Policy Choice
How to achieve change
“We think local and state policy can matter, but in general, federal policy is more important. We think there's great people doing work on international policy, but if you want the biggest bang for your buck as a policy wonk, as someone who's working in this field, US federal policy is the largest lever you possibly can have.”
Rob Henderson — Troubled
Mobility, meaning, meritocracy and the military
“The vast majority of Americans don't have professions. They have jobs. They have a job, like the kind that I had in high school where you clock in and clock out. You get paid by the hour, and that's it. For people like that, as a society, we could think more about how to create sources of meaning and fulfillment for those people. What were those sources of meaning? Relationships, marriage, family, kids, maybe your local church, your religious community, giving back to your neighborhood, those kinds of things. There's very little attention paid to those other sources of meaning.”
Rupert Sheldrake — On Scientism, Morphic Resonance and the Extended Mind
How to discover the next paradigm
“I think in fact most real scientific discoveries come from intuitive imaginative leaps. As Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, said, there's hypotheses and testing of hypotheses, but the hypothesis is basically a guess about the way things might be. And there's many examples of scientific hypotheses that come in a flash to people. It's not logically arrived at. It's an intuition. So that is actually part of the scientific process. And philosophers of science would agree about that.”
Jacqueline Novogratz - Manifesto for a Moral Revolution
An ode to action
“Too many people sit at the starting blocks wondering what their purpose is, waiting to do something. And I've learned that purpose doesn't come to people waiting on the sidelines. We find our purpose by following the thread of our curiosity. We take a step toward it, whether we fall down or learn, we're going to know a lot more after we've taken that step. It leads us to the next step. And before you know it, you've lit the world. So just start.”
For root access to your humanOS, dig into our back catalogue of 207 episodes (and counting).
Words ✍️
Five Ways to Overcome Your Unconscious Beliefs | “If you find yourself instantly reacting to something, either positively or negatively, without really knowing why, congratulations! You've just uncovered an unconscious belief.”
Curation, optimism, and perseverance in the early days of TIME Magazine | “What is essential? What is most interesting? By using these two filters to sift through the never-ending deluge of information, early TIME magazine was engaged in a herculean act of curation.”
Dignity Over Dependency | “Acumen isn’t your everyday charity. Its approach to philanthropy, which Jacqueline developed through hard experience in Rwanda, Latin America and elsewhere, seeks to do nothing less than change the way the world tackles poverty. By harnessing the best impulses of both the market and philanthropy, it aims to create an impact optimised for dignity, not dependency; prosperity, not profit.”