Lawrence Yeo — writer, illustrator and author of The Inner Compass — joins the show to discuss the power of intuition in an uncertain world.
We explore why embracing uncertainty leads to greater curiosity, how social conditioning pulls us away from our true north, why doing things for their own sake builds authentic conviction and how journaling the "whys" rather than the "whats" can transform your self-awareness.
This conversation flowed so naturally we jumped right in without a formal introduction! I hope you enjoy it 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 Paradox of Envy
“The people that we tend to be most envious of are people where I feel like they actually have a great potential to be very close to you […] You look at people like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or something like that, and those people aren't really targets of envy from the average person's perspective […] It might be the high school friend you had where you stopped hanging out and then you go on LinkedIn one day and you're like, "Oh, he's doing that thing." But you were once in that same place in high school together or your next door neighbor. These are the people where envy runs wild. And paradoxically, they're the people that actually could become friends[…] but instead it's like, "I want what you have, and that makes me feel inadequate." So it's this weird thing where we envy the people that have the greatest potential to be close to us.”
Curiosity is Gratitude for Uncertainty
“Curiosity is ultimately being grateful that you don't know everything. It's this gratitude for uncertainty. If you knew everything, there is literally no room for curiosity to emerge. What would you be curious about if life was truly predestined or if you knew what was going to happen based after making a decision every single time? Where is the curiosity? Where is the desire to learn? Our very desire to learn stems from the fact that the world is uncertain.”
Chasing Mastery
“Then you start developing this desire for mastery as opposed to trying to attain status. And mastery really is like you're doing it because you're just trying to improve yourself. Comparisons are not made with other people, but only with prior versions of yourself. That's what mastery is. And the moment you have the thought of, "Mastery is what I want as opposed to status and all this stuff," then that flywheel starts turning up. I'm doing it on its own accord. I'm learning from other people that I admire and respect and I want to get better. And […] you're going to make some good stuff and you're going to learn how to communicate better, you're going to learn all this stuff, and it's just natural that self-confidence begins to increase with that.”
Journals > Diaries
“Most people journal as if it's a diary. And there's a distinction between the two. I think the diary is about the what's of life. Like, what did I do? What did I feel? What did I say? Whereas journaling, I feel like, is more about the whys of life. Like, why did I do that? Why did I feel this way? Why? […] Journaling is so powerful because once you start asking why, it always comes down to some sort of conditioned story and you peel layers.[…] But if you just chronicle what you did, you're not getting that deeper exploration. So I always advocate for journaling why.That's the power word here.”
Reading List
The Inner Compass: Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself; by Lawrence Yeo
Two Thoughts: a Timeless Collection of Infinite Wisdom; by Jim O’Shaughnessy and Vatsal Kaushik
A Letter to my Newborn Daughter; by Lawrence Yeo
Mistakes were Made. (And, Yes, by Me.); by Jim O’Shaughnessy
Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing); by Lao Tzu
Death; by Thomas Nagel
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Well, hello, everybody. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. A little different this time, because I've already had an incredible conversation with Lawrence Yeo, the author of The Inner Compass, Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy
About 10 years ago I was reading, I think, I don't know, Tony De Mello or somebody like that, and I had this insight that at best, I am a co-creator. And that shift in mindset was incredibly remunerative for me because it removed my mind from thinking, this is my idea, this is I'm going to be the one who owns, in quotes, owns this idea and puts it out there and made it much more collaborative with people I don't even know.
Lawrence Yeo
Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Like, I'm at best a co-creator. And so all of a sudden, the Muses started speaking to me in a way that they had not in the past. I would get an idea for a book or whatever. And I found that when I made this shift, my aperture opened way up and I was like, "Oh, wow, that might work really well for this." Because I think what it does is it really encourages synthesis of ideas. And at least in my case, that's been really helpful.
Lawrence Yeo
I'm curious, why do you think you have this co-creator mentality? Because I feel like the initial impulse for a lot of folks that create things is not necessarily this ownership of an idea, but it's like, oh, I have my ideas and then I want to structure them and have total agency. Agency and creativity are so linked where having that agency really makes it feel like it's yours. And I feel like that's generally a default position. But it seems like you consciously are aware that, hey, I'm a co-creator and using the phrase "at best, that's what I am." What do you think led to that perspective?
Jim O'Shaughnessy
In my youth, in my career, I was a real proselytizer. I was, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot's Prufrock, "I have come to tell you all, I shall tell you all." And in that youthful exuberance, I realized that I did get across a lot of ideas that were kind of new and these were in the investment field. But I guess that in my own case, I am a very internally oriented person. I'm not an externally oriented person at all. In fact, I was reviewing letters that I wrote to my kids and that was literally the first letter, which was—I even wrote down part of it. And we got to do the formal introduction of you soon. But I love just jumping into the conversation.
Lawrence Yeo
I feel like this is already the podcast.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I think so too.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah. I feel like it's just very natural way to dive into it. If it sounds all right to you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, it does. Which is really great. But where is the letter to the kids? I'm a huge fan of the Dao Te Ching. And so that was literally when I wrote this to my son, who was six days old when I wrote. Still seems pretty cool to me now. It's like, Lao Tzu has this great quote which is, “if you know much about others, you could be considered learned, but understanding yourself makes you more intelligent. Still control others might perceive you as powerful, but self-control, self-mastery, you're much more powerful. Happiness from others might consider you rich, but contentment, that is self-willed, that's inexhaustible wealth.” Now, that's all Lao Tzu.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And then to my kids, I said, 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. And I was 24 when I wrote that to my kids. And my life thus far has not disproven that idea.
Lawrence Yeo
That's Jim-Tzu right there. That's a banger line, man. One thing I've been telling anyone that's an expecting parent is to write a letter to their child.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Good for you. Good for you.
Lawrence Yeo
And then I published a letter to my daughter too, before she was born or I started on it and then she was born and published it. But it has such this interesting aspect of clarifying your value system. Knowing that, okay, this is, at this snapshot in my life, what I feel like I understand about the world through lived experience. And there's going to be more lived experience. I know. And some of my views may shift, but there's a conviction around this letter that you are writing where you don't feel like I have to be too nuanced or anything. It's like, here's what it is and let me just communicate it. And you're going to be delivering this to a being that's going to have your unconditional love. There is this huge thing around that.
Lawrence Yeo
And logistically, it's best to do it before they're born, because right after you're not going to have much time to do it. So I always say, do it now. Do it now before they're out. And then you have the headspace to be like, oh, the world is beautiful. Or this is how I want to think about it this way. Because after that, it's just all about survival, making sure the kid is alive. Do it now.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Well, the thing about unconditional love is really interesting because before my oldest is Patrick, and before his first child was born, a boy, I said to him, after he is born, you will understand how much I love you. And literally, he came out holding Pierce with tears in his eyes, and he goes, "I had no idea how right you were."
Lawrence Yeo
You were.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Because that unconditional love is something that is so hard to kind of verbally or in any kind of artistic art form convey to another human until they experience it.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah, that sent goosebumps on my skin because I know exactly how you and Patrick feel, and it's a beautiful thing. And I really think unconditional love, it just comes down to the element of knowing that there is no game to be played with this human being. There's nothing that you can achieve. I mean, I could be proud of you for achieving something. But my love is not contingent upon that achievement. Pride and love are distinct emotions. And I think the sad thing about much of what happens after childhood is that there is the inevitability of playing certain games for you to be able to function in the world.
Lawrence Yeo
And the beautiful thing is that if you have the knowledge, though, that there are people that will give you that love, regardless of how well you may be playing a certain game or what have you, that goes a long way in terms of building confidence, in terms of having conviction in yourself. I just thought about this a lot as a parent, and I like to just question things that seem like, duh, what exactly is the unconditional love of a parent so important for? And it really is the knowledge that I can receive it independent of any hierarchy I have to climb or any status I may inhibit or have. Paradoxically, that actually helps to make you more successful or navigate relationships better because you have a beacon that shows you what it's like to have that love without any of the influence of this game.
Lawrence Yeo
So I'm very curious to see as my daughter grows up and she goes into certain pursuits and builds a name for herself, a reputation—how me and my wife's love will be able to carry her through all the beautiful and sorrowful moments in that journey.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And just back briefly on unconditional love, I don't know whether you've read much of Tony De Mello, but he writes incredibly beautifully about these topics. He died way too soon. He was a Jesuit priest who essentially got enlightened by a conversation that he had with a rickshaw driver who was terminally ill. And De Mello said, "How much do you make a day?" I can't remember where it was. It might have been in Mumbai. I don't recall. And the guy told him, and he goes, "If I paid you that, would you be willing to just talk to me?" Because De Mello was flabbergasted by this guy who just had this incredible beamish aura about him.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And De Mello knew, through the brief conversation that led De Mello to ask him to spend the day with him, that he was terminally ill. And he just couldn't grok that. How can somebody who's a rickshaw driver and terminally ill just have this innate sense of happiness? And one of the things that came out of it was his work on unconditional love and on his idea that attachments to outcomes are the root of all suffering. He said that he learned from this driver these kind of profound truths that the minute you attach how you feel, whether you're happy or sad or whatever, to some specific outcome, you've made your entire life conditional.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And that really hit me—when you look around at so many people who are suffering, you can almost always find that it's because they're in the sort of mimetic sense, modeling their desires on other people and on the Girardian idea of mimetic desire. And they're not internal at all. They're like, "Oh, Lawrence has this. I want this, and I won't be happy until I get this." Anytime, in my opinion, that you make things conditional, you're kind of setting yourself up because, like, okay, what happens if that outcome doesn't happen? Then, "Oh, I failed. I'm sad. I'm no good." It can lead to a really almost unconscious downward spiral that you're not even aware of.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
The idea of conditionality, I think, is very important to your work as well.
Lawrence Yeo
And I think the mystique of what another person may have also makes you feel like it will bring you contentment, the uncertainty around that. And it's funny because I feel like envy is probably one of the most pernicious emotions. And at the same time, I think I forgot whether it was Munger or Buffett that said, "Greed doesn't drive the world. It's envy"—one of the more nihilistic statements, but there's truth to it. But I feel like the interesting thing about envy is there's not like someone else is pointing to you and being like, "You don't have what I have." There's rarely this targeted "You don't have this." It's more of you look at it and it's your own inner critic that interprets what they have. It's like, "Oh, I don't have that."
Lawrence Yeo
"Why don't I have that? What does that say about me? What would it take for me to get that?" That happens the moment someone posts something about a promotion that they had or some achievement. And it's also crazy because the people that we tend to be most envious of are people where I feel like they actually have a great potential to be very close to you. So one distinction I make here is that let's say we use wealth as the object of desire. You look at people like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or something like that, and those people aren't really targets of envy from the average person's perspective. It's like they actually may be sources of inspiration because they're too far away, they're too far removed, but it's actually the people that are closer to you.
Lawrence Yeo
So it's like it might be the high school friend you had where you stopped hanging out and then you go on LinkedIn one day and you're like, "Oh, he's doing that thing." But you were once in that same place in high school together or your next door neighbor. These are the people where envy runs wild. And paradoxically, they're the people that actually could become friends. Or if you were to reframe it, these are folks where, alright, if I were to convert that envy into inspiration or more so, I could view this as, "Hey, we're similar, we have shared interests," but instead it's like, "I want what you have, and that makes me feel inadequate." So it's this weird thing where we envy the people that have the greatest potential to be close to us.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I think you're dead on about the proximity idea. I just had a completely different thought about the inner critic. I remember reading a piece that I thought was really illuminating, at least for me, and it was a conversation between a therapist and a person who was really racked by a feeling that their spouse was always criticizing them, was always saying things like, "You're really bad at X, Y and Z." And the therapist said something really unusual and interesting. He looked at her and said, "Would you be angry if I called you an ugly horse?" And she was kind of taken aback a little bit. And she's like, "What?" And he said, "Would you be angry if I called you an ugly horse?" And she goes, "Of course not. Why?"
Jim O'Shaughnessy
"I don't even understand. That's just so bizarre. Why would you call me an ugly horse?" And he goes, "The reason you are not at all triggered by me saying that is every fiber of your being knows that you are not an ugly horse. Whenever you react with anger to a statement, it's because your inner critic thinks that there might be some truth to what is being said about you." I always thought that when I read that, I was like, "Wow, that is just bang on." What do you think about that?
Lawrence Yeo
I love it. I love it. And it's so true. And I think when it comes to any object of envy, any object of desire, there's always a narrative behind that object. And I think that's why wealth and status are the greatest sources of envy. And they're also the things where there's always a story behind it. Money is a value-neutral thing. It's what we choose to do with it that gives its energy and so forth. And as a result, it's all the way you interpret it. Of course, there's a certain baseline of money you have to have in order to survive and function, but after that place, it becomes more of, alright, what's the story you tell yourself about it? How does your upbringing come into the picture?
Lawrence Yeo
How do you think about scarcity and abundance and things of that nature? And anytime there's a story to be told about something, then there's always the flip side, which is something about this narrative will include inadequacy. Every story has the yin and the yang, the poles, the different poles going on. Whereas in that ugly horse example, you don't even, you're not even aware of what the poles are because you've never thought of yourself as a horse. So there's no story really to latch onto. But with money, status, things of that nature, there's always a story. And the one thing that I really wanted to hone on with the inner compass is who is telling these stories? Who is telling these stories?
Lawrence Yeo
And you may think that it just kind of came from within, or you always had it and this is always the way you lived your life. But I really think that it's layers and layers upon some sort of conditioned narrative that is kind of overlaying your core being and much of education. I think the function of education is really to peel back a lot of those layers. And the problem is that age and wisdom tend to be correlated. You just have a lot of lived experience and you just become a little more comfortable in your own skin. You have more conviction because experience yields lessons and older folks have more lessons as a result. But I think that the greatest educators, what they help us do is to break that correlation.
Lawrence Yeo
They help us attain whatever that wisdom is through understanding earlier so that they don't have to be on a deathbed to know, "Oh, that's what life is all about." It's like, you want at the end to feel like, that was nice. That was a nice journey. And I imbued many moments I had in my life with presence. I think that's all we could really hope for. And education helps you have that feeling before the end.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I'm fascinated by social conditioning and why and how it works. And I don't have an extreme view on it. By that, I mean, I think a lot of social conditioning results from kind of millennia after millennia of other humans experiencing lessons like you just mentioned, and that it gets compressed. It's almost like an algorithm for survival. "Hey, don't sit on that hot stove." And that kind of thing. So I definitely think that there are evolutionary benefits to a certain level of social conditioning. I think it would be virtually, and I think it was more of a pipe dream when Rousseau was basically propounding that "everywhere we are born free and yet we are all in chains." That's a very romantic notion.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
The idea that we could have a society where there was no conditioning. I think it is sui generis. It just comes out of all of those who kind of went before us. Is it all right? Of course not. Should it be questioned? Of course it should. But then you kind of slip into, like, Bob Wilson, who is an author, who I love, and it touches on your idea of intuition because Bob would say that a lot of social interaction is based on unwritten game rules and that people who do well in their lives intuitively understand those game rules a little bit better than people who maybe don't do so well in their life. And he wrote a lot about how you can learn how to understand game rules that are unwritten better and question, always question them.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Because you end up with a situation—as I told you in the beginning, we all tend to feel like our intuition is our internal compass pointing to true north for us. But as I mentioned about how I started recording my intuitions, because I kind of thought, I wonder, like, I think I always feel like these intuitions are correct. I wonder, maybe it's the quantum me, I wonder, how right are they? But I found that by doing that, it actually improved my intuition not dramatically, but significantly. What do you think about that kind of process for people who are reading your book?
Lawrence Yeo
So I think the inner compass metaphor is something that we all inherently know in a sense. But just to clarify, so the way I present your intuition is you have an inner compass, and then you have the true north, which identifies your sense of conviction, this feeling that there is uncertainty but I'm going to move forward with this. And then anything that kind of swings you out of it really are the forces of conditioning. And I feel like whenever you are in pursuit of your true north, but you're questioning it, it's because that questioning stems from fear about what you're doing. And that fear is generally a narrativized thing. It's the way that you're taking in kind of the collective conventional wisdom and thinking that, alright, if I do this, it kind of goes against what I feel like I should do.
Lawrence Yeo
And this inner compass, really the way it signifies your intuition—and I define intuition as this kind of inner wisdom that welcomes uncertainty—it really is a relationship between uncertainty. And I think if you were to visualize it, kind of taking a step back from the compass, any decision that you want to make, rationality will get you to a certain point. And I say in the book, there are three things. For example, if you get these three right and you get a ton of other things wrong, you'll still be pretty happy. It's one, where you live, two, what you work on, and three, who you're with. These three things.
Lawrence Yeo
Now, for something this important, you might think, well, okay, I'm gonna do a pros and cons list and figure out this city versus that or why I might want to marry this person and all that. But we all kind of laugh at that because we know that for the most important things in life, your rationality takes you so far. And then there's a decision you ultimately make. That gap is your intuition. That's basically what it is. You could even think of it as unwritten rules that you're thinking about. The uncertainty that you choose to delve into. So you have this compass. And I think the question here is, well, you think you're at true north and you're moving towards uncertainty with conviction. But how do I know it's at the right place? What if I end up falling off a cliff?
Lawrence Yeo
And this is kind of where I introduce another metaphor. But you could think of it as almost metacognition or meta-intuition, the thing that is governing the compass and this magnet essentially is what I refer to as self-understanding, the pursuit of knowing yourself. So if the compass is showing you where you're going to go, the magnet is telling you, "Hey, is your true north pointed in the right direction? Knowing what you know about yourself?" And I think the magnet is what is commonly left out of the equation of just trusting your gut. So this magnet, the default state is it's very small. So this is why in high school, we just want to date people based off how attractive they are.
Lawrence Yeo
We don't care about personality or the moment you go to college, everyone wants to go into banking, consulting, the same industries, because you're just looking at what everyone else is doing. And yet you still have conviction. You're like, "This is exactly what I need to be doing." But the truth is the magnet is really small. And anytime the crowd says, "Oh, we should do this thing instead," then it's not strong enough and it'll just blow away. But the bigger and bigger the magnet gets—this is what life is all about. You're trying to make that magnet larger and larger so that if the compass is pointed there and you feel like that conviction is moving you towards the right place because you're testing it with reality.
Lawrence Yeo
Then as the conditioning comes in, it won't budge because you're much more aware of your capabilities and you have this system in place where you can test your intuition and you have confidence in that. And that's why as you get older, a lot of the time people just tend to have more conviction. They understand what they're doing, sometimes to a fault. But there is this sense of, I'm not going to really pay attention too much to what other people say. And that building of the magnet is what I really go into in the second half. But I don't know if you have any particular thoughts or comments on that before delving into it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, I love that metaphor, and I agree entirely that the need for what is actually an illusion of certainty is the source of much suffering because it leads to fear, it leads to doubt, it leads to all of those things where you're looking at, to go back to we peg off other people. You're looking at, well, all my friends are going into consulting or tech or whatever. That's probably where I need to go. And then you kind of convince yourself of that because you need that certainty.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I think that to be comfortable, I would go so far as to say that the greatest successes in the world, and not just monetarily, some of the greatest artists, composers, scientists, fill in the blank, are people who are immensely comfortable with uncertainty and in fact, not just comfortable with it, but play with it. The idea that you are certain about almost anything other than the old saw about death and taxes.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I think that is just kind of crazy because if you took somebody from, I don't know, 1700, if you and I could jump into a time machine and go back to 1700 and rustle up the hundred smartest people or most esteemed thinkers of that era and really go through their views, what we'd find is that they're probably wrong about almost everything they're saying. And so why are we different? I think the mistake that people make is, "Oh, those people from 1700, they were so idiotic and they didn't know this and this"—we're the same. If people traveling back 400 years to our particular time are going to be going, "Oh my God, I can't believe they actually thought this was true."
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And so if you put it into that kind of continuum, you become out of necessity much more modest. And then kind of to tie it back with your idea of the magnet growing. That is lived experience and things like that. My feeling is very much that there's this idea. A friend of my son's has this idea when he's assessing someone, he always asks, are they pre-fall or post-fall? And I was like, that's intriguing to me. Pre-fall, obviously, is that like the Mike Tyson quote: "You can be as certain as you want until the other guy punches you in the face." And so me referring to my younger self as being a proselytizer, that was pre-fall. And then afterwards. And you lived through lots of experiences that at the time felt super unpleasant.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Like the joke meme—"I didn't do this because I thought it would be hard. I did this because I thought it would be easy. And it ain't." And you get to post-fall after learning those lessons, after experiencing those things, which out of necessity makes you far more modest, because you got to be. I mean, if you really want to keep going and you really want to keep getting back up after getting knocked down, you become aware of your own limitations, your own biases, your own talents, too. And after I heard this buddy of my son's express this, I just couldn't get it out of my mind.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Like, when I was reading somebody, I was like, "Oh, he's pre-fall."
Lawrence Yeo
Gotta take it with a grain of salt. That's an interesting delineation. And one thought I had while you were speaking was that when you have a fall, whether it's a particular event or a sequence of events, I think it really is when you are in uncertainty, like this really strong degree of uncertainty, but you interpret that as something you do not want in your life. It's not uncertainty that you welcome. It is something that was kind of just thrown at you. It was like a tidal wave that just enveloped you, and you didn't expect it. There was like this rug pull of life, and you were like, "Just get me out of here. I need to get out of here."
Lawrence Yeo
And the reason why we look at those fall moments with an element of grace as we get older is because a lot of people are thankful for these falls even. Even in that moment it was such a difficult time. But I think that happens because you just become a little more comfortable with uncertainty. When you know what that feels like, then you could look back at the fall and be like, "Wow, that was a pivotal moment in my life that I needed to experience." And the one way I like to think about this is curiosity, for example. And I realized that curiosity is ultimately being grateful that you don't know everything. It's this gratitude for uncertainty. If you knew everything, there is literally no room for curiosity to emerge. What would you be curious about?
Lawrence Yeo
If life was truly predestined or if you knew what was going to happen based after making a decision every single time? Where is the curiosity? Where is the desire to learn? Our very desire to learn stems from the fact that the world is uncertain.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I love that framing. I think that is bang on. And it reminds me of the religious myth of Brahman and Atman. Brahman, perfect knowledge. Knows everything. Incredibly bored. Because he's like, "I know everything. I know everything. There's nothing that's gonna make my day here" until he gets this idea, "Wait a minute, maybe I don't know everything." So he creates infinite Atmans which are him. He clones himself, but he takes their memory away. And then he delights in the drama of all the Atmans looking for, "Oh, I'm very curious about this. I don't know anything about this." And it becomes drama that he gets addicted to. Because you are so right—if you think you know everything, life is going to be incredibly boring and dull.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah, it sucks. It sucks. And I think this is why there is also this preciousness of childhood.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yes.
Lawrence Yeo
And the reason why—I was actually reading this essay by Thomas Nagel about death, and he was questioning, why is death bad? And what makes a life worth living? And so forth. And he kind of proposed this idea that life in itself has this inherent value. And there's a reason. For example, my interpretation is like, why do we congratulate people when we find out they're pregnant or when a baby is born? Why do we congratulate them? And it's because there is this inherent, like this beautiful uncertainty of what this child is going to become. You don't know. And the very fact that there are infinite paths, but at the same time that this child will be born with infinite curiosity, that is the starting point.
Lawrence Yeo
And that we as parents have the privilege of being able to be in a state of presence with that. Because a lot of time that curiosity gets beaten out of us or we start to over-index uncertainty over the unknown. And we want that. But when we view children as they're growing up, like everything is an object of curiosity. And that makes you feel like it just beams your face. There's delight in just witnessing that and being a part of that. Which is why it's such a beautiful stage in life and why every parent will tell you, "Hey, cherish this, cherish this." Because this state of infinite play, everything is curious, literally everything. It's this short window of time.
Lawrence Yeo
But there is a very clear delineation between delight and an uncertainty that you think is worthwhile to navigate. And I think that last part is important. In the end, the things that we'll find meaningful or purposeful, they will always have a degree of challenge. And the goal is not to escape challenge and to find something that's the most certain because as you said, that leads to boredom, that leads to discontent. But what challenge do you deem worthwhile and worth your attention and time? It's not always going to be so fun and exciting, but you feel like this is something that you've chosen and you want to dedicate your attention to it fully, that's where the meaning comes from. And there's always uncertainty that you have to accept in any endeavor that is worthwhile.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Again, you're preaching to the choir. I wonder. So what's your hope? As I mentioned, your book is already number one on Amazon's motivational self-help category. What would be some great outcomes from your point of view from people after they've read it? And they come to you and they're like, "Lawrence, man, thank you. Because I never framed it that way." I personally think a lot of these things are framing issues. And it's very difficult to get people to want to be uncertain. I guess would be the way. Because back to conditioning. We again, Bob Wilson, he said his early schooling years were basically the destruction of his innate curiosity because he was schooled by a group of nuns. He was brought up in a Catholic tradition.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
He was schooled by a group—he's very funny too—by a group of marauding nuns who were insisting that they would insert the correct answer machine in my mind. And a lot of education honestly is like that. And in terms of the wonder of a child like you, every artist who's worth their salt talks about if you can continue to look at the world through a child's eyes, you're going to probably be able to do pretty well. And myself, I'm blessed to have six grandchildren. And watching it not from the parents point of view, but from the grandparents is even more exciting because you get to see it again and it is so beautiful watching a young child. Because you're right, they are pure curiosity.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And as the parent, I remember, "Oh, my God, here comes the hundred and first question." And so when I was younger, I was 24 when our first kid was born, and you do get to the "Please just stop asking me questions." But as the grandparent, it's like, "No, no, ask me more."
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah, yeah, because the parents are going to be the one to put you to sleep and give you the bath and everything. I'll just take all the intellectual fun while they have the biological duties.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
There's a funny joke that goes, "Hey, why do grandchildren and grandparents get along so well?" And the answer is, "Because they have a common enemy."
Lawrence Yeo
I love that. I never heard of that one. That's fascinating. You know, one thing I remember from our conversation, we had a chat a while ago, and you were telling me that when you got into investing, the reason you were so fascinated with it was because you saw it as this gigantic puzzle. Everything was this puzzle piece, and you were just trying to see how the pieces fit, how they don't fit. And there was not just this trial and error, but this fascination with the field. And I mean, it's one of those things where I think with investing, for example, of course, there are concrete barometers of success and metrics and so forth that could indicate that.
Lawrence Yeo
But without that innate fascination with it, like, if it was just purely about, well, it's always number go up, I got to do whatever I got to do that. Then I think you're missing a key ingredient for you to achieve whatever success may mean in that field. And going back to your question of what do I hope to get from this, I don't really think of it as someone reads this book and then they're like, "Hey, this thing changed my life. And as a result, I made this big decision. I quit my job, or I chose to call someone that I had beef with, and we patched things up." I don't think it's about making these gigantic leaps.
Lawrence Yeo
I more so think of it as a leap to be like a series of small steps. So by the time you take a leap, it doesn't even feel like a leap. It just feels like the logical next step. And I think for this book, it's more of getting someone to take a first step into what does it mean to do something for its own sake? What does it mean to be delighted by the fact that you are fascinated by something that may not have much extrinsic value and to engage in certain pursuits that are not necessarily tied to concrete rewards that society heralds as virtues? And I think if someone, for example, were to tell me, "Well, I read this and as a result I started a journaling practice."
Lawrence Yeo
"Or as a result, I started to make things in my spare time or I decided to record a conversation with a friend about something." These small things. If they told me that, I would have been like, "Okay, I think this book did its job." So it really is this sense of curiosity to look inward. We do not need many rule books for how to navigate the external world. I feel like there's many out there in different fields. But this really is more of igniting someone's curiosity to be like, "Huh, that element of self-understanding sounds like a really abstract kind of woo concept. But there actually seems to be something practical here and I feel like there's something worth navigating where it's driven purely internally. And I'm okay with that."
Lawrence Yeo
"Can I sit with that and give it a try and see what happens?"
Jim O'Shaughnessy
You know, that's one of the reasons why I fell in love with your work when I first encountered it, because I hate listicles. I get so triggered—back five years ago there were always these things on Twitter and other social media, like "The five things a millionaire does every morning" bullshit. It just drove me absolutely mad because it was this sort of invitation—if you're being cynical about it's like, "All I have to do are take a cold plunge and do my whatever, have my special brand or whatever they're selling."
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
What I love about you is you're not selling anything really, other than, "Hey, look at what you can do when you lean in to things that you're passionate about that really you're almost obsessively curious about." And that's why I love your answer because that would be what I would hope you would want to get out of this book. I was delighted when you were answering that not a single part of your answer was conditional. It was not, "Oh, I read Lawrence's book and then I took the big plunge to fill in the blank." Because that doesn't work. That's the ultimate external authority telling me what to do, and I'm fiercely anti-authoritarian. I do not like people telling me what to do.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I often joke that if I suddenly wake up in a super hot room whose walls are covered with 24-hour cable news and I am filling out forms, I am in hell. I have died and I am in hell.
Lawrence Yeo
That was the word I was going to use. Like, are you describing the inner circle of Dante's Inferno?
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Digital inferno, yeah, a digital inferno. And I used to joke that, well, I'm not certain about much, but one thing I am certain is I've already got a block of ice right next to Satan with my name on it. Let's not worry about that because I know that's going to happen. But the idea that if your work simply inspires—and I think it will—people to just reframe a little. Reframe away from fear. Reframe away from the need to be certain. Because it's a chimera, it's a mirage. You can't ever, with very few exceptions, be 100% certain. And I honestly think that it is the enemy to all progress.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Because if you are certain, Lawrence, if you and I are certain of a dozen things, we are going to do everything we can to make certain that those dozen things stay as the rules of society or the rules that we will live our life by, or all of those things. What if we're wrong? What if, like back to our time machine, what if we are absolutely wrong? And it's this idea that we know everything is one of the biggest roadblocks to discovery, in my opinion, of all the roadblocks. This premature certainty is really bad because it removes all of the other paths that might be more true. That also might be better for you, for society, if you want to be grand about it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
But certainty in my opinion leads not only to boredom but to stasis. And stasis is death.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah. I mean, "What if we're wrong" is one of those questions where, if you were to reframe that, then it's such an immense source of growth because we have this bias towards being right and feeling like people are in agreement and we want that. But that question of, "Yeah, what if we're wrong"—that really is the propellant for anything interesting.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Totally. Mistakes are portals of discovery in my opinion. And it's very difficult to discover new things if you don't make mistakes or if you're not wrong.
Lawrence Yeo
Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And the way I look at it is, George Box had that great quote that "All models are wrong, some are useful" and if you think about it that way, it allows you to be much more flexible in terms of—it doesn't rob you of conviction. I've had this conversation with different people in different manners and covering different topics, but it's like, "Well, yeah, you're so open-minded that your brain falls out." No, no, I have very strong convictions but I treat them as things that can be tested and that I'm always wondering, "Huh, maybe I'm wrong. What can I learn and how could I improve? How can I get rid of this model?"
Lawrence Yeo
Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Of looking at the world or lens, whatever term you want to use. If I can get better glasses. We all wear reality goggles and that to me is the source of much of the misunderstandings and sorrow in the world. It might not be that you have any animosity towards me at all, but if I'm speaking dog and you're speaking cat, I'm going to think "meow" sounds a little aggressive and you're going to think "woof" is really aggressive. And so those basic goggles that determine what we see in the world, you can go to an optometrist, i.e. be curious, learn more about other things and get a better prescription. And yet this kind of constant, "No, I'm right."
Jim O'Shaughnessy
The need to be right again to me just speaks of a certain level of naivete that really closes a person down. Or am I being too histrionic?
Lawrence Yeo
No, I think you're spot on. But selfishly I wanted to ask you a question because this kind of provoked—I just really want to know how you've contextualized this in your own life. Because I feel like this element of making mistakes being this kind of gateway to discovery and your kind of relationship with uncertainty, like how have you thought about going into different projects and different things independent of your investing career? For now you have, you're a publisher now and you're doing, you're building AI and you're doing all these different things where I'm presuming that you go into it thinking, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing."
Lawrence Yeo
And I remember last time we talked, you said that Two Thoughts book was going to be like your testing ground and it's going to be your guinea pig because you're like, "It's my name on it. So I'm just gonna make all the mistakes." How do you, if there was a way you practically do that, is there some sort of framework you think about where you go into something knowing that there's a lot of mistakes to be made and you're going to accept that and maybe even be delighted by it? How do you think through that?
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, I think you did a pretty good job in framing your question and giving the answer at the same time. You frame it in just the way that your question laid out. These are all things that I've always been interested in that we're doing now at O'Shaughnessy Ventures. But I had a full-time job running O'Shaughnessy Asset Management for years and that kind of precluded me really diving in on things like publishing, on things like filmmaking. We're doing that as well. And I think that the lived experience, my lived experience was I learned so much from my career in asset management. I wrote a piece called "Mistakes Were Made—Yes, by Me." And some of the things that I learned there are highly applicable here.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I often think that you can learn a ton about whatever particular domain you're entering from other domains. I'm a huge fan of Lao Tzu and the Dao de Jing and Daoism and man, that taught me a lot about investing that no CFA exam was going to teach me. Same with history. Same with human psychology. To the point where everyone investing talks about they're looking for an edge. And I think that the only durable edge is arbitraging human behavior.
Lawrence Yeo
Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
So, unfortunately the majority of people are still over in the "I'm right and I'm certain and I would bet my bottom dollar on this, and I'll die on this hill." And from my experience, I embrace the General George S. Patton view that I'd rather the other poor dumb bastard die on his hill than die on this one that I'm not even certain about. But so having that kind of attitude, knowing going in, knowing that you're going to learn, you're going to make a lot of mistakes, but that they will learn or they will teach you is kind of a great way to build a living. It's a living playbook that you're creating in real time.
Lawrence Yeo
Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And so you mentioned the publishing. I'm writing the first fictional book that I've ever written, and it's really fun, but it's really hard. And so it kind of frames your question perfectly. I look at it as pure joy in trying to become a fiction writer.
Lawrence Yeo
Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Because I'm making all of the classic mistakes and yet it's exhilarating. I'm literally creating a world. And what I'm finding is not maybe what I expected to find. For example, I'm creating the world, I'm creating the overstory, and then I'm finding that my characters are telling me who they are rather than the other way around. It's kind of like, damn, I never would have thought that this villain would think this way. And yet he's just telling me how he thinks. And to me that's just so much fun. And the same is true in making movies and other media projects that we're doing. It's just kind of exhilarating when you kind of lean into the uncertainty and kind of sea of chaos and then just make discoveries.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah, I think that really is the point, I feel like, of the book as well. There is this exhilaration with uncertainty and it's more of not just getting comfortable with it, but when it arrives, how do you lessen that impulse of it being such this big scary thing and having this real confidence in your ability to figure it out? I feel like that's a big thing too. And your ability to figure something out is not just contingent upon your technical ability in something. And I think your example with the Dao de Jing and investing is particularly salient because when people talk about that, I remember the first time I heard something like that, it was like, "Wait, that doesn't make any sense. How would those two tie in together?"
Lawrence Yeo
And I feel like it's like this nice blend of the Dao de Jing, for example, really giving you the framework or the understanding of nuance and that there's opposing truths on either side. And then you have the quantitative intelligence that comes with investing and so forth. But it's like a mix of the two. And I feel like, yes, there is some technical, practical abilities that you're to cultivate in the form of a skill that will help you figure something out. But the other part of it is really this welcoming of uncertainty and that helps to act really as your compass of how do you use all the skills that you've developed that you've cultivated? If the skills are the what of your knowledge base, then I feel like the compass is more of okay, well how and where do you take that? And that's ultimately what understanding is. You have the knowledge and the understanding and that's kind of how I delineate them as well.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, kind of with all thy getting get understanding.
Lawrence Yeo
Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Because that can be a very useful guide. But as you were talking, I was reminded of a conversation I had with somebody in much the same lines. We weren't using this terminology, but it was somebody who was timid and they got very emotional. This is a long time ago when I was still that proselytizing Jim and they blurted out "If I had an ounce of your self-confidence I could do so many other things." And I wonder, what's your view on that? Do you think that things like self-confidence are innate or can they be learned?
Lawrence Yeo
It's a great question. I do feel like it can be learned, but I don't think it comes from a listicle. I think by learning it's about the desire to apply yourself. I think there has to be this spark of wanting to do something on its own accord. I really feel like low self-confidence stems from this kind of pernicious thought that "I'm not going to do something because it's not going to turn out well." And what do we mean by turning out well? It's always some form of outcome, whether it's someone's reaction to what you did, whether it's immediate through a facial gesture or whether it's online and then nothing happened as a result of you sharing what you thought was great. It's always, "I'm not going to do this thing because it's not going to go well."
Lawrence Yeo
And I think the pursuit of self-confidence or the desire to kind of break out of that is, well, what if you remove the "not going to do well" from the equation? What if you did something because you felt like it gave you a sense of agency and it doesn't have to be tied to a particular outcome? I thought about this, like interior designers, for example. We would consider them to be artists. We would consider them to be craftspeople. But if you're just shuffling things around in your room and you're cleaning things, you wouldn't consider that to be an act of creativity because there's no real intention behind it. But the fact that you call someone an interior designer means that because there's intention, they might be doing the same thing, moving stuff around.
Lawrence Yeo
But one is done with intention. One is done with, "I'm really trying to apply myself and do things in an intentional way." Same thing with us podcasting right now. If I just called you on the phone and we just talk, we might not consider that a creative act. But we're sitting here, you got microphones. We're here to discuss a particular topic, and all of a sudden it becomes, "Oh, we're dancing in dialogue." And it feels like a dance. And I think having that intention in doing something, but taking away, "Is this going to become something?" Just the intention itself to want to create something, to want to express a certain way. Just setting that and then giving it a try a little bit more and more, I feel like that will build this kind of conviction.
Lawrence Yeo
"I like doing this for its own sake." And then that starts building, "Okay, I like doing this. Who else can I be inspired by?" And I think I make a distinction here between you're looking at other people because you want what they have, and you're like, "Oh, that person's such a great writer. Why would I even write if there's someone like him or her already out there producing great work?" But instead, as you were discussing, most of life is a framing issue. So what if you were to look at that and be like, "I'm so inspired by that person, because he or she writes in a way where they're doing it for its own sake, they're doing it for themselves."
Lawrence Yeo
And I think it was Morgan Housel who said, "Writing for others is work, and it shows. Writing for yourself is fun, and it shows." And I think it's not a surprise why Morgan, for example, is someone that people look at as a source of inspiration. It's like, "This is a person that writes according to his inner compass." And at the same time, inspires so many people along the way. So you could take in, "Let me look at it from a source of inspiration. People that are doing it the way that I feel like aligns with the way I want to do it." And you learn from them.
Lawrence Yeo
And then you also notice when it's gone astray, when you're focusing on people, where you're like, "Wait, why am I thinking about this?" The other day I was on YouTube and listening to some business guru who I otherwise wouldn't be listening to because I had this thought of, "Oh, I need to really accelerate my business and all this stuff." And I'm like, "Wait, why am I listening to this guy? I would have never listened to this guy at the beginning or middle of my journey." But because I feel my compass being pulled away, I'm giving this person my attention. So instead, let me just redirect it back to the people that I know act as model examples of even my own creative values, and learn from them.
Lawrence Yeo
And when you do that, then you start developing this desire for mastery as opposed to trying to attain status. And mastery really is like you're doing it because you're just trying to improve yourself. Comparisons are not made with other people, but only with prior versions of yourself. That's what mastery is. And the moment you have the thought of, "Mastery is what I want as opposed to status and all this stuff," then that flywheel starts turning up. I'm doing it on its own accord. I'm learning from other people that I admire and respect and I want to get better.
Lawrence Yeo
And you have those three things and you're going to make some good stuff and you're going to learn how to communicate better, you're going to learn all this stuff, and it's just natural that self-confidence begins to increase with that. So there's this interesting paradox where declining the things that you feel like you need to have confidence, like if you pursue status to get that, then you're going to always use your own place in society to determine your self-worth. The things we want are the things that we're going to use to judge ourselves. That's always the case. So if what you want is to understand yourself better, is to pursue mastery for its own sake, then that's the way that you're going to view your own endeavor and you could do for the long haul.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, again, preaching to the choir. I think ultimately too, that creativity, curiosity also kind of take courage. Because when I wrote my first book, I was, I don't know, 34 when it got published. And man, I gotta tell you, when I read the first really negative review, I was stung. I was cut to the quick. And then I kind of wondered—and I journal all the time. I have like 45 years of journals. I'm a big believer in writing them by hand and I don't yet have the great neurological proof why that is helpful, but it certainly is for me. And so as I was writing out, "Why am I reacting like this?"
Jim O'Shaughnessy
"Why do I care what some guy on Amazon who I've never heard of, who I've never met, who I have no idea what his background is or what he knows about markets or doesn't know about markets. Why am I so stung by that?" And it really led me to kind of an eye-opening experience of "Well, because he's saying I'm wrong or because he's saying I'm dumb." And I don't like that. But then I thought, and I still have the journal somewhere around here. "Why do I care?" And I realized at that moment I really don't. I would care if somebody I respected had something really critical to say about me or if somebody that I loved was incredibly critical of something that I had done.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
But what do I care with John Q. Public who may have read, misread the book? I don't know, why should that affect me at all? And that was kind of like a mini satori for me. And ever since then, I can read the most cutting things that people have written about books that I've written or things that I've said and just laugh and it just completely bounces off. But you know, it was like I didn't even have that experience in my life yet where, when you're an author or you're an artist or whatever your creative venue is, when you're putting something out there for the first time in my case, people are going to differ with what you have to say. And that's fine.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
In fact, one of the things that I really believe very deeply is that if, let's stay on Amazon, if my book has nothing but five-star ratings, there's some mistake, because if you're saying something that is really interesting in the Claude Shannon sense of is it real information? If it's real information, it's novel and doesn't simply repeat what everyone else already thinks or knows. So what you really want is in an ideal world, like 4.1 or 4.2 stars, where a lot of people are like, "This is amazing." But there is a sizable cohort of people who are like, "You're an idiot, you're a moron. How could you ever write something like this?" And in fact, if I don't see that, my alarm bells go off. It's like, "What?"
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Do you have similar insights?
Lawrence Yeo
Totally, totally. I mean, even today I checked the book and because it was like five stars and then it went down to like 4.9 or something and I'm like, "That's better."
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, exactly.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah, and it's indicative of the fact that there are—you want what you create to not be head nodding for everybody, because what really is the value in that? I think you want to attract differing opinions about what you're doing. And especially if those opinions come from a good-hearted place. Of course that person that left a negative review probably did not have your thoughts in mind and didn't see you as a human being really. It was just "I'm gonna post this slanderous thing," but there is, I feel like the best kinds of work invite conversation instead of just a silent "mm."
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Totally agree, totally agree.
Lawrence Yeo
You go somewhere, everyone's just nodding. It's like, "Okay, well where's the curiosity here?" And I really like what you said about journaling. It's interesting because the way you framed it when you got that review was, "Why do I care about this? Why?" And I advocate journaling. And some of the pushback I get is like, "Well, I don't really see the point of chronicling my life and just saying, I did this, I did that." And what I realized is that most people journal as if it's a diary. And there's a distinction between the two. I think the diary is about the what's of life. Like, what did I do? What did I feel? What did I say? Whereas journaling, I feel like, is more about the whys of life. Like, why did I do that?
Lawrence Yeo
Why did I feel this way? Why? So, and that's where you're going to get a lot of great insights and that's where journaling is so powerful because once you start asking why it always comes down to some sort of conditioned story and you peel layers when you ask why and you use words like "because" you start seeing the clauses that are attached to these other narratives. But if you just chronicle what you did, you're not getting that deeper exploration. So I always advocate for journaling "why." That's the power word here.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Perfect way to put it. And back to that first letter I wrote at age 24 to my 6-day-old son. In the letter I say, "I do not want this to be a diary of how many times you woke us up at night or when you took your first step. I want this to be a conversation, because I want you to be able to understand me as your father." But I think I'm gonna much better understand myself too when, as Pericles said, "Wait for the wisest of counselors, time." When suddenly you have a 30-year history of letters, there's a lot of self-knowledge there. Like, "Wow, I was really naive when I wrote that." Or conversely, "I still believe that." It goes both ways.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
It doesn't have to go just to the "Oh, look at how much I've grown." It can be "Look at how much I've retained these same basic principles that I believe deeply in." I think that journaling and your way of contrasting it with keeping a diary is bang on. It's like journaling is a path of discovery and figuring out why you are the way you are or why others. You could also be trying to figure out other things. But I think that there's a great C.S. Lewis quote that is, "I don't write to make other people understand me. I write to understand myself." And that is really powerful. A diary—not powerful at all. Who cares about what I happen to do?
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Can you imagine me journaling about this? And it was just "Recorded podcasts with Lawrence, then looked at movie trailers, banged my head against the wall because fiction writing is hard." What the hell—it's worth nothing.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah. And it captures nothing of the essence of what was happening there. And I think diaries are valuable in an information-scarce environment, which is why for example, we look back on Herodotus or all these great historians and we really needed their chronicling of events to piece together what happened because we don't have any other information. But to say it lightly, we're a pretty information-rich society now. And there is no value in the pure chronicling of events. We have enough of that. The value really is the discovery element and understanding what's happening within you and trying to tie that in with the greater world. And that quote about C.S. Lewis hits.
Lawrence Yeo
The way I think about it is that writing reminds me that a wiser version of myself is available when I need that person the most.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I love that I'm stealing that.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah, please do. I mean, I sometimes look back and I'll be like, "Oh, I'm struggling with self-doubt." And then I think, "Oh, wait, I wrote this 3,000-word piece on self-doubt years ago when I felt like I had a little bit more clarity around that time or I was struggling with it deeply. So I wrote about it" and then I'll read it and be like, "Oh, I'm capable of thinking that."
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, it's great. In fact, one of the apps that we're developing through our AI lab and we'll probably commercialize at some point is exactly that tool. It takes people who are writers and we dump everything they've ever written into there. They can control what goes in and what doesn't go in, but we feel the greatest value is if they say, "Yep, here's everything I've ever written." It's private, it's just for them. So think of it as kind of like a Google extension as you're writing "self-doubt," up comes a knowledge graph.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And you see all of the other times you wrote about self-doubt and it's pretty cool when we've been testing it with some good friends of ours who are writers, they're like, "Holy shit, this is amazing because I completely forgot that I wrote about that extensively because it was like nine years ago."
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah, give me that. Because so far it's just like putting stuff into ChatGPT and Claude. But there is—and also the responses aren't that really great when I ask it to reference other writing. But having an actual graph there and seeing—that's pretty nuts.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And it's your own work. That's what's really kind of cool about it. Now we're having internal debates about like, do you want the AI to model who your nearest neighbors and writers are? Do you want to do that? Yes or no? And the way we're trying to solve for all of this is, no, we'll let that stuff evolve. And if we do commercialize this, if enough of the writers are like, "Hey, it'd be really great if I could do this." One thing that I've learned in developing a lot of different products or services over my career is the things you think are going to sing are the things that actually sink. And the best way to build is to get a group that you trust. Like, for example, I would include you in this group.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And so if we are ever going to really go towards commercialization of this, you'll definitely be hearing from me. But then listen to you. Because, for example, in a completely different sphere, when we developed the Canvas portfolio customization software, that ultimately is why we sold OSAM, because the bigger company wanted that. One of the things we did was we worked with a very tight group of advisors and took their feedback and we all, ahead of time, had what we thought were going to be the 10 things that were the features of Canvas that people would like. We were completely wrong. And it was back from the advisors giving us feedback. It's like, "Oh, shit. The thing that really gets them going is the ability to tax manage accounts." Well, that's really boring.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
But you got to listen to what people are finding the most useful. And so as we develop the writing thing, it'll be you telling us, "Hey, it would be really cool. I love the knowledge graphs. I love to be able to see in the bubbles of networks that connect with each other how often I link this and this. But maybe you could also make it do that." We found, at least in my own experience, that's the kind of thing that really ends up singing for the person you're developing it for.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah, well, I'm looking forward to checking that out. That sounds really cool. And just everything you described there was also an example of your thinking your intuition is taking you somewhere and then you put it, you test it. And that's why relationship is a fundamental component of understanding yourself too. It's not just you're in a cave and you're meditating. It's really about how you interact with others and then be open to what comes in as well. And as a result, you get some great stuff that people also find useful that started with this intuitive thought.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Could not agree more. Now we're going to go with the final question that we ask everyone, and that is, Lawrence, we're making you the emperor of the world just for a day. And you can't kill anyone, you can't put anyone in a re-education camp, but what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that will incept the entire population of the Earth. Whenever their morning is, they're going to wake up and think, "I just had two of the greatest ideas."
Jim O'Shaughnessy
And unlike all the other times, I'm actually going to take action against both of these ideas today and forevermore, what two things are you going to incept in the world's population?
Lawrence Yeo
The first thing is try to do something for its own sake today. And the second is try to see people for who they are and not for what they have to offer.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Oh, I love both of those. Those are—wow, I like those. You might have just incepted me. This has been tremendous fun. I always love talking to you. It's always a great conversation. I wish you the greatest success with the book. It's available everywhere.
Lawrence Yeo
Yes, it's available on Amazon, so that's the place to go.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Well, that's where 80% of books get sold, so.
Lawrence Yeo
Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I think we're gonna—I'm experimenting with enabling other levels of distribution, but as of now, it's on Amazon.
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Cool. Lawrence, thank you so much. Best of luck with the book. I think it's brilliant and I think everyone should buy a copy.
Lawrence Yeo
Thanks so much, Jim. As you said, our conversations go really fast because I enjoy every second, so appreciate you again for having me.
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