Tiago Forte — Unlocking the Power of the Annual Review (Ep. 267)
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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, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today, I have a very fascinating man as my guest. I have long followed him.

Diego Forte, author and entrepreneur who wrote the bestseller Building a Second Brain, a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. And the more recent The Para Method, simplify, organize and master your digital life. Diego, welcome. Thank you, Jim. Happy to be here.

Happy to have you here. I have watched from afar as you have kind of gone on to conquer a lot of these productivity tools. And as one who is sort of stuck still using my Apple Notes app for much of my capture of ideas and things, your work absolutely fascinates me. Now, I'm sure we're going to cover things from the second brain today, but you yourself have said you're kind of all in on the new annual review, a pair

para method, which we will go into at length. But first, before that, like, let's close the door on second brain for a moment. What blind spots in your second brain thesis did you find that led you to say, well, the real frontier is this para method, this annual review method? Yes. Great question. I think it was two things.

Building a second brain is this holistic methodology, this very comprehensive philosophy, which is nice to have it be so holistic. But then even when people buy into it and they do, the book has sold very well. They usually just want to know, well, what's the first step? What's the immediate next thing that I concretely do? And that is almost always to organize their existing notes.

Right. Like before you go and capture and acquire all this new information, just start with the stuff that's already there. And almost everyone has some existing, even if it's just like a few, you know, things they've jotted down in their Apple notes, they have something. Right. And so the follow up book, The Paramethod, which came out just like a year after building a second brain, was just my goal was to write it at a fifth grade level.

Or not even fifth grade. Explain like I'm five. It was like, how would I explain this to a five-year-old? And it actually has nice pictures, like storybook pictures to just make it brain dead simple to organize your existing notes. That's it. And then the annual review book, which I'm writing now and will come out next year, was the opposite. So instead of getting small and concrete, it was like zooming out, like way out to the big, big picture of your career, your life,

your, your life really. And it's based on, it's really teaching a practice that I've done every year for, I think 17 years now, which is I finish every year with a retrospective on the past year. What did I learn? What went well? How did I grow and improve? How did I not? And then that annual review, which is what I call it, has been the absolutely crucial ingredient in informing my

my future plans, my future projects, future goals, future learning. And so the book is teaching and encapsulating everything that I've learned over those 17 years. Yeah. And I think what I love about that is the way you externalize that. I think we all do that, right? Like my mom used to say, the best way to determine what someone is going to do tomorrow is to look at what they did yesterday. Yeah.

And we probably unconsciously do the process that you are externalizing. And it's in the switch from the internal, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, where you're kind of talking to yourself to the external. Something I deeply believe in is you've got to get it out of here. You've got to get it. In my case, I've kept paper journals for 40 years and a variety of other methods. But the magic often seems when you externalize it,

you, A, find yourself looking at things like, oh, wow, I really did fuck that one up. How am I going to address that? And ideas that, you know, were bouncing around in the head, but you didn't have concrete notions of them. You know, the second brain is kind of an identity-shaping practice, right? Absolutely. And if we look at all of the people that you've successfully coached,

What identity shifts, intended or unintended, good and bad, have you seen in longtime students? And how can newcomers get insights from what you've seen working with all these people? Oh my gosh, that's such a good... I don't know if anyone has ever asked me that in quite those terms, because that really is how I see it.

The process of building a second brain is also the process, yes, of becoming more productive and more creative and more effective, but it's also at a deeper level. And this is the level that I'm most, I'm kind of most fascinated by. It is an identity construction and reconstruction again and again and again. And it's almost, I mean, everyone takes their unique path, but it's almost predictable. You're right. There are some, oh, you're going from that identity to that identity right now. Okay, got it. Yeah.

So a few that come to mind that I look out for, a big one is from consumer to creator. Big, big one. We're all consumers. We are born consumers. We know how to consume. We know how to read. We know how to watch, how to listen to. So everyone is a consumer. Few ever really make the transition to a creator. And I don't mean like an internet creator. I don't think everyone should become an internet creator. In fact, I don't advise it. Yeah.

But creating, I mean, I come from a family, like what I think of is my family. My mom's a musician, a guitar player and a singer. My dad's an artist, a painter. My brother is a dancer, a ballroom dancer. My other brother is a construction superintendent making buildings. Those are the things that are, they're inherently worth building, worth creating. It's art, music, art.

It's just something inside of you that takes, like you said, an external concrete form that is inherently worth it. Whether you ever make money from it, whether it becomes a business is less important.

Yeah. But again, have you seen with the people you're coaching, like did, did Mr. Black turn into Mr. White or, you know, have you seen profound changes where they were like, wow, this would have never happened had I not done this, had I not worked with you on, on this program? Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. I mean, I, I knew this concept of a second brain, this, this system was powerful, but

It was really teaching live, which I started doing in late 2016 and taught live cohorts of my course all the way until 2023. And I still, to this day, can't believe, you know, it's kind of a nerdy technical subject, right? It's not, it's just like organize your knowledge and your notes. But if you think of the fact that everything is information,

right everything outside and inside of us including us it's all information becoming more capable and fluid in the transformation of information from one place to another to to one format to another to one form or another that's almost in a way like the ultimate it's like your thanos you know with the rings the rings you can just mold reality the informational reality at your whim

Yeah, I love that notion. And for a long time, my career, the majority of my career was in asset management. And people would say, like, well, you know, how would you describe more abstractly what you do? And this was during the meme phase of word cells and shape rotators. And so I said, I am a symbol manipulator.

And they would kind of look at me like, you're a weirdo. But I kind of think that that's really what all of this, ultimately, once you get it

Once you get it all where you can start playing with it and seeing connections that, you know, you might not have seen had you not done that. I think that that's what this allows. But you mentioned your family as well. And that really intrigued me because, you know, you were brought up in this incredibly vibrant visual and auditory Brazilian music, Brazilian art, all of these incredible,

Incredible. I would, both of which I love by the way. And, and yet you yourself have pursued a life of, you know, systematizing knowledge. Yeah. And, and you and I share the idea that you've got to expose yourself to some chaos, some, uh, you know, unexpected thing. I'm a big fan of Terrence McKinnon and he talks about that all the time.

But how do you balance those? How do you balance the creative, I guess, how do you optimize a system to have just enough entropy so that it allows a little bit of the unexpected in into the frameworks that you're working with with your students? Yeah. Oh, another great question. You're good at this. So I think that background explains so much of it. My mom is Brazilian. She immigrated when she married my dad, who's

But then even my dad is half American, half Filipino. So both my parents are themselves multi-ethnic. And then I'm just like a hodgepodge mutts of just like, and so it was this pretty, in some ways chaotic or at least dynamic clash of cultures at home, you know, switching, like we were talking before we started recording from one language to another Brazilian Bossa Nova clashing with, you know, classic rock,

also at the level of values and like fundamental, like temperament Brazilian culture, I almost think of as like the opposite of American culture. If you get every American value and flip it, you know, one 80, you get Brazil. And I think from the American side, I pulled, I call it American mode. American mode is useful. It's

it's powerful if you're trying to create a system or create structure or become more efficient or make money or build a business american mode is the best is almost like the ideal culture for those things

But my Brazil mode, I also value just as much, is ideal for parties, for having fun, for enjoying life, for music and food and hanging out with people for endless hours. And so I almost feel like I switch into one of those modes depending on the situation. And each one provides the antidote to the excesses of the other.

Like I love, obviously, the United States, but there are some real pitfalls to the American way of seeing the world. Some blind spots, which Brazil fills in, and vice versa. Yeah, I love that. I'm a huge fan of travel for that same reason. I think that Mark Twain wrote that brilliant piece about how it destroys biases, it destroys your prejudice. If you just...

broaden your aperture and you see that your country of origin, obviously Americans are probably, probably the most guilty of this. You know, the more you travel, the more you understand, wow, okay. So they do things completely differently here. And then you're able to, as you do, you're able to say, wow, this part of this culture is really, really great. I'm going to bring that into my own way of looking at the world.

And I definitely feel that the more you expose yourself to the better the mix, right? Yes. You mentioned blind spots. One of the things that I do, because we're going to talk a lot about AI, I would expect in a moment here is I, we have a native O'Shaughnessy ventures AI in house and it's because we wanted it to be as non nerfed as possible and

And, you know, a lot of the commercially available programs

Might have a point of view that are very different from one another so the ability to you know You kind of do the Gann analysis with one model fighting with the other I think it raises really interesting ideas and topics to the surface but one of the ones that I've kind of OD Don is Hey, tell me what you have all of this vast information on me

what are my biggest blind spots? Yeah. What do you suggest I do to improve this, et cetera? I am just like absolutely convinced that the new AI layer,

is going to radically transform not only business models and playbooks. We are doing a continuing series we call The Great Reshuffle, basically based on these ideas. And what do you think? What are your thoughts about

I think everything at Oceana Sea Ventures is an AI first layer because I think it's not going to replace our creativity. I think it's going to really enhance our creativity. Yeah. You know, we can offload all of the, you know, manual cut paste, all the boring stuff and

And it does that beautifully well. But it also does provocative questions, et cetera, really, really well. And what are your thoughts about that and how are you incorporating it into everything you're working on? Both in work, but also in life, in family life, et cetera.

Yes. Oh, my gosh. In so many ways. In so many ways. Just this morning, just before this call, we launched officially, publicly, our first major educational program about AI. It's called the Second Brain Enterprise. So it's very much on my mind. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And I would say what we're teaching and just generally my view on it is that term you used, AI first. Yeah.

I think practically, if you think of something being AI first as a lens, you can look at virtually anything in an AI first way. Obviously, every aspect of business, but that's just the beginning. Like you mentioned, you can look at relationships and community in an AI first way, a personal growth, spirituality, like just practically anything. Gosh, there's so many ways we could enter this topic.

But I'll give you one like very concrete example. This is actually a YouTube video that will come out on Tuesday. So by the time this is published, this video will be out on our channel. But are you familiar with the platform Notebook LM from Google? Of course. Okay. So those have been my most successful videos of the past year have been about Notebook LM.

And the third one on Notebook LM that's coming out, I basically wanted to see if AI could be a life coach and a business coach. I noticed on our invoices that my business coach that I've worked with for years charges like $750 an hour. And I thought, hmm, I wonder if I could get, you know, even a fraction of the value, if I could have on demand would save me a lot of money.

And so the first thing I did was find all the context I could. And you mentioned context. This is so crucial. Every bit of context matters. You can never have too much context. And what's unique about AI is AI can utilize all that context. A human, once you tell them five or 10 minutes about yourself, that's about all they can use, right? Right. And so I found 50,000 words.

I have documents, which included years of journals, which I digitized from paper, included three years of notes from my coach, like working with my human coach, included all my annual reviews for over 15 years, included like my Myers-Briggs, all these personality assessments. I just have to, I want, you're going to continue, but we are doing exactly the same thing, but

But please go. Are you really in as part of your AI unit? Absolutely. We're digitizing 40 years of journals of mine. I put my big five in. I put the Myers-Briggs. I put everything. I've written four books. They all went in. I've written endless blog posts. They're all in there. I spent 30 years writing letters to my children. They're all in there.

And man, it's powerful when you give it that amount of data and context. Yes, it's wild. I mean, the insights, its ability to see patterns. Yes. You know, like I'll give you one example of what it found. I had written a blog post summarizing my takeaways from a seminar, like a weekend seminar I did last year about changing attitudes towards money.

So I'd spent three days really with a coach and a facilitator really examining my attitude towards money since my childhood. And I'd written about things like where did my relationship to money come from? Who taught it to me? What are the key memories it's based on?

So that was just one source, one little blog post among 42 other sources. But think about what a crucial piece of context that is. Like imagine a business coach trying to coach you on growing your business or solving business problems, and they don't know anything about your underlying attitude towards money. That's going to be pointless.

Right. And so it could find things like you could say, well, in this blog post, you wrote about how as a child, what was modeled for you was spending money on people as a way of showing love.

You also mentioned in your last annual review way over here on the other side of the graph that you tend to over hire and pay people more than what is a reasonable market rate and thus spend too much money and thus a few months later you have to let them all go because you're out of cash. Maybe those two things are related. Maybe you spend money and overpay people because you appreciate them and like them and care about them when it makes no business sense. I was just like,

Oh my God. Yeah. And for people who are just listening and not watching this podcast, you would have missed me shaking my head in violent agreement because I think one of the things that AI does best

Incredibly well. I don't think we've ever had a technology that was able to look into an array of 100 million different items and into the latent spaces there and find connections that even the brightest of we humans couldn't do. We couldn't hire entire people.

you know, posses of brilliant humans to do it. AI is able to do that because of the way it works. And I, and it, it, it drew me back to Jung's quote where he was, he said, until you are able to integrate your shadow into your personality, you will look at what happens to you and forever call it fate. Yeah. And what AI is amazing at.

is the ability to pick up just as you just described. Like, I certainly couldn't do it. There's that great quote about no matter how brilliant, no matter how insightful or creative a human being is, you simply cannot ask them to write a list of things that would never occur to them. And so...

the ability of the AI, not just in business, but across all aspects of our lives to surface these things is really extraordinary. And like, well,

one of the exercises I did was just took my letters that I wrote to my kids and said, tell me about myself. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, holy shit. And let me, you know, spoiler alert, it is not all complimentary. Yeah.

That's how you know it's true. That's how you know it's true. Exactly. Exactly right. And sometimes you do have to kind of bully the model into, no, no, no, harder, you know, get real with me here. But if you're persistent, it ultimately will, right? Yeah.

And, I mean, one of the things that you talk about outside of this connection, but I'm viewing it as kind of inside, you treat envy and jealousy as diagnostic tools, as, you know, a compass to say, wow.

I hadn't thought about that. I didn't realize that I was feeling envy or jealousy. Can you walk us through a recent event where you redirected something, having surfaced this knowledge that you probably wouldn't have been able to without AI and without the vast body of data and knowledge that you have, where you really made a major life or business decision based on this insight?

Yes. Yes. This arena of my life, by the way, is all based on the work of Joe Hudson. Are you familiar with him by any chance? I am. Yeah. Okay. He's a Silicon Valley executive coach that has become a mentor and a dear friend over the past five, six years. And his work is all about emotional intelligence and emotional fluidity. I have a lot of writing on my blog about the takeaways from that. But I would say

I came to this insight through being part of Joe's programs, which is that every emotion can just be treated as a source of information. Like going back to, you know, information theory that we were talking about. Yeah. If you remove the moralistic tint, you remove all the connotations and associations, you remove the honestly traumas and past emotions.

memories you may have, if you remove it all. A great book on this is How Emotions Are Made by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. She talks about this, that all an emotion is really is just a series of bodily sensations arising and then your brain assigning an effective label, a name for a concept that explains those sensations. And so if you treat it as a source of information, well, wouldn't you want to have access to every source of information you can?

Like, of course you would. So when you have any emotion, even the quote unquote negative emotions, which there's no such thing as a negative emotion, the more of them you have access to, the more fully you invite them in, the more fully you bring curiosity to them, the more information you have. And that's the better decisions you make, the wiser you are, the better, the more effective your actions. So like envy, let's take that example. I found that every year I would be doing my annual review

where I kind of go through the areas of my life, you know, my, my parenting, my health, my diet, my home life, like both professional and personal. And I noticed that I would feel jealousy. I would feel envy towards people, right? This past year, the, the, the person that I was jealous toward was fit dads. Every time I saw a fit dad, I was,

You know, especially if they had like multiple kids, like more kids than me. We have two. They would have like three or four kids and they're more fit than me. Well, I guess I'm just a complete failure. But then a few years ago, I started noticing that that was actually a very pure signal.

It was such an honest signal. It can't be faked. You know, a lot of times your desires and your goals and your dreams come from somewhere else in a bad way. They come from your parents or society's expectations or a fear that you have. And those can be more or less useful. But envy, you can't fake envy. Envy is really telling you what is missing in your life.

I think. And then you can, you can act on it. You can decide to just accept that part of your life. Yeah. You know, that's one option or you can make a plan to, to, to change it. Yeah. I, I have been ridiculously blessed with, I'm very rarely envious or jealous of other people. And you

you know, Timothy Leary had that theory that we get imprinted early in life and we have no control over the imprinting that's happening to us. Right. So obviously for listeners and viewers, the language is antiquated so we can come up with different words, but to use Leary's own words, uh,

He says that the two big imprints that really affect your life, materially affect your life, happen before you're two years old. And the first one is are you imprinted as a top dog or a bottom dog? His language, not mine. So anyone who's getting triggered, calm down.

And are you imprinted with a winner's script or a loser's script? And it comes back to what you were talking about with the coaching and your idea about money, right? So in asset management, what I learned very quickly was I had to really know a lot about psychology and

and psychiatric care for people because inevitably when you were talking about people with money, about money, right? It emerged for me, the more people I spoke with, the more I realized that money was kind of the last taboo.

You know, people would talk about their sex life, you know, forever. But when you got them on money, oh, man, lots of pain points there. Lots of it just touches and informs so many other aspects of their life. Yes. And one of the things that I found, even in really high performing individuals, obviously we

our firm, Oceana CSA Management, took high net worth and institutional money. So high net worth, you know, at least on the money front, they had demonstrated, you know, a real skill. But I came to learn at the suffering of maybe some other things that went unattended. Yeah. And so what do you think about when, like, when you're thinking about

All of the things that you got envious of, do you often just let that go? Or is it a catalyst, kind of a forcing function for you? And, you know, like, you know, I keep those fit dads are pissing me off. Does that lead to a new program? Or does that lead to, you know what? I'm going to let them piss me off. I'm happy because you look eminently quite fit. Yeah, you know, it could be either.

It could be either. I think it's important to not, to not predetermine the outcome. I don't think it's at all the case. Like I really don't like the, the segment of the self-help industry that is just about endless kind of machine-like personal optimization. I think it's become so apparent even in among the, in the self-help industry, we were coming around to the idea that that is a really not good way to live. Yeah.

And yet improvement is still possible. So like this in between the endless self optimization and the complete self acceptance, there's there's a good middle ground where you accept yourself, you love yourself, and you're also seeking to change in ways that align with your values that fit in your lifestyle and your schedule that are just feasible, right?

And so in that example, I just, I tried different things. I tried doing like body weight exercises here in the backyard that didn't work so well. Then I tried, I joined one gym, but it was only open in the mornings and evenings. And I, it was like an experiment, right? Like you had Anne-Laure Lecomf on your show. She's a good friend of mine that the first experiment failed. The second experiment failed because I realized I like to work out in the middle of the day, right before I pick up the kids from like one to two o'clock is my sweet spot.

And I found a gym. I have to drive a bit further, but I'm like 10 times more likely to actually go because

And thus that's, that's been a, it's not a huge radical life change that has come out of that, but it's a moderate one that I think has made a difference. I'm definitely fitter. I'll say that. Well, you look great. That makes me think about that whole idea of just treating everything as kind of a tiny experiment as she outlines in, in her book and in our discussion. And it's always been kind of one of my things that,

that like yeah, I know you've written that you know the the idea of a goal that sits out here is Probably not the best or most optimum way to get what you want I agree with that and you know Ken Stanley's great book, you know why greatness can't be planned you've got to be able to Try a bunch of things and then kind of lean into what works but

How does that translate to you when you are coaching clients? Do you have a particular way? Because, you know, another thing, I'm a big fan of neuro-linguistic programming, and I'm sure you're very familiar with that. And people literally have different communication styles. It's one of the reasons why I think AI tutors are going to be huge.

Because they'll be able to train on the student. And in a way, I'm sure you kind of train on the person that you're coaching, right? Some people are visual. In fact, the majority are visual. So they really understand when you say, can you see the big picture? But somebody who's auditory, you know, they don't see the big picture. They hear the bell ring.

but they don't see the big picture. Are there ways that you adjust your coaching style to the person you're coaching that like,

Just on the face of it, you might get a lot of people who's like, I'm never jealous. I'm never envious. How do you work around and, you know, kind of back to that emotional thing? Because those emotional sparks, I think, are where you can get a lot of maneuverability. What do you do? Yeah, gosh, I've learned so much about coaching the past few years, both from doing it and from being coached.

I think you've got to be open to multiple approaches. Sometimes I think of like the head, heart, gut as like the three portals, the three entry points. And when I'm coaching someone, it's usually on Zoom. Usually they're leading with one of those. They're leading among my followers. It tends to be the head. They have this oversized intellect. We're running in the same crowd. Yeah.

Which I'm so fond of that group. They're so endearing, you know? Smart people, I just love them because they, you know, your strength is always your weakness as well. And so they have this incredible intellect that's capable of such sophistication, such abstraction. And yet it's also corresponds to their weak side. And so with them, it's often easier to almost go around the intellect, right?

And I'll have them go to their emotions. And if they can't set, they're often a bit closed down emotionally or they don't have access to their emotions. Then you go one level deeper. It's almost like if you're trying to hack a computer. If you can't get in through the software, go to the operating system. If you can't get in there, go to the firmware. If you can't get in the firmware, then you have to hack the physical machine. So.

Like, let's just role play for a minute. You've got somebody who comes to you and says, listen, I believe that I have to write out my 12 objective concrete goals, right?

And I will view it as failure if I don't achieve at least a 70% success rate on those goals. How do you pull them away from that way of thinking and introduce the idea of intentions and the framework that you're writing about now, the annual review? Are there hard cases that you're just like,

Dude, sorry. I just can't help you. If you're going to stick with the 12 goals with the 70% success rate, good luck. Yeah. So let me tell you, this isn't necessarily something I would say, but what's going on in my head as a coach, based on just the brief thing you said, I'm thinking, okay, this person

rates highly on things like control, perfectionism, precision, intellect, achievement, which is neither good nor bad. Okay. But they're probably over-indexing on those qualities to avoid an emotion.

So then my only goal for the next step, at least, is to find what that emotion is. Brilliant. Brilliant. And what do you find? Given the person you just outlined, what emotion do you usually find at the bottom of that type of thinking? Yeah. So the most common ones for that kind of person are they don't want to feel either sadness, helplessness, heartbreak.

dependence, like dependence on someone or something else. It's all the feelings that are the opposite of achievement. So like the opposite of winning, conquering, you know, winning the race, winning the battle, all the opposite of those, they will have a hard time feeling.

And they're using these, you know, winning experiences. They're trying to win. They think they're going to win a race or a battle or a contest or a game that is going to allow them to not ever have to feel those feelings. And that's just not the case. It actually is exacerbating those feelings. They're festering and they're festering and building up underneath the surface.

That is absolutely brilliant. So let's go to the next step then. How do you bring that up? How do you get them to see that? Yeah, so there's some pretty straightforward questions like if I can have them define failure,

So like, oh, those 12 goals, what would happen if you didn't achieve those? Oh, well, then this would happen. Well, what would happen if that happened? Like trace down the series of events at the bottom of that series of events that that cascade of consequences is always a feeling. Oh, well, then I'd have to feel a loss of respect for myself. Oh, I'd have to feel the disappointment is another big one. I'd have to feel my disappointment and the disappointment of others, which is really the same thing.

Then once we found what is at the bottom of that, they just need to feel it. They just have to literally allow it to move somatically through them. And that is easier said than done. Yes. So is there a my guess is it's not a one size fits all. Right. How do you kind of coax people?

that out of your client who you're coaching? Because I know a lot of people like that, right? And I have certain methodologies, but you're the expert here. I would be fascinated to hear yours.

Yeah. I mean, this is, I feel like the true expert that I'm referencing in all of this, that I've learned all of this from is Joe Hudson. So I feel like you should have him on. That would be a great guest. Yeah. There's not, there's for sure no one size fits all approach. And in fact, the most common way the whole coaching interaction will derail is if I, as the coach, have any preconception.

If I think I, you know, I know who this person is, where they come from, what they're dealing with at all, they're going to sense it and it's going to go off the rails. But I would say often it's somatic movements. You know, you can feel helplessness by, you know, hanging your head, drooping your shoulders, having your hands in front of you, laying on the ground, curl up in child's pose, you know, or even not moving and just...

bringing your attention to the gut level where there's always sensations arising at every moment. And that's also easier said than done. Like it actually, it's actually a skill to even be able to sense what's happening in your body at any given moment. But there's a whole range. You can also approach it from the intellect, which is kind of an interesting, sometimes people won't, the gut and heart levels won't work. And that's where I'll sometimes use my own intellect as a kind of

Kind of a bludgeon. Like if I need to, it's a little bit of a last resort, but if I need to, I can sort of get the intellectual, like the mental model they have and just try to deconstruct it. Just question it, poke holes in it, undermine it, introduce alternatives, list all the reasons it's not true, uncover the underlying assumptions. It's like it's an edifice that they've built up in their mind. And I can just go to work just undermining and deconstructing it.

Yeah, brilliant. One thing that I have had some success with is having people write out a fictional story in which the protagonist, i.e. them, but it's not them because I've told them, no, no, no, this is a fictional story. And the protagonist has these particular problems that they're trying to deal with.

Just let your creativity flow. Now, lots of pushback sometimes on that. Oh, I'm not creative or what's the use? That's a waste of time, et cetera. And one of the things that I've found is that the higher the resistance, the more efficacious the story writing because it allows them to,

I would often, I developed when I was very young, this idea of an objective observer. Now, no observer is objective. So it is a device, but it would be like, if this weren't me,

And I was an objective observer and somebody came to me and said, hey, Jim, really would love your advice on how to do this. I did find that that ability to kind of remove it from the feelings, because you're absolutely right about that. People like, are you familiar with Candice Pert's work, The Molecules of Emotion? No. So she was a biologist who wrote this book called The Molecules of Emotion.

And she tied it into what actually physically happens in your body when a strong emotion is felt. And she basically describes the path instantaneous with the emotion being felt, neuropeptides flood your entire body. So getting to the gut, getting to the heart, getting to all of those places, which is why

All of a sudden you feel, depending on the emotion, right? You can either feel overcome or, you know, overcome with joy or overcome with sorrow. But they work, the mind-body split, you know, Rene Descartes, you have a lot of explaining to do because like-

That isn't the way it works, right? Like we are embodied intelligence, embodied emotion. And ignoring the cues from your body, like you quite rightly point out with envy and jealousy. You know, George Soros always said that some of his greatest trades were made simply because his back would go out.

And when his back went out, he knew something big was going to change. And that would set him off on trying to find what that big thing was. Wow. Yeah, right? And so I remember the first time I came across that, I'm like, wow, okay. I got to see if I can pay closer attention to that. Do you find that when you're writing the annual review,

You've been doing it, what, 15, 16 years? Yeah. What one or two were the kind of the greatest insights that you've had when you've done it? And did it lead to a tangible change in either your business model, your family life, your personal life?

I'd be really interested in the response to that. Oh my gosh. So many, so many. One example comes to mind because I was just writing it in my book manuscript, which is

So it's kind of random, but I was in Miami, which is I usually advocate going to the most like calm, peaceful, introspective place you can. Well, it was the end of the year. This was the end of 2022. And I was in Miami about the least introspective place on earth. There are Vegas. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And it was it's funny, speaking of not bringing preconceptions, you know, I sat down at a cafe I had, I was on a business trip to speak at a conference and I had an extra day. So I said, let me let me take advantage of this time very productively and do my annual review.

And maybe it was the environment. I don't know what, but I sat down and I just couldn't do it. I tried to come up with like new, big, hairy goals, scary goals. And like, okay, well, we grew this much last year. Now this year we need to grow that much. I had just published my book. So it felt like, okay, now I have to like take on even bigger things. And none of it resonated. None of it was meaningful. And I just felt resistance and blockage. And so I just packed up and left. I was in Coconut Grove, which is a suburb of Miami.

And I just walked down the street aimlessly and I come upon this museum called the Barnacle House, which is this preserved early Florida house by this man who was named, oh my gosh, his name is escaping me. We can put it in the show notes. But

He was one of he was a pioneer, one of the first people to settle there. And he was like one of these like town pioneers, like so into family, he had a big family, they all live together in this house. He was really into the environment, like he wanted to preserve the swamps and the marshlands and not develop everything. He was into designing boats. He was a very prolific boat designer. He was a very prolific

He was into history. He was into culture. He founded the first library, founded the Yacht Club. Like he was just one of these founders you hear about. And as I'm going through this tiny random museum in the middle of nowhere, practically, I'm so moved. Like it wasn't envious. It was just, it wasn't envy. It was like every aspect of this man's life spoke to me.

And he wasn't ambitious in the traditional. He didn't make millions. He wasn't insanely wealthy. He wasn't even really famous. But all the things in life that really mattered, he had. And seeing that, I realized, oh, wow.

We had just had our first kid and a second kid about to be born. So that was another thing. The pandemic was over. And I realized through visiting the Barnacle House that there was a new chapter of my life starting that wasn't about pure ambition, pure achievement. It was time to shift my identity. It was time to shift my values, shift my priorities.

And even though technically it wasn't by sitting down doing my annual review, it was opening myself to this wider set of feelings and this wider perspective on my life that allowed me to have that insight. Fascinating. And how did your family and friends react when you – because I would assume that was a fairly material change that you put into place. What was the reaction of friends, family, etc.?

I mean, friends and family were like, oh, finally, gosh. On the business side, you know, it wasn't all fairy dust and roses. You know, in a funny way, that moment kicked off two of the worst years in the business. Right? Like there's probably some correlation there. Yeah. I stopped pushing as hard, started working less, started not...

Not taking on too much, honestly. But, you know, what's really funny is even though the business, the financial results, let's say, of the business suffered for a couple of years, what that allowed us to do is sort of retrench. You know, we reduced the team. We we reduced the portfolio of products and services, everything, everything retracted and retrenched.

But now, two years later, more than two years later, that retrenchment means we are better prepared to take on this new AI phase, far better prepared than if I hadn't been hitting the gas, you know, flooring the gas that whole time.

Yeah, I do a similar exercise where I kind of view my life as the play that I am writing. And, you know, I say Act 2 is done, Act 3 is beginning, what are my intentions for Act 3, etc. It can be very useful.

But you also bring up, and you brought back in AI, so I have two questions there. How are you going to future-proof the PARA method or the annual review method? Imagine a decade from now where we have ambient AI, which is auto-tagging, capturing, and distilling everything it finds and connections with our particular life. What sort of indisputable...

you know, that everyone would nod their heads. Yep. Yep. You're right. This is an indisputable human skill. Will Para, the annual review, et cetera, still require that automation just can't supply? Yeah. Yeah. Such a big question. Such an important one. You know what I think is happening is

We're having to separate in any given domain of life or even down to like each individual task, each individual, each individual activity, each business workflow, everything we're having to peel apart. Like it's like it's like unwinding a woven string.

We're having to peel apart the part that is a necessary evil that we just had to do because there was no other way from the part that is inherently valuable and worth doing, even if we don't have to. There's like, you know, we never had that chance to separate those two things. A great example of this is organizing, like organizing, let's say, files and folders and data. You might think,

Number one, most obvious situation where AI is going to do all of it and we're going to do none of it. Right. That's not the case. That's not the case because there are little bits of organizing as annoying and manual and labor intensive as it is that are inherently valuable that are still worth doing. You know, something as simple as deciding what the categories are.

That is worth doing. The categories of your life, the categories of your business, the categories of your notes, right? Now, the part that we're peeling off and not doing maybe is the individual moving of every file into the right category. That part AI may do, but the conception of the categories, which is really a creative act, like identifying the categories, it requires volition. It requires...

mind to see the patterns and see the categories and

So even in something as basic as organizing the files on your computer, we may continue to do maybe 10% of it, 15% of it because of that value, I think. And that's true across everything. Yeah, that's very interesting. When I was writing the book, I guess I'm best known for What Works on Wall Street, which looks at all of the most popular investment ideas. You know, like we like stocks with low PE ratios or we like stocks with the highest growth rate, right?

And what we did with What Works was simply say, okay, well, let's see how that works. Let's go and test it over decades of data and see what the empirical results are. As I was doing that, the first version of the book, the automated backtesting facility that Compustat, which is the keeper of all of the data,

had provided me wasn't as robust. This is in the 90s, so I'm sure it's perfect now.

But back then in the 90s, it wasn't as robust as I would have liked it to be. So I had to resort to doing each year hand by hand, i.e. walked each year of the data on the computer. And the things that I learned from having to do that, what I was really pissed, to be honest. I was like,

Are you kidding me? I'm going to have to do every year from 1950 forward, look at the names, walk the data. I learned more and got more creative ideas because I had to do that than I ever would have had if I was able to simply press a button like today and have it completely automated. Yes. Because it taught me about how anything

so-called pristine data set ain't pristine. Yeah.

And, you know, how mistakes happen. And then you see them repeating themselves. Then you see it polluting, as it were, the broader data. Yes. And it just got me into the mode of thinking that, quite frankly, I would have never gotten into if I didn't have to do that. So I think you're absolutely right about even the categories because, again,

The, the, what we were talking about earlier where, where people attach a label to something,

Like label thinking is not thinking. It is precisely the opposite of thinking. You hang a label on something and then you turn off your thinker. And because, you know, it's nice in that nice little container over there and you don't need to think about it anymore. And that's a huge error in my opinion about labels and why you want to as best you can avoid them.

You know, I'm kind of a burn the ships kind of guy. And you have this idea of one-way doors. Talk a little bit about that because I think it's really the same metaphor.

where, you know, it's kind of like, okay, done with that. I'm going to close that door behind me. I'm going to lock it and I'm going to move forward. Have you made any kind of irreversible decisions recently that you could share on how you locked that door and how did it change your thinking? Yeah. Yeah, I do love one-way doors. You know, it's funny too. We can sort of bridge what we were just talking about to this. Yeah.

It's funny where in a world where hard work or hard effort becomes optional, like let's say all of AI's potential is realized and like hard work, hard effort is just optional. You can do it if you want and you don't have to. In a world where hard work becomes optional, hard work gets more valuable, right? It becomes a scarce resource. Not just because so few people are going to consciously choose to do hard work, right?

but because the value of rare knowledge, of alpha, is going to skyrocket. When every single person in the world has access to the same large language model, and thus there is no competitive advantage in anyone using that large language model, if you can find one historical archive in 19th century Germany that has... that's not been digitized, that's going to be priceless, because you're going to have novel information. The same is true of optionality.

in a world where optionality is infinite you can do anything at any time you have no constraints you never have to make a hard decision in that world choosing to reduce your optionality is more valuable right so like i even think of like choosing to get married

which you don't have to do in the modern world, choosing to have kids, choosing to live in a specific place and not be a globetrotting, you know, digital nomad, nothing wrong with that, but choosing to like be in one community, invest in that community, choosing businesses that are not easy to exit when it gets hard, all these kinds of one-way doors are going to become more valuable because so few people are going to, are going to choose to reduce their own optionality. Right. So those are all things I've done. I've, I'm

Chosen to get married and have kids and move to a small town in Mexico. But even something like, you know, in 2022, when we when I had that realization with my annual review, we wanted one very specific decision that came out of it is I chose to stop teaching the cohorts of my course, building a second brain, like stop them altogether. When I made that decision, like beginning of 2023, those cohorts were responsible for like 95% of our revenue.

Wow. It was like kind of insane. And I honestly don't know if I needed to make such an extreme, if I really needed to burn them that quickly, burn the boats,

But in retrospect, it had a wisdom to it because it forced us into the new AI era. I could have spent the rest of my career just teaching people how to organize in a pre-AI way, take notes in a pre-AI way. I could have written that out easily. But by pulling the plug and taking that one-way door, I was forced to learn, in this case, AI very, very fast.

Yeah. And the forcing function of that is, I think, still underrated. And as I'm listening to you, though, I'm also thinking, wow, I wonder if he's got a mole in my organization. Because one of the things that we are doing right now is we are scouring the globe.

For all of those papers that have not been digitized, I have a teammate who's up at Harvard going through all of William James' letters, notes, et cetera, that they have in their archive, never been digitized. And guess what? There's a treasure trove of all of those around the world.

And the alpha, I mean, we are absolutely simpatico on the idea that if you want alpha, that's what you gotta do because you're right.

Everyone using the same large language model is going to get, unless they're, you know, you could make the case that people who are much better at prompting are going to get deeper, better answers. And I believe that's true. But I also believe that training or fine tuning models, William James, I'm a big fan of his. And, you know, really the father of the only true,

truly American school of philosophy, pragmatism. So what about training or fine-tuning a model to be a pragmatic AI investigator? You know, the old computer adage of garbage in, garbage out really does hold true. And if you are training on

not great data set, you're going to get not great output from that. So one of the things that I think is going to happen like you is

is you're gonna be able to have tremendous alpha by access to the non-digitized world. It sort of leads me to another thing that I wanted to ask you about, which is we have a publishing company called Infinite Books. We are essentially, I love books. That's why we have it. Let's not lie.

But also my experience as an author led me to say, you know, there's got to be a better way. There's just got to be a better way. And you've navigated both traditional and self-publishing. And so if you were hired by a legacy publisher and they said, look, we're going to give you carte blanche here.

We are going to give you a blank canvas. We want you to reboot our entire company, taking in the AI first mentality. What's the first sacred cow that you're going to kill and make delicious hamburgers out of? Interesting. So like one of the big traditional publishers? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Well, my first thought is I don't know if I would try to reinvent them or invent something completely new, you know? Like, oh gosh, let me think.

So I think I have a kind of contrarian view on this for my cohort of online course creators. So I have a little WhatsApp group with like 30 or 40 authors, all of us YouTubers, online course creators, we're on X, we're on Instagram, whatever it is. And they're all, or most of them are pretty like self, like they're fans of self-publishing. I'm actually the traditional publishing advocate.

Because I almost think of like traditional publishing, everything about it makes sense. All their incentives, all the decisions they make, all the ways they think. If you think of it as them producing and distributing a physical product.

Right. Like we think of a book as an information product and this, oh, it could be audio and video and this like, like it's infinitely malleable. But no, think of it just like a, like a can of Coke or just like a package of tissues. It's this commodity, a widget, a widget. It's just a widget, right? You understand it all.

You understand why they move slowly. They understand why it's a relation. You understand why it's a very relationship based business. You understand why it takes absolutely forever to make a book and to get it, you know, shipped all around the world. You understand why they take so much of the money and their share is so large, everything about it. Right. So when I think about

My book, I would say traditional publishing, everything I've said makes the most sense for that really like 0.1% of books that are most successful, right? Yep. The fact that I can go down here in my little Mexican town in the little one bookstore they have in town.

And I can find my book in Spanish on the shelf with the colors and the design, everything localized at a price and using like, you know, more affordable materials that are thus cheaper for people to buy. So everything from Mexico is just makes a tremendous difference to me. And that's what self-publishing can't do. And you know what? I think this is a this is a blind spot of Internet people.

We think, oh, everyone has the internet, right? Therefore, everything that's on the internet is available to everyone all the time, instantly, forever. Couldn't be further from the case, right? It's very meaningful to me that my book exists in all these formats, some of which are very labor-intensive to produce in all these countries, in all these languages, in all these distributors. And so to summarize, traditional publishing makes more sense than ever, but for an ever-vanishingly small percentage of people,

So I would just leave that as it is. Like it's taken decades, centuries to build that system. Let's just like leave it. And then I would just create a whole new and it is has been created. It is being created a whole new built from the ground up self-publishing digital infrastructure.

But treat them like they're treated as competitors or alternatives. I think they're not. I think certain ideas, and this is why I've done both, certain ideas that are just very like, it's about a specific technology and it's going to change in a year, do self-publishing. If it's an idea that is a big picture idea that could really enter the mainstream, that is a kind of timeless, go traditional publishing. And just to treat them as completely separate channels would be my advice. Interesting.

And where would you, where would you place your own work? Would it be just the big idea that you would go with traditional publishing? Would you ever aggregate all of your blog posts into like a compendium that people could, you know, just download and be interactive with? Like, would that be the way you approached it?

Yeah, I've done that. I've done, I think, four or five self-published books that are just a compendium of my blog posts. Yeah. I will continue to use all the above.

It depends. I think the right vehicle depends on the passenger of the vehicle. Right. So like the annual review is a great example. That's totally timeless. Like the examples I'm using, I can just as easily use an example from ancient Greece. Right. Ancient Mesopotamia as one from today. And I believe it's an idea that everyone from a Fortune 500 CEO down to a middle school child can use.

For all those reasons, traditional publishing, right? And I'm going to spend years. It's going to take years to bring that to market. But on the opposite end, if I write a book about AI, I literally don't think you could use the traditional publishing system for such a book. Because one-tenth of the way through the timeline, everything would be different. So you have to use self-publishing. And I'll do that. I will probably write a self-published book on AI.

Very cool. You bring up performance reviews and I was thinking about it as like the performance reviews on, on yourself. What's the single hardest truth in your opinion, through all of your work with many, many different type of people? What is the single hardest truth that people discover when they are, are doing this auditing their performance and, and how do you help them if you're their coach?

How do you help them make that like a galvanizing forcing function rather than a paralytic? Gosh, I would say the the single possibly the single most common one that is so common. I think we're kind of all doing this in some way or another all the time is it's like that adage.

When you have what is it when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail like a nail yeah, yeah We're mostly all doing that We have our strength, you know Usually it's our strength something we we do well and we know that we do well and we just keep doubling down on that strength again and again and again and

Until it has diminishing returns and then it has zero returns and then it has negative returns. And we're still... Right? And so, and it makes sense, right? Like the ROI on your effort is always going to be higher on existing strength versus developing something else. But I think to a large extent, my job is convincing people to just put down the hammer for a minute, step away from the hammer and like try a screwdriver.

Just try something that is outside, you could say, outside your comfort zone, outside your repertoire of skills, outside things you've experienced to just broaden their experience, broaden their repertoire. And almost invariably, that leads to, I mean...

great, great learning experiences. It leads to, it doesn't necessarily lead to explicit results, at least right away, but it makes them more of a, more of themselves. It makes them a more holistic person. It broadens their horizons. Very interesting. The, you know, one thing that I passionately believe, I look at mistakes as portals of discovery.

And failure is a ladder, right? Like you either win or you learn, in my opinion. And so I would have thought that one of those would have been like at the bottom, like people just deeply afraid. Like it's not going to work out and how you might solve that. But I like very much the when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail because you are right.

I see that in so many people. And so what I try to do is like, and I've done this all my adult life. One thing that I would do back when we had record stores and CD stores, I would walk into Tower Records and literally buy a dozen, two dozen CDs totally at random, literally at random. I would not even look at what section I was in. I would pick

I didn't even look at the cover because I really wanted to randomize. But that's how I discovered what was then called European New Beat and is now called Techno or EDM. And I loved it.

And, you know, I would have probably never like gone and said, you know, oh, techno or European newbie. This looks interesting. I'm going to buy this. And so I found, and I do that. I did it with books too. I would randomly, that was a little harder because it took a lot more effort because I would have to commit to reading the book. But I found, I was thinking about that as I was getting ready to chat with you because

you, you are very clear that you've got to have a bit of that randomness. If you want your creativity to bloom. I'm also wondering what your thoughts about like a lot of people that I talk to that are AI skeptics or not yet seeing all of the incredible unlocks that it allows and

One thing that I hear often is, well, that's just outsourcing your memory. You're going to outsource your memory. And because you're outsourcing it, you know, your brain's ability is going to atrophy. And then they'll often give the example, like, look at what GPS did to people's sense of direction. Look that...

Young people can't read paper maps anymore. What are your thoughts on that? I have a particular point of view, but I'd love to hear yours. Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's clearly true. You know, I think it was Marshall McLuhan always said, technology always extends us, but every extension is also an amputation. Yep. I think I learned that from David Perel, our mutual friend. But so I think it's, first of all, important to see that clearly.

It is not unfettered, you know, unmitigated upside and, you know, rainbows. I think it's just about making those trade-offs consciously, making them intentionally, deciding when to make them and when not to make them. And there's definitely no one-size-fits-all rule. Like both extremes of I'm going to just –

automate everything in my life and just unthinkingly embrace AI without thought to the consequences is just as bad as I'm going to be a Luddite and reject everything and not even, don't look beyond the blinders, which people don't like to hear. People don't like to hear that they're going to have to just think deeply, make a series of conscious, make a series of intentional choices based on their personal values. No, I hate that. Wait, what? Yeah.

So that also kind of leads me to

You know, just with your own business, I kind of look at you and what you're doing and I see, you know, how investors always talk about moats, right? I sort of see your moat as being your community because I think a lot of the methods in the para methodology, for example, you can recreate those pretty easily if you've got chat GPT, right? Yeah. And what are your thoughts about that? Do you worry ever?

that a lot of your ideas and hard work and creativity are just going to get sucked up by the AI and spit out, you know, here you go. This is all you need to do. I still think that the moat of community stays, right? Because that's the unique human part of this. But do you have any concerns or worries about AI just like sucking it all up and removing...

you know everything that we think are special about ourselves oh gosh you know i don't know if i'm a delusional optimist but i i don't worry

Maybe I should. I probably should worry a bit more. Great. You're going to go, you know, this O'Shaughnessy guy, I loved it for the first couple of the first 30 or 60 minutes, but now, God damn him. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I probably should. A couple of things come to mind. I think one is,

Speaking of intercultural perspective, I think both my parents come from countries that sort of have real problems. I hate to say that, but like, I feel like these are such first world problems, you know, like, oh, the LLN will integrate my data at too high level of abstraction. It's just like, okay, like, you know, in my mom's country, Brazil, they, you know, ramping corruption and, you know, like,

Yeah. I mean, everyone knows what happens in these countries. So that's part of what makes me just at a visceral level, not that worried is like there's wars and there's revolutions and there's pandemics, like real problems. The other thing is, I guess I just, as long as I keep betting on my own capacity for change and for learning. I love that one. That one is very true. If I, if I made the decision to retreat and say, no, I,

I'm going to opt out of this technological change, then I think I'd be worried. Because then every new development, every new advancement is a threat to me. Whereas current, at least for now, at least on this day, this can change next week. But I feel like I'm able to be, and part of this is having a very small lean team that can change direction quickly. I'm sort of at the forefront of the wave here.

And at least for now, every new AI advancement is a net benefit to me, I feel. Yeah, yeah, I feel the same way. I love your riff, though, on these being real first world problems because you are right. But, you know, it does lead me to worry a bit. And I'm not a worrier. I go along with the idea that worry is an endlessly peeled onion.

And, you know, you can always find something new to worry about. But one of the things that I do think about a lot is are we going to be in a world, let's say 10 years from now, are we going to be in a world where there is a cognitive chasm between us

those of us who were early adopters of the AI first mentality and all of the things that spring from the, what we can learn from creative and otherwise from AI. And, and then on the other side, like when I see the EU writing these regulations that I, I like, I really can't contain my, my worry that they're committing suicide. Yeah.

What do you think about that? I agree. I agree. I mean, that cognitive gap is already so wide. You know, the U.S. is currently more unequal than France at the start of the French Revolution. You know, so like it's more like we're already in it. And most of it happened pre-AI. It happened due to many other causes. AI is definitely going to accelerate that. But it's funny because France,

AI on one hand seems to create more inequality. Like for example, just how expensive it is to build these models. You know, it seems like soon you're going to have to spend like hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, which only like a handful of entities in the entire world can do. But in another sense, and equally, it's a democratizing force. You know, the fact that the CEO of the Fortune 500 company probably uses more or less the same LLM as a student, you

You know, and the fact that it collapses a lot of the distinction between small and large organizations, like we as a five person team can now run a hiring process or document a workflow or do a lot of things that without AI, we'd have to be a hundred person or 500 person company to do.

Um, so it's also deflationary. Like so much of tech is deflationary. So like in the balance, does it actually increase inequality or maybe it increases some forms of inequality and not others? I, I really, I really don't know. It was like the famous line, the future is already here. It's just not equally distributed. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, if you look at the history of innovation and the diffusion of use of innovations, um,

That's kind of been the story all along, really. You know, it took good old Martin Luther nailing the precepts onto the church wall to get, that was the forcing function that made people read, learn how to read.

Because, you know, of his contention that, no, no, no, no, you didn't have a relationship with God through intermediaries like the Catholic Church wanted you to believe. You should have a direct relationship with God, which meant, well, that means we got to publish Bibles in German, in Polish, in English, in all of these different languages, which of course...

gave birth to time binding of ideas and literature and all of the above, but for a very prosaic reason. So I agree that the upside of it, your insight is essentially how we have developed the business models guiding all of our verticals at Oceana C Ventures, right? Like you couldn't run a publishing company without 500 people. We can now.

Because we can have that AI layer do a lot of what used to be human need and, quite frankly, boring human. We're still going to have lots of human editors and, you know, all of that, but the boring stuff. Yeah. That required lots of hands in the past, and it no longer does anymore.

It kind of leads me to the idea, you know, you read a ton of science fiction. I'm also a huge fan of science fiction. In fact, we have a book coming out, our first fiction book called White Mirror, which is a collection of stories riffing on Black Mirror, right? Great.

And that's so needed. That's so, so important to have out there. I totally agree. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you though, is like from reading all of the science fiction, right? What do you think, as you look at the various world building and you look at like, and it's a very disparate group,

We're hoping to bring a little more optimistic balance to it because, unfortunately, for the most part, it's mostly dystopias that interest the science fiction writer. But what trends that you see in the novels that you've read where you kind of think to yourself, you know, I think that's actually going to happen? Oh, gosh. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. My two biggest genres of reading are history, like past history and science fiction. I'm pretty obsessed with both of those equally. And they're such great compliments because reading about the past and, you know, my

I read so much history that my friends and family are always annoyed at all. I'm just in every conversation bringing up, oh, this happened. 1463. We are like brothers from different mothers because those are my two favorites as well. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. It's like history gives you just this broad perspective that there's nothing really new that it's all happened before or that cycles repeat themselves or that human psychology never changes. Like it gives you this perspective that,

But then science fiction gives you the, introduces you to the possibility that new things are possible and that actually the future is this infinite wide open horizon. So those, I like to balance those two, right? But I think what science fiction does is when something happens, like a new AI model or some new development, you recognize it almost as if it's something that's already happened because it's been in a sci-fi book. Yep.

You know, you're like, oh, you know, like that thing about alpha being so valuable. I read a, I can't remember which book it is now. I've read over 120 of them. So they've kind of all melded together, but they have this future world where alpha is so valuable that a job that people have is they cover themselves in sensors. Like imagine a suit with cameras and infrared sensors and radiation detectors and every kind of sensor. And their job is just to walk around.

And they just walk around. Their whole job is just to collect the most recent version of reality. Right. Yeah. And so having read that years ago, when I encountered LLM's, I was like, oh, okay, well, we're now on that world path, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And I think something pretty close to that is going to happen. Yeah. Pretty close to that, that guy with the, you know, sensor suit. But in terms of specific things, I might need to think about that more. Yeah.

I mean, one one example. OK, just one thing came to mind. Sure. There's a book called The Forever War. Yeah. Love it. Right. Yeah. So I don't remember. I read most of these books before I took a lot of notes. So I'm so bummed. I don't have notes for most of them.

But the one idea I remember from that is the idea of an interstellar war, right? Where it takes so long to get from one place to another that by the time your armada arrives, it's totally out of date and obsolete, right? Which is like really depressing and sad. Yes. Right? Because they also have no, they feel they have no choice but to continue doing that because the alternative is just to be annihilated.

I think we're starting to see a similar effect where the timeline to accomplish anything, to execute a project, to launch a product, to build a team is now so variable. Yeah. Right. It could take years as it has in the past, or it could be done in like hours or days or weeks that the relative technological progress

between two, like kind of what you were saying with the cognitive gap between two people, between two teams, between two companies, between two organizations, between two countries is starting to be the definitive factor in their interaction, like everywhere. Yep.

The other fun thing that I do that you might enjoy, given the fact that you also love history, is I'm sort of in the idea generation mode. I use large language models a lot because I'm like, hmm, I wonder what would happen if we had an alternate history where the Roman Empire didn't exist. Mm-hmm.

Try that one in a large language model and then ask the large language model to speculate on what the future looks like because it is wild. It is so cool.

how we owe so much. For example, one of the speculations was the United States wouldn't exist in its current format because the founders were so obsessed mostly with the Roman Republic, but with Rome in general. If you look at all of our symbols, all of our iconography, it's all inspired from Rome. And right down to the eagle, that was the symbol of Rome.

If you think about it, that was the sigil that they carried around. And, you know, the all-seeing eye and the pyramid and all of that, it's just really fun. And then you can mix and match, right? You can say, okay, so what happens if Rome never fell?

Right. What does society look like now? And so that the, the only problem that I have there is if you're a rabbit hole diver, like you, you can eat up a lot of your time, but I have, I always make the excuse. Well, I'm simply coming up with concepts, ideas for our authors or the filmmakers that we're going to have make movies. So it, it, it is a ton of fun.

Incredible use case, by the way, alternative history. Oh, I love it. I barely touched that, but I think that's brilliant and actually important. It's important at this point in history that we develop the practice and the skill.

Yep. Which is, I think, what you're developing, that the ability to even see that there are multiple ways history can go. Yeah, we are. So many things are path dependent. And when you realize that, you think, OK, well, let's look at what the other paths lead to.

Because they lead to very, very different outcomes. Yes. Which fascinate me because like if you're in a mode of trying to build worlds for new science fiction that has a more optimistic bent. I'm a huge believer that the overstory controls a lot of the other single stories, right? And the overstory in science fiction used to be optimistic or at least optimistic.

oriented towards, look how cool the future's going to be. Right. And then we went into this phase where it was like literally black as night. Right. It was so dystopia oriented. And, you know, there's a great quote. I can't remember who said it, but it goes along the lines of, I

i don't care who writes the laws of a country if you give me control of the stories i can take over that country literally because the power of stories is another thing that is built into our human os right like talk about you know worrying about outsourcing your memory to technology

The weirdest people in the world, if you read that book, they show that when people became literate, it colonized and changed the physical shape of our brains. It colonized the part of the brain that was for visual acuity. And if you take somebody today that is highly literate and you take a picture of the brain and then you take somebody who's not literate, the brains are physically different.

And so that's the idea of cumulative cultural evolution. It does affect us. And I think that one of the things we're running into right now is we're speed running this. And, and there are a lot of things that we weren't designed to do that we're going to adapt ourselves to. Well, I'll pause and just welcome your thoughts, your thoughts on that idea. Yeah. That's an incredible like parallel or metaphor is like,

Our entire history as humans, we've been losing capacities. You know, we no longer have the capacity to smell, you know, something miles away like a dog. We don't have, you know, we can't fly, we can't hibernate. We've always been losing things, largely through our use of technology and shaping the environment. So that's nothing new. But then the big question is, well, what does that make room for? What new capabilities, new capacities that we probably can't even imagine

Exactly. I love that take. I think you're exactly right. Because, yeah, we are shedding a lot. But by through the shedding, we are making room for

for a lot of new capabilities, a lot of new abilities that we don't even yet know what they are. And I'm a big fan of David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, in which he's sort of like, listen, we're just at the beginning here. And I think about that a lot. You know, when you put things back to context, back to history,

Do you know that it was just a little over 100 years ago when the first human being addressed more than 100 people, or not 100, 1,000, 10,000, whatever the number is, simultaneously. And that was when the radio broadcaster was broadcasting Lindbergh's return to the United States. He was speaking to more human beings than any other human ever had in history.

And what blows my mind about that is it was relatively recent. Like we are so new. Our culture is so new that, you know, Bill Bryson has a great book, America One Summer, in which he looks at the 1920s and all the things that came online then. And when you read it, you just cannot escape this idea that

that we're babies. We are literal babies. Yes. And we're at the beginning of infinity, not even close to the end. And if you go in with a preconceived notion, like one thing people do a lot when a new innovation comes is they, for example, movies. When they invented movie cameras and everything, what do you think the first thing they filmed was? Plays.

Because that is what they were used to. All of the ideas of CGI and all the freedoms afforded somebody as a filmmaker versus a playwright putting on a play or a director putting on a play weren't thought up yet. And so they did the thing. Well, I guess we'll...

film this play and rebroadcast it. Interesting. So if you just keep your mind always open to the fact that you probably are wrong, you probably don't know what it is that, that expands your aperture to a place where you're able to pick up on these things and,

be much more open to use cases that have not yet occurred to anyone. And so probably some kid right now is sitting in his garage, maybe a neighbor of yours there. He's 14 years old and he's in the garage and he's coming up with a use case. And you and I will 10 years from now say, wow, what a great, what a great use case. That's what I love about the current platform of potential is,

It's not only that it, for the first time in history, you alluded to it earlier, you know, a team of five, like your organization can, can do the work of a fortune 500 company now. And that is so brand new that you also means that that kid in the garage, he's going to be able to do things that would have required an army to achieve and

just with the tools available to him or her on their cell phone. And we have created the ultimate networked society. And time, space, geography, they've all collapsed. And the sooner you recognize that,

the more you're going to be able to lean into this type of stuff, which is what you are doing with everything you are doing. I'm trying. I'm trying my best. Ah, you're doing a great job, Diego. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating and interesting.

Every bit as fun as I was anticipating it would be. I love what you're doing. I didn't get to half the things I wanted to talk, so I'll extend a re-invite for later so we can get to the second part. Let's do it. If you've heard the podcast in the past, you know that our final question is at least fun to me. And it is, we're going to make you the emperor of the world for one day. You can't kill anyone.

You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp. You can't force anyone to do anything. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that are going to incept the entire population of the world.

Whenever their morning is the next morning, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, I've just had two of the greatest ideas. And unlike all the other times, I'm actually going to act on both of these ideas starting right now. What two ideas are you going to incept in the world's population? Okay, I think I got it.

I would say two quite different but complementary ideas. The first one is, do they have to be like one sentence? No. The first one is, the first thing that I would incept people into is something that we talked about, which is just, there's no such thing as a bad emotion. Every emotion is a source of valuable information.

I think is one of the most important ideas in the world of our lives. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, I would say when you, it's the idea that when you externalize whatever's going on inside ideas, theories, feelings, stories, whatever, when you externalize them, they become infinitely more valuable, more useful, more impactful.

I think that's kind of the theme that's tied together all my work, I would say. I love them both, and I agree with both. So it can't get much better than that.

Well, thank you so much. This has been so much fun. I can hardly wait until our second conversation because then I'll ask you all of the questions and we'll go through a lot of your work, which is absolutely fascinating and very powerful. Absolutely. Looking forward to it. Such a pleasure, Jim. Such a pleasure chatting with you. The pleasure was all mine. Thanks for coming on. That was great. And I'm getting the hook here. I've got, apparently I have a three o'clock I didn't know about.

So this was really fun. And we'll be in touch and schedule the second part because we didn't get to have the stuff I wanted to get to. That's the sign of a good conversation. But yeah, happy to come back on the show. Terrific. All right. Thanks.