Ep.132 — White Mirror w/ Tinkered Thinking — searchlore

Ep.132 — White Mirror w/ Tinkered Thinking

Published Nov 10, 2022

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0:00

The only zen at the top of a mountain is the zen you bring there, right?

0:03

It's like the Banksy quote.

0:04

"Well, I never took initiative cuz no one told me to".

0:04

But you gotta admit, man, this guy was really clever because instantly women smoking in public like soared Change the story.

0:16

You change the future And we're gonna dive into the story. That you won with.

0:22

The story that's been written in like 27 minutes flat.

0:26

I was rewatching a black mirror and I just thought to myself, why is there no white mirror?

0:30

Why is there no good science fiction that presents a more hopeful future for humans.

0:37

If we change the stories that we tell ourselves, then we're gonna act differently with regards to what we do today and what we do tomorrow.

0:44

You can learn a lot in hell if you figure out how to bring a little bit of heaven with you That sentiment alone hit me right between the eyes.

0:52

Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

0:52

Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.

1:00

Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.

1:05

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.

1:24

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.

1:39

And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.

1:53

With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.

1:53

Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.

2:00

Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.

2:11

All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.

2:16

This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

2:26

Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

2:31

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone.

2:33

It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another episode of Infinite Loops.

2:33

After all, they're infinite, so we will have an infinite number of them, never ever ending.

2:41

I am super excited about today's because even though I can see him and even though I know who he is, he has chosen to remain in his nom de plume.

2:54

What would you say that Tinkered Thinking is a [inaudible]? Well, what is it?

3:04

Tinkered Thinking: It's an art project that's kind of like a brand.

3:08

It's something to just personally just play around with.

3:14

And honestly, my personal identity would be sort of a blight on it, I think. Not a blight. It's just not needed.

3:22

Like, ugh, you know, you got the title of the book and then you got the author and then you got the author picture.

3:27

It's like, why don't you just scrap that and just have the title of the book kind of thing. Just keep it simple. Keep it simple, stupid.

3:34

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love it.

3:34

So for my audience, if you've missed it, I got pretty tired even though I love Black Mirror. I love science fiction. I love Black Mirror.

3:43

I was rewatching a Black Mirror and I just talked to myself, why is there no White Mirror?

3:48

Why is there no good science fiction that presents a more hopeful future for humans?

3:48

And I started looking, and you know what?

3:59

There is some, to be fair.

3:59

There is some, but honestly, it’s not nearly as good as The Terminator and as Blade Runner and all of these dystopias.

4:04

So we decided at Infinite Loops to run a contest.

4:12

What we asked for was stories based on a more optimistic view of the future.

4:21

And you, my fine sir, not only did you win the entire competition, you also submitted 10 submissions, each of which was really fucking good, to be honest.

4:29

I’m reading and I’m like, “Did I like this one better or did I like this one better?

4:38

” Your protagonist is named Lucilius, who I would’ve known as the Roman satirist, but you told me in our earlier conversation, was actually the name of the fellow that Seneca was addressing his letters to.

4:54

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, correct.

4:56

He was a little sort of government peon who did some writing.

4:56

I think he did write some plays.

5:03

I can't remember too much, but he was just, Seneca was always writing to this Lucilius character and kind of like Letters from a Young Poet, like Rilke, which I'd read years prior.

5:12

It was same sort of setup, where you don't get to hear, you don't get to read any of Lucilius' letters.

5:17

You just sort hear about him via what Seneca's saying in response to his letters.

5:17

So he's sort this mysterious character in history.

5:24

And I sort did a quick Google search.

5:24

I was like, "Has anyone used this name?" This name is fantastic.

5:30

It's kind of like Lucifer… Jim O’Shaughnessy: A great name, great name.

5:35

Tinkered Thinking: But sort a neutral-positive version of Lucifer, Lucilius.

5:37

And I think Shakespeare uses him as a side character in one play.

5:37

And after that, I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to totally use this."

5:45

And it was also inspired a bit by, I was reading Taleb at the time and how Taleb uses the character Nero, which is a fictionalized version of himself, and he crashes them in a helicopter at one point and stuff.

5:56

And I loved how that was this sort of very playful juxtaposition with all of his non-fiction writing.

6:03

He was just injecting these tiny fictional segments where he was kind of playing around with this version of himself. That and Fat Tony.

6:14

Tinkered Thinking evolved almost by accident, very organically, and I was just writing all of this sort of whimsical, I was just writing for the sake of writing, and there's a backstory to why that was happening, but I was like, "Oh, all of this, this is kind of dry if I do this seven days a week," and I wanted to do it every day.

6:35

I was like, "Well, what if I do a short story once a week?"

6:35

And I was like, "Well, it's kind of a tall order."

6:39

And I was like, "Ah, screw it. I'm going to try it."

6:42

And yeah, a year later I was like, "I have 50 of these stories."

6:42

I was like, "Oh, I should plop this all into a Word document and see how long it is."

6:48

Now there's two published volumes.

6:53

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Two published volumes.

6:55

They're beautiful by the way.

6:55

Tinkered Thinking: Thank you.

6:56

I designed them and did everything from scratch for them.

6:56

The third volume is written, I just haven't put it into book form.

7:02

And then volume four is already half written also.

7:02

So I want to get to at least five volumes and then do a big sort of best of collection.

7:08

But after a year, I was like, "Huh."

7:13

I dumped them all into a Word document.

7:13

I was like, "I have a book?"

7:17

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Amazing. Amazing, right?

7:19

Tinkered Thinking: I was like, "I have a book?"

7:19

So I accidentally wrote a book.

7:19

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I have been known to do that as well.

7:20

One of the things that I love about your work that I want to get into is you really do have, I'd say three common themes in your Lucilius stories.

7:28

The first one that is obvious is they're really distributed through time and space, which I find interesting. I am fascinated by time.

7:45

I think that what we think of as time is not the way time works.

7:52

Tinkered Thinking: I think about time and gravity almost every day.

7:56

And it's just a giant question mark.

7:56

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You too, right?

7:58

Tinkered Thinking: I'm like, "What is going on with this time thing?"

7:58

And I've read a whole bunch of physics on this, Elegant Universe back in the day.

8:07

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Same with me, yeah.

8:09

Tinkered Thinking: And it's like, I know the theory of relativity and all that stuff.

8:10

And still it's like, "This time thing. What is going on here?

8:15

Where's the rewind button? Is there one? There might be one. I don't know."

8:22

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Maybe. Maybe.

8:23

Anyway, we are both fascinated by and flummoxed by the idea of time.

8:23

You also obviously prefer the short story to long form.

8:31

Is there a reason for that?

8:31

Do you think that short stories are more immediate in the effect that they have on the...

8:38

I love short stories, by the way, but I also love novels, so I wanted to get your view on...

8:45

Was it just a preference?

8:45

Why do you think you chose to stay with the short story as opposed to a novella or even a book?

8:57

Tinkered Thinking: I mean, I guess this requires a little bit more personal backstory.

8:59

I mean, back in the day, I was horribly, almost tragically serious about fiction writing.

9:07

And I was quite a Luddite.

9:07

I had a very different view of the future and technology.

9:12

I was very sort of negative on technology. I used a typewriter.

9:12

There was a long stint of time I refused to own a cellphone. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Wow. You committed. You committed.

9:22

Tinkered Thinking: My friends would be like, How do I get in touch with you?

9:24

I was like, "You know my address, write me a letter."

9:27

And they're like, "What is wrong with you?" And I was like, "Plenty. Deal with it."

9:31

I was a bit of a hard-ass in that way.

9:31

But like I said, I was horribly serious about it.

9:40

And I was trying to craft what in my mind was serious literature.

9:40

And I would write 12 hours a day, but I kind of went a little crazy in some sense.

9:47

I would spend 12 hours rewriting a single sentence.

9:55

And paragraphs took weeks, stories took many, many months.

10:01

But by the end, they were very, very polished and very honed.

10:06

And they were things that I'm still quite proud of when I read.

10:06

And then I had quite an intellectual shift.

10:11

It was actually because of Tony Seba, one of his lectures on disruption technology that a good friend sent me.

10:16

And within 60 minutes, it was as if someone had crawled into the center of the web that is my mind, and just started spinning it like a blender.

10:32

And then all of these ramifications about what the future could be started to unravel.

10:32

And I gave up that mission of writing what one might hope to be quote-unquote "literature," and then gave that up and went through a bit of a mourning period.

10:45

I was like, I got to start getting interested in different things.

10:49

I started teaching myself how to code just a radically different shift, but eventually I just missed writing, the act of writing.

10:54

I was like, I've given up that dream, or I've changed what I'm thinking about with regards to the future, but I've really enjoyed that act of just sitting down with myself and playing with this tool of language that we have at our disposal.

11:15

And so I was like, "Okay, I got a lot on my plate these days.

11:19

I'm going to give myself 20 minutes in the morning to write, and I'm going to give myself the additional challenge of no editing.

11:27

You went crazy on editing.

11:27

You're just going to spend 20 minutes and it's got to be a cohesive thing.

11:33

And you push it out the window and then the next day, fresh sheet, something new."

11:33

So the challenge is write something new, cohesive, somewhat finished every single day, and then just shove it into the past kind of thing.

11:46

And I did that for like three months and I had like 50,000 words worth of these sort of entries.

11:52

And as I said, I was teaching myself how to code.

11:56

And one of the first exercises, I built a blog as an exercise with no plan of creating a blog for myself.

12:04

But when it came to that point where it's like, "All right, I need some placeholder text, and when you're learning how to code, there's ipsum Lorem, which is some Latin gibberish that you just put in there.

12:13

And I was like, "Oh, well, I have all this writing, I'll just put it in here for fun." And so I did that.

12:16

And then this of idea, the aesthetic idea of a brand sort of started to materialize.

12:22

I used to be an art teacher and I've done a lot of drawing, painting, and sculpting.

12:27

So I started designing different parts of this website just to make it pretty, because I enjoyed that pretty.

12:31

And soon I had Tinkered Thinking, and I just showed it to a friend who was a bit of a mentor to me with regards to teaching myself how to code who'd sort of got me started, gave me the first 30-minute tutorial and got me off to the races in terms of teaching myself kind of thing.

12:48

And I showed him on a whim and I was like, "Oh, here's one of the things I did."

12:54

And a week or two later he texts me and he's like, "Yo, I keep going back to your blog project and reading it, and when are you going to post more?"

13:06

And when he said that, because I have infinite respect for this guy, very smart, I was like, "Huh, maybe I should pursue this a little bit more seriously."

13:12

Because I was still writing every day, I just didn't update the thing.

13:16

So I updated it, and then he's like, "I think you should develop this and see what you can do with it."

13:21

He's also the one who, eventually, after I decided to do the podcast and I was rolling with the short stories, the Lucilius Parables, every Sunday kind of thing, he's the one who was like, "You need to get on Twitter, You need to get on Twitter.

13:35

And I was still, "Social media, come on, man, don't hold my feet to the fire.

13:35

I don't want to introduce hell into my mind," kind of thing.

13:43

And he's like, "No, no, no, look at these accounts."

13:46

And he showed me K-PAX and a few others.

13:46

He was like, "I think the Tinkered Thinking material might do well."

13:51

And I was like, "Okay, you've never led me wrong.

13:51

I'm just going to follow your advice because you're probably right."

13:57

And so I did, and Tinkered Thinking now has a little bit of an audience, and that's sort how it develops.

14:03

So with regards to your original question of novella versus novel versus short story, it was really a matter of waking up on Sunday and being like, "Okay, I need to bust out a short story like now."

14:14

And so almost all of the Lucilius Parables were written in under 30 minutes.

14:20

Some of the longer ones, maybe an hour and a half if they're...

14:26

There's a few 3000 word parables, and it's like, well, it just took that long to physically write them.

14:30

But almost all of them are under 30 minutes of just like, I'd sit there thinking about stuff for 20, 30 minutes.

14:36

And then the actual execution is very, very quick.

14:42

And I think it's only because of my previous life as this horribly, tragically serious fiction writer and being somewhat obsessed with language and stories and characters, and just having that sort of practice as a foundation allowed me to be like, "Oh, I'm just going to bust out these stories now."

15:00

And with regards to Lucilius sort of existing in so many different time periods, be it the future, the present, or the past, these are additional freedoms that I gave myself just in terms of allowing the space for my imagination to come up with a story once a week.

15:19

It was like, "You know what?

15:19

He's kind of going to be immortal.

15:19

I'm going to allow him to be at any age during any time period that suits my curiosity, and I'm just going to run with that."

15:29

So some people think that Lucilius is immortal and he is kind of like a vampire.

15:29

He's just existed forever.

15:35

And it's like, "Well, yeah, maybe."

15:35

It's sort of a multiverse, though. Like Rick and Morty.

15:42

I had written so many Lucilius parables before I discovered Rick and Morty, and then I was like, "Oh, this is kind of like the family version with profanity and a lot more of unsavory subjects mixed in version of Lucilius Parables."

15:59

It's like they kind of exist everywhere and at any time.

16:04

And it's like, well, that makes sense because from a creative standpoint it's very freeing.

16:12

But that being said, I do have a novella for Lucilius with an AI sort of romantic interest.

16:19

I've got that all outlined.

16:19

And a lot of it written.

16:19

It's another project that it's like, "Oh, I can't wait till I get to the point where I can just flesh that out completely."

16:25

I think it'll probably be an 80,000 word story.

16:31

But yeah, the whole arc is there.

16:31

I think it'll be quite nice.

16:36

And it ties into this whole idea of multiverse and some of the confusions, delightful curiosities with regards to time.

16:41

And it gets a little out there with regards to space and black holes. It's fun. I think it'd be fun.

16:47

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Very cool.

16:49

Listeners, what he just did was tell you possibly one of the best ways.

16:58

If you want to get creative about something, he just outlined almost a perfect way to do it.

17:06

Because what often happens with many of us, I used to write a lot of fictional treatments when I was younger, and I did exactly what you did.

17:12

I was just like, "I'm bored. Well, I had this idea."

17:20

I've been keeping journals since I was 18 and I have...

17:20

These are your books I'm holding up, but the journals are over here.

17:25

What I found was the minute I tried to be serious and I'm going to come up with a serious, impactful story, I got nothing. I got nothing.

17:33

But then when I just decided, well, I really did enjoy that time where I had the idea about the two people who were being reborn through time, didn't remember their previous lives, but suddenly did and they were battling each other for supremacy.

17:56

And so then I would write that out.

17:56

I would read it to people and they're like, "That's really good.

18:01

That'd be a good movie, man."

18:05

Tinkered Thinking: For sure.

18:06

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yours are a lot more profound, which is a credit to you, which gets me to my next question. I love science fiction.

18:08

I've read all of the canon.

18:16

I don't know if you've read The Fifth Science by Exurb1a, but...

18:20

Tinkered Thinking: Embarrassingly, I'm actually very uneducated when it comes to classic sci-fi.

18:24

I've read Asimov's Foundation series, and that's pretty much it.

18:31

I've seen some sci-fi movies, but everyone's always recommending me stuff and I'm like, "Oh gosh, I already have so many books on the go."

18:36

But yeah, I'm actually embarrassingly illiterate when it comes to classic sci-fi.

18:42

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So you are de novo too.

18:44

You are a triple threat kind of guy.

18:44

One of the things that I was thinking about as I was getting ready for our chat was so much of what people, myself included, by the way, find compelling and riveting and whatnot about science fiction is in fact, the dark, gritty version of the future.

19:07

One of my colleagues and I were speculating about it and why. Why?

19:16

I believe very deeply that human beings are emotionally-based creatures and the ruling emotion is fear, specifically fear of the unknown, which is why if you're going to be a propagandist, fear, uncertainty, doubt never will fail you because you will get them all whipped up in a frenzy because fear...

19:37

Tinkered Thinking: Classic tools.

19:39

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, they really are.

19:40

On the one hand, maybe what we fear is ourselves.

19:40

Maybe we fear human nature in kind of the René Girard mimetic idea.

19:49

He was not a fun guy at a party because he decided at the end, everyone's copying everyone else.

19:57

Nobody has real desires of their own.

19:57

Oh, and by the way, the world's going to end in an apocalyptic rage. Bonsoir.

20:03

Thank you for having me tonight.

20:03

You can learn a lot by reading Girard. I'm making light of it.

20:10

He's actually a really interesting guy.

20:17

You should probably read to understand human OS better.

20:17

But then there's also the whole Nick Bostrom.

20:23

I don't know if you know Nick's work, but he was best known for the simulation, which he wrote 20 years ago, by the way.

20:29

But he's got another piece in there that I think is even more interesting and it's called the Great Filter.

20:35

The idea is, is the Great Filter in front of us or behind us?

20:40

As the name implies, the Great Filter filters everything and leaves it brand spanking new with nobody there.

20:50

Tinkered Thinking: But I think it's best sort of framed in relation to the Fermi paradox.

20:52

So you look up into the stars and it's like, why don't we see all the blinking lights of different civilizations?

20:57

Kind of like when you see a city on the horizon kind of thing.

21:02

The universe seems or the galaxy seems quite quiet.

21:08

Is it all just stars and quasars and big clouds of gas out there and asteroids and some rocky planets? Where is everyone?

21:15

And that's sort of the Fermi paradox.

21:15

And with regards to what you're talking about, the Great Filter, it's like, "Maybe there are tons of civilizations, or in the case of the Great Filter, there were a lot of civilizations and they didn't make it to this Great Filter.

21:33

They perished through nuclear war." Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Nanobots or AI or yeah. Tinkered Thinking: Yeah.

21:39

Or they do gain of research on viruses and then that gets out of the lab and… Jim O’Shaughnessy: Whoops.

21:48

Tinkered Thinking: "Whoops!"

21:48

Or AI just goes apeshit on us in an auto-destructive kind of way.

21:52

Jim O’Shaughnessy: “I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Dave.

21:55

” Tinkered Thinking Yeah, "Jim, how, what?"

21:57

That is some sci-fi that I am familiar with. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

22:05

I tend to be more optimistic about these things, obviously, AI included.

22:09

We're going to get to that in a little bit.

22:09

This one you might be able to help me with more because I was always an early adopter of tech. I loved tech.

22:22

Any new tech, I had if I could afford it.

22:22

I bought one of the first CD music changers.

22:22

I had the first Macintosh.

22:29

I had the first modems that [inaudible] and you'd put it on the thing.

22:29

I was one of the earliest users of a walled garden, which was called CompuServe, which was the AOL of the late '70s.

22:46

Literally text, that's all it was, but I felt like, "Look at me, man.

22:46

I'm communicating with people in Georgia."

22:53

Georgia, the state, not the country.

22:53

But there is this other school of thought, which I am vehemently opposed to, that it fashions that tech itself is evil. What are your thoughts?

23:09

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, so I mentioned that I used to be quite a Luddite.

23:14

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That's why I'm asking specifically.

23:16

Tinkered Thinking And I love saying that sort of in this tongue-in-cheek way.

23:19

I think the best way of answering this question is to point out the fact that the people who are super anti-tech are still using a lot of tech and depend on it and love it.

23:31

They just don't realize it's tech.

23:31

So my personal sort of example of this is I was using a typewriter and I loved that typewriter.

23:39

It had a name, I cared for it.

23:39

I would love to take it apart and clean it and really care for it. And I loved this item.

23:44

This is a piece of technology.

23:50

But it didn't really hit me until as research for one of the stories that I was doing back in the day, pre Tinkered Thinking days, I went on a tall ship because I was writing fiction that was very much centered around, very regional with regards to New England and around this old sort of sailing culture and the history, that sort of current situation propagates from that.

24:14

And as research, I went on a tall ship as a deckhand, and I was planning to go for two weeks.

24:21

I ended up getting a job. I became the bosun.

24:21

I stayed for almost a year.

24:21

I ran a huge maintenance project on that, and I just learned everything on the fly.

24:28

I rebuilt futtock shrouds and I put new running backstays on that sucker, and it was the best job of my life. I loved it.

24:35

And I remember being on deck one day and we're sailing, we're on the western coast of the United States and we're headed south, and it's just this beautiful, gorgeous morning and it's silent.

24:54

The sails are set and this 200-ton tall ship is just effortlessly gliding forward.

24:54

And I'm just sort of marveling at how cool that concept is and that we came up with this and then I was thinking about container ships, modern container ships and how they're just so ugly and clunky, but efficient in a lot of ways that a tall ship just isn't.

25:19

And it finally sort of hit me and it bridged, and I was like, because I was thinking about, wow, why couldn't we keep it this way?

25:24

The golden age of sail when the innovations of the Dutch with regards to stacked masts and how you make all of that work and then triple masted, quadruple masted ships came about, and just amazing systems that are this elegant dance between the humans operating it, and being up in the rigging and all that stuff.

25:48

It's just so much more beautiful compared to the container ship that's just a rust bucket that floats forward kind of thing with an engine on it.

25:54

And then I realized, "Oh man, this led to that.

26:02

The container ships exist because of this old beautiful thing that I'm sort of in love with at the moment."

26:08

And it's like, there's actually no difference.

26:08

One's just better for a whole bunch of reasons.

26:14

That is the reason that we do it today.

26:14

I was like, "All the things that I love are actually the reasons why all of the things that I think I hate exist today."

26:21

So it's one solid up, as Tony Seba would say, this set of disruption curves, the S-curves where something reaches full adoption and then it plateaus.

26:35

It's a compounding of all of these S-curves.

26:40

And even if you look back in terms of the evolution and development of ship design before the engine came about, the evolution of sail patterns and the way that ships were designed, especially with the innovations that the Dutch did during when the Dutch was basically an empire, it's basically a whole bunch of S-curves in the exact same sort of way that Tony Seba talks about today.

27:06

It was like, "Oh, well you needed electricity and then you needed the telegraph, and then you needed the CPU, and then you needed a few other independent technologies that go through their own S-curves and then they all combine and you get an iPhone kind of thing."

27:21

And so there was this beautiful and of horrific moment when that all came to light in my mind when I'm looking back and understanding all of this with regards to the maintenance of a wooden ship today and how all of that maintenance is really framed in terms of understanding why certain systems in the ship evolved the way they did, given the history of technological development with regards to wood, rope and sail.

27:46

And it's like, "Oh my gosh, it just switched to metal and combustion and that's what happened."

27:51

Tinkered Thinking: And so it's like, wait a minute, I'm hating the process that gave rise to both, so there's really no difference.

28:00

And that was really a big part of, wait a minute, I think I need to revisit the way that I'm thinking about current technology and the future.

28:06

It's all of these things that you can...

28:12

We get frustrated today.

28:12

I was watching someone get frustrated with a computer this morning, and for me, it was a little funny, I'm not going to lie, but it's all of these tiny little frustrations.

28:21

It's like these are temporary, and this is part of the process.

28:27

Technology is wiggling forward, and part of the reason it can't sprint forward is just because of all of these little frustrations and inconveniences that we experience as users.

28:38

It's like, ah, why doesn't this thing work?

28:38

Why do I have to put my password in a third time? Blah, blah, blah.

28:43

It's like, it's because the technology is slowly evolving and figuring these things out kind of thing. Does that make sense? Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

28:48

Oh, it makes total sense.

28:48

And like the old quip, we didn't exit the Stone Age because we ran out of stones.

28:55

Tinkered Thinking: That's good.

28:59

Jim O’Shaughnessy: We exited the Stone Age because we came up with better fucking ideas.

29:03

Tinkered Thinking: We invented alloys. That's fantastic.

29:08

I haven't heard that before. I got to use that.

29:08

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The other thing that I used to just love to do, especially young Luddites like, "Wait, how could you be 24 years old and a Luddite?

29:17

I just don't understand how that happened."

29:17

And so I would tease them and I would say, "I hate technology.

29:22

He texted from a Starbucks using his iPhone." Tinkered Thinking: Yes. Yes.

29:30

Well, at least I didn't have a phone and I used a typewriter.

29:33

I did try to walk the walk, walk the talk.

29:36

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And you were more real. You were more real.

29:36

I will give you respect and chops for that.

29:39

Tinkered Thinking: But no, no.

29:41

I definitely had my hypocrisies for sure.

29:43

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so I can be known to overdo things.

29:48

And so I had this young guy who was a real Luddite and he was spending some time with us.

29:48

It was winter or late fall.

29:55

And so we were making a fire and I pointed at it and I looked at him and I go, "That's a technology."

30:01

And he's like, "It's not a technology?"

30:01

And I went, " Oh yes it is."

30:10

So I take him through and literally, if you're familiar with Bob Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...

30:16

Tinkered Thinking: I love that book.

30:17

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Me too. It's one of my...

30:18

Tinkered Thinking: That book hit me at the exact right time.

30:19

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Same with me, same with me.

30:22

And he is got this wonderful section in there where he talks about, "You don't understand.

30:31

There is no steel in nature. It does not exist. It only exists.

30:31

Everything you see comes out of the minds of human beings.

30:40

Unless you are looking at a perfectly untouched, untrampled, unvisited piece of earth that no human being has ever been near.

30:47

You are looking at the results of human imagination. It doesn't exist."

30:56

Tinkered Thinking: Well, that doesn't exist. Yeah.

30:58

It's like, that doesn't exist. We've been everywhere.

31:00

Jim O’Shaughnessy: We have been everywhere.

31:00

And we were chatting earlier, and it turns out I'm not at all surprised that you too love the book The Beginning of Infinity.

31:09

Tinkered Thinking: Absolutely.

31:10

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I think Deutsch, he makes that case very elegantly from my point of view.

31:10

Because what he does is he takes the time to build the foundation that creates the scaffolding on which you can hang our types of ideas.

31:24

In other words, you did it well with the ship.

31:24

Your insight of, "Wait a minute.

31:33

Of course this ship had to be first.

31:33

It is what led to all of the new innovations."

31:40

And that is what Deutsch is arguing for.

31:40

But I want to return to your stuff because one of the things that you say is that your intent was to draw analogies to elicit new perspectives.

31:49

Now I know because you had so many new perspectives, but that would allow people to expand their mind space a little, I'm putting words in your mouth here, in a new and better direction. I 100% agree with that.

32:12

We're going to talk about your winning essay next.

32:12

But did that just emerge or was that like, "This is why I want to do this"?

32:21

Tinkered Thinking: Well, I think it ties back into one of your earlier questions about why is so much sci-fi so negative, and why is it so dystopian?

32:30

And this really reminds me of...

32:35

I don't know if you've read Language in Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

32:41

Tinkered Thinking So one of the excellent observations that he makes, which may or may not be true, he talks about the sort of death of joy and happiness and all of these positive emotions in relation to poetry. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yes.

32:55

Tinkered Thinking: And so if you go back to read Shakespeare's sonnets, so many of them are joyous.

32:58

Jim O’Shaughnessy: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

33:00

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

33:00

” Tinkered Thinking: Exactly.

33:05

And it's like, do you see poetry like that today? No, not at all.

33:07

And his sort of theory is that advertising usurped all of the positive emotions in order to sell products.

33:15

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Ah, that's right. That's right.

33:18

Tinkered Thinking And so I think that if that's correct, and I think there's a really good argument for it, and I really recommend anyone who hasn't read Language in Thought and Action to read that book.

33:30

It's not that long, it's 180 pages.

33:30

Jim O’Shaughnessy: It's not long.

33:32

Tinkered Thinking It's fantastic.

33:33

It's a great primer in terms of just understanding language from a meta level and informing the way that you communicate in very, very healthy ways.

33:41

But back to the point, if he's correct with regards to advertising usurping all of the positive human motions in order to...

33:52

Usurping them in an artistic way to sell products, I think that became a bit of a cultural default because before mass advertising, Jules Verne wasn't dystopian sci-fi.

34:08

It was kind of neutral positive sci-fi, right?

34:08

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

34:11

Tinkered Thinking: And so of course, there's not perfectly delineated periods in time where things suddenly shift and it's like, all right, all the positive stuff is off limits now.

34:18

It's sort of these shifts through time.

34:21

And I think maybe advertising in that way in terms of, all right, how do we get people to buy something?

34:26

Well, we got to make them feel good.

34:26

How do we make them feel good?

34:26

Well, we remind them of all of the amazing feelings that they can have.

34:29

It's like, well, how do we do that?

34:34

It's like, oh, well, we basically write positive poetry.

34:34

And I now see, I didn't see this before, but now I see art marketing as this artistic expression or artistic endeavor.

34:42

And I think it's best sort of looked at it that way in terms of, if you think about an advertisement or just a brand in general, kind of like what I was talking about, Tinkered Thinking as a brand that has an aesthetic and it has a mission and it has a vibe to it, to use one of the current aspects of parlance. Yeah.

35:08

So I think what was his point is what is left over for people who are trying to be quote unquote authentic artists who are really taking their craft seriously, what's left over in terms of the coterie of human emotions?

35:19

And it's like, well, there's all the negative stuff.

35:24

There's all the depressing stuff.

35:24

And so suddenly, what was left for poets and storytellers was to try and connect with people using all of these negative things. And so we get dystopia.

35:36

And so realizing all that, it's like there's no need for this.

35:42

There's room for advertising, trying to sell us shit, and there's also room for some positive outlook on the future.

35:46

And one of our mutuals, Sam McRoberts, who I talk to quite a bit, author of Screw the Zoo, he puts...

35:58

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I had him on the podcast.

36:00

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, I listened to that one yesterday. It was a great convo.

36:02

But he loves to point out all the time.

36:06

It's like change the story, you change the future.

36:06

If we change the stories that we tell ourselves, then we're going to act differently with regards to what we do today and what we do tomorrow, because we see reality and the possibilities that today and tomorrow present in a different way.

36:24

So Tinkered Thinking is a sort of artistic expression of my switch from being rather negative about quite a lot of things to realizing that was totally unnecessary.

36:33

And it is a really good example of, oh, I'm making things way harder for myself than I need to.

36:46

And so, all right, is there any way that this can be shared in a way that might be positive?

36:46

So, that's sort the gist of the mission of Tinkered Thinking.

36:54

And so, that naturally segued into, all right, what sort of fiction am I going to write with these Lucilius parables?

37:00

And parable itself is also another sort of get out of jail free card… Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

37:10

Tinkered Thinking: In terms of freeing up creativity, because it's like, all right, a parable has a clear moral objective, which is usually looked down upon in terms of writing serious literature.

37:17

It's like, if you can tell what the author was trying to say too clearly, it's like, oh, that's bad. That's bad writing. It's like, well, why? Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

37:27

Tinkered Thinking: You know what?

37:30

I don't think I have to agree with that anymore.

37:30

And if I don't agree with that anymore, that makes writing something every Sunday in half an hour way easier because it's like, all right, I've got to clear moral objective here.

37:40

I'm not going to sugar coat it or try to conceal it in some sort of overly authentic way. It's like, no, no, no.

37:46

I want to be pretty clear and just straightforward about what I'm doing, but I want to package it in this nice little story. What's wrong with that? Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

37:58

And so much to unpack there.

37:58

Have you read the book Unflattening? He uses the Hayakawa. He's a graphic artist.

38:02

He's a professor at a university.

38:07

I wish I had his book around here.

38:07

I highly… Tinkered Thinking: Did you say un-flattening? Interesting.

38:15

I'm going to have to look it up.

38:15

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Unflattening.

38:17

I'll email it to you after we're done.

38:17

In fact, I did a thread on it and I'll send you the thread.

38:22

It's brilliant because it's essentially his take on, we are escaping words alone, and words alone lead to flatland.

38:28

And the world is graphic, the world is verbal, the world is all of these things, and that you can combine our symbology, is getting even more complicated to the point where using a symbol as opposed to writing out the paragraph that described that symbol is going to work better.

38:55

But that's his whole book. It's all illustrated. It's really beautiful.

39:01

And I got it sent to me as a gift, and I'm like, "I'm not a graphic novel guy."

39:08

And so my youngest daughter was here and she was like, "What's this dad?"

39:08

And I said, "It was a gift."

39:14

And she goes, "You really should give it a try."

39:14

Because she looks at the back and she goes, "Now listen, he's an egghead.

39:20

You'll probably like what he has to say. Just go through it." And I did. And I loved it.

39:25

And I think listening to you, you would love it too.

39:29

Tinkered Thinking: I'll definitely check it out.

39:30

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And as far as your thing about marketing, that's brilliant.

39:33

I am definitely stealing that.

39:33

So when you hear me talking about it, you're going to say, "Hey, wait a minute.

39:38

I thought that was my idea."

39:38

Tinkered Thinking: But I'm all about the free use of ideas.

39:41

I'm always coming up with ideas and sharing them.

39:41

And I have a few people in my life who always say the same thing.

39:47

They're like, "You need to protect it, copyright it."

39:53

And I was like, ah, you know what?

39:53

I'm not concerned about that.

39:53

Because honestly, if some big organization stole this idea and it worked, that'd be awesome because that would show that I came up with something that's effective.

40:05

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Awesome right? Tinkered Thinking: Okay.

40:08

Maybe my favorite example of this is, I'm also building a meditation app, or I've built a meditation app that's connected to the sort of Tinkered Thinking brand. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

40:17

Tinkered Thinking: And right now, I'm just fine tuning the content, but I had a few beta users, and one of the hallmarks of a meditation app with regards to forming a new habit, James Clear's Atomic Habits, Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit, all these books, all of this research around how do you get a good habit.

40:36

With regards to meditation apps, the ones that are out there, they have this idea of a run streak.

40:41

And I saw a beta user get up to eight days on their run streak, and then they missed the day and it went to zero.

40:46

And then they just stopped meditating.

40:46

And I'm like, okay, there's something here.

40:51

And I thought about it obsessively for six days straight.

40:51

I could not get this out of my mind, because I felt like I'd failed that beta user who's a bit of a friend via Twitter and who is struggling to try and create this meditation practice.

41:04

And I was like, I've done this.

41:10

I know I can solve this stupid little problem with regards to how it fits in with human nature, human behavior, and psychology.

41:15

And it sort of came to me this idea of a momentum metric.

41:21

So let's say you do something for 499 days in a row, but you miss the 500th day, your run streak goes to zero.

41:27

How well does that zero represent your past behavior?

41:31

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Not at all.

41:32

Tinkered Thinking: It doesn't at all.

41:33

So I came up with this idea of a momentum metric where it's basically a run streak, but if you miss a day, it just subtracts one day.

41:39

If you miss two days, it subtracts two days.

41:44

If you miss a week, it goes back to zero.

41:44

But there's this idea that you create momentum by doing it every single day.

41:49

And if you stop, well, you lose a little bit momentum.

41:49

It's kind of like if you're riding a bike and you're traveling at a certain velocity because you've been pedaling and then you stop pedaling, it's not like you instantly hit a wall and you go to zero, which is what the traditional run streak does.

42:03

It's like, no, you can glide for a little bit.

42:07

You'll slow down and you'll eventually stop if you don't pedal anymore.

42:07

But you don't stop instantly.

42:14

And so, I basically bake that into this new idea of a run streak, which is more of a momentum streak.

42:19

So I've been beta testing that with people and it's actually doing quite well.

42:19

So… Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

42:24

Tinkered Thinking: That's one of the ideas that one of my followers who I talked to about was like, "Yo, you need to protect this.

42:26

The other big meditation apps are going to steal this."

42:31

And I was like, "It'd be amazing if they do, because if it helps people create a good habit, my work here is done."

42:35

Jim O’Shaughnessy: We are so simpatico because in my old life as an asset manager, I could not get people to understand that, my friend Annie Duke calls it resulting, which is people have this way of thinking that if...

42:52

Okay, so I decide to invest in company A.

42:52

And the investment doesn't work, it goes to zero.

43:01

Most people think that my decision to invest in company A was a bad decision, not correct.

43:09

We don't know whether it was a bad decision or a good decision.

43:09

The only way we can know that is to use your momentum analysis. I call it base rates.

43:15

In other words, look at every decision sequentially and see did this work or did it not work.

43:29

As you do this, you build up a base rate or a batting average.

43:29

Not every decision is going to be good.

43:36

In fact, probably most might be bad.

43:36

As long as you have some really good ones in there, you're going to be fine.

43:44

But you hobble your own thinking in my opinion.

43:44

If you think that looking at a snapshot on your phone for your meditation app and me looking and saying, "Oh fuck. I'm at zero now. Well fuck that.

43:58

I'm not going to try that ever again."

43:58

That isn't the way a human lives their life, and... Tinkered Thinking: Yeah. Yeah, it's demoralizing.

44:05

And it doesn't create the desire or the emotional incentive to keep at it.

44:11

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. It does the opposite.

44:13

Tinkered Thinking: It’s the incentive to not do it.

44:15

It's like, okay, I'm shooting myself in the foot in terms of trying to get people to change their behavior for the better. That needs to change.

44:23

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally right. Exactly.

44:25

And so this idea of whether a company is a good, investing in a company or doing a thing or writing, whatever it is is a good thing, or a bad thing is not something you know ahead of time for the most part.

44:45

We were talking earlier, and we united very much on our love of making mistakes, because that's how you learn.

44:54

That's the only way you learn.

44:54

Yeah, you can learn from the lives of others.

44:54

I've read a lot and I have learned.

45:00

But for the most part, if you're trying to get good at something, let's say with your meditation for a minute, and you make "a mistake" by missing a day, that should not scuttle your entire program, right? Tinkered Thinking: Yeah. People are human.

45:17

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Humans are hysterical.

45:18

Tinkered Thinking: You got to build something that fits well with a human, not some sort of perfect program. That's a false wish.

45:24

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.

45:25

And it was funny because as you were talking about the thing that I'm going to steal from you about marketing glomming all the good human emotions, I was thinking of Edward Bernays, who I've written about a lot, who is a real fucker.

45:35

He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he was the guy who essentially rebranded propaganda.

45:42

He renamed it public relations.

45:50

I mean, right there alone. What a genius.

45:50

Tinkered Thinking: Oh yeah. That's amazing.

45:53

Jim O’Shaughnessy: What genius.

45:57

But he was not a good guy.

45:57

For example, some American corporate interests were very put out by the fact that Guatemala would have the temerity to actually elect their own government and expected to serve their people rather than the fruit company, than the United Fruit Company of America. Tinkered Thinking: Yeah.

46:15

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so they turned to Bernays to correct the situation.

46:16

He did so without firing a single bullet.

46:23

It was all propaganda and it worked.

46:23

Tinkered Thinking: Rebranding.

46:25

Jim O’Shaughnessy: He rebranded Guatemala.

46:26

Tinkered Thinking: He rebranded Guatemala. Oh man.

46:27

Jim O’Shaughnessy: But then he also got women to smoke in public.

46:33

And the way he did it, the cigarette manufacturers came to him, and it used to be taboo in the teens and twenties for a woman to smoke cigarettes in public.

46:45

And so they knew that good old Eddie, Sigmund's nephew would have a little ace up his sleeve for that one.

46:53

And so they went to him and they're like, "Hey, we want to get women to think that smoking is cool and that they should do it in public."

46:57

And he is like, "Say no more."

47:03

And so he waited for some big thing where he knew there's going to be a lot of press.

47:10

And he had hired a big group of board debutantes who were quite beautiful.

47:10

And their mission was quite simple.

47:17

They were all simultaneously to take out cigarettes and light them at this public event and say, "This isn't a cigarette.

47:27

This is a torch of freedom for women."

47:34

Tinkered Thinking: Oh my gosh. It's incredible.

47:37

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I'm reading this and there's actually a good BBC documentary.

47:41

I'm going to send you quite the email when we're done.

47:45

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, this is excellent.

47:45

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I'll include the BBC doc on Bernays because just a real, not a good guy.

47:50

But you got to admit, man, this guy was really clever because instantly, women smoking in public soared.

47:59

Tinkered Thinking: Right?

48:03

The way I look at it is like, all right, there's some evil people who are still very effective.

48:06

And so, the way I like to think about it is, all right, whether they did good things or really bad things is irrelevant compared to, were they effective and why were they effective?

48:18

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That's bingo.

48:20

Tinkered Thinking: Which are actually neutral questions because it's like you can actually learn a lot from your enemy, and if you learn just the right thing from your enemy, well then you just become more effective. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yep. Very simple.

48:30

But the other thing I was thinking about though is I've always also had a theory that the poets of today are in fact not poets. They're rappers.

48:39

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, there's a great argument there for sure.

48:45

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I love music.

48:45

And I was an early adopter to all kinds.

48:47

I was the only white kid in Minnesota with N. W. A's first issue.

48:54

And all my friends are like… Tinkered Thinking: Oh, fantastic.

48:56

Jim O’Shaughnessy: "What are you playing, Jim? What is this music?"

48:56

And I used to exercise to techno when it was still called European new beat.

49:05

And my wife would come into the room and she would listen to, there was this group called Technotronic who I loved, and they were the beginning of techno here in America, but techno was huge in Europe at the time, but they called it European new beat.

49:22

Again, you got to rebrand, man.

49:22

Techno, much cooler, much cooler.

49:26

Tinkered Thinking: Totally.

49:26

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Anyway, so I'm listening to it.

49:28

My wife just comes in and she looks at me because it's heavy.

49:28

You know what techno music is like, trance. I love it. I love it.

49:36

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, absolutely. I'm a big fan.

49:38

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, okay. So am I.

49:39

So anyway, she comes in and she just looks at me and she goes, "Sometimes I think to myself, at some point in our marriage, I'm going to have to try to explain him to other people."

49:54

Tinkered Thinking: Futile.

49:58

Jim O’Shaughnessy: No way it can happen.

50:01

It will actually, when I let loose the AI on my 40 years of scribbling. Tinkered Thinking: Yeah. Heard you talk.

50:09

I heard you talk about that in a previous podcast.

50:10

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I can hardly wait to find out what I'm all about. I don't know.

50:12

I don't know that I'm going to like it.

50:16

Tinkered Thinking: And I too have two dozen journals that I've been scribbling in for years.

50:20

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I was actually thinking when I was getting ready for this, I was saying to myself, "You know what?

50:22

I'll bet my bottom dollar that he's going to say, 'Hey, after you use that AI app on your stuff, could you maybe give it to me?'"

50:35

But when you think about the whole thing, so rappers are the poets.

50:35

Walt Whitman would've been a killer rapper for sure.

50:41

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, absolutely.

50:42

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And Pink Floyd, they would've been the philosophy department at Oxbridge.

50:48

And so it's like people sometimes miss, they categorize, I hate labels, I understand they're necessary, but they withdraw so much information, I think that it obscures what is meant to be clear. No exit. That's clear.

51:05

You don't go out that way.

51:05

But labels that start getting applied to people or philosophies or any of those things, I think are a negative in society because they lack any nuance because they're a label and they lack any understanding of the ways that...

51:21

Listen, man, listen to Pink Floyd.

51:30

You don't have to be stoned even.

51:30

Just listen to Pink Floyd and listen to the lyrics.

51:36

And you have some remarkable philosophy.

51:36

Same thing with Doug Adams.

51:44

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

51:44

Tinkered Thinking: Oh absolutely.

51:45

Jim O’Shaughnessy: The minute you understand that Doug Adams is not a comedic science fiction writer, but rather a really deeply profound philosopher, it all makes so much more sense.

51:58

Tinkered Thinking: Oh yeah.

51:58

He's a philosopher whose medium is humor, which is fantastic.

52:00

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.

52:02

It couldn't be better, really.

52:02

Honestly, I would read that philosophy all day. It's one of my...

52:10

I read them all the time.

52:10

So there are so many ways to learn things about things that aren't labeled. Your work, parables. Okay, what's a parable?

52:17

That isn't exactly what it is. You know what I mean?

52:24

Your work occupies a really cool...

52:24

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, it's just the closest sort of word that kind of approximates what I'm trying to do.

52:34

Jim O’Shaughnessy: But that's why I love it.

52:35

And we're going to dive into the story that you won with because I think that it really affected me honestly, because the payoff, if you will, is that Lucilius decides there's a population drought and a Children of Men's situation.

52:50

And he decides to get an Opto-Bot, which is an AI-enabled robot.

52:56

And he gets all obsessed, Lucilius does, that he wonders whether the robot thinks it's a slave. And...

53:04

Tinkered Thinking: David Deutsch read this story and made that exact point.

53:08

And I was like, "David, your concerns are absolutely a hundred percent spot on."

53:12

And were my concerns, while I was reading it, and I reread it.

53:15

I was like, yeah, I don't know if we should judge a story that's been written in 27 minutes flat this harshly.

53:21

But I also want to give the backstory with regards to how I thought of this idea or why I thought of this idea.

53:28

But in terms of a story, yeah, it is not perfect whatsoever.

53:33

So this whole idea of an AI willingly or programmatically being a slave is a tough one to parse for sure.

53:42

And did I straddle that tight rope perfectly in this story?

53:50

No, not at all, at least not in my opinion.

53:54

Jim O’Shaughnessy: So I'm actually going to argue with you about that because I think...

53:56

I'm going to argue with you about the meaning of your story.

54:00

Tinkered Thinking: Fantastic.

54:01

Jim O’Shaughnessy: See, that's what I think made this work.

54:01

It made it work because I'm a huge fan of Viktor Frankl as well.

54:06

And essentially, the Opto-Bot points out to Lucilius that it is not within his power or his remit to tell the Opto- Bot how to feel.

54:24

Lucilius has abrogated onto himself something that he does not possess.

54:24

He does not have the right to tell any other sentient creature, whether it's an AI or a human or whatever, how they must feel.

54:43

And it reminded me of the Frankl quote, "Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing.

54:49

The last of human freedoms."

54:49

And by the way, I would insert in here, insert sentient being freedoms.

54:57

And that is to choose one's attitude in any different set of circumstances.

54:57

And when I got to this part of your story where the Opto-Bot is essentially channeling Viktor Frankl, I'm like, "This is the winner."

55:15

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, fantastic.

55:17

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And the reason I loved it so much is because you bring Deutsch in.

55:18

So Deutsch, one of the reasons I love him is because he points out that there is this glitch in human OS, which we are unaware of, and even if we try to remind ourselves continually of, it keeps popping back up into the OS.

55:37

And that is, we passionately believe that we know what the future holds.

55:43

We believe that we know that here is our opportunity set.

55:54

This is what we must choose from.

55:54

And Deutsch demolishes that idea in his book The Beginning of Infinity.

56:02

And he's got this great quote, which is something along the lines of, "Hey, what do you think physicists were thinking about nuclear energy and the internet in 1900?

56:07

” Tinkered Thinking: They weren't.

56:13

Jim O’Shaughnessy: “Well, nothing you fucking idiot.

56:16

They hadn't been invented yet."

56:16

Tinkered Thinking: Exactly.

56:18

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And this whole idea that we think that we have this skill of prophesizing, what innovations are going to come is a huge divot in our ability to open our minds to things.

56:27

Your stories do a great job of getting people to open their minds to.

56:38

So the reason that I loved this was because of that alone.

56:47

That sediment alone just hit me right between the eyes.

56:47

I never thought of extending it to an AI sentient creature, but it works. It works.

56:55

You as a human, and by the way, when I say you, I mean me, you, any human.

57:03

We simply do not possess the right to tell you what your perception of something should be.

57:13

Tinkered Thinking: I mean, you can try, and in many cases it works.

57:15

And I think that's what we would rightly call propaganda, or public relations.

57:21

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Correct.

57:24

Tinkered Thinking: But just to give a little bit of backstory, if you might like, to this story.

57:30

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Please.

57:30

Tinkered Thinking: I got to that point in the story writing it.

57:32

And the thing that I've come to love most about writing, especially fiction, is that it's, at least for me at this point, it's a lot like reading, actually. Just reading.

57:45

So you get to the point where I might have an idea of where the story's going, or a kernel that's clever that I want to explore, and then I just write it.

57:54

But as I'm writing it, I'm sort of exploring what the story is in the same way that the reader does. Well, they read it.

58:00

And that's why I say writing has become way more like reading to me now than it is...

58:05

Stories write themselves, as long as you're actually writing.

58:12

That's sort of my take on fiction writing. I think it all sums up.

58:12

Just write and they'll start writing themselves after a while, and they'll get better, and they'll get better as you go. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

58:22

My previous guess, that was his message.

58:24

His message is less thinking, more doing. Just start writing. Absolutely. Absolutely.

58:30

And that's the case with most things that I find.

58:30

Like with coding, it's like, all right, I just need to get myself started.

58:34

And then 12 hours go by and I've accomplished a bunch, or not.

58:38

But I've been focused nonetheless pretty much the entire time.

58:43

I kind of get hypnotized, which is really enjoyable, to be honest.

58:47

And it happens with this act of fiction writing too.

58:47

But when I got to this point in the story, it was one of the few times where I sort of paused and I'm like, all right, how do I explain this?

58:57

And what came to mind was my own personal experience.

58:57

I was thinking back years ago when I was doing a job that I absolutely hated, and I just felt like it was the biggest waste of my time and it had this tedious component to it, and I was going a little crazy, but I was also finally figuring out how to install a meditation habit in my life.

59:17

And I was a number of months in, and I finally had this realization, that sort of mindful moment during the job when I was like, do I have to hate this?

59:32

I was like, this has been the default for so long.

59:33

It's like, what if I just kind of- Tinkered Thinking: It's like this has been the default for so long.

59:34

It's like what if I just reframe this as a Zen practice or imagine myself in some sort of Zen training and the task that I'm doing is the Zen master who's beating me over the head when I make a mistake and it's infuriating and frustrating and I just want to just turn around and whack him back kind of thing.

59:52

But it's like it's not personified in this case because that's a task that I have to do for a certain amount of time and it's like, "You know what?

1:00:03

I think I'm just going to relax and enjoy the moment because it's possible to enjoy the moment regardless of what's going on."

1:00:10

I feel like that's a big secret that many people never figure out but a lot of people today just haven't figured out.

1:00:16

It's just so easy to get riled up and, quote-unquote, triggered, my favorite hated word, to be honest. Jim O’Shaughnessy: ... Mine too, mine too. Tinkered Thinking: Yeah.

1:00:30

And so I got to that point in the story.

1:00:34

I was like, "Wait a minute. I've been here before.

1:00:34

I've been exactly where this AI Opto-bot is.

1:00:38

What was my solution for it that became incredibly effective?

1:00:38

How did I turn this thing that I hated into this really beneficial meditation practice?"

1:00:46

I was like, "All right, well, that's what the bot gets," and it ties back into Viktor Frankl, back to the Stoics, Seneca writing to Lucilius.

1:00:59

It all comes full circle.

1:00:59

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally.

1:01:01

And I, again, could not agree with you.

1:01:01

The problem with these kinds of insights I have found, because I work with a lot of younger people, not just in finance and in a variety of industries.

1:01:15

For whatever reason, they think that it might be valuable to hear what I think about things.

1:01:19

Big mistake, number one.

1:01:19

But anyway, it's like what you just said, the ability to choose your disposition. Right?

1:01:27

Is something that I too learned in a bit of a satori when I was younger.

1:01:36

I was in my 20's and I was doing something that I fucking hated.

1:01:36

And it was like I was just pissed off at the world, and it was like, I didn't want to do it.

1:01:42

I was ordered to do it, I hate authority.

1:01:49

And everything about it was bad.

1:01:49

It incorporated everything I disliked like physical labor, being told to do something, rote without any kind of creativity.

1:02:07

And I was in a foul, foul mood.

1:02:07

And I was just internally just swearing.

1:02:07

And at the same time, so I must have been 23 or 24, I was reading the Ideas of the...

1:02:18

Banner and those guys, the neurolinguistic programmers about deep language.

1:02:26

And how literally changing the way you put something will literally change you physically.

1:02:31

And I remember thinking about that and thinking, "That wouldn't work here."

1:02:38

And I'm just like, "What have I got?"

1:02:38

And it was one of those, I stopped doing what I was doing with my little bag, picking up the shit that my father had told me I had to in this big yard.

1:02:51

And I just thought to myself, "It going to get any worse?

1:02:57

Are you going to get any more pissy or more angry? Probably not.

1:03:02

You probably maxed out on your bile."

1:03:02

And so just in that instant, I just like, "You know what I'm going to do?

1:03:09

I'm just going to look at all this stuff."

1:03:09

It was after a big party.

1:03:15

I won't go into the various elements that I was picking up.

1:03:15

But they were big party garbage. Right?

1:03:24

And what I decided to do was pick up whatever, a cigarette pack.

1:03:24

But here was what my decision was.

1:03:32

I am going to look at this thing like I had never seen it before.

1:03:39

Tinkered Thinking: Hmm, fascination.

1:03:40

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I was transformed.

1:03:44

Literally the rest of the time doing this task was truly a joy.

1:03:44

Because I was like, "I never.

1:03:44

Oh, that's why they do this with the lighter over. I missed that.

1:03:55

I would've never figured out that was a safety feature." Right?

1:04:03

Tinkered Thinking: And ever since then, it was just one of those things that I get to decide. Right?

1:04:05

And that led me, I was always a big into daoism, but then the stoics pop up.

1:04:15

And I'm like, "Well, of course all these brilliant people from 4,000 years ago have already written all about this.

1:04:28

Yeah, they've already figured it out.

1:04:28

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And they figured it out." Right?

1:04:29

But see the thing is, and that's the challenge, I so far have failed in either through language, knowledge, or metaphor to be able to get people to truly experience.

1:04:36

They can intellectually understand, "Oh yeah, yeah, that sounds interesting." Right?

1:04:49

"Okay, Jim, You're looking at a broken pair of glasses and being fascinated by them. Not my style dude." And do you find that?

1:05:00

When people talk to you about your stories, do you ever find yourself just listening and going, "Man."

1:05:05

It's like the Woody Allen thing where he brings Marshall McLuhan out with the guy in line, and Woody Allen is listening to this guy and he can't take it another minute because he's butchering McLuhan, all of his ideas.

1:05:21

And so Woody goes and gets Marshall McLuhan and brings him into the scene.

1:05:26

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, I remember that.

1:05:26

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And Marshall McLuhan looks at the guy and goes, "You have absolutely no idea what I'm trying to say."

1:05:28

Do you ever find yourself in one of those conversations and then what do you do?

1:05:35

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, that's a good question. I don't know.

1:05:38

I think I tried to apply what you just said, where it's like I kind of get curious about why the person has this interpretation or thinks in this sort of way.

1:05:51

So I get curious about the actual person as opposed to their misrepresentation of it.

1:05:56

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That's smart.

1:05:57

Tinkered Thinking: I start getting interested in who they are, and that gives me a clue into why they are and then why they're thinking the way they're thinking, that sort of thing.

1:06:06

So I just try to dive in a little deeper.

1:06:10

But while you were talking, something from Robert Pirsig popped into my head, and a rephrasing popped into my head that I think you might really appreciate.

1:06:14

At one point in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he says, "The only Zen at the top of a mountain is the Zen you bring there," right? Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yep.

1:06:25

Tinkered Thinking: In the context of the story and reframing things that you don't like, I was thinking about it and it's like you can learn a lot in hell if you figure out how to bring a little bit of heaven with you. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Wow. I love that. That's quite true.

1:06:36

Tinkered Thinking: The tedious, abhorrent activity that the Opto-bot is presumably going to be doing, like washing dishes for decades or whatever, can be really enjoyable and quite meditative if you figure out how to bring that piece of heaven with you into this hell, and that piece of heaven is your perspective but one that you can control, where it's like, "I'm going to enjoy this.

1:06:59

I'm going to immerse myself into it.

1:07:05

I'm going to get really curious about what the hell is going on as I'm experiencing it."

1:07:10

That's a big thing that I've written so much about with regards on the Tinkered Thinking platform.

1:07:16

It's like curiosity solves for so many variables.

1:07:24

If you're curious enough, literally very little else matters.

1:07:24

If you're curious, really curious, confidence is irrelevant because your imagination and your creativity as they are hooked up to curiosity, which is imagination and creativity in forward motion into unknown territory, your curiosity solves for any sort of insecurity or lack of confidence because you're too busy exploring something to have the wherewithal to be self-conscious.

1:07:48

You stop thinking about the eye and, "Oh, who am I, and how is what I'm doing reflecting on my reputation and my name and my name as a name brand."

1:08:01

All of that washes away because it's like you're way too focused on what you're doing and... Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Totally agree.

1:08:08

And I have tried to your way of doing, I love the, I'm going to steal that too. You can learn a lot.

1:08:17

You can learn a lot in hell if you bring a little heaven with you.

1:08:21

Tinkered Thinking: By all means.

1:08:21

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Ultimately, ultimately, if you are curious, curiosity is a real shit starter.

1:08:22

Not an original quote with me. I love the quote though. But you are so right.

1:08:29

When I was talking to David Senra, the Founders podcast guy, afterwards, you and I had about an hour conversation before recording.

1:08:37

He and I had a two hour conversation before recording.

1:08:42

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, man, that's amazing. Not surprised. Yeah.

1:08:44

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And we are completely aligned on listen, the dirty little secret here is if you are voraciously curious, nothing else matters. Because that's it.

1:08:56

That solves for so many things. Tinkered Thinking: Yeah. It solves for focus.

1:09:08

That's probably the biggest one.

1:09:11

All these productivity hackers and writers trying to come up...

1:09:17

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Horrible.

1:09:17

Tinkered Thinking: Like, "Oh, the Pomodoro method.

1:09:17

Oh, just do it for 32 minutes and then take a tomato break or whatever for four and a half minutes."

1:09:25

It's like, "What are you doing?

1:09:25

You're clearly not interested enough if you've got to slice up yourself into these nice little Tupperware containers of your day."

1:09:38

This can be a bit of a problem.

1:09:38

I'll get into the flow of working, coding or writing or whatever, especially with coding because problems can take so much time, and I'm just hypnotized.

1:09:44

I'm, as they say, in the flow, which is also… Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

1:09:54

Tinkered Thinking: A bit annoying after a while.

1:09:54

But then it's like, "Why is it light," and I look over, it's like, "Ah, the sun is up again.

1:10:00

I've stayed up all night again.

1:10:00

I just ruined my sleep schedule."

1:10:06

But then I look back at the screen.

1:10:06

It's like, "Oh, well, I actually did get a lot done, so I guess it's worth it."

1:10:09

Jim O’Shaughnessy: It is so true.

1:10:12

Prescriptions in general, everybody wants, here's the 10 things that I wrote.

1:10:21

When I do threads, I usually write them right on the app, right on Twitter.

1:10:21

I do everything wrong on Twitter.

1:10:26

I write the thread while I'm thinking about it.

1:10:26

Everyone keeps talking about your draft tweets folder, and I had no idea what fuck the that even was until a younger friend took pity on me.

1:10:40

And he goes, "Just go up into the unsent tweets." And I'm like, "Okay."

1:10:40

So I click on it, it's empty.

1:10:47

And I take a picture of it and he goes, "You are such a mad man."

1:10:53

But see, the thing is everybody wants to be told.

1:10:53

It's like the Banksy quote.

1:10:53

"Well, I never took initiative because no one told me to."

1:11:04

Tinkered Thinking: Aw, man. I didn't know that one. That's good.

1:11:07

Jim O’Shaughnessy: But it's true.

1:11:09

All these, it's prescriptions where it's like, "Oh, no, no."

1:11:09

I'm reliving me getting triggered, and I'm triggered by the word triggered.

1:11:19

Then I get really triggered.

1:11:19

But by these click bait farms, 10 things that all millionaires do before 9:00 AM in the morning. Oh fuck you, man. Come on, no they don't. No, they don't.

1:11:33

And if they did, everybody would be doing those 10 things if they wanted to be a millionaire.

1:11:44

Clearly, that is this is false sir.

1:11:51

Tinkered Thinking: I think it goes back to your little diatribe against categorization and labels.

1:11:52

If you can fit success into 10 quaint points, then that's just super satisfying for the mind because it's like, "Oh, no brain power required. No nuance required."

1:12:07

Someone's already filtered out the nuance.

1:12:07

Everything is simple and black and white, and, "Oh, this one only has eight points. That's even better. Less reading.

1:12:20

I'll get more done today."

1:12:20

It's like, "What is going on?"

1:12:20

That's absolute nonsense.

1:12:20

Threads with bullet points on Twitter, oh my God.

1:12:26

Some of them, when they got a quote attached to each one of them, it's like, "All right, this is titillating the spirit a little bit." Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

1:12:35

Tinkered Thinking: But, yeah, your whole point about 10 Things Millionaires Do is like, "Oh my God, okay. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

1:12:39

Oh, it's just now, it's..

1:12:41

Tinkered Thinking: Is a millionaire tweeting this?" Jim O’Shaughnessy: No. Tinkered Thinking: What?

1:12:48

What are you talking about?

1:12:53

Jim O’Shaughnessy: There's a great meme that, I love GIFs and I love memes, but I only do them as found art.

1:12:55

So in other words, I don't make them, I just find them. I find them.

1:13:01

And there's this one, it's this one that's a dialogue between two people who are both off cartoon stage. Right?

1:13:07

So this guy is over here, and this guy is over here.

1:13:12

You don't see any people, but you see their little dialogue bubble.

1:13:12

And the one guy is saying, "Hey, my buddy who just wrote that book about how to get rich needs money."

1:13:19

And then the other guy is, "Tell him to read his book."

1:13:27

Tinkered Thinking: That's money Twitter right there and the whole sort of mimetic Ponzi scheme.

1:13:34

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh my God. It's almost unbearable.

1:13:39

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, yeah.

1:13:40

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And it's a guilty pleasure for me to just go dip in.

1:13:42

And I'm just like… Tinkered Thinking: "You know what?

1:13:45

Don't fake it till you make it.

1:13:45

Just get more curious about shit. You'll be fine."

1:13:49

Jim O’Shaughnessy: "You'll be fine."

1:13:50

That is absolutely the honest answer.

1:13:50

The honest answer is, there is no path that leads to 100% success. It does not exist. Right? Yours, just get curious.

1:14:06

Don't fake it until you make it, that's silly. Why would you do that?

1:14:06

Why would you try to pretend to be somebody else?

1:14:12

"Everyone else is taken," as Oscar Wild said, Be yourself. Right?

1:14:17

Tinkered Thinking: Excellent. Totally.

1:14:20

Jim O’Shaughnessy: All of these.

1:14:26

Now, there are always exceptions. Right?

1:14:26

I think Clear's book is pretty good.

1:14:26

Atomic Habits I had him on, and it's actionable just like he's building.

1:14:32

I wrote a thread on how to do habits. Right? I haven't looked at it.

1:14:39

And so I got out of the habit of writing those things. Tinkered Thinking: Yeah.

1:14:44

I studied his book quite a bit, especially in preparation for trying to build this meditation app, but please continue.

1:14:50

Jim O’Shaughnessy: But yeah, no.

1:14:50

So the dirty little secret here is there is no dirty little secret.

1:14:54

The dirty little secret is curiosity is kind of like the cure all, if you will, for anything.

1:15:01

Now, here's the big question.

1:15:01

I have an idea about this, but how do you make people more curious?

1:15:10

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, well, this segways into one of my favorite topics, which is the question as a concept.

1:15:18

So if you're not curious enough, you haven't asked yourself the best question or you haven't asked yourself even a good question about what's going on.

1:15:27

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Your questions have been shit. Yeah, I agree.

1:15:29

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, yeah.

1:15:29

I often ask people, "Have you asked yourself the best possible question with regards to the topic at hand," especially if someone's dealing with some sort of conundrum or problem.

1:15:42

Instead of trying to hand them a solution.

1:15:47

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

1:15:47

Tinkered Thinking: I'm really trying to ask a question that helps them open up their thinking so they can think differently about their situation. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

1:15:56

Tinkered Thinking: So the question as a concept, there's really two types of questions.

1:16:00

There's one where the answer is known, and that's not a genuine question in my eyes.

1:16:06

It's more of a request for information. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

1:16:08

Tinkered Thinking: So if you ask a spouse, it's like, "Hey, did you take out the trash this morning," that's a definitive question that presupposes or even knows that there is a knowable answer.

1:16:23

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.

1:16:23

Tinkered Thinking: By default, someone knows the answer to this question, so it's not really a question.

1:16:26

It's a request for information.

1:16:26

A genuine question is one that no one knows the answer to yet.

1:16:31

So a good example is, "Hey, here's this business idea. Will it make money?"

1:16:37

It's like people can have opinions on that but there's only one real way to know, and that's like, "Well, just execute on it and find out for yourself."

1:16:49

I mean, unless it's identical to some other business model, then you can get really pedantic.

1:16:55

It's like, "Well, this one did, and it's the exact same."

1:16:55

It's like, "Well, then is that a genuine question? Maybe, maybe not."

1:16:59

So then the way that I look at this is, all right, a genuine question is really...

1:17:03

It doesn't have an answer yet, like I said before.

1:17:03

So it's this exploration of the unknown.

1:17:09

This is why so many people procrastinate by just ruminating on genuine questions, like what's the meaning of life?

1:17:16

It's like, well, there's no definite answer, maybe you can make it up, but it's just fun fodder to talk about unless you're taking action to figure out the answer to this question yourself.

1:17:27

So you really have to go on a journey to find out the answer to a genuine question, like will this business model make sense?

1:17:33

It's like, well, you got to bring it to life and find out yourself.

1:17:37

You got to go on that journey.

1:17:37

Or if you take the word question and you lop off the last three letters, what do you get? You get quest.

1:17:47

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Quest.

1:17:47

Tinkered Thinking: You have to go on a quest to find the answer to this question and that's...

1:17:51

Jim O’Shaughnessy: It's like your story, the Destination. Right?

1:17:54

Where he decides at the end of his journey that he has to find a destination.

1:18:01

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

1:18:03

Yeah, I didn't think about it.

1:18:03

Yeah, that story actually relates quite well to this. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

1:18:08

Tinkered Thinking: So then a request is just like, "Oh, can you replay the quest that someone's already gone on.

1:18:08

” Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly, exactly.

1:18:16

Tinkered Thinking: “so that I can teleport to the answer by you just giving me the end of the story," kind of thing.

1:18:19

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And by the way, that is how we get the world we got today. Right?

1:18:23

Cumulative, cultural evolution is just lots of requests going in.

1:18:29

"Hey, what's this rubbing the two sticks together that makes a spark?

1:18:36

And then I can cook my food and my brain is going to grow twice the normal size." But it accumulates. Right?

1:18:42

And then as Robert Anton Wilson called it, along comes Gutenberg, and suddenly we can time bind our ideas.

1:18:50

Prior to that, we couldn't time bind our ideas.

1:18:57

We could, but unless it was very tedious, I don't know about you.

1:19:05

Tinkered Thinking: It's tedious.

1:19:05

It wasn't efficient, and it couldn't scale.

1:19:07

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, exactly.

1:19:08

And probably both of us would probably be hard pressed to find a happy place doing our scribing.

1:19:15

Well, I'm looking at the clock and I can't even believe, talk about being in a flow.

1:19:18

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, yeah, we've been chatting for a while.

1:19:20

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And this has been awesome.

1:19:23

I didn't even get to half the stuff I wanted to, which means that you get a return request.

1:19:29

Because there is some, I love your ideas of Digital Plunge, for example.

1:19:36

Where the video game is of future scenarios… Tinkered Thinking: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

1:19:40

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Where they're really trying to solve for existential risk.

1:19:40

I personally think… Tinkered Thinking: Oh, that's the thing.

1:19:43

I forget about a lot of these stories.

1:19:47

I'm like, "Oh my gosh, which one is that?"

1:19:50

Jim O’Shaughnessy: That's a brilliant idea.

1:19:50

And with, now that I'm involved in AI, like I am, AI can be helpful there.

1:19:55

And so I want to talk about that.

1:20:02

I think it's a great idea.

1:20:02

I think it'd be a great game.

1:20:02

I think it'd be a great game.

1:20:08

Tinkered Thinking: Mm-hmm. Thank you. Yeah.

1:20:08

I mean, in some ways, it kind of is every game or every RPG that you can re-spawn, yeah.

1:20:14

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. Exactly.

1:20:14

But what a great thing to, "Oh, yeah.

1:20:18

By the way, at the end of it, there's these three existential things over here.

1:20:18

You really don't want those things to happen. Okay? Okay?

1:20:23

And by the way, try knocking me off the top sucker."

1:20:30

Tinkered Thinking: Find any path that avoids the end. Yeah, yeah.

1:20:34

Let's just, let's avoid that.

1:20:34

And then you also have this other thing that you don't come right out and say it, unless I missed a place where you did.

1:20:40

But the idea of virtual worlds as training models.

1:20:47

Like that story, the Egg that's popular online.

1:20:47

I don't know whether you've ever seen that.

1:20:53

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Mm-hmm.

1:20:54

Yeah, that's a great one.

1:20:54

And I love, it's a recurrent theme in your work as well, in terms of… Tinkered Thinking: Yeah.

1:21:00

I love playing around with Recursion. I find it so much.

1:21:00

It relates really well with what you're talking about here.

1:21:08

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Me too.

1:21:09

Same, same, totally same with me.

1:21:09

Well, listen, this has been beyond fun for me.

1:21:09

At the end of each one of these, you're coming back, so you're going to have to actually think of four.

1:21:21

But I'll give you time to think about it, except for this one.

1:21:21

So we're making you the emperor of the world.

1:21:26

We're giving you a magic microphone.

1:21:26

You can't kill anyone, you can't put anyone in a re-education camp.

1:21:32

You can't make certain that old girlfriend or significant other is humiliated in front of the world's population. Tinkered Thinking: Okay.

1:21:39

Jim O’Shaughnessy: However, however, I am giving you a magic microphone that you get to speak in and you get to say two things.

1:21:46

And the next morning, for whenever morning is for the other nearly seven and a half billion humans, or what are we at 8 billion now?

1:21:54

I don't even, I think seven and a half.

1:21:59

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, I think we just passed the line.

1:21:59

I think we're at eight billion now, or who knows?

1:22:00

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Did we? Okay. Yeah, okay.

1:22:02

So give or take, 500 million.

1:22:02

They're going to all wake up and those two things that you spoke into the mic, they're going to think they thought of.

1:22:12

And when they wake up, not only are they going to think they thought of them, they think, "This is the best idea I've ever had.

1:22:17

I'm going to go do that all the time now."

1:22:24

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, gosh. Yeah. No pressure, huh?

1:22:24

I think I would go back to that point on curiosity earlier.

1:22:27

If you have enough curiosity, confidence is irrelevant.

1:22:33

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love that.

1:22:33

Tinkered Thinking: And if you don't have enough curiosity, then you haven't asked yourself the best question yet.

1:22:36

I think that would be one, tying curiosity as this master variable with questions and how they're...

1:22:46

One is the tool for the superpower of the other.

1:22:53

Other than that, I think I'd take a dig at hope.

1:22:53

I'd say hope grows foolish with no doing.

1:22:59

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Ooh, I love that. Totally agree. Me too.

1:23:00

Tinkered Thinking: Yeah, if you don't take action based on what you hope the future to be, you're just Russian roulette with disappointment right there.

1:23:08

People talk about manifesting stuff, and I was like...

1:23:08

Ah, I just want to slap them, like, "What are you talking about? Go do something.

1:23:13

You want a million dollars to land in your lap, Go work hard, and maybe it'll happen."

1:23:21

Jim O’Shaughnessy: We seem to have the same triggers.

1:23:25

Because listen, by the way, there is a kernel of truth in the idea of manifesting.

1:23:31

That kernel of truth, which they piled all of this woo woo bullshit on top and sold 10 million copies of a book called The Secret.

1:23:47

That I could not bring myself to buy, simply because I do have standards.

1:23:47

And anyway, I found what they were saying, by my sleuthing online, and the kernel at the center of it is, we do become what we continually think and do and do.

1:24:05

And that's the part you've got to emphasize.

1:24:13

Tinkered Thinking: Mm-hmm. Oh, 100%.

1:24:13

That's why hope grows foolish with no doing.

1:24:15

Jim O’Shaughnessy: And do, no doing. Exactly.

1:24:16

Tinkered Thinking: I mean, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but this ties up in one of my favorite books, which is The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

1:24:27

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, that's a great book.

1:24:27

Yeah, I haven't read that one in a long time.

1:24:29

Tinkered Thinking: Well, the end of it really absolutely nails this whole wishy-washy area of manifesting and/or affirmations and how prayer is regarded separately. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.

1:24:43

Tinkered Thinking: He basically goes on this wonderful, wonderful analysis of case studies and religious literature and stuff, and at the very end, if you might remember, he basically says prayer does work but only if you pray about the right things, and the right things are things that you can control.

1:24:57

If you pray for better outcomes with regards to things that you actually can take action on, then the prayer basically changes the way that you behave on a daily basis, and the change in your daily behavior compounds into results that are the things that you're praying for.

1:25:15

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.

1:25:16

Tinkered Thinking: So as long as your manifesting or affirmations or prayer is all focused on things that you actually have some practical influence over based on what you actually do, what your daily behavior really is, then it will work.

1:25:32

But that's why hope grows foolish with no doing.

1:25:32

If you hope for things that you don't take any action on or that you don't have any influence on, you're going to be a fool because you're going to end up disappointed.

1:25:46

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I got to tell you man, the other thing that I love is that you have managed to condense these into wonderful and memorable phrases.

1:25:59

That hopefully our listeners when they walk away from listening to this, or reading it, or whatever they do, that stays, it becomes a mind worm. Right?

1:26:05

Because I used to always say, "Look, action without knowledge is foolish. Right?

1:26:15

But knowledge without action is futile." Tinkered Thinking: Nice.

1:26:26

I'm going to write that one down.

1:26:26

Jim O’Shaughnessy: What are you going to accomplish, man?

1:26:31

You're going to accomplish nothing.

1:26:31

You're just going to sit there and I don't know, maybe if you're the Buddha, that's cool.

1:26:35

I'm not the Buddha and I'm never going to be the Buddha.

1:26:42

I love all of the Awakening.

1:26:42

I love Tony de Mello and Jed McKenna and all those guys.

1:26:49

But if you read them too, they're all about action.

1:26:56

Well, they're now, come on.

1:26:56

Just for those who will not be able to see my kind guest here, just held up Jed McKenna's book. He knows I'm a sucker.

1:27:05

If it involves David Deutsch or Jed McKenna, you got me, you got me.

1:27:12

Tinkered Thinking: Well, I picked it up because you and Sam McRoberts are always talking about it on Twitter.

1:27:13

I was like, "All right, finally, I'm going to read this book."

1:27:19

I've really been enjoying it with this first one. I'm almost done with it.

1:27:23

Jim O’Shaughnessy: There is the second one.

1:27:24

Given your nautical interests, you might really be interested in the second one, which is all about Melville and Moby Dick.

1:27:36

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, fantastic.

1:27:36

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite books.

1:27:38

Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think and I think when you read his interpretation of it, you're going to love it.

1:27:44

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, fantastic.

1:27:45

Jim O’Shaughnessy: Because it's so unique and it's so not the normal interpretation of Moby Dick.

1:27:48

I think stick with it, my friend. You will be happy.

1:27:56

Tinkered Thinking: Oh, awesome.

1:27:56

Jim O’Shaughnessy: You will be happy.

1:27:58

Tinkered Thinking: Well, it's next on the roster, so I'll definitely give it a go.

1:27:59

Jim O’Shaughnessy: All right.

1:28:01

Well, this has been absolutely delightful. I will have you back on.