Jean-Marc Daecius, my Chief of Staff at OSV, joins me to explain what it means to be “AI first,” and why he believes he may be the last human to perform his role.
We also explore how AI can remove meaningless cognitive load, protect deep work, and unlock creative leverage.
Jean-Marc and I have these kinds of conversations ALL the time and, as you’ll hear, we tend to go off on all kinds of tangents…
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
Jean-Marc’s OSVerse essay: The Future of Food.
Links
Highlights
The Last Human Chief of Staff
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The line that got me, that cinched it for you was, “I will be your last human chief of staff.” Elaborate on that a little bit.
Jean-Marc Daecius: Well, there’s a few parts of the job that, like any job, is a little annoying. Particularly with email. There’s so much that is just kind of like bullet holes through your attention during the day when you check five emails, and then all of a sudden, by the time you’re done with the fifth, you have like six more, and it’s like, all right, I’m not getting anything done. Email is a useful communicative tool, but there’s a huge trade off there because it’s essentially just nuking your ability to concentrate on one meaningful thing that actually has ROI for a given period of time where you can actually make progress on it.
I think AI can handle a lot of that shenanigans that happens in emails where it’s like, all right, I guess I needed to read this. I guess I needed to be updated on this. I would much prefer at the end of the day and at the beginning, or at the beginning of the day, I check a little app that I’ve built, and it’s like, here are a little ticker tape of things that I need to know that have been aggregated from emails that I haven’t actually gotten to since I last looked at it. And here’s like a short list of meetings and then my highest priority items. So integrate a to-do list into it.
And so then an AI that also has the context of all of my priorities, my personal priorities, my work priorities, and then the priorities of the company can crunch all of that and then give me a short list of things that I should work on. It’s like, all right, you have a lot of meetings today. You have a couple of emails that will require some time. So you don’t actually have much time for any deep work. So your to-do list has been reshuffled to reflect that. And so it’s like, all right, here’s a few little easy things that have been on the back burner that you can just knock out with a little bit of available time that you have. And then the next day it’s like, all right, I got one meeting in the morning. Emails are kind of light. Block off this huge thing and tackle this next big phase of a coding project that I’m working on. So an AI that can just take all of that sort of meaningless cognitive weight off of the human would be great, because there’s no point for me or anyone else to be doing that kind of thing.
Don’t Tolerate Bullshit
Jim O’Shaughnessy: A lot of people hate the book business and think that’s not a good business. And the way it currently exists, they’re probably right […] Do you think it’s this corporate culture that is just endemic to most big company legacy companies where it’s kind of like having to... Each upgrade needs to be compatible backward? […]
Jean-Marc Daecius: I think maybe two parts from a human psychological point of view is people have way too high of a tolerance for bullshit. You were saying meetings are masturbatory. I feel like that’s just waterboarding yourself with bullshit. And it’s like if you have such a high tolerance for that, I don’t think that’s a good sign. And then I think people also just lack imagination where if someone tells you, oh, this is the way that it’s been done, the iconoclast is like, well I don’t care about that, let’s find a different way. Most people don’t react that way. Most people are like, oh great, someone just told me what my job is and gave me a rubric for what I need to do. That’s great.
If this is the way it’s always been done, then it must be tried and true and I’m golden. I don’t have to think anymore. If you want to find a new way of doing something, it’s cognitively taxing. And so I think that goes hand in hand with people who can tolerate tons of bullshit are perhaps talented in the ways of not wanting to think too much.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Didn’t Bertrand Russell or maybe someone of his ilk say that what most people call thinking is simply rearranging their prejudices? And if you really want to do good work, it’s taxing, right? Because you got to think deeply and hard about things, but you also have to be willing to just say, oh well, I fucked that one up and what can I learn? I think there’s also that very strong in traditional corporate culture the cover your ass mentality. And it’s just not a good structure. It was designed for a completely different era for industrialization and Taylorism, which, you know how little I think of Taylorism. But to be fair, for the time that Taylor came up with all of these ideas, they made sense, right? Because you were supposed to do one thing. You pull that crank right on a big industrial assembly line. And yet it took over what we call corporate management or those types of things to an extent that people didn’t realize that it was just enshittification of everything.
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Let’s do your superhero backstory, because when we were chatting before we decided to record, we both agreed that your CV, unless you had a nutcase like me being able to not pay... I didn’t even look at your CV, to be honest. But when I learned a bit after hiring you, I’m like, huh, wow, that’s pretty cool that you got this job.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, it’s kind of like hyperstition. But I never even would have gone for a job like this, to be totally honest. But the situation here is much different than what I think most chiefs of staff would be dealing with. So I think it dovetails well, nicely into the fact that I don’t have a traditional CV for this kind of position. Well, the position is also a bit different than what I think most chiefs of staff might be accustomed to.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And although we use the terms, we are essentially in real time trying to create a completely new sort of company. AI first in all of our verticals, everything that we’re doing. The line that got me, that cinched it for you was, “I will be your last human chief of staff.” Elaborate on that a little bit.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Well, there’s a few parts of the job that, like any job, is a little annoying. Particularly with email. There’s so much that is just kind of like bullet holes through your attention during the day when you check five emails, and then all of a sudden, by the time you’re done with the fifth, you have like six more, and it’s like, all right, I’m not getting anything done. Email is a useful communicative tool, but there’s a huge trade off there because it’s essentially just nuking your ability to concentrate on one meaningful thing that actually has ROI for a given period of time where you can actually make progress on it.
I think AI can handle a lot of that shenanigans that happens in emails where it’s like, all right, I guess I needed to read this. I guess I needed to be updated on this. I would much prefer at the end of the day and at the beginning, or at the beginning of the day, I check a little app that I’ve built, and it’s like, here are a little ticker tape of things that I need to know that have been aggregated from emails that I haven’t actually gotten to since I last looked at it. And here’s like a short list of meetings and then my highest priority items. So integrate a to-do list into it.
And so then an AI that also has the context of all of my priorities, my personal priorities, my work priorities, and then the priorities of the company can crunch all of that and then give me a short list of things that I should work on. It’s like, all right, you have a lot of meetings today. You have a couple of emails that will require some time. So you don’t actually have much time for any deep work. So your to-do list has been reshuffled to reflect that. And so it’s like, all right, here’s a few little easy things that have been on the back burner that you can just knock out with a little bit of available time that you have. And then the next day it’s like, all right, I got one meeting in the morning. Emails are kind of light. Block off this huge thing and tackle this next big phase of a coding project that I’m working on. So an AI that can just take all of that sort of meaningless cognitive weight off of the human would be great, because there’s no point for me or anyone else to be doing that kind of thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And you definitely avoided my question about your superhero backstory. So we can truncate it. What, and you’ve done so many different things, which I find super cool, what one of those things that you did do you think was the most helpful for you in the role you occupy now?
Jean-Marc Daecius
Oh, man. Playing with Legos when I was a kid, maybe. Actually my first entrepreneurial endeavor was actually accidental and slightly illegal. I was living in Vancouver in a tiny studio apartment. And I remember I’d gotten a decent paying job and like two months in, I looked at my bank statement, I’m like, why do I have no money? And I look at my credit card statement, I was like, whoa, booze is really expensive in Vancouver. And my reaction to that was, well, how hard can it be to make whiskey? And so I spent the next nine months studying separation sciences and built a six foot fractionating column complete with a Graham condenser in my tiny studio apartment and distilled my own vodka, gin, rum and whiskey. Even barrel aged the whiskey myself.
And it wasn’t until I was doing my first run and I actually tasted this, got it up to 94% ethanol. I tasted it, I was like, this is good. And I had a friend over at the time and they were like, is this legal? And I was like, I didn’t think about that at all. But I’d also spent quite a bit of money building this copper still. And so I wanted to make my money back. So I may have traded a few boxes of booze for money with some friends.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So wait, so the headline is, Jim’s chief of staff at O’Shaughnessy Ventures, the best prior skill I got was from bootlegging.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Well, I mean, it was essentially a complete business that was founded on an experiment of curiosity that required a lot of tinkering and a lot of hands on building in order to get it to work. So it was this initial question of, well, how hard can this be? And of course Hofstadter’s law, it always takes much longer than you think it will, especially when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. But then unintended, it developed into this business experiment that, well, I’d had all of these costs and it’s like, well, now I want to recoup these costs a little bit. And so I was young at the time and I never really thought of starting a business at the time. Obviously it wasn’t a legitimate business, it was just really like a hobby.
But it was the first time that I made something that earned an unexpected dollar in that sense. And so I think the lessons involved in that entire little hobby experiment extrapolate really well to pretty much every product or service or business experiment that I’ve run since and have run since I’ve come on board here. So it’s like, all right, this is a cool idea, but what will the ROI on it be? Is this actually going to move the needle? Is this actually like a decent business experiment or is this really just fulfilling some curiosity? Fulfilling curiosity can be great.
It can be useful because it can lead into unexpected unknowns where you can find a little bit of gold and then it’s like, all right, kind of like the Bell Labs, where it’s like, all right, a whole bunch of scientists just do cool stuff and then they uncover all sorts of things that eventually do have higher ROI. But that all being said, I think it is good to have every sort of proposal or idea go through that litmus test of like, can we see a viable ROI here?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And basically what we believe is there is gold in them there tails. But a lot of people aren’t operating there because of a variety of reasons. Like for example, with AI Lab, we think that we’re going to be able to develop some very commercially successful software that people will use and love. But we have kind of an edge in that no VC would touch it because the market isn’t big enough.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I think one of the troubles that traditional enterprises get into is they get captive of their own jargon. Right. And so what’s the TAM, the total addressable market? Oh no, that’s not big enough. And plus they’re constrained by the fact that every investment that a traditional VC makes, essentially they need it to return the fund. And we are not under any of those problems.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yes, it’s kind of like they have incentives that create scope paralysis. So they can’t zoom into something that it would actually be very much worth their while because of those incentives that you outlined. And then because of that kind of becomes a habit. So if they move into some other area, they might still have those, their zoom is basically stuck. Whereas here there’s just so much freedom in terms of like, well, how high could that go? How low can we address it and still have a meaningful ROI? Even if something’s just an internal tool, doesn’t have immediate ROI, but it has, once you compare it to an industry standard and then you scale that across time, it’s like, oh, actually this is going to save a ton of money over time. So yeah, I do think about scope paralysis quite a bit. And it’s often the very mistake that I’m making when I’m trying to work on something and I’m stuck. I often have to be like, all right, I gotta shake my head out of the grass and stand up and be like, all right, bird’s eye view. What’s going on?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I think also we’re a fairly interesting crew here in that, if you are not a highly agentic person, you’re not going to make it here. Right? I’m not running a kindergarten, and neither are you. And so there’s a lot of people who think that writing furiously about something and posting it on social media, that shows them, whereas the value of that is precisely zero for most endeavors. What’s it feel like? You’ve worked at a bunch of different places. One of the things that we try to do here is show me. You’re very good at that.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. I had an idea that I bounced off you based on something that Jimmy said in one of the monthly meetings, and I bounced the idea off you, and your response was, sounds really cool. Write up a proposal for it. And so I went home that weekend. I thought, I’ve never written a proposal for anything. I guess I’ll take a shot at this. And I was like, oh, it’d be really cool if I could show what the UI of this thing would look like. And so I whipped out my iPad, I started drawing it, but then I was like, oh, actually, it might just be faster if I just code up the UI real quick. And so I did that.
And once I had it on the browser, I was like, well, I’ll take a shot at the back end. Just see how far I get. And so Monday morning rolled around. I don’t know if you remember. I was like, Jim, so you asked me to write a proposal, and I didn’t do it. You were like, okay. I was like, but I built a working MVP. Do you want to check it out? And you were thrilled. So that developed into a tool that we use almost every day now. It’s a meeting about a meeting in order to think about a proposal, and then another meeting for someone to decide who’s going to write the proposal. And it’s like, when are we eventually going to get to the interesting part, which is someone actually does the thing.
So I’ve always been a little bit, I guess you could say allergic to corporate culture, because it just seems like a lot of meetings and nothing gets done where I’m much more of the, okay, that’s great. Leave me alone. I would like to actually take a crack and get something working and see how useful it is and then we can get feedback on it and we can actually build something meaningful. That’s the number one thing that I think I love about being here. But perhaps maybe not having the traditional CV also, these go hand in hand because I just never wanted to go through all of these, jump through all these hoops in order to build a CV in order to get this kind of job. It’s like, no, I just want to actually do things that are interesting and give me real feedback as opposed to more gold stars.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, well, even when I was in a more traditional environment, I think 80% of internal corporate meetings are masturbatory and a total waste of time. And I think the challenge with that is that people think that they’re accomplishing something. You had 10 meetings today. Who the fuck cares? Did you do anything today? And as part of the series that we never really kind of got off the ground, the Great Reshuffle, I think all of that... And I started that, I don’t know, 2018, where I got the sense we are going to go through the biggest transformation in the way businesses are run. Who wins, who loses. The old playbooks were going to stop working and we’ve already seen that. And then aligned our verticals around things where I saw the greatest arbitrage ability.
For example, Infinite Books. A lot of people hate the book business and think that’s not a good business. And the way it currently exists, they’re probably right. But the way we are reinventing it, kind of... We toy with the word, not even calling it publishing, but an author’s operating system. And it amazes me. A simple thing. We A/B test all of our covers, right? And you and I just had an experience where the cover that both you and I were not happy with won. The whole team hated it. And yet again, maybe it’s my empirical quant background, but if the market says something and you’re saying something else, market is right. But I wonder, okay, that’s the easiest thing in the world for like a Simon & Schuster or one of the legacy publishers to do. Do you think it’s this corporate culture that is just endemic to most big company legacy companies where it’s kind of like having to... Each upgrade needs to be compatible backward. Right. We don’t suffer under that problem. But is it a mixture of things. Is it... What do you think it is?
Jean-Marc Daecius
I think maybe two parts from a human psychological point of view is people have way too high of a tolerance for bullshit. You were saying meetings are masturbatory. I feel like that’s just waterboarding yourself with bullshit. And it’s like if you have such a high tolerance for that, I don’t think that’s a good sign. And then I think people also just lack imagination where if someone tells you, oh, this is the way that it’s been done, the iconoclast is like, well I don’t care about that, let’s find a different way. Most people don’t react that way. Most people are like, oh great, someone just told me what my job is and gave me a rubric for what I need to do. That’s great.
If this is the way it’s always been done, then it must be tried and true and I’m golden. I don’t have to think anymore. If you want to find a new way of doing something, it’s cognitively taxing. And so I think that goes hand in hand with people who can tolerate tons of bullshit are perhaps talented in the ways of not wanting to think too much.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Didn’t Bertrand Russell or maybe someone of his ilk say that what most people call thinking is simply rearranging their prejudices? And if you really want to do good work, it’s taxing, right? Because you got to think deeply and hard about things, but you also have to be willing to just say, oh well, I fucked that one up and what can I learn? I think there’s also that very strong in traditional corporate culture the cover your ass mentality. And it’s just not a good structure. It was designed for a completely different era for industrialization and Taylorism, which, you know how little I think of Taylorism. But to be fair, for the time that Taylor came up with all of these ideas, they made sense, right? Because you were supposed to do one thing. You pull that crank right on a big industrial assembly line. And yet it took over what we call corporate management or those types of things to an extent that people didn’t realize that it was just enshittification of everything.
Jean-Marc Daecius
I guess constant meetings are like the doom scrolling of the corporate world.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I mean honestly. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I like LinkedIn. They feel fine over there. It’s like, oh, he got a promotion, wow. I guess I’ll now mimetically become envious of him and try to bring him down. I think that we are very fortunate in that this isn’t exactly a startup. Right, because we don’t have to worry about funding and all those kinds of things. And your average startup founder spends what, 60% of their time on raising money or keeping investors informed, monitoring the situation and... And so we don’t have to do any of that bullshit. And we also have a culture that bullshitting is not appreciated unless it’s like shitposting or having fun. I mean, how many people do you really think right now could thrive in an environment like this?
So, for example, we’ll talk about this right now. You just did a post for our Substack, which is fascinating. You told me about it months ago, and I rode you relentlessly to write it. But you’re a good writer too. And how many places are you chief of staff, but hey, I also want that Substack from you on AI and ag. Talk a little bit about that because I think it was a fascinating idea.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. First, thanks for letting me do that. It’s a lot of fun to have it broadcasted on the OSVerse. Some really nice feedback on it too, so far, which is great. So the basic thesis is that the same argument that you’re making about Taylorism and how that’s infected the corporate world in this overly bureaucratic, bloated, meeting heavy way...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Vogons, Vogons. If you’re a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan, you’ll know the Vogons are the most bureaucratic race.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, and they’re blowing up the world in order to build a superhighway straight through it because they don’t have the dexterity to question the order or just build around a planet. Solar system, like, come on, guys. So very similar to these... If you take that as analogy or a metaphor for the current way that we do agriculture, which is essentially just industrial monocrop farming, there’s something very similar there because we have these endless rows of the exact same crop, and they require like a Vogon-like contraption to harvest all of it. Because, for example, I think it’s the Calmer 1357 or something is like 32 rows of corn. It’s basically just this long hammerhead type device that you put on the front of a tractor and then you run it through 32 rows of corn and it can harvest all 32 rows simultaneously, which is amazing. And from the point of view of the Industrial Revolution, this is a triumph. But it has come with serious downsides.
One, for example, is that in order to have monocropping work, we have to dump loads of pesticides on these plants in order for them to make it to harvest. In the U.S., the U.S. applies over 1 billion pounds of pesticides to food every single year. That trickles down to about 3 pounds of pesticides per person per year, which trickles down to about 11 aspirin tablets of pesticides on your food per day. And even after you wash food, you still have 75% of the food still has pesticides on it. And many of the pesticides now aren’t even something that you can rub off. They’re called systemic pesticides. So they basically infuse into the fruit or the food so you can’t wash it off. It’s literally inside. And this has health consequences which I could get into that even relate to the GLP-1 craze and obesity and whatnot.
But back to what I think is probably going to happen with the future of agriculture is we’re going to get something that’s far more dynamic. Charles Mann is a writer, awesome writer, who published this book called 1491, which details what his best thesis, what North and South America probably looked like prior to the arrival of Europeans. And one thing that stuck with me from that book is an agriculture technology that we don’t use today. It’s called the Milpa and it’s a system of intercropping where you plant like a dozen different species together. And like, for example, corn lacks lysine and tryptophan, but beans have lysine and tryptophan. So if you plant them together, they basically complement one another. And what one plant takes from the soil, another plant provides. And so you essentially get this fully regenerative system in this little collection of species that can be harvested basically forever without depleting the land, which is kind of like an infinite food hack. And the Aztec empire, the Inca empire, all use these systems of intercropping. And then we basically bulldozed that system and we invented monocropping.
We had to because it had to cater to the machines that we had available as a result of the Industrial Revolution. We didn’t have a tractor that could plow through a milpa and catch 12 different varieties of plants that are all getting ripe or ready for harvest at all different times. We don’t have a machine that could do that, but we will. Once we have humanoid robots, we could transition huge monocrop fields to essentially food forests that have dozens, if not hundreds of different species of food. And these fields, these food forests would be attended to by essentially a small army of robotic gardeners. Because the human hand, once we have that in fully automated form, it can differentiate between a ripe tomato and a ripe avocado.
And all these other things that it’s going to interact with can also, using AI, basically run hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of concurrent experiments in order to find a little bit more arbitrage in these systems. Like, oh, this species does a little bit better for whatever reason, if it’s 2 meters away from this species, we don’t know yet, but it seems to work. And then like this species of insect next to this species of tree with this type of mushroom and dandelions here are necessary because dandelions hoover up zinc and selenium and all that sort of stuff. We’ll be able to run those experiments concurrently, but then also rebuild the topsoil. Because another thing that monocropping does is it depletes the topsoil. And topsoil, an inch of topsoil takes a thousand years to build.
And then in the Midwest we are losing, what was it? I think in an average field we lose 2.2 tons of topsoil per acre. And then in the Midwest we lose substantially more. It comes down to basically like in an average field, we lose 11 years of topsoil in one year. And then in the Midwest where it’s much more heavily farmed, we lose 69 years of topsoil growth in one year. And so with these numbers, you just project them forward. Things are going to look really bad in about 50 to 60 years. So if we don’t figure out a different way to pivot away from monocrop culture, we’re going to run into problems. The other thing about this Milpa style food forest is that you won’t need pesticides because you have all of this inter-species competition.
It alleviates basically all of the problems that you get with a huge field of corn which can be just destroyed overnight by one particular species of bug. You just don’t get that if you have this diverse ecosystem of plants and insects that are all interacting together. So then you can do away the pesticides, the topsoil comes back. That means that the ground can hold more water. There’s just so many benefits here. So I outlined all of that in this Future of Food.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know what I love about it too, is that it kind of speaks to our overall thesis brilliantly, right? Monocultures are bad just in humans, in any variety. When you slip into a monoculture, bad shit happens. Using food as the example. Yeah. For when that was the way it had to be done. That was the way it had to be done because we were limited and constrained by the technology and the hardware and rigs available to us. But that’s no longer the case. And part of our thesis is that everything’s going to become customizable and so can food, right? And then I guess with a tilt to my fierce anti-authoritarianism, you’ve got to look at a system that goes at things top down. And one thinks of course of Mao and the sparrows.
And for people who aren’t aware of this, Mao decided that he was going to collectivize all of the farms in China and he fucking hated those sparrows too. And so they literally killed all of the sparrows in China with disastrous effects because the sparrows were eating the bugs that were destroying the crops. Right? And it just to me makes me go crazy. People don’t think of second and tertiary effects of anything. And then take an ideology that thinks it has the answers to everything and one of them happens to be, yeah, the supreme leader doesn’t like those fucking sparrows, so we got to wipe them out. And millions of people starve to death. And so one of the reasons why I’m so incredibly bullish on this new era is it doesn’t have to be like that anymore.
And your article is a perfect example of how it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. And one of our themes is that we are an AI first company, meaning that anything that can be done by AI should be done by AI because why should I want you, who’s incredibly creative, incredibly productive... Why should I want you doing horribly boring and tedious jobs that AI can do much more brilliantly and quickly and all of that. And I sometimes think when I talk to people who are like normies, who aren’t looking at this stuff and why should they, right? I get that. Those inside kind of the AI bubble, we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and everything and so we think, oh man, they’re just promoting the hell out of this, and maybe they should tone it down a little. I think we’re not promoting it enough because there’s a huge class of people. This just isn’t their thing. Right. And that’s a shame because they themselves, like Steve Jobs very famously said, a computer was a bicycle for the mind. AI is a rocket ship for creativity, for leverage for all of these things. And that was one thing we aligned on immediately. Give our listeners and viewers some more of your... I don’t want to steal the credit for your ideas, so talk a bit about more of some of the workflows that are just unlocking time, talent, and the need for huge overhead.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Just to comment on the normies. I think there’s something that could be said about the school system which indoctrinates this high tolerance for bullshit. And this...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, it’s totally fucked. FUBAR. Fucked up beyond all recognition.
Jean-Marc Daecius
A good example is, I think traditional advertising is just... It’s very much like monocrop culture, where you’re just spraying and praying at thousands, millions of people with the idea that, oh, it’ll work for some of them, but for most of them, yeah, fingers crossed. But for most of them, you’re actually wasting time and attention, even if it’s just like a tiny little bit of a scroll.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And it’s irritating.
Jean-Marc Daecius
It’s irritating. But you add all of that up over a lifetime and it’s like someone... People are wasting just ungodly amounts of just tiny little slices of cognitive attention that could be devoted to more fulfilling life. And so what’s the humanoid robot food forest gardener version of advertising? In that sense? It’s very much like a really great recommendation from a friend where Liberty comes to you and is like, all right, this movie, you gotta watch it. You’re gonna be like, he never misses, so I’m gonna watch this. Essentially, that was an advertisement. He just advertised this movie to you. But it doesn’t feel like that because it feels organic, it feels human. It’s customized to you because a human is behind it.
Whereas the majority of advertising is just like a bad billboard, which is like, why did I even just look at that? Oh, I had to, because it was on my screen and I had to click out of it in order to get the thing out. So I think in the age of AI, we can use AI to figure out if someone is a good fit for a recommendation for something where advertising doesn’t become this sort of waterboarding the population with something that we want to sell, but more of like, oh, here are the 385 people in this pool who’ve expressed interest in similar things. That would be a good fit for this. Let’s contact them. That just seems like a much better use of everyone’s attention and much less waste.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, and you’re being modest. We really drill down and we find not only the nearest neighbor audience, we also look at their work and they’re like, oh, wow, look, he just wrote an essay that he’s going to love this book. But then we bring up the essay, right? And a lot of that... The reason I feel so comfortable with that is I would welcome that email if somebody took the time to read What Works on Wall Street, right? And they found a book that was really similar, but different, with a lot of new information. And I got an email citing the findings from What Works. Wow. They actually read the book. Most people simply use it for personal protection or as a doorjam because it’s this thick. But I would welcome that, right? And the way we’re doing it is, I think, somewhat similar. You’re probably not going to get an email from Infinite Books, Infinite Films, Infinite Media, if we haven’t done our homework on who you are as a person. It’s all about really trust. And I would trust the company that I never got a bullshit spammy type email from. And I hate... I hate the ones, especially the ones who seem to do it intentionally. If you want to unsubscribe, hit unsubscribe, and then you’re fucked because it’s just like they keep coming in and there’s just so many of these annoyances from the previous industrial era that we don’t have to have anymore.
And the same is true with the app that we’re just crawling on it right now, but the recommendation app, because I do believe that like anything, AI is going to bring a tsunami of slop and it will also bring brilliance and masterpieces and everything else. But you need... People are going to need help, right? And so the recommendation thing that we’re going to be working on, it won’t be in the form that I want it in until maybe 2030, 2032, but it will be something that I want, right? How cool would it be to be able to open an app first thing in the day, here’s the books that you might like, here’s the movies you might like, here’s an essay, here’s a Substack that you haven’t discovered. Now, granted, this is the opposite of a mass market, right? We are using a very targeted market of people, but it’s still a big market. And I anticipate that a lot of our stuff will appeal to not a huge group of people, but that’s fine, right? That’s the other thing that people don’t seem to understand. It’s like you live under a system for so long. So, right, like American TV, you’re familiar with the standard bell curve. 68.5% are within one standard deviation of the median. And guess what? I Love Lucy has 79 million viewers because it fits right into that distribution of 68.5%. Now, we’ve already seen this, of course, but there’s going to be much more of it. There are shows, podcasts, Substacks, movies, books, et cetera, that can be enormously profitable, but with a much smaller audience. I mean, what was Game of Thrones? I can’t think, what, 18 million watched the final season. That seems... That’s a huge arbitrage point that people are just ignoring.
Jean-Marc Daecius
I’ve often thought of the human species as like a single entity. And what we’re doing with all of this scrolling, we’re kind of like liver cells that are processing these free radicals and whatnot. And all of the spam email is basically inflammation in the collective body. And it’s like, all right, we need to do something about this. Where is the immune response to all of this spam? And then you get the arms race between Google, Gmail filters and whatnot. And then the spammers level up their arsenal. And you essentially have this immune battle between these two things that are going on. And I think AI can become like an antibiotic for a lot of this nonsense in our culture.
And the way that we’ve set up our systems, it can just debloat a lot of this inflammation. Imagine if I could, very similar to your curation app, I would love to have an AI just curate Twitter for me so that every day I could just open it up and I could get the 10 posts that would take me 15 minutes to find and comment on, and I could just see those and be like, all right, that was actually great.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. The risk there, of course, is that confirmation bias. Right. And I don’t know that we want a society where everybody has their own personal bubble. So as part of the curation app, just to stick with that one for a minute, we’re intentionally going to add things... Well, not noise, but it might be noise, but it might be something. They’re like, oh, I never thought about that. Maybe I should check that out. What other areas do you think... I personally, you know my views on the leverage component of AI, but I take it much further, as I usually do most everything. I think you can learn a lot with the book I’m writing right now. As you know, it’s a thriller, it’s a novel, but a lot of it is based on real world things that really exist in the real world. And literally we never formally calculated it out, but I think that conservatively, it would have taken 10 years to do the amount of research that I did in nine months.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, I mean, it depends how many people you were employing during that 10 years.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. I mean, you would literally need an army because they’d all have to go to libraries around the world. Right. Because it’s not all centralized and I wouldn’t have done it. And so I think that the research part, but I also think the writing part, I write everything longhand and then I put it on the thing, but then I put it into AI and say, tell me how bad this is. And then I’m like, okay, you think you can do better?
Jean-Marc Daecius
Show me.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And so I think that there’s always a moral panic when a new technology comes on which crushes the gate that the old talent used to have up, right? And so it’s nothing new. It’s like all the way back to the novel. Those manuscript monks were pissed off, man. And calculators I experienced when I was a kid, they were very expensive. Everyone thought they were the coolest thing in the world. And then they banned them from all the classrooms.
Jean-Marc Daecius
You’re not going to have a calculator in your pocket.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly. Well, yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Are you sure about that?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But so the pattern of it is the same. And I think we’re kind of in the moral panic period right now. The pearl clutching. Oh, was AI used? Well, come on, get used to it. Right? It shouldn’t be... And that’s the other thing they always do. The ones who were the kings and stars under the old system, when they see their gate being crushed, right? Gate gets nuked, then everything becomes about process, right. Whereas it should be about outcome, especially in a creative endeavor. Did this movie or book or podcast change your mind? Did it inspire you? Did it piss you off? Right. It should have some effect on you. And so I just think it’s really funny seeing everyone like the process. Can you imagine if we did that with everything.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
We’d still be living in caves.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. You don’t need to take organic chemistry in order to talk to ChatGPT about a particular health condition and then go to a doctor with a really informed opinion and then you get this smug sort of gaslighty rebuke from the doctor. It’s like, did you ChatGPT that? It’s like, well, yes, I did. But am I wrong? Is my premise here that I’m proposing to you incorrect? And it’s like, oh, but that’s not the thing that you’re focusing on. You’re focusing on how I got to this information.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yes, I did use ChatGPT and I want some actual answers because now I have a little bit of context around this, which previously most people didn’t. And then they were just at the behest of whether they had a good doctor or not and whether that doctor was well informed about whatever the issue was. That’s been one of my favorite and most eye opening examples. You were talking about using AI to educate. The amount that I’ve learned about health since ChatGPT dropped has been unbelievable. The things that I’ve been able to do personally, just taking blood tests and plopping those into various AIs and being like, all right, give me a read. It’s been incredible. It’s like, oh man, I wish I had this like a couple decades ago.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, as you know, you’ve seen the actual journal from 1983 or whatever in which I spend page after page talking... I didn’t call it AI, begging and pleading for it to come. Now, we’re enthusiasts, right? And so I doubt that a lot of people out there are going to be doing their own blood work and sending it to a lab and having it processed. But even in that old 68.5%, so many lives could be made materially better by just embracing the technology for simple things like learning. I mean, we talked about the school system, yet another relic of the industrial era. Right. It was like industrialists saying to the... Imagine industrialists had influence on governments. The shock. Basically, they’re saying to him, yeah, what we need you to do here is we need the kid to not be curious, not be controversial. We want them to have a correct answer machine installed in their head. And there is only one correct answer. And that’s the one we are supplying. Right. And there’s high tolerance for bullshit. Yeah, high tolerance for bullshit. There’s a reason why I liked Pink Floyd’s song about, “Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone.” But rather than just go on and rant about it, there are now alternatives. And I think it’s really easy to root against things. And so I always look for things to root for. And I think that in the field of AI and across disciplines, right, there is so much to root for. I mean, I look at my grandchildren and the way that they are using AI, and it’s really clever. And it’s one of those unknowns. Right. And this idea that... Did you ever see the movie Matilda?
Jean-Marc Daecius
Oh, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, right. All my kids love Matilda, especially my girls. And I just remember that scene. Why? “Because I’m big and you’re little. I’m right and you’re wrong. I’m the adult, you’re the kid.” It’s like, that’s just so much... And we can unlock, I mean, really what we’ve done. And I get a little extreme here, but school and a lot of current curriculum is designed to crush creativity, crush that way of thinking. And it doesn’t have to be like that anymore. With AI, we’re investing. We’ve invested in several AI companies for education. What other areas do you think are non-intuitive for where AI could be an amazing unlock?
Jean-Marc Daecius
Well, before answering that, just to address something that you said about people criticizing it, they’re so quick to criticize. And when I hear a criticism of AI, the first thing I always ask is like, well, how much do you use it?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Because if Picasso was in the room and he had a criticism about a particular paintbrush, I would take that criticism very seriously.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
As would I.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Dude probably knows what he’s talking about. Whereas someone who spent, who’s only done like three or four queries on ChatGPT...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The free version.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. And like, oh, this sucks.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s like, well, they’re right. The free version does suck.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Well, yeah, it’s like, all right. You’re clearly an authority on this. You’re kind of like anyone on Twitter who’s like, whatever the subject of the day is, you’re now an expert in when you actually haven’t gone deep on it at all. What’s going on here. We hear a lot about it, but it’s almost invisible, which I think might count as not intuitive. Just Tesla’s full self-driving AI.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Amazing.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Unbelievably good.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Sorry, I will interrupt. You were the guy who converted me. I still don’t drive a Tesla, but the firm has one and it’s fucking cool. And if you’re driving around midtown Manhattan or downtown here. The last time I was with you, I was blown away and you even turned to me and said, if I was driving, we would have gotten into an accident. Right. And so the proof’s in the pudding.
Jean-Marc Daecius
There’s been at least twice in the last 10 months where I’m like, oh my gosh, if FSD hadn’t been operating...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Would have been bad.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Things would suck right now.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It would be bad.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. But the thing is, it’s invisible. You can’t... For example, when cars were first invented, it was super visible and obvious. 1901, a picture of a Manhattan street was like almost all horses and then like one car in the distance and 2.5 million pounds of horseshit. And then like 15 years later it was the complete reverse where you had like a sea of cars and one horse in the background. Whereas with AI taking over driving, it’s completely invisible because you can be in a regular gas powered car going down the highway and then someone right next to you is in a Tesla and the Tesla is driving itself.
But it’s really hard to tell unless you’re like, oh, they don’t have their hands on the wheel and they don’t have their foot on the pedal.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So I think that’s going to be, I think that’s an example of something that’s non-intuitive but which is actually going to have this enormous effect. Tesla’s starting to ramp up their robotaxis in Austin and in San Francisco and I think those are just going to demolish. At that point it might become slightly more obvious because then you’ll see a car driving around with no one in it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Because if you do summon on a Tesla in a busy parking lot. I’ve done this a few times where the car is driving itself to me and it drives past a pedestrian, they’re like, there’s no one in that fucking car. But some other non-intuitive ways.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I just want to make a point about that because I think something people often miss is that my thesis is at least that for your everyday person they will be beneficiaries of AI because it is invisible. I think that 10, 15 years from now it will be like electricity. It’ll just be there. And it will be doing yeoman’s work. Right. It will be doing heavy lifting. The self-driving car being a great example. But people will just get so used to it that it won’t even be remarkable anymore.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Oh man. That’s kind of the sad thing about technology is that once it becomes a protocol, it ceases to be magical.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Even though if you went like a century before it was invented and introduced that now protocol thing to those people, they would be like, what kind of devil sorcery is this?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’d probably be burned at the stake depending on how far back you went.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. Oh man. It’s just how... It’s just strange how humans have this immense capacity for becoming inured to wonder and something that’s truly magical while simultaneously having very crippled imagination. Huge tolerance for bullshit. We really are such a strange species.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But we’re actually quite pro-human here at... But the, and of course the classic is Louis C.K.’s thing about Wi-Fi in an airplane. He had this great bit where he’s like, do you remember the first time you went on an airplane and they had Wi-Fi? How you were like, oh my God, I can’t believe it. I’m 30,000 feet above the earth and I can waste my time scrolling Twitter. And then he goes, then the minute it goes out you go, what the fuck...
Jean-Marc Daecius
This is bullshit!
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But you’re absolutely right. But I think that over time that has been a positive for our species, that we are incredibly adaptive. And yeah, it does suck that something that is almost magical in its properties gets taken for granted.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But I think it’s also good for the species.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. I mean it could just be like an artifact of the life cycle of a given innovation because when it’s in the...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
They’re all speeding up.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. Well, when it’s an MVP stage and Louis C.K. is sitting on a plane and then the Wi-Fi router gets overloaded, it’s like everyone reacts negatively. It’s almost like an immune reaction. And that’s actually a signal to the people driving that innovation forward. Like, all right, well, we need to improve this. Clearly it’s wanted, but clearly it’s also failing. And so that’s sort of like the MVP stage is you get feedback real fast on whether it’s working, whether it’s not. And if you get a high signal on either of those, it means that people are using it. Which means, like, all right, this is useful. We should keep pursuing this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
One of the downsides of a lot of the innovation you and I were chatting about before we started to record. And I admire your point of view about this because I didn’t experience it. And it’s this idea that there are secondary and tertiary effects to ubiquitous cell phones. And the way you put it is much more direct. But you’re under continual surveillance. And I made the comment that if cell phone cameras or the ability to take a film had been around when I was a teenager, I would be totally fucked. Because... But talk a bit about that.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. So in the 1920s, the Hawthorne Works factories in Chicago ran a study which unveiled something that later became known as the Hawthorne Effect. They were trying to figure out how to make their workers more productive. And they tried all sorts of things, like turn up the lights. That seemed to increase productivity. But then to A/B test the experiment, they turned the lights back down, but productivity remained high. And they were like, this doesn’t make any sense. Did the lights help or not? Eventually they realized that it was the presence of the people doing the study and the effect of the workers knowing they were being watched that changed their behavior. And so the Hawthorne effect is just when someone feels like they’re being watched, their behavior changes.
A sort of structural incentivize, or if we’re going to take that form and those incentives and put it into an actual structure, you essentially get like a panopticon where it’s essentially like a circular prison with a guard tower in the center. You can actually put one way or two way mirrors around that guard tower. And the guard tower can be empty, but everyone in this prison will think they’re being watched just because there’s that eye of Sauron there.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And so what inadvertently happened in the late, around 2010 when camera phones started getting good is suddenly we entered a social surveillance state. And that’s particularly pronounced for high schoolers where they can’t really have fun in the way that previous generations did because now they’re hyper aware of the fact that, oh, everyone has a camera in their pocket and if I act weird or if, God forbid, I do some underage drinking or something like that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Underage drinking? People drink when they’re underage?
Jean-Marc Daecius
Actually, no, they don’t anymore because they’ve...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That was my generation, my bad.
Jean-Marc Daecius
They’ve stopped. And my thesis is that it’s because the youth now lives in this social surveillance state where if someone did get drunk and acted silly at a party, everyone’s going to whip out their phone. It’s going to be... There’s the threat of the ever present looming threat of it getting posted online and then they wake up the next day with a hangover, open up their phone and realize that their life is quite literally over. I mean, you think about mean girls and all of the weird, brutal social dynamics that happen while humans are figuring those things out between age 5 and 18 and then you just magnify that with them being able to be like, look what he did kind of thing.
I mean, I think it’s quite sad and potentially really bad. And I... This makes me hope. Circling back to AI strangely, I think that the answer to this is when AI gets so good with regards to deepfakes that it frees everyone from the social surveillance state. Because if you do something silly and someone films it, everyone who sees it on social media the next day is like, it could be fake.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, it’s AI.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. So suddenly it’ll free those younger generations from basically being beholden to this social surveillance state again.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I have six grandchildren and I would not want them to have to suffer that fate. So maybe something we should look into is like a blocker. Well, actually we funded a fellow who is blocking surreptitious recordings. Wouldn’t it be kind of cool if your phone emitted something that made it impossible for the phones close by to take a video of you or whatever. I like your answer though because when everything’s fake, what are you gonna do? I do think that is a real danger because you look at certain ideologies today. And they have zero contact with reality. And that’s why you see so many of these idiotic things being done.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Well, that’s always been the case.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I agree, I agree.
Jean-Marc Daecius
We’ve always had myths and religions.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, but they didn’t have the potential to scale like they scale now, and they didn’t travel as quickly as they travel now and they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous. Right.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Well, perhaps another counterpoint is that like for example, when film was first invented. Moving pictures.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
I mean there’s the famous story of the first one that was shown in a theater is like a train coming towards the camera.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And everyone freaked out.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And everyone freaked out because they thought it was real.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And then eventually everyone learned like, oh, it’s on a screen. Yeah, it’s actually fake. Sort of.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It was a real train, but it’s a movie of a real train.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s not coming at me.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So compared to that first audience, human behavior adapted and learned.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So I think that maybe something very similar will happen with, there will actually be good in this avalanche of AI slop because in some of it will come the redemption and the freeing from the social surveillance state.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Which I am 100% in favor of. I remember I was horrified when my youngest was a tweener, I guess, and we were at a cocktail party and all of the other parents were talking about how they had spyware on their kids’ phones. And I’m like, that is horrible. Why are you doing... Why? And they get really defensive, right. Like, I want to make sure they’re safe. And I’m like, you just want to lord it over them that they have zero privacy. And so I hope that actually happens because what a bummer, man. To not be able to... A friend of mine and I were having lunch up at the Core Club many years ago, pre-pandemic, and he’s of my vintage and we kind of agreed that one of the problems that younger men specifically were facing today was they never got punched in the face. Right. My generation, I can guarantee you, if there’s a hundred guys 65 years old and you ask them, have you been punched in the face? 99 will say yes. And but again, what does that lead to? It leads to the dispute is over. Right. Somebody says something you don’t like, is an asshole to you. Whatever. You get punched, he gets punched and then you’re done.
Jean-Marc Daecius
It also puts other things in perspective. If someone calls you a name, it’s like, yeah, words are not violence. I’ve been punched in the face.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, words are not violence. Violence is violence.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Exactly. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And when... But it’s even bigger than that. I think that was the way you adjudicated disputes between young teenage boys and... But then they were done.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, it’s part of a learning experience.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
With mommy and daddy calling out the kid and getting them expelled and then that kid’s parents suing mommy and daddy because they were mean and it just seems like such a waste of time to me.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, I mean, let kids grow up.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly. And that’s where we do the most learning. Talking to a neuroscientist once and he’s like, yeah, your average baby is tripping balls 24 hours a day. That’s how the brain develops. Right. And so this desire for control and this desire to think that you as a parent can make your child this perfect thing, it’s just wrong.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Well, I mean, I don’t have children myself yet, but I’ve spent a lot of time with friends who do and I think it’s probably like they’re trying to prevent the worst case scenario. And given current technology, trying to prevent the worst case scenario also requires doing all of this other Big Brother Orwellian stuff. And so going back to your question about other non-intuitive ways that AI might help, I can very easily see a way where this will affect this issue. There’s been a few devices like the Friend device where all of these sort of lanyard things where there’s an AI that you can talk to.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I have one of those, don’t I?
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, you do.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I’ve never used it.
Jean-Marc Daecius
No. But there’s these proto attempts at AI companions and they’re just not very useful right now because it’s essentially like a chatbot that has a microphone that is in a device and there’s not anything terribly innovative and because of that, super useful. But I think back to one of my favorite games when I was younger, Zelda Ocarina of Time. You’re like this little kid with a sword, but you have this little fairy that’s following you around and her, I think her name is Navi or something. And whenever you are stuck or you needed help, you could ask her a question or she might prompt and tell you something.
And so I imagine in the future, you might be able to not worry about your kid at all because it has this little AI companion that’s following it around, which 99% of the time doesn’t do anything. But then it sees like, oh, the kid is getting peer pressured to jump off a 35 foot structure onto concrete. And it’s like, actually this is a bad idea. That’s when the AI speaks up and it’s like, guys, no, this is bad. And it’s like, actually given the density of your bones, if you jump off there and you hit at literally any angle, you will have a minimum of about seven fractures, that sort of thing.
So maybe there’s an avenue where essentially the tracking tech that parents are using to try and prevent worst case scenarios. It’s just another instance of the technology is too young, so we’re forced to...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
We haven’t gotten to the iteration that would actually work.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Exactly. We’re still using a hammer on a screw because we invented the screw before we invented the screwdriver. And it’s like, well, this doesn’t work very well, but it’s the best I got right now. Yeah. So, yeah, I’m just gonna ruin this wall by hammering a screw into it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Something I have done.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, I think we’ve all done that at some point where it’s like, you just don’t have a screwdriver and you’re...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, one of my big things when I got married very young. I was 22 and had my first child Patrick at 24. So pretty young. But I quickly learned that I needed to selectively underperform in certain things that my wife wanted me to do. And so I became a master of selective underperformance. And she wanted me to do a bunch of work around the house. I’m all thumbs. And so she bought me a drill. And so I’m like, this is very dangerous. And so what I did was even more than I... I really underperformed. I basically took the drill and drilled holes into a basement wall until... And I did it, hoping she would hear me. And she did. And she came down and goes, what are you doing? And I said, I’m testing out the drill. And she’s like, give me that.
Let’s bring it back to business. And the areas where we’re seeing just tremendous leverage from AI and one of the reasons, by the way, I think that this whole solo founder thing is a phenomenon that might have some legs because much of what we do in our various verticals, film, books more so, medium, even more so is leverage AI workflows so that we don’t need 100 people on staff. And the people we have on staff are using their time and thoughts for much higher level ROI potential. When do you think that will be completely normalized in even like standard traditional corporations, if ever?
Jean-Marc Daecius
I don’t think for a while. I mean, someone in the family who’s been a software engineer for his whole life now, two decades plus. And whenever I’m with that part of the family, I always ask him... I always ask questions to try and suss out how much they’re using AI and what for. And especially with something like coding, where AI has just made coding so much more fun, right? Because you can move so much faster to the point where the feedback loop in the personal agency algorithm there is just, it can be addictive to the point where it’s like I was describing that, the proposal I was supposed to write and I was like, well, I’ll just code up the UI and then... Instead of seeing the back end as... Previous to AI, it would have been like, oh, this is going to take so much time. I got to plan this out. I got to... It just feels like this huge, enormous chore that I’m going to have to slowly chunk away at. With AI it was like, I’ll see how far I can get. Why not? And then I had it working within like a few hours.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, it was amazing.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So the fact that that exists on one end of the spectrum, which is very close to the solo founder thing that you’re talking about. But then on the other end of the spectrum you have like a very big company that is employing coders and they’re essentially just not really using AI at all.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Self-preservation.
Jean-Marc Daecius
There’s definitely an element of that because if certain power holders within this company were really going to face the music with regards to what actually is on offer with regards to these tools. Yeah, they might be like, oh, well, they might have two reactions. One might be like, oh, we can actually cut a bunch of people. Another reaction might be like, oh, our existing people can actually do 100x more. Yeah, like, wait a minute, maybe we’re thinking too small. Yeah, maybe we have scope paralysis. Maybe we need to zoom out and be like, wait a minute, what else can we do?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And most of it is performative.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It isn’t real.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s like, sorry guys, but I... [Speaking to the producers] One of the things that I’ve told him is you guys got to get AI’d out. Teasing, teasing. You are artists of the highest order. We would never. Well, we might. We have the best producers in the business. So you guys are probably solid for a while. But I say that jokingly, but that’s the central fear that is driving a lot of people kind of crazy and they can’t get beyond. What’s the great quote? You can never convince a man of something when his salary... Yeah. Upton Sinclair. When his salary depends on him not understanding it.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. That’s exactly what’s going on here.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And in general, I am a... Look, I believe there will be a dislocation. I am not Pollyannaish about this at all. I think we have to do something to take care of that cohort of society. I’ve said this multiple times. I’m willing to throw everything against the wall on fixing that. Primarily because people who through no fault of their own get disintermediated and, like the think of the 55 year old guy or woman who’s been doing the same thing for 30 years and...
Jean-Marc Daecius
They’re really a product of the school system.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. The point is that talented people. I’m not worried about talented people. Right. You guys will be just fine because you’ll figure out a cooler, much more interesting way to do what you love to do.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Well, they’ll just start using the tools.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right, exactly right. But I am worried about the people who aren’t cool and good at what they do. And I shouldn’t use that. It’s a pejorative term who just through... Again, through no fault of their own. Just that isn’t their thing.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And what are you afraid of happening here?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, I would hate to see a bunch of pitchforks down in Union Square. I don’t want any Ned Ludds to become the cover story of... [Speaking to produers] Is Time even a magazine anymore? Do they still have that? Oh really?
Jean-Marc Daecius
So funny.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay, so the magazine Time, which I didn’t know even still existed. They used to have the person of the year. We do not want Luddite to be the person of the year.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So I asked you the leading question in order to get to that exact answer.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I didn’t get... Oh, you fooled me.
Jean-Marc Daecius
In order to bring it full circle back to the future of food thing. Because once you have food forests with automated humanoid gardeners, what starts happening to the price of food because...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, it’s incredibly deflationary.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Exactly. Once you have the hardware and once you have that transition period, I mean, all you’re really paying for is the occasional replacement part and then solar to power all of these things.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And so the parallel that I like to draw is, why don’t we pay for oxygen?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
No doubt someone has tried.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Someone has tried, but it’s actually impossible to charge for oxygen. I mean, well, maybe not impossible.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
There are oxygen bars in Tokyo that are very popular.
Jean-Marc Daecius
True, true. But the distribution system for oxygen is perfect and it’s already built into the system.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
The distribution for food sucks by comparison.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And so once you automate the growing and harvesting and distribution of food, it will start to trend towards the price of oxygen, which is...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And the other thing that’s cool about it and you know how excited I get about this, it’s not only does the price go down, the quality goes up and we have never existed in that kind of world. Right? Tech. Yeah. But it speaks to the, for almost all of human history, the central story has been scarcity. Right. All of economics is based on theory of scarcity. The allocation of scarce resources. Right. In the world we’re going into, scarcity becomes a lot less important for a lot of things. Of course there will be enforced fake scarcity because of that old mindset. Right And because we’re status monkeys and... Right.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And well, it’s kind of like fasting today. Fasting is enforced self-imposed scarcity.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah. And so listen, there will always be an elite, right? It’ll change as to what that elite is. But I mean that’s human nature, right? The pecking order is real. I used to believe that you could stand outside the status hierarchy until... Will Storr and my friend Rob, who wrote a great book about it, convinced me. No, no, we’re all signaling all the time. And but people will figure out new ways to signal. Right. It would not be at all surprising to me if we see a strong counter trend where everything’s in person, where the most exclusive ticket you could get is not filmed. It’s just a one time event, won’t be filmed. And oddly you’d be able to make a lot of bank on that.
Jean-Marc Daecius
I think Netflix is actually going in the wrong direction because I find myself craving movie theaters even more and more. In fact, last night, what was I... I was trying to watch something with someone and the UI on Netflix was just annoying me so much because I couldn’t automatically skip back to the beginning of the episode.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, yeah, no, don’t get me going.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And so I had to like...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Apple is the biggest criminal. Yeah, they fucking ruined iTunes because they let engineers who want all these cool features, and your average user doesn’t want any of them and they make it so complicated that you abandon the app. Yeah, that went... That is what moved me to Spotify. We had here, we had... This was all Apple Music, we had wonderful playlists, everything else. And then it just got to the point where they made it... They so insidified it that it was unusable. And I see it happening to Apple TV now and I’m like, it’s... It’s one of these things where like, is the purpose here to continue to make money and make more money? I’m a capitalist. I can get behind that. Why are you doing this?
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. Last night I kind of came to an unexpected realization because the person I was watching it with while I was trying to rewind and it was like going at like, gosh, this is taking a while. And the comment that someone I was with said is like, oh, it’s like rewinding with a VCR. And I was like, this is ridiculous. But it sent me on another tangent of thought when I was like, oh my God. And this relates to the sort of in person movie theater experience which led me to think that I think Netflix is absolutely going in the wrong direction. I thought about the Blockbuster ritual where you have to drive to Blockbuster and then you would do the...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Requires an investment.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yes. You had skin in the game. And then you did the perusal where you had to spend at least 20 minutes just looking around and...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly.
Jean-Marc Daecius
By the end of that 20 to 90 minutes, you would finally end up with one. You’d be like, all right, I’m confident.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
This is good.
Jean-Marc Daecius
This is the one. And it really actually didn’t matter how bad the movie was.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jean-Marc Daecius
By the time you actually get back and put it into the VCR, you are sold on this experience that you’re gonna watch the whole thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And I think that changes the quality of attention that someone brings to the movie. Whereas Netflix, you can be watching a great movie, you’re like, four minutes in, you’re like, I’m just not in the mood for something serious. And you just press...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That line sucked.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah. You just press a button, it disappears, and you spend most of your time scrolling. But for some reason, the time spent scrolling is not at all equal to the time spent browsing in a Blockbuster. They’re both time spent. So the impetus is to think like, oh, there’s skin in the game on both ends. But no, because you don’t have a sense of commitment at the end of that time spent with Netflix, you do with Blockbuster. And so that all just came into my head last night. And so I think it speaks to this point where I really think that in person is just going to continue to grow and grow because of that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I think that probably for the bespoke part of the market, you’re absolutely right. I think even though Barnes & Noble is opening bookstores everywhere, for example, and man, I love bookstores. It used to be a family ritual. We would take the kids there every Sunday, give them as much time. It fits right into your Blockbuster thing. But I think 80% of books are moved online and will continue to be. And I think probably 80% of films will be consumed online.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Actually, I’d put a caveat on that. I 100% agree with you, but I would say that 100% of book sales where you know exactly which book you want...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
It’s probably going to be online. Or it’s going to be 99.9.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
But then if you want to go browsing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. The explorer function, they don’t do that well. Amazon does not do that well.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And I think it’s just more... I don’t know if you can capture on a screen what happens in person when you just have a space that you can walk around.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The Strand Bookstore, which is a few blocks over. I love the place because... And in fact, I would get so guilty because I read most things on the iPad. The Kindle for iPad. Back in the day when I used to still have to travel as the primary sales portfolio manager for OSAM, literally, my bag was nothing but books and always got flagged on weight. Right. And so the minute Missy, my wife, gave me a Kindle, I was done. That was it. Because I could have a thousand books on this thing and it was just perfect. So I developed that way, but it never was... We, by the way, we always buy a hard copy of a book that we really love just to support the author and also just so that we can have the physical version too.
Jean-Marc Daecius
This also makes for a good gift.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. But I got so guilty going over to the Strand that I ended up having to buy things, even though what I would do is just take pictures of the books that I was interested in and then buy them for Kindle. And I’m like, I feel like a cad here. I really have to buy... So generally what the fix was, we love art, as you know, and they’ve got a great art book selection and art books are expensive. So I go and buy an art book. Usually they give us a gift.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, I was just gonna say it sounds like you’re speed running a museum when you’re... You just run through and take a picture of the Van Gogh, take a picture of the Rembrandt. You’re like, oh, I’m just going to study them later.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
We are funny creatures. Let’s tease another thing you’re writing that came out of a conversation you and I were having that I thought was really hysterical.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Oh, gosh.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
This was your insight that at first I thought you were bullshitting. And it has to do with the star ratings on books on either Goodreads or Amazon or wherever. And you told me the ideal that you want for stars is like, what is it?
Jean-Marc Daecius
4.8.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
4.8.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Because you got to have some haters. If you get five, it means you’re spam.
Jean-Marc Daecius
It looks like a scam.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And you’re looking at a scam. And obviously if you get one, not optimal. But we started talking about the star rankings on some of the world’s greatest literature. So just for the...lay some of the really hysterical ones on our listeners and viewers because I was like, you have got to be kidding me.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Okay, so the one that I gravitated towards at first, I ended up looking up a whole bunch, but was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Now, amazing book. Yeah. Is it his best book? Probably not.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
But it is spectacular.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
A true work of art.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, it’s amazing. And on Goodreads, I think it’s a 4.2. And what? Really? What really... What I ended up gravitating towards is that the top... This is weird, but the top liked review of this book gave it a one star and it was long. This review is 3,000 words long, and it was quite well written and quite elegant. He’s describing all of these reasons why he thinks the book is bad. And I was like, he’s doing a great job describing all of the reasons why this book is actually really good. And yet he gives it one star. And the disconnect of like, this is such an elegant... How is this possible? How could you miss the point?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
We found an outlier.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Exactly. Yeah, he’s in a weird quadrant of the graph that we haven’t seen before. And so then I started looking up other things like Moby Dick and Lolita, the Bible, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Shakespeare. And the one that out of this...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I gotta say, when you first started telling me these, I’m like, holy shit. Idiocracy was a documentary.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Maybe out of the ones that I just listed, plus like a handful of others like Don Quixote and whatnot. The highest rated one was J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. And I think it got like a 4.7 or something like that. But she beat Shakespeare.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I think it’s hysterical. But I choose to reframe it. And the way I reframe it is, look at these idiots giving Shakespeare lower ratings than J.K. Rowling. Although my kids loved her books.
Jean-Marc Daecius
They’re great books.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
They’re great books. That’s right. But if you’re an author or creator or anything, do you need a better example of the fact that most of the people out there are not terribly bright? You don’t have to be afraid. If Shakespeare is getting 4.1 stars, don’t sweat putting anything out there and don’t care what the majority think. And that’s one of the things that we are trying to really emphasize now. Granted, taste is the final moat, and we are putting podcasts and books and films and everything else out there that we think are in really good taste. I’m sure we’ll miss a lot, but the notion that you should be afraid of being judged, it just... That’s what I loved about this article. These are the greatest literary lights in history and 3.9 stars.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So the digestive to this story is. After I’d written the article, I was thinking about it a little bit more and I went back to that review. 3,000 word review, one star for The Road. And I look at how many people liked his review, and it was like 3,000 people. And then I looked at his profile on Goodreads and he had thousands of followers. And I was like, oh, this guy figured out a way to engagement farm. He’s like, I’m going to write an incredibly well thought out review of a book that’s going to get a lot of eyeballs, and then I’m going to do the incredibly controversial thing of giving it one star. And I was like, oh, shit.
It worked on me because I saw it and I was like, well, I got to read this. What is this guy talking about? I read all 3,000 words. So he succeeded. And that essentially he... The incentives of this platform are probably misconstruing the reality of what these books actually mean to our species.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
In general. And it’s all because he found a formula that worked.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Loophole.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Exactly. It’s at the detriment of the truth about these books.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right?
Jean-Marc Daecius
I mean, truth might be maybe lowercase T here.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
But it was clear after that, I went and looked at a few of his other reviews and I was like, son of a bitch. Yeah, he found an arbitrage. It’s clearly working for some reason. I don’t know how he’s actually benefiting from it, other than clout on Goodreads, which, buddy, aim a little higher. But okay.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I’m a Goodreads influencer.
Jean-Marc Daecius
I mean, maybe there’s benefit to that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Are you killing it?
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, you pay me $10,000, I’ll give you five stars.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I’ll give you five stars. Yeah, and I’ve got a hundred thousand followers. Maybe that’s what he’s doing.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, maybe it works. I don’t know.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Turns out the guy’s making 100 grand a month. We just look like idiots.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Got to respect the arbitrage.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Always respect the arbitrage. All right, I’m going to put you on the spot and say, and I’ve never asked you this, so it’s 2030. What does OSV look like? What breakthroughs or things that we might not even be working on them right now, but five... And don’t make it OSV. Make it a super innovative AI first company. What do you think are going to be the five differentiators that let them soar? And if we want to have really fun, a lot of fun, let’s make it the first billion dollar single solo person company. What five things would make that human be able to be a billion dollar corporate...
Jean-Marc Daecius
Okay. One of them, which I think is the maybe the most pressing and most important, which Misha is actually working on, is the context problem. So right now, the way that AIs work is with retrieval augmented generation, which has huge downsides. I built a RAG system for an early MVP that I did in my second month here. And I remember showing Misha and I was like, this is so clunky. I hate this system. And he’s like, no, this is exactly how companies worth millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars are doing it. I’m like, this is awful. And he’s like, I have just the thing for you. And so he’s working on that. If we can solve that context, which is really like a memory issue.
If we can solve that, it really unlocks just a tremendous number of things. Because the way that the AI field’s been dealing with that first is just trying to enlarge the context window. You can only do that for so long before you start to get diminishing returns. I don’t want to have to dump in the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in order to have a query because then it’s just going to take a long time. Yeah. It doesn’t matter how...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Spoiler alert. We do have what looks to be a solution for that.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Yeah, I’m very excited to put this thing through the wringer. So that’s definitely number one. Number two, there’s clearly some data problems. For example, whenever I hear an artist bemoan or begrudge the fact that, oh, AI can create art, but it can’t do my dishes for me. And I try to explain why that’s the case. It was like, all right, how many pieces of human art were there on the Internet before AI became a thing? And the answer is like, well, all of it, obviously.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And I was like, how many examples on the Internet are there of first person point of view, hands washing dishes? Maybe there’s one weirdo YouTuber who did this. But the answer is like, almost nothing. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
And so you can’t train a system on something unless you have a huge amount of data. So there are many areas in which we’re very data poor.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So there are some really interesting solutions that are popping up. There’s a really cool robotics model that just popped up where you can essentially wear Meta glasses and film your hands doing some particular task and it translates really well into the system where those robot hands can mimic. So essentially like mirror neurons, I guess you could say very loosely. But there’s definitely a whole bunch of other sources of data that we just, we’re a little bit blind to. And the analogy that I like to use in this case is, why are Lego manuals not text only? Because it would be so obnoxious to read and it’s so difficult to describe certain things of like, oh, the 2 by 4 by 1 block.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The limits of linguistic description.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Exactly. So I do a lot of woodworking and I’ve primarily done this by myself because I enjoy it. And there’s been a few instances where a friend will come along and be like, oh, can I help? And I’ll be like, sure. And then I’ll start trying to push what I’ve been doing through the language part of my brain. And it’s just like, you know what? No, you can’t help because I’m just shape rotating over here and it doesn’t fit through my brain. So there’s this huge 3D area of reality which language doesn’t capture very well. And so I’m using that as analogy to say that there’s all sorts of data that we’re invisible to the fact that we don’t even have it, which we can’t even give to an AI.
So I think the next thing there will be AI plus robotics that is simply for gathering data of all sorts of different types. Number three, people anthropomorphize AI a lot. And, why doesn’t AI prompt… like there’s all sort of little things that after a lot of deep use I’m like it’s because it’s not curious that it didn’t figure out like 10 chats ago what I was really trying to ask. And it took me a whole bunch of chiseling away at the granite in order to get to the shape, in order to ask the right question. And it’s like if it had some basic curiosities and basic drives, it would have been able to do what a human would do is like, oh, what you’re really trying to get at, right?
You don’t have the context and the language and the experience in order to get there. It’s like, oh, you actually want to pay attention to variable X, Y, Z, but you’re stuck on A, B, C, D, E, F in order to get there. And so I think that kind of probably requires something like a limbic system, which makes me nervous. I don’t want a limbic system created and attached to AI because then you could get some really weird incentives. But you would get something... Yeah, you would probably get something that’s way more agentic than ChatGPT.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So I think the word agents in AI is a bit blown out of proportion in terms of what AI agents currently can do. Really from my experience and my understanding, you’re really talking about a recursive set of LLMs that are referencing basically a scratch pad or several in order to go through these different things.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Is that really agentic or is that kind of like a Rube Goldberg machine that’s made of jello? I’m not sure. But I think true agency is going to require something that is going to be analog to the limbic system, but hopefully very different from the limbic system because ours was developed under very different circumstances with evolutionary pressure, which gave us a whole bunch of bad OS.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Which we don’t want. And this is where the what I think is a pretty silly debate about the alignment problem actually comes from this area. I mean, we can’t even align ourselves. I don’t think alignment as a word is particularly meaningful in this debate.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
No, I agree.
Jean-Marc Daecius
It seems to stand as a very solid flag in either camp. But yeah, I think that the development of an AGI appropriate limbic system is going to be necessary in order to really spark life through things like LLMs that are not human input. Because right now it’s human input that gets the...
I picture an LLM as essentially like a giant Galton board or like a bell curve with all of those, with a bunch of pins and then you drop the marbles and then they create the bell curve. So I kind of, if you take out all of the balls and you just have the pins in the grid, any one input or query is essentially you’re dropping a marble at the top and most of them are going to fall straight down as part of that bell. And then every once in a while you’re going to get like a weird... Oh, that was strange. It told me that maybe I should end this relationship kind of thing. So, yeah, I think an AGI appropriate limbic system would be the thing that would breathe life into.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That might be worth more than a billion. I would like an MVP of that a week from today.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Okay.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You set yourself up for that one. What haven’t I asked you that you feel passionate about in terms of anything that we’re working on or trying to change.
Jean-Marc Daecius
I am droolingly awaiting the day when we have an OSV OS, which is essentially a system that has context of every little thing that’s happening in OSV. This is so necessary in order to combat the desire to bloat from a bureaucratic standpoint. Because I’ve witnessed many times in my life that there’s this perennial desire to discuss something, come up with a solution, and then hire a third party that is that solution. And I’m like, no, don’t want to do that. Let’s just do a quick and dirty version of it with the tools that we have. Because then at the very least we’ll just learn what’s possible. If it really isn’t possible, it’s like, okay, let’s either build something more intense or look at other third party options if we need to. But I want to learn at the very least.
So if we had... And I’ve noticed in a few instances at OSV where someone’s working on a problem and then like a week later I discover that this person actually has fairly deep domain knowledge on said problem. And sometimes this person is me. And I’m like, oh, I didn’t realize you had all this knowledge. I need to hoover up a bunch of information from you because I’m building something in a domain that I’ve never built in before. And if there was simply instead of when I type into a chat bar, I’m talking to an LLM, what I really want to do is I want to talk to OSV. Yeah. And I want to be like, do we have... Where does this piece of information exist? Can you pull it up for me?
And a really cool thing that the beginning sort of ember spark of this was a little while ago. I wanted to pull some information from one of the CRMs that we do. And I was looking at it, I was like, I just had enough of a headache. I was a little too tired. I was like, I don’t want to try and figure out how this works. And so I went to the settings and I pulled an API key and then I threw it into our AI lab. And I was like, here’s the API key for this product. This is the information I need. Can you do this? And it just did it. And I was like...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I remember you telling me, I was...
Jean-Marc Daecius
Like, oh my God, thank you. Just saved me so much frustration.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jean-Marc Daecius
So I, yeah, I want that just a spider with a leg in every corner kind of thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I love the OSV OS. I think that is another thing that also fits in to the billion dollar solo practitioner. Well, this has been amazingly fun. I always of course get to have these conversations with you daily. But as you know, you’ve got your chance to be emperor of the world. Can’t kill anyone, can’t re-educate anyone, can’t kill any sparrows. But what you can do is talk into the magical microphone. Incept all 8 billion or whatever we’re at right now, people on the planet, whenever their next morning is, they wake up and the two things that you are going to incept are front and center in their brain and they’re like, you know what?
Unlike all the other times when I ignored all of these great insights I had, I’m going to actually act on these two things today and continue to do so. Dazzle me.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Okay. I would incept them to try and foster two things simultaneously. They sound mundane on their own, but I think it’s in the combination where the magic happens. Foster a bigger imagination, just always try and break scope paralysis. I love that little clip from Inception when the guy is shooting with a pistol and then Eames comes over and he’s like, “Darling, dream a little bigger.” And then he holds up a rocket launcher kind of thing. That sort of enlarge your imagination, coupled with have as low of a tolerance for bullshit as possible. And the reason I say these two things together is because I think there’s this assumption that people with a huge imagination are just kind of full of bullshit.
And then people who are like no bullshit don’t have any imagination. Where the real arbitrage is the asymmetry of having zero tolerance for bullshit but a huge imagination. Which means that you can go out into cognitive space and take something that is truly innovative but then actually translate it into reality. Because you can’t put up with any... About the fact that, oh, it’s just a... Oh, it’s a great idea. It’s like, no, it’s not a great idea until it’s here and real and you can do something with it. Yeah, that’s what I would incept.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Love both of them. Thank you for taking the time.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Thank you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And everyone watching and listening. We have these conversations all the time and sometimes they go off on tangents. Thanks for being on.
Jean-Marc Daecius
Thank you.
