Natasha Joukovsky — On Recursion, Status Games & Manufactured Nonchalance (EP.268)
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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that

to avoid going in infinite loops of thought. We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens, including history, philosophy, art, science,

linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker. With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.

Thanks for joining us. Now, please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops. Well, hello, everybody. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another edition of Infinite Loops. I am so thrilled today to welcome Natasha Joukowsky.

who has worked. You're such an interesting person. Thank you. You've straddled two very different worlds. You worked for years in the art world where you were at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Metropolitan here in New York. Then you moved on to strategy consulting. Yes.

And oh, in the few hours that you had available to you, you managed to publish a debut novel, "The Portrait of a Mirror" in 2021. You also write nonfiction. My God, I'm feeling social anxiety already. And as art mirrors life, you also are the patent holder and inventor of a recursive estimation algorithm. Now you're speaking my language.

hard at work on a new novel. Natasha, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Jim.

I got to tell you, you're very, very impressive. Let's talk a bit about, before we get into your first book, how do you straddle these two very different worlds? And keeping in mind that, like, we're going to talk a lot about the unspoken game rules and all of that. They're very different in the art world and the world of consulting and commerce. Yeah.

You can do everything, just not at the same time. So, I mean, I never worked in consulting in the art world at the same time, right? I fully switched careers in what was it about 2014 after I finished business school. But then, you know, with the novel stuff, with the other stuff, it's three words, leave of absence, right?

You know, I'm very fortunate to work for a company that is, you know, large enough with, you know, diversity of folks trying to do a huge number of different things that they have a really good program for leaves of absence. I've taken advantage of basically all of them at this point, I think.

I did, you know, you can do up to a year unprotected, which I did in 2016. But, you know, one way tickets to Europe with my husband. And that's where I wrote the bulk of The Portrait of a Mirror. Of course, they have like maternity paternity leave. I wrote a lot, a lot of the end of my first novel on maternity leave.

leave with my son like sleeping right next to me. And I took a future leave, which is more like a sabbatical, a protected three month leave.

to write the bulk of my new book, which I can't talk about quite yet. I'm going to tease a couple of at least, they won't be spoilers, but maybe they'll be teasers. We can do teasers. Yes, teasers, no spoilers. How about that? I'm hoping to be able to say more very soon. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm working on my first novel myself as well. Oh, what's your novel about? Oh, my gosh. No, no, no, no, no. I can't even tease it because I'm sure that it is so interesting to me, though, having written four nonfiction books, right, that all focused on, you know, investing, etc. Yeah.

Boy, fiction writing is a whole lot different. Do you think fiction's harder? Yes. I think fiction's so much harder. But do you also think it's more fun? Oh, absolutely. No question, right? Absolutely. It is much more fun, but it is much harder because

And, you know, it's like, it's just a wonderful experiment for me. But let's talk about your book. You know, the characters in your book might fit very comfortably into the world of consulting or into the world of the art world.

You know, it's focused on warring desires, you know, which social norms do we transgress? Which do we adhere to? Why? Why do we do that? And kind of what you infer as the illogical and bizarre American etiquette norms. Yeah, yeah. So essentially, you're following two well-off couples, and it seems to me the themes are...

innovation, mythology, and glamour. You did your research. I did. LAUGHTER

I'm kind of a research junkie. The themes came first. The novel was admittedly a vehicle for the themes, a vehicle for ideas. And I don't know how familiar you are. I'm guessing a bit because of your relationship with Anna Gott. But I didn't know about René Girard yet when I was writing the book. But I had come across many of the same things.

insights incidentally and in literature and was writing, you know, very much in, in that tradition of exposing the romantic lie and the, the, the imitative nature of desire. Yeah. The, the Gerard, he was, I knew a lot about Gerard because I thought his work

was very helpful in trying to understand auction markets. In fact, I did a thread on Twitter using the conceit of Titanic. Remember in Titanic where Rose is buying all of the artists who go on to become the greatest masters. But at the time, everyone thought it was just junk and scribbling. And so I change it. The ship doesn't sink.

She does marry the bad guy and sets up a salon in New York City. And then I talk about mimetic desire of all the couples joining this glamorous couple. And maybe that's how the art got very, very important. I find it really interesting that you started with the themes. I'm kind of doing the same thing with mine. Yeah. You know, art mirrors life.

But, you know, in the real world, you have a patent on a recursive estimation algorithm, which to me kind of lives at the higher end of quant probability modeling. Right. And yet in your book, you've turned recursion into a literary engine of doubt and self-reflection. Talk about that a little bit. Well.

I mean, we were chatting a bit before we started recording about Douglas R. Hofstetter's Gardel Escherbach. And the recursive nature of, I want to say, reality writ large on so many different levels is a pattern that just emerged to me in many different areas. I mean, I think

I knew I was interested in it before I would have known to call it recursion. And, you know, probably since college and the exposure to it in the Narcissus myth of, of Ovid's and, you know, the stories within the stories that you have, you have the, the kind of the frame and, and, and the structural layer, you have all of the reflections of reflections of reflections in, in,

you know, the layers of the art to within the story of, you know, of Narcissus looking at, at himself, but then echo being an echo of Narcissus and the, you know, the visual and auditory thing, all, you know, operating at all of these different levels, but the same sorts of isometric patterns. Right. And, and,

I would say that I don't think I draw the hard lines between literary and quantitative that a lot of people do. I think that the patterns emerge in both in similar ways to me and mutually reinforce each other. I always kind of...

joke that, you know, the studying Ulysses was more instrumental in, you know, in a good consulting education than business school was even, right? Like, there are

Looking at and trying to figure out how unstructured data is composed and patterned is – I mean, I'm sure you deal with it all the time in your businesses. And when you're thinking about investing in something, like whether the folks are –

are tapped into kind of these fundamental, these fundamental, yeah, recursive patterns. Yeah, I have been absolutely fascinated by them for a long time. And I think that you're right. You see them in literature a lot. Once you're exposed to it, right, it's like the reticular activating system, right?

And I did experiments on it once. It's like you don't see things unless you've planted an instruction to see them, right? And I was kind of reading it and I'm like, I think that's kind of bullshit. And so it gave an exercise and it said, you know, think of something you don't see very often and write it down. And then for one day,

See how many of them you see, right? And so I thought, well, I don't see very many really green cars. You know, I see a lot of black cars, a lot of white cars, a lot of blue cars, but I very rarely see a green car. And so I wrote down green cars. And then it asked me, estimate how many you think you will see over the next 24 hours. And my estimate, I think, was five. You know how many I saw? Fifteen. Fifteen.

43. Oh, my God. Well, that's I mean, recursion, you know, is like that to the if you're seeing 43 rather than five green cars. I mean, recursion is just you can't not see it everywhere in everything. It becomes like the end. It is. I mean, the pattern of recursion.

life, the fractals that you see in coastlines and even tree branches. I can't look behind me anywhere, anywhere without seeing it truly everywhere. And I think that one of the great things that, you know, Gertl Escherbach does is he

show these isomorphisms so explicitly in such different realms. The realm that I think he really forgets or doesn't do justice to is the literary realm. Because if you look at Gardley's, what, like 19, what, 30s? Yeah, early 20th century. Yeah, early 20th century. Escher's mid-century. Bach is, you know, 18th century.

But Ovid, Ovid is in the first century AD. And not only do you see like Escherian, Bakian, Gedalian patterns in the Metamorphosis in particular, but you like...

have the multiple layers of reflection about those patterns themselves. I mean, the story of Narcissus is a story of those patterns. The story of Pygmalion is a story of those patterns. The story of Medusa is a story of those patterns. There's, I mean, there's more, there's so many. So I

I think it's a miss. I'm going to try and pitch a review somewhere, I think, to do a meta-dialogue style review of Gödel, Escher, Bach, accusing world historical genius Douglas R. Hofstetter of leaving Ovid out of one of the most brilliant, perfect books of all time.

I love that. Way to counter signal, by the way. Excellent. Hey, Hofstetter. Yeah. Okay. The book was okay, but dude, you missed all of the literature. What is up with you? It's so funny because like Mandelbrot, I'm sure you're a fan of his as well.

Big fan, big fan. You know, I reread, talk about torturing myself. I reread Goldilesscher Bach about 10 years ago. I read it first when it came out and I was young.

So it came out in 79. So I was 19 and probably not really well equipped to read Goldilocks or Buck, but I insisted I was going to make my way through it. And before we started recording, we were talking about both of our experiences of reading it. And I would read a page, make notes, et cetera. You know, I was very diligent. And then I would turn the page and I would look up and I would think,

I don't think I understood a single thing he said on that last page. But honestly, I bet you were as ready to read it as ever. Like, when could you be ready to... I've been thinking about recursion and, you know, the related phenomena basically nonstop for over a decade. And...

you know, this book totally blew my mind. I mean, there's no way to prepare yourself. I actually, my line on this is because it was in my house for 20 years because my husband picked it up in college and read it so young that, you know, he'd kind of forgotten enough about it not to, I'm like so mad at him that he never told me, you have to read this book. I'm mad at,

literally everyone that I've ever met who has read this book and didn't like implore me, beg me, like, you know, get down on their knees saying, you have to read this. You're going to be obsessed with it because it's, you know, but I just don't, I don't think that, I think a lot of people bought it. I don't, I don't think a lot of people have actually read it. Yeah, no, I agree. I completely agree. It's one of those, it's, I, I'm a big fan of the Tao Te Ching and

And I often do threads on Twitter or whatever about how you can apply it to other aspects. Investing is one theme that I did many threads on. And I always knew I got into this recursive pattern where when somebody would ask me on the timeline of Twitter, which translation should I read, Jim? I knew two things. I knew, number one, they were never going to read the book.

And number two, they were signaling, right? They, you know, it's like, and I mentioned to you, Godel, Escher, Bach, like just doing a cover pick of Godel, Escher, Bach and putting up, you know, currently reading. Current read, yeah. I don't think you should be allowed to post this book until you've read it. I agree. Yeah.

I agree. It's kind of like there's the, I think on literary Twitter back when, you know, there was literary Twitter, there's a whole kind of,

about not being allowed to like read remembrance of things past in public until you were like at least, you know, a hundred or so pages and that it was just too, too cringe, too embarrassing. You had to get through like a certain chunk of this in private before you were allowed to read it.

I will admit that I did not get through Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. I haven't finished it yet either. I tried really hard, but I just didn't get there. I'm on the third book. I'm not going to say that I haven't gotten there. I'm going to say I haven't gotten there yet. Yet. I love that. And that it is a book that takes a really, really long time to read. I've loved everything that I have read. But you also just need to be kind of in a specific place.

mindset. And it requires, I mean, like Gertl Escherbach, 100% of your attention. And as we all know, it's getting harder and harder to

Give that, isn't it? But I want to go back to what you said, Jim, about translations and how translation is signaling because there's actually a scene in The Portrait of a Mirror where one of the characters signals to another about their high status and erudition by specifically recommending a specific translation of Anna Karenina.

So there you go. And you know that they're never going to read it. Of course. But she does. Because, you know, only if you're in love, I think, maybe.

I think that it's really interesting because so much of your book does cover the status game, for lack of a better word. Will Storer picked that beautiful title for his bestselling book. And you've written about kind of an arms race in manufactured nonchalance. And I remember when I was preparing for this, that's kind of like one of the ways that I was raised.

I was raised and it was never overtly said to me. It was an unwritten game rule, right? But I got it from my parents. I got it from the rest of my family. And that was never make it look hard. Always make it look easy, which I kind of lived by for a big portion of my young life until I like was really young.

working very, very hard on setting up a company, et cetera. And I just had this insight, like, this is bullshit. Like, this is really hard. And yet I've got to continually say, ah, yeah, that was nothing. Why do you think that that is such unique aspect, I guess we'd call it, of certain classes in America where, you know, it's definitely a class thing. It absolutely is. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Talk to me about that. Give me your thesis on that. Well, I mean, off the cuff, it is utterly ingrained in our elite education system. So, you know, my public school in central Pennsylvania, where I went until eighth grade, you know, there was a certain level of it. You know, it's an upper middle class, you know, academic school.

inclined environment around Penn State, et cetera. And there was some sense that maybe you wanted to make it seem like you weren't trying quite as hard. But when I went then to boarding school in Connecticut, different world. The level of the delta between

the amount of effort and like the effort to shield effort is part of what you are literally learning there because it is such a class signifier and, you know, what classes ultimately function to do is, is self perpetuate, right? It's the success is succession as my friend, Erica Robles Anderson, a professor at NYU would say, right? And, and,

That manufactured nonchalance is how you show that you are part of the club. And specifically, it's not manufactured nonchalance. It's trying to make it as genuine seeming as possible and really show

It's very, very hard to learn that skill. That kind of ease is, you know, a function of being raised in privilege. And it came, it did not come so easy to me, you know, coming from State College Pennsylvania as it came to, you know, many of the kids from New York, from Boston, etc. And

you know, that, but that's, that's probably why I worked all the harder for it. Well, you know, like the button writes about status anxiety. I don't know whether you've read my friend, Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs. Yeah. Yeah. I'm familiar with, I'm familiar with luxury beliefs. And like in one view, sort of modern meritocracy is,

increases, at least according to the button, increases our status anxiety precisely because we're told that, hey, anyone can succeed, right? Under the merit system, hey, it doesn't matter that you went to state school. It doesn't matter where you come from. You can succeed. And that can cause a lot of anxiety to people who like, wait a minute, I went to fill in the blank IV, the blank prep school, right?

And it seems to me that I guess one of his prescriptions is that, you know, you should you should try to as best you can become of like what Paul. Have you read Paul Fussell's class? You better believe it. You better believe it. That, you know, right around the end of college, I think one very few books have influenced me more. I thought it was a riot. It you know, no, it's it.

Paul Fussell has influenced my work immensely. I love that book. It's kind of a guilty pleasure because he is so caustically funny, but so funny. He just nails it.

He nailed it from, I guess, when was it published? In the 80s. Yeah, like 19. 40 years ago. I mean, even by the time I was reading it in the late aughts, it was already outdated in some ways, but it was familiar enough that, you know what my favorite part of that book is? You know the living room diagnostics in the American? Yes.

I mean, I die over it because, you know, this is where this is. And a lot of it with, you know, women.

what's really, really funny about that book is the whole creation of the X class is like gives him an out, right? It's like a very status conscious thing for him to do to like try and remove himself. And you know what, what David Brooks would go on to like, like glob on in, in the early aughts around the Bobo, but,

a bohemian movement that's like very, I want to say, self-consciously in the...

Fasalian tradition of, you know, class books. But the, you know, the living room thing I thought was hilarious, but it was also very at that, you know, point in my life where I, you know, gained some social confidence, right? Having gone to boarding school, having gone to university, feeling like I could manufacture an enchiladas a little better, right? That to go back and see, oh my gosh,

No wonder I could eventually do it. I, you know, I grew up in an upper, you know, we didn't have very much money, but I grew up in an upper class living room, right? With like, you know, old valuable paintings and lots of books and, you know, all the things, even if it was in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. And, you know, my parents were effectively...

not, not, not, not wealthy at all, you know, academics and professional class kind of, kind of folks. Yeah. And I think that it's just his target, which he skewers brilliantly, but kind of viciously is the middle and middle upper class. And he basically is like, there is where a constant state of anxiety is

is ever present. And, and like, I love the way he sets up the nine different classes with the top out of sight is what he calls the, the richest or the highest class. And then the bottom out of sight and basically says they're the same. Yeah, they're the same. But what's so funny about, I actually don't, he, he is super, super hard on the bourgeois strivers. Um,

But that actually, to me, is less impressive than how much he gets away with skewering the lower middle classes. And I mean, in ways that really, I think, would be politically incorrect these days, you just basically couldn't do. But I mean, everyone except for the top out of sight, bottom out of sight, he he's merciless. And the X class, he's just he's merciless. He

You almost can't imagine. It's so funny, you almost can't imagine a book. And it's laugh out loud funny. And there's a mid-20th century author, Stephen Potter, who wrote a series of books on gamesmanship, on how to one-up the other person. Oh, that's funny. That fits really, really nicely with Fussell. Yeah. But, you know, you're right about the way he skewers the lower class. Like,

He, you know, pro gap in the suit and the kitsch, like all of like the little, what are those little dolls? I like, don't even know what they're called. Gnomes. I think the garden gnomes, all of the kitschy stuff like unicorns and stuff. I don't know. I think it's, I don't even know what it is because that actually was like the least relatable part of it. I mean, I mean, it was horrible.

hilariously funny, but I think that, you know, those trends maybe turn over faster and they just weren't as, many of them were gone by the time I was reading the book. Yeah. Whenever I recommend it, I always say, now you gotta understand this is a very old book and,

and a lot of things are not going to resonate with you because we don't have them anymore. But I also reminded, I don't know whether you've ever seen the comedic movie, Arthur with Dudley Moore. He plays this super rich, complete malcontent, great sense of humor, but he's a drunk. He doesn't do anything, et cetera. And so his family does an intervention on him.

to get him to stop drinking. And they go, and he goes to like AA and they're all in their little circle. And, and somebody he's, he's talking very much like the top out of sight member that he is. And so somebody takes him on and he goes, well,

you know, you're just a drunk, just like all the rest of us. And, and more delivers the line perfectly. He leans back in his chair and he goes, you know what? You're absolutely right. I am just a drunk, just like the rest of you. But unlike the rest of you, I am a drunk who knows exactly where his next drink is coming from. You think about this a lot though. I mean, you know, we laugh and,

But it's true. Like, alcoholism is seen very differently by social class, and it is judged so much more harshly when you actually don't have the resources to support it. And, you know, early in life, it can get...

Like almost glorified as, oh, he's a party boy. She's so much fun. You're only fun and like a party boy if you have the means to sustain your addiction. So, yeah, no, it is fun.

This is one example, right? There's so many examples where the exact same behavior reads not just more or less offensively, but like antithetically based on your social class in many ways. At a certain point, you can, like the Olsen twins, they're top, you want to talk about top out of sight, top out of sight and bottom out of sight, by the way, absolutely still exists. The Olsen, look at the Olsen twins

twins with their and and it doesn't matter they could do they can dress oftentimes they're very elegant but sometimes they can look just like crazy homeless bag ladies and you know it's a it's a hundred and fifty thousand dollar bag that they're carrying but nobody you know if somebody else was wearing that same thing

I don't know. Nobody is going to be putting it on Vogue.com is what I'll say. But that's also interesting to me because we have changed so much from where social status was pretty easy to signal in the physical world. Yeah. Right? Like, you know, a bespoke suit, a beautiful watch, a beautiful home, etc. But we now live so much of our life through screens, right?

And it doesn't land. In fact, often it lands the opposite where you get mocked. Like if you're putting up, you know, just like the person who puts up the picture of Goldilesscher Bach, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The people who are kind of really switched on just chuckle, right? Yeah.

And so you've got this disconnect between the person striving, like, oh, I want to show the world that I can read Godelischer Bach or I can do this particular thing. And then it backfires. And what do you think about that? What do you, you know? Oh, I have a whole theory on it. I would love to hear it because Dieblen goods like aren't the thing anymore. Yeah.

Damn it, Jim, you beat me to it with Veblen. Like, like, so I did an addendum to Veblen a couple of years ago, the theory of the leisure class on Instagram. And the like central nature of my, I guess, evolution is that his theory basically was

in terms of all of the phenomena, pecuniary emulation, conspicuous consumption, et cetera, et cetera, but the mediation of screens and particularly image-based screens

social platforms has its skew very differently. And we can actually chart starting in 2012, like the evolution of Veblenite behaviors, for lack of a better word. And like, you know, in 2012, there wasn't there wasn't yet, you know, that much difference. It was really just like

pictures of the bespoke suit and the vacation and what, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever it evolves over time because, and this is where, where, you know, the, the, what I call it is egoic bifurcation. And this is where your online ego fundamentally separates from your embodied physical world and

And we get the phenomena that we see now. And you see, and what was that? Like there was that HBO documentary, like fake famous or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about. That's like the perfect example of egoic bifurcation because you have people working to pretend they are.

are at leisure which is of course the antithesis of leisure and is actually miserable to do and you know so they're like they're like you know lying on some uncomfortable thing where just you know just in the circumscribed shot does it look like you know they're they're relaxing at a spa or something and then they're like literally lying in a parking lot and

And this phenomenon of egoic bifurcation is just getting worse and worse and worse. And if anything, I think that that is definitely tied to mental health problems and challenges that we face.

We are often solutioning our lives and like the status games we play, all of the, you know, debattant and, you know, will store and all of what these guys are saying is, you know, true. But we're it fundamentally changes when you are like optimizing for your digital avatar that doesn't actually exist.

And at the expense of your like your one wild and precious life. Right. And it's really, really crazy. But we all I mean, I have had to. I was so addicted to Instagram at one point, like when I was writing portrait, I was.

It's really, really hard not to do it. You can be extremely sophisticated in thinking about these things and still get sucked into the whole process because it's Moorish and it's such an effective status mechanism for... As it gets easier to fake status, it...

status itself changes and the signifiers itself change and, you know, evolve away from the ease of communicating status itself. This is where you get things like the phenomenon that I kind of end with in my post-Webelin piece, where you see a lot of what I call conspicuous crap. Like,

The ultimate flex online, at least, and maybe I think it's maybe changing, but a few years ago anyway, was like Timothy Chalamet posting a picture of his sneaker with a cup of noodles. Like, like honestly, the, and it gets 3 million likes, 3 million likes. Getting that many likes for something that dumb is insane.

that is where the status comes from. You're effectively saying, I am so cool that I can do the dumbest shit imaginable, like, like actual brain dead kind of stuff. And you're just gonna, you know, you're just gonna eat it up.

And I think part of that is because at its core, status is associated with scarcity. And the problem is we're moving towards more and more abundance, at least of material goods.

And so people are kind of at sixes and sevens for how to counter signal like Timothy did with his ratty sneaker and whatnot. But, you know, thinking back to that emergence, I was not an Instagram guy for a long time until my wife is a street photographer and she has a different picture every day on her Instagram account. And so she was like, hey, it'd be nice if you followed me. And like...

Okay, I'm not an Instagram guy, but I will. And so I started on Instagram and we have a friend, Joel Meyerowitz, who is kind of the granddaddy of street photography. And we were together at dinner and he turned to me and he said, you know, Jim,

I have to tell you, your Instagram account is my absolute favorite. I need to check out your Instagram account. I only do it on my desktop. That's my secret. You should have seen my wife's face, though. Oh, she would have been mad. Yeah. She looked at him and she goes, but Joel, Jim just...

Posts random shit like all day long. That and the grandchildren. That's what Jim posts. And Joel looks at her and he goes, that is precisely why I love it.

And then we got into a conversation about authenticity, right? And how do you fake authenticity? Groucho Marx said that great line. If you can fake authenticity, you've got it made. I'm butchering it. He said something else, but, you know, being a good guy or whatever, if you can fake those, you've got it made. Okay.

But Oscar Wilde has an even better one on this, which is naturalism being just to be natural is just opposed, oppose. And the most irritating one I know. Yeah.

I love Wild. And another classic example, he would have killed it on Twitter. He would have killed it. He would have killed it everywhere. My God. Yeah. I don't think there's any age where he wouldn't have been a celebrity. He would have been amazing on reality TV. Can you even imagine? Oh, I mean, amazing. Just because I love his work and him.

But the idea of the flipping, if you will, from the person lying at leisure and they're really lying on a sidewalk. I remember learning about people who would rent private planes for like 10-minute allotments. I read that too. I read that too. So they could have their picture taken on it. And you know what? I actually read that it wasn't just private planes, that somebody actually set up like

a fake private plane. It looks like a private plane for people to rent out and take their picture, which is,

crazy. There are also, I mean, there are also all those hacks, like using a toilet seat to look like you're flying. And these things are, I mean, you can't make it up. It's so crazy. And then you, but then you catch in little ways, I mean, not anything that, that egregious or anything, but in little ways, I catch myself doing it. And, you know, I catch myself

falling for it and like having to tell myself, wait a minute, that that one is that's not real. It's all of it. All of it is the highlight reel. Even your grandkids, you're posting the best picture of your grandkids. Presumably it's not the one where they're like that. I mean, maybe it is. And maybe and and and maybe when when you do that again, these things go in

Go in cycles because I'm going to amend what you said about scarcity. And we're getting dangerously close to my new books. I'm going to have to be careful. But it's not scarcity. It's rarity. Scarcity is rarity.

lack of necessities. You have a scarcity of water. There's never a scarcity of diamonds. Nobody needs a diamond. You can only have scarce resources that are needs as opposed to wants. And it's rarity, not scarcity, that I think really, really drives a lot of status games and

recursive cycles around what becomes cool and uncool and that accelerating sense of cycles as, you know, it becomes harder and harder to gatekeep signifiers. And so they have to shift faster and faster, you know, in order for everybody to, to show they're rich and cool. Yeah.

And, and yet it also bleeds downward, right? You had the piece on Atlantis, the hell hole that I absolutely despise in the Bahamas. Oh my God. So you've been there too. I've been there very reluctantly and against my will because of the duty to the children that my wife used to get me there. Yes.

But the moment I got there, I looked at her and I went, I hate cruise ships too. I've never been on like a big cruise ship. I've never been on one of the big ones, but I just hate them just looking at them. And I get to Atlantis and they clap that little wristband on you. Oh, God, I love the colored wristbands.

And literally I looked at my wife and I said, you have brought me to a cruise ship on land. Did you? I, I, I like, I died with some of the theming, like, like where the Trojan horse is like on top of the child. I mean, I like had not deal with that place at the same time.

Jim, I like my husband was like, we were like, we got to practice like taking our, you know, I think he was he was four or five at the time. And we were about to go on some big trips like Japan and Scandinavia. He's like, this is going to be like our trial run to start, you know, traveling and being people again. And, you know, all that stuff. And I was like, OK. And but then but then.

I negotiated. I was like, if we go to this place, you better book the nicest thing, like the nicest part of it. And then I will admit that when they slapped the wrist band on my hand, I was like, I have the best wrist band. I was like, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in the least shitty circle of hell. I like your optimistic attitude towards that. Yeah.

But it's kind of like me. And so I, I decided my wife is just like, all right, just stop because like, I, you're not going to ruin this trip.

And what I want you to do, Jim, is just take your fucking notebook and sit by a pool and do your anthropological expedition. And that's what I did. You can't. You can't, though, because or at least you can only from like 9 to 1030 and because at 1030 and even like the the adults only pool. What starts? It's like you can't even read at that pool. Oh.

I looked at my because this is what this is part of what he sold me. And he's like, there's an adult only pool. You'll be able to sit there and read like, you know, while while, you know, Dorian's in child care. And like, you know, that's what I got sold on. And then it was like this. I don't know, you know, third rate Miami club. And I couldn't handle it.

It's the same reason that I hate Las Vegas. It's basically just a monument to airsats and false. And like, I've never been there. So I used to stay, I used to have to give a lot of speeches in Las Vegas because when I was in asset management and they would do big conferences there and I would always stay at a hotel in my day, it was the four seasons. I think there are other ones now.

that did not have a casino. But then when I was wandering through one of the places where I was speaking, it had a huge casino. And I recommend it actually, because if you want to see perfectly tuned Potemkin village of like persuasion, go onto the floor of a casino.

You'll notice there are no clocks. They take time away. Yeah. The slot machines close to the entrance are rigged to pay off bigger than the ones inside the casino. So it gives the illusion to people coming in that, oh my God, look at how easy it is to win. And like it is...

It could be a master class in trying to persuade people to get them to give you all their money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we had to walk through one in Atlantis. They have one in Atlanta. Yes, they do. Well, it wouldn't be Atlantis if they didn't. Yeah.

Because like it's, we had a friend, my parents had a tiny villa on an out Island in the Bahamas on Abaco. So like nobody went there at all. And our neighbors down there love that fact. They loved the fact that nobody was there. And then, so the owners of the hotel and complex tried to get cruise ships to come in. And I remember I was like a teenager, but I still remember the conversation and,

The woman's name was Frankie Corbett, and she was talking with my mom, and she was very irate. And she – because she called – the people who came off the cruise ship were, according to Frankie, package people. And then she turned to my mom, and she goes, free drinks ruin everything. Yeah.

Don't get her to sponsor your wedding, man. Well, she was an old school, you know, New England type. And but I always loved that line because, you know, there's a lot of truth to it.

Which kind of leads me... That's what they do in the casino, too. They apply you with free drinks. Absolutely. As long as you're gambling, you get to drink however much you want, yeah? Yeah. And, of course, it also has a very definable objective. Yeah. Get you drunk because you're going to play any of those games much less well when you're drunk than when you are concentrating and sober. And for longer. And for a lot longer. Yeah.

Let's shift gears to choice plot versus no choice plot. Yeah, one of my favorites. Okay. Let's talk a bit about that and bring in, like, are the streaming algos that we now face today flattening out?

the various literary forms in a manner that we could talk about in the first off tell our listeners and viewers what you mean by choice plot versus no choice plot and then we'll talk about the effect of the algos are they maybe turning the modern world into a no choice plot

Yeah, I mean, at least behind the scenes, I think that there's a lot of evidence that they are. But first, you know, to start, you know, what I mean by the choice plot and no choice plot. So

A couple of years ago now, Parul Sehgal had a great piece in The New Yorker against the trauma plot. And she talks about the trauma plot versus the marriage plot. And this piece had me thinking for a long time. And so...

thinking, you know, even more broadly, because honestly, what it was, was, was Toni Morrison. I could not wrap my head around why I loved her books and why Beloved was one of my favorite books. And, and, you know, versus the, the general trend and how much I don't like, you know, trauma literature and prefer, you know, marriage plot literature. And it's just,

Morrison seemed to be such an exception. There's so much trauma in her books, and yet they are amazing.

And what I sort of realized is, you know, most that when I think about what what I really like versus don't like in novels, it's not just about like, you know, is there marriage structurally or is there trauma structurally? It's it's a slightly broader category around the level of agency that the

the characters have as they move through the world of the novel. So, you know, most marriage plot novels are choice plot novels and most trauma plot novels are no choice plot novels. But, you know, not all. You know, there's exceptions. And as I was looking for a framework that, you know, better aligned with my own literary tastes,

You know, it couldn't just be sentence level because I'll take my least favorite book ever, A Little Life. Very good on the sentence level. And yet I think it's just like a steaming pile of garbage. And it comes down to not that it's traumatic so much as that just no one makes any choices. This poor character is just like brutally, pedophilically raped over and over and over again. That's like the whole story.

And, you know, the problem with the no choice plot isn't that it's traumatic per se. It's that without choice, it's boring. And because choices are interesting. If you have no choice.

agency, where does the tension come from? So that's really what I landed on. Of course, I need strong sentence level writing to enjoy a book too, but it's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. And yeah, I fundamentally gravitate toward novels where the characters have

some sort of agency. I'll talk about like Beloved again because you may look at that as like, what do you mean? There's so much out of our control. Yeah, but the novel hinges around

Like the last choice, the last most difficult choice that Seth has. And it's heart-wrenching because she has to make it. Because only she can make this choice. And she does. And thus she has no one to blame. Yeah.

as Beloved comes back and all these things happen, but herself and it's tied to her own, the one voluntary action she had left. I agree entirely on the idea of agency being interesting, right? I long ago kind of took the idea that

I'm just going to decide once and for all that I am responsible for everything that happens to me. The ridiculous idea because I'm not. But it really helped me

Because it stopped me from ever blaming other people, right? Like when something goes wrong, the tendency to want to push it off and say it's somebody else's fault is just almost overwhelming. And so I just decided I am going to act as if I am responsible for everything that happens to me, good and bad. And it really offers you actually oddly...

a much broader menu of options because you're like, okay, if I'm responsible, I've got to take, I've got to really think this out. I've got to really learn from all these screw ups and mistakes and everything else. But the idea of agency and being much just more interesting, right? It's like if you're reading something where there are no choices and it's just this

horrible dis i mean it's kind of like kafka's metamorphosis right well that's i to me to me that's probably like the the least bad right right this is actually a very elegant it's a beautiful it's a beautiful by the way it's a it might be apocryphal but i don't think it is i think it's been verified

through letters and everything. Do you know that he wanted to have his friend burn everything he wrote? Yeah, I've heard that. I have heard that. Oh my God, thank God that friend had the agency and didn't do it. Yeah, but I also think it's the kind of thing that you don't say to someone if you really want them to do it. If you want your stuff burned, you burn it. You don't tell somebody else to do it. Part of that is like,

you know, the status posturing. I think. That's a great point. That's a really great point. So it's like wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Yeah. Burn, burn my stuff. Burn it, burn it. No, don't. And then the guy goes to get the matches in the next scene. No, no, no. Don't do that. You gotta come here. I wasn't serious. You're crazy. But like,

What advice would you give to like an aspiring novelist who, to paraphrase Elliot has, you know, in the love song of Poof Rock, I shall come back and tell you all, I shall tell you all. And then he ends it with the woman saying, that's not what I meant at all. Right. What, what tip would you give somebody who is, you know, really trying to serve beauty and truth and,

but has something that they want to convey, has some moral conviction that they want to convey. Is it possible? I actually don't know because I, so I was really interested in what you said about always taking like, like, like,

Almost having the forced misconception that you are in control of everything and almost giving yourself. Total illusion, by the way.

psychologically hardwired to try and blame everybody else. So I think that my technique is probably a little bit different than yours in that I do the exact same thing on stuff that's unflattering to me. On the unflattering stuff, I try very hard to actively counteract that

bias and overtake because, you know, because I know that I'm going to like give myself an out and

think that actually, no, you have more to do with that than you'd probably like to admit. But on the other side, I actually do the opposite because we're psychologically hardwired to think that everything that we do well and every success is, you know, due to our, you know, our greatness rather than any sort of luck. So on that side, I actually tend to attribute, you know,

Oh, yeah. I should addend my statement because I do that as well. Whenever it's like Harry Truman, if you don't mind who gets the credit, it's amazing what you can accomplish. Really? It really is. And again, one of my favorite thinkers, Lao Tzu, talks about the best rulers being those where the people don't believe they have a ruler at all, where the people say, we did it ourselves.

And he puts as the worst ruler, the one who rules through fear and intimidation. And then the next is the one who takes credit for everything. And then the next is one who tries to be loved. But then the best ruler, the absolute best ruler is that which makes the people think, no, I, we did that ourselves. We, we didn't do any of that. So I'll amend. Yes, I do. So I actually do kind of apply it the same way you do. I,

I wonder if you do this, you know, at your, at your companies, but I am really, really big on self-organizing teams and kind of the, the really, really, at least in, on the product development side, like really flat, agile structures that are,

allow for, I think that structurally allow best for that sort of thinking to take hold. That is exactly how we organize everything at O'Shaughnessy Ventures. Yeah. It's a very, very- Not surprised. I'm always trying to do that on every one of my work teams. But to answer your question on my advice to an aspiring novelist with this

Challenge is and I actually have a whole set of 10 of these things for that Lit Hub published a couple of years ago for the aspiring aesthetic novelist. But it is number one on the list. Success generally rests on disarming the very cognitive defense mechanisms designed to protect one's fragile body.

So the ones that we've already talked about are among them, but there are more too, right? Like our brains are self-protective devices. And ironically, you know, you need to tear down your cognitive protection in order to, I think, access the type of truth that makes for really, really good.

good art you know the kind of art that when you encounter at least in literary art in particular where you encounter it and and you think oh my gosh that's so true and nobody wants to admit it right that so much of the greatest literature is is and mimetic desire you know all of the gerard's insights would would count among among these things things that we just don't

like to admit are in existence. It's a huge amount of our problems to go back to the, like the arms race types stuff, right? So many of our problems are based on the fact that we can't even admit as a, as people that we care about positionality and positional status more than absolute benefit. Mm-hmm.

And so when we're, you know, trying to solve systemic problems like how to do taxation or, you know, like big, naughty, hard things, we can't even frame the problem correctly because we're unwilling to admit basic things about how our own brains work. Could not. I mean, that is beautifully put. And I completely concur. Yeah.

It is one of the biggest challenges that, you know, I faced it personally. Like, I always believed that I was, that I had escaped the status hierarchy and that I was not signaling. And then I got to know Will Storr and I read all of his books and I got to know Rob and I read all of his writings. And then I thought to myself, oh, shit, I'm signaling all the time. All the time. Yeah.

All the time. I was fascinated, by the way, I think you were, I think it was Alex Danko you were talking to about the, like, like the, the whole not name dropping Harvard game, right? Like that is deeply, deeply related to that. And the number and the number of recursive layers that get between this, because, you know, it, you get into this system where, where

You know, your your defense mechanisms are like on top of defense mechanisms are on top of defense mechanisms. So it's like I don't want to signal that I went to Harvard, but I want to say.

I don't want to use the word, but you're right. So, so that in and of itself is this, you know, is this, is this loop of, of, of self deception around, you know, around what, what even somebody is doing. But you have to admit like, like, oh, I want it.

say that I want the other person to know that I went to Harvard because it is high status and status is important to me. And status, like anything that is so basic, it's really not that embarrassing because no one is immune from status. No. Some people are better at manufacturing nonchalance than others. You know, I have a line in Portrait about like one of the characters who,

you know, almost passing the Turing test, like the most impressive aspect of her algorithm being like the inability to see that the algorithm was there. Yeah. Yeah. Some people are really, really good at hiding it. Sometimes it comes close to crossing into second nature, but it's always an almost everyone is interested in status. We are social creatures. We definitely are. And, you know, it was, um,

talking with Will and reading all of his stuff who finally convinced me. I'm like, okay, I surrender. You're right, Will. And, you know, the whole Harvard thing. Another thing that works really well on all of these misconceptions and misperceptions is humor, right? Oh, humor is the best. So I immediately thought when you were talking about the Harvard, I really want to signal that I went to Harvard. I thought of the joke that was Timberlake

Texan who went to Harvard doesn't know which dimension first. Exactly. And this goes to the fact, you know, why, you know, Paul Fossil, we don't mind. We can take it when there's humor in it. It makes it so much more palatable. Now, better yet, if it's both humorous and there is...

let's say an obscuring layer that allows us to still like keep our own ego out of it. So my friend Luke Burgess is, has this great example of Seinfeld that the reason Seinfeld is so popular is because it's

They're taking advantage of all of like, like the, the underlying natures and mechanics of mimetic desire, but they're doing so in such a way that you're laughing at rather than with them. And you yourself can have the satisfaction of saying, Oh, how silly that's a them problem. Yeah. Like I've seen this in so many other people, but not me.

Whereas, you know, you get into some of the other stuff. You get into Proust, for instance. And there it becomes much, much, much harder to divorce yourself.

from the insights that you're seeing in Marcel. Yeah. And the other thing that that ties into is something that I got worried about kind of mid 2014, 13, about what I was noticing, especially in younger people, was basically presenting things that they did not believe in

As they did. Right. So falsifying their preferences and falsifying their preferences because they were worried that if they were honest about their true preference, revealed preference, right, that they would be in some way excommunicated from the group.

And, you know, Todd Rose wrote a really good book about this called Collective Illusions, where it's like if you believe that everybody believes, right, you're going to go along even if everybody's just faking it, even if everyone doesn't believe that. And that can lead to some really bad outcome.

They have the academic psychological studies to prove this. All of those studies where it turns out that the group is brought in and to the one person who is a subject, it seems that all...

all, you know, five or six of the people are subjects. And then, and then, you know, you have two lines and, and you need to, and, and, and the publicly, the five people have to say, you know, are they the same length differently? Like which one is longer? And, you know, very often, I don't know, it's like two thirds or three quarters of the time, the one subject who's not in on the joke will join the group with the obviously empirically wrong subject.

Yeah. And what I find interesting about that is it gets back to how do you determine if somebody is a high agency person? They're the person who, and low in agreeability if you're bringing the big five in, right? Yeah. It's like the whole mimetic Girardian idea. I'm very interested in the person who throws the first stone. That's the person I want to figure out.

Because like they are the one that allow all of the other stone throwers to let them have it. Oh, yeah. But we are mostly, we mostly copy.

And, you know, it's like Robert Anton Wilson is another guy who's written extensively about this kind of riffing on the idea of reality tunnels. And we all see the world very, very differently. And then he gets into game rules, that unspoken thing, right? That we all know, we all know they're there, but...

But different people play that game better, right? Basically, the person who has no fluency in being able to infer what the game rules are is going to appear pretty stupid to the people around them. Yeah. And yet he gives examples like driving, right? That's an easy one.

Obviously, there are official traffic rules, right? You stop at the red light, you know, you give way on the yield and all. But there's a whole host of unwritten driving rules, right? The letting somebody come in, the thank you wave, all of that that can cause huge road rage in...

If if you violate them, you know, office politics being reasonable, all these things are separate reality tunnels kind of clashing. And then he has this great line where he says, you know, what it does is it makes it very difficult for people to have actual rights.

substantive communication and conversation with one another. And the way he puts it is, you know, if I'm a dog and I say woof to you and you're a cat and you go meow, we're both going to think the other one's a bit dumb and we're really not going to be able to, and we're going to make assumptions about them that simply are not true simply because, you know, a dog doesn't speak cat or a cat doesn't speak dog.

what, what, and I, and I saw a lot of that in your work, kind of the game rules, like, like one of your characters, I don't remember which one, I think it was Dale who, you know, your characters in certain parts of the book treat their romantic partners like college admissions, right? Oh yeah. Dale is Vivian's backup, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, what's your backup here? And so let's get back to the differences because I'm fascinated by the fact that you live in two really different worlds. That's actually what I was going to relate it to. And this is relevant to the novel too because I bring both of those worlds

in, but one of the things that I'm really interested in kind of industry to industry is what the points are and how that changes between like, like in so many ways, business is way more simple because the dollars are the points, their material, they're easily quantifiable. We all, you know, have a shared understanding of what they mean. It is money is a material.

really successful cultural story that, you know, has been, you know,

very successful. It's killed it over history. And part of the reason is because it's so easy, because it's so clear. So that side of things is less interesting in many ways, just because it kind of, to a certain extent, is what it is. When you get into the prestige

industry is which I experienced firsthand in you know the big museums but also in publishing it's really interesting because the dollars are no longer the points

The points are metaphysical. They are difficult to understand. And oftentimes you need to be getting dollars from somewhere else even to play. So it's just – they are two totally different games that

Totally two totally different games governed by different social rules that have varying amounts of respect for each other. One of the most interesting things that I found, which you may appreciate this, is that in my day job and consulting job, like my boss and my coworkers are friends.

more interested and supportive of my literary career than I think, you know, the publishing industry. I think it's very much, you know, looked down on

upon as like kind of a sellout move. Like nobody, like a consultant really, like nobody wants to, you know, wants the consultant to, you know, publish a book over, you know, the people who have, have been, have given their lives and sacrificed their material well-being, you know, for this, this great work. But I'm going to be honest. I think that

That like bourgeois comfort is highly conducive to literary, literary art in particular, because of the amount of time it takes, the stability it requires and the challenge of it. Meanwhile, so many writers fall into the trap. And this is actually one of my, like one of my other tips that if you're going to write about writing fine, but the bar is higher. Like,

You need to be better if you're going to be writing about writing because it's much harder to be interesting. Having some kind of other job, being a scientist, being, you know, anything, it gives you stuff to write about in a different, you know, a different way.

different games to compare between and contrast and, you know, think about. So I think operating in multiple worlds in both like a materially and a metaphysically driven industry at once has been very, very helpful for me anyway, and in, in thinking about the ideas that, that drive my fiction a lot of the time. Yeah. Yeah.

I again, I agree. I many high achieving people kind of have portfolios of status games, if you will. For sure. And that many times causes envy. Right. Because they're like, you know, fuck you. You're this great consultant. You write great literary fiction. You're pretty. You're stable. You're all of these things. And then, you know, you can feel the envy rising. Right.

But I definitely think that you're onto something because you're right. The trope of the artist is starving in a Garrett somewhere. Yeah. Doesn't really work. Right. It worked. Okay. Van Gogh. He didn't have an easy life. He also was a visual artist, which is again, the medium is I, I, I say literary art specifically in literary arts though, like the starving art,

The starving artist archetype is a much better fit for poet than a novelist. Totally agree. You know, you can write a beautiful poem in an afternoon and, you know, being there for the inspiration in your garret. I don't necessarily think that poverty is particularly at odds with great poetry, and maybe it's even conducive to it, but...

Good Lord. I mean, unless you're Jack Kerouac and like, and I know precious few people who actually, you know, right, right this way where you're, you know, just kind of stream and going and, and going very, very fast. The stability is, is, is part of it. I mean, I can speak at least for myself, like when I am,

able to work full-time when I'm on one of my leaves of absence that I so wonderfully get to take is

just so much easier to when you have those kind of big chunks of time the leisure the it's really it's conducive to to working I think a lot of I can't remember what's his name Cal Newport the slow productivity kind of mindset Jane Austen's his first example in in that book and it's like it's like a total

It's totally apocryphal that she was scribbling in between her social obligations. No, she had these set periods of massive amounts of leisure and she...

She crushed it during those times and then often went years like she had a really difficult period where she, you know, in Bath and she was like barely writing at all. But she was living there. And, you know, being a writer is and I'm sure you've seen this, too, like with all of the hats that you wear as as an investor and as an author, et cetera, like you're not necessarily writing all the time. Like, I mean, how many over how many years have you written your four books?

I mean, I would imagine that you weren't always in the act of writing one. Even I haven't even in my last two books, right? Like 80% of my most recent novel was written in my three month leave of absence where I was spending 14 hours a day on it. Yeah, no, the luxury of having time.

to concentrate time to really do deeper work is, at least in my experience, this might not be true for others, but in my experience, it was necessary. Yeah. Because literally you had to be able to do that. And I, because I had in most instances, my own companies that I'd found it, I could say, yeah, Jim, you can take that 90 days off. But it is really something that

has to be there. And, and I, I'm very fascinated by the pretense, right? That these various social systems that collide with one another, they, they have different pretenses, right? Like on, in the literary one, there's, there's a lot of, you know, kind of like, how dare you? Yeah.

You can't have a bestselling book. You're a money manager. You can't do that. And yet over in the world of asset management, they're like, huh, maybe I should write a book too. Yeah. I think, I think that part of it is it goes to rarity too though. Right. Because like,

As as lofty as we tend to think of, you know, asset management or, you know, high end consulting or investment banking as being it is infinitely easier to get one of those jobs than to publish one.

Like, it's not in the same realm of... They're just not that rare versus... You know, they're rare in a certain sense. I mean, it's still not easy, but it's not that hard. Like, most people, if you, like, really, really want to be a management consultant and you are willing to put in the effort and, like, go, you know, listen to Victor Cheng for 100 hours before...

You know, your case interviews, like most people could probably do it. I think the vast majority of people could work their whole lives and never write a good book. Oh, totally. I couldn't agree more. It's much it's I love I'm going to steal that from you. I love the rarity. That's a better way to look at it than scarcity as I'm thinking about it.

Much better, actually. So thank you for that. I will definitely steal that from you. Before we go, though, I'm just going to touch because we don't want to. We'll just give teasers, not spoilers. Your new book is about probability, basketball and narrative illusion. Tease it a little bit for what people can look forward to.

It is another, well, my first book was a modern reinterpretation of the myth of narcissists. The new one is a modern reinterpretation of two myths. It is the

the story of a modern Icarus as narrated by a modern Cassandra. And so, Oh, I love that. Yeah. I was really, really tickled by the idea of, I never thought I would write a first person novel, to be honest. I'm very of the Austenian tradition. She's the voice in my head, the reason I wanted to be an author, et cetera, et cetera. And my first book was very much in kind of her, her,

like 19th century third person. But no, I was really tickled by the idea of an omniscient first person narrator. I thought it was funny. And so I had an idea for a Cassandra novel and I had an idea for an Icarus novel. And...

As happened to me with Portrait 2, when I really realized, oh, I really have an idea, is when I realized that those two novels were actually one novel and that Cassandra needed to tell the story of Cassandra.

But I think all three of them, all three of the myths that I've been really, really drawn to are to the level of wanting to put a whole book around, just hold up in our modern world.

So well, I mean, you know, you talk about like algorithmic determinism, for instance, and, you know, there's a lot of Cassandra's running around saying this stuff like it kind of doesn't doesn't some of that stuff make everyone feel a little bit like Cassandra. I feel like Cassandra all the time with that stuff. And, you know, Icarus flying around.

too close to the sun and just our world's obsession with fame and flight and status, highness, high, medium, lowness, and

Yeah, I and of course, I mean, narcissists is probably the most I went for that one first for obvious reasons, I think. I mean, like, you know, you start you start looking for you talk about talk about, you know, seeing something everywhere when you start looking for it.

Count how many times something reminds you of the myth of narcissists during the day, like in a single scroll through the social media platform of your choice. Like it is, it's all, all narcissists. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's all echo. And on Twitter, there's that handle VCs congratulating themselves. Oh gosh. I've never, I haven't heard. I'm not very Twitter. Yeah.

Twitter savvy. So you've got to tell me. You should check it out. It's hysterical because it's kind of like the old Goldman Sachs elevator, which is, you know, just basically making tremendous fun of these people who are so tone deaf. They don't understand that they're being like, they're making narcissists look modest by comparison. I have to think that, that you must,

To a certain extent, and I'm curious if I can ask you this, if you feel that you have a competitive advantage as a VC,

In the way you've expanded beyond that role with this podcast, with Infinite Books, where you're, you know, just often talking to, like you talked to my friend Julia Sonvend about charm, right? Things way outside of, you know, necessarily what somebody reading your Wikipedia article would think of as your core interests, right? Do you think that has given you

you because I, because I do in terms of, in terms of like the novelist consulting thing, I'm curious if you think all of your other endeavors make you better as a VC too. I think that that's probably true, but my, my, my origins were really in public stock management. So VC, I didn't really start doing private investing until about 2006 and, but did,

Definitely, it has very much influenced the type of venture investing we do. So for example, we love what they call pre-seed and seed. That's when things are just getting started. And we love that because it's not as crowded as sort of series A and series B. We're not playing in the

my brand is better than your brand, which happens a lot with the marquee, you know, sort of series A, series B, and we're just crazier. And the ability to glean insights from our other verticals like films, books, movies,

social media, YouTube, Substacks, et cetera. Very, very helpful. Yeah. But it also helped me understand what I'm not good at. Sometimes it's really good to understand your own limitations. And like, I kind of suck at the series A, series B. I'm not built like that. I'm built much more for the, oh, wow, this guy, this woman over here,

she's got a great idea. Let's give her some seed money and see if it plays out. We enjoy it more. We have a lot more fun because we can actually help. You know, when it comes up to the, when the business model has been proved and every kind of thing like that, I'm, we're not going to really be of much help. So yeah, definitely. You're avoiding the mimetic hype train where you get interested in something because other people are

are interested in fact one of the one of the rules that we have across all our verticals is we don't participate in auctions

Meaning like if there is some, an author for infinite books that we really love, but it's gotta be an auction environment. We'll wish them well. We'll support the book even when the other publisher pays up for it. And so we'll continue to support the author. But like if there's an auction, we don't play. Same with VC, same with films, same everywhere. Yeah.

because of the mimetic nature. And because like, I'm a fairly competitive person. It's hard to avoid. It really is. And so I put rules in place to remind myself, hey, dummy, if you're gonna do that, you're gonna regret it.

And you'll end up not having as much fun. So yeah, we try to avoid and yet understand the memetic nature of many markets, literary markets, financial markets, movie markets, like it plays in all of them. Oh yeah, 'cause it's human. Exactly. Well, and that's kind of like Will Storr's conclusion about status games, right?

Whereas de Botton basically says, hey, no, be a bohemian or do the arts or philosophy. Will just says, you know what? We're human and we're never going to stop playing this game. So my response to de Botton on this is interesting, too, because like I think I think his position is interesting because and I'm more sympathetic to some than others, because I actually think that art, for instance, is a very good conduit at lessening.

the impact of, I guess, status anxiety around just in life, right? Because the status anxiety isn't pleasant and facing it head on and facing it in many of the conduits that de Botton recommends are actually helpful. It's that you can't fool yourself that those arenas themselves are devoid of the thing you're looking to

Like, as if the art world isn't brimming with status games. Like, where are the status... Like, find me a more intense status game structure than the art world. You can't. You can't.

Or, you know, or I mean, what it is, is religion, right? Or philosophy. Like, you think like big, big, like brand name philosophers aren't competitive with each other for, you know, academic status and their, you know, chairs and and accolades like dream on. It exists everywhere. So face it.

realize that you can't escape it. Realize no one else can either. It's not embarrassing. And, and, you know, do, do your best to keep it, keep it in perspective.

Perfect segue to our final question. I have had the most fun chatting to you. Oh, me too. Me too. We have a heck of a lot in common. We absolutely do. So our final question here plays a little game, and that game is we're going to make you Empress of the World.

Only for one day. Yeah, of course. Who wouldn't, right? But only for one day. And there's two things that we do have two rules. You can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a re-education camp. But what we're going to allow is we're going to hand you a magic microphone and you can say two things into it that will incept the entire population on planet Earth and

Whatever their next morning is, they're going to take the two things that you've incepted and they're going to say, you know what? I so rarely act on things that are ideas to me, but I've just had two of the best ideas and I'm going to actually act on them. What two things are you going to incept into the world? The first one, read Jane Austen. All six novels, all six of them.

no better way to understand the world. And the second one's very selfish, which is read all of mine. I love that. You're going to sell 8 billion copies of your book. What a great inception point. Natasha, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for coming on.

And best of luck with the book that shall not be named, but hopefully is coming out sometime within a year, maybe? Let's sure hope. Thank you so much for having me. The pleasure was mine. What a treat. The treat and pleasure were mine. Thank you.